one word's existence that a student reminded me of today

nope

leading you

Two days a week I arrive at an office building and have to give the reception my passport number before I can go in. I arrive at a time when a lot of english teachers are arriving. One guy today, who I heard speaks six languaged and who I overheard today speaking english with a germo-slavic accent, smelled like some eastern bloc-issue cologne I would guess to be milky green.
Adjunct the glass lobby, the smokers section is through a glass wall, some benches under the lid of the second floor. Lots of days while I wait a blind guy comes out of the turnstyle via gentle stick smacking and makes his way to the bench near the door. This is in the early morning, so I suppose he has just gone upstairs and left his things and come back for what is probably not his first cigarrette of the day, unless he takes the nicotene as some kind of shot that propels him through his morning.

On the bench he crosses his legs and lightes up and smokes deeply. The cheeks go in, the tip goes conical. His eyes, as this is the kind of blindman he is for us observer, are calm, closed and unmoving, but he doesn't always take a regular breath among drags and face-enveloping outpuffs.

"Does a blind man enjoy a cigarrette more?" I ask myself in the morning, having long abandoned interesting thoughts. And another, "Does he know he hits it so much harder than everyone else?"to which I answer.
Probly

The weather underdifferentnumericschemes

As I was walking down the street, my eyes getting baked open like two blue-yolked eggs, I noticed one of the evenly spaced street signs that alternate temperature and time. Somewhere in the Dali desert of my mind, clocks a-hanging off the branches, I thought, damn, it must be 34 degrees. The time flashed away and I was proved correct, point being, CelsiusI feel you now!

This picture, which I pulled from another blog, was taken because the ad is pretty nice, saying,

"The thermometer shows that the earth is heating up. The clock, that there's still time to save it."

Montevideo in 1 Metaphor and 2 Photos

All these vegetables may have since been eaten, but the news is new!

Its a beautiful city, with an old-port pearl inside the oyster of a typical South American urban landscape, though like everything in Uruguay, smaller. Besides the requisite 'first church' and 'exact replica of the French theater house' that every Southern Cone city seems to have, the port is packed with Belle Epoque style palaces interspersed with slightly later Art Deco that blends in perfectly.

This beautiful and agéd old port has lead us to one major metaphorical conclusion: Montevideo is the Montreal of South America.
Say it: MMMontreal,
MMMontevideo.

Just like tourists in Montreal, we have basically just been walking around and taking pictures of each other taking pictures of grey stone buildings of impressive age.
Like Montreal, we are on a huge river and the wind whips through the city incredibly. We wanted cold, but this is a little more Canadian than we bargined for! And when shutter fingers start to tremble, what do we drink? Hot Chocolate!

I went out for the famous steak dinner last night (poor Renata had to watch me devour it) and tonight we are going to a concert of a local rock band, then we are off at 315 tomorrow afternoon. The airport was so small we actually disembarked on the tarmac, which is so glamorous. I ran down the stairs so that I could turn and take a picture of Renata in her Jackie O sunglasses. Also glamorous was the official blue and gold United States of America airplane parked next to our plane- the secretary of something was visiting from Washington to talk about buying more steak and wine in exchange for old fighter jets. (kidding!)

On the whole we are excited to get back to Brazil- people here are, shall we say, more European than Brazilians, and we miss the smiles and the non-brown-wool items of clothing. Not to mention that perhaps the most European thing here is the hotel breakfast- ham, cheese, rolls, apples (not a papaya in sight, but ohhh the dulce de leche!)

In truth, too much of our impression may have been formed by an encounter today where a used-book vendor in a plaza accused us of stealing a book when I put my camera in Renata's purse. We opened it up for her inspection, but she didn't even apologize. Bitch!

We walked away miffed, an emotion that was instantly transformed when we bought a hand-knit sweater for Rafael to steady rock through the rest of winter.
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

Montevideo in 4 pictures and 3 poems

I
Cuando llegamos ella quería hacer una ligación
(everything brown)
a gente quiere sair,
o barfo inaguentable,
(everything brown)
intolerante de las efusiones
del otro,
dos cavallos ligados por
couro o cor das
(everything brown)
folhas da plaza,
ela lo quebrou
quando colocou un
boligrapho na bunda
and bucked in the bed
like her own horse.

I showered
(Tudo marron)

II
pdababa bu bu bu bu

paduba du bu bu bu

pdabubadu bu bu bu

Queria fazer charme
no farol
Mas equanto la ciudad
fue por viejo a gastado

muito predio muito bonito
muita vontade de verlos mañana

Con maquina melhor, frutilla
Sabor remedio, la levares?
Sim.
I have to poop.

III
Stronger light means
wintry light in the plaza
the leaves less there
the city like rocks on
the blue hills of smog
a distant church, multi-pico-ed

A wailing man in the plaza,
barulho de que religion isso?

Last night, useless,
a documentary on the removal of settlers
grubbing land in the desert
but usually with less hub-bub
in Uruguay
coats of wool,
one brown or another.

Something like a phenomena

I started playing soccer on the East Zone of town, the tough side, with some nice guys. We play late at night and the field is alongside one of those big transit arteries where the two sides of the street are separeted by a hundred yards of boulevard. Both times that we've played, in the middle of the game I suddenly heard strange music coming from the blackened boulevard, a twisting, sinuous, seemingly horn-based music that sent my imagination to one place- gypsylandia. Did the gypsys, whom I have seen camping in the circular spots of grass formed by curling exit ramps, gather here in the darkness of the east zone and blast their music out of the trunk?

During the first game I was afraid to ask, mainly because of the old school nature of the tough guys around me. My friend, Silvio of the fishing expedition, was the only one I could imagine asking, but he was on the other team and far away. Most of the other players were his uncles, nice but supremely tough guys, and more than anything not the type of guys that you ask in imperfect portugues about the possibility of an illicit gypsy presence on the boulevard.

On the second game I got the courage up to ask one of Silvio's friends, a guy nicer than tough, who always plays in full São Paulo gear. He told me,

No, no, I know it sounds like it, but really it's just a regular bar, way on the other side of the street. It's that there are a lot of cars....

Oh.

From then on, when I tried, I could almost make out the brazilian accordian-based pagoda music that must have been leaving the speakers on the far side of the darkness, but I needed as much imagination to put it back together as I did to invent the gypsys. And still, it's pretty cool that typcial music, when cut to ribbons by perpendicular traffic, sounds just like those ribbon-clad masters of the road.

hay una substancia que controversa el efecto del botox?

We love GNT.

Doi tudo

Iris is on tv, and doi tudo. Doi ainda mais because one of our houseguest dried thier face with one of our towels after using a caustic facial product, staining the green towel white. Cassete! The role of towel use in the fortunes of our guests would have been a key post had this blog forced its way into existence 6 months earlier.

The weather is grey in our city, and if you recall the weather reporting I promised to do, its a dark day indeed. Our house, I must admit, is governed by seasons...

And Iris? Oh she's the girl whose booty be in my face every time I walk by a newspaper stand. She is seasonal as well, the product of Brazilian Big Brother, meriting another post. The show has ended and the housemates are busy staying on TV as long as possible. Some who went before them have made it into Novelas and other tv shows. Iris, a working class hero, besides the big bucks for playboy, has landed a billboard holding a jar of olives and the TV commercial that just passed in which she announced that thanks to a new credit plan, a digital camera is with reach of everyone.

The Weather Underground

To prove my newly remember autofocus, I'm going to start a project that I've planned for a long time. It's a list of Her maladies. Similar to a weather forecast, this information is useful for all those who plan to spend a day inside the wide outdoors of her personality, as well as for the creation of a historical register amassed in the hopes that a pattern might one day emerge to explain such profusion.

Today is a tough day to start. Heavy cough and difficulty breathing in the night time- so much lying on top of me wasn’t impossiblizd by gravity/phlegm physics. This condition was, however an improvement to Monday, where the not-uncommon state “doi tudo” (everything hurts) was declared.

I'd sworn I'd wear purple

I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe it- I had become just the blog I swore I would never be. You know, one of those horrid blogs who delight in picking nits out of hair of others, lint off the fabric of society, kinks in the Rube Goldberg machine of language.

Gente! Disculpa! From now on I promise I’ll stick to mowing my own back yard, as the original intent of this blog was much the same as the gardener’s- to grow and watch grow your own.

Aquela coisa chata

Why do words, suddenly appear,
so every time, you can hear
just what they mean, and all the things
they’re supposed to do?

This phenomena of the suddenly appearing word is part of living as a foreigner inside a language world. Starting out, it can be an incredibly basic word, even one of those that straddles the line between word and sound, which you then realize is everywhere. I can imagine a visitor to English one day finding the language full up of like like like everywhere he goes, stumped as to how he didn’t hear it before.

The longer you hang around a language, the more you feel the right to dislike a word, and that happened to me with a basic Brazilian word that's used in an annoying way. The word is Aquela- that. Reference the above foto and her most famous song to understand the special way it’s being used.

That thing, that thing, that thiiiiiiiiiiiinng, is what I want you to hear. Now imagine if the song were “the thing, the thing, the thiiiing.” It would be missing something.

The answer, besides that thing, is emphasis. This is the way people be using it down here.

I identified/hated the word for the first time when I was overhearing a conversation on the bus, in which a very performative storyteller was telling about another time he was on the bus and there was a couple having a fight. But it wasn’t a fight, it was that fight. Indeed, it seemed the couple had started having that fight. But considering that the reason for the fight wasn’t known or much less communicated by the storyteller, so that aquela, a specifying word specifying nothing, wasn’t just some sauce for your sentence but actually a hotdog bun with no meat and all ketchup.

There is another guy who I know who, instead of sending a hug like everybody does when they are hanging up on the phone, he sends that hug, much better because he is playing off it, and at the same time implying that his hug is special and memorable, which it certainly is since he be 5 foot 2.

Day in the Office

One shitty thing that can happen is that you have to sit down and interview someone and they turn out to be your doppelganger, he was bearded like me, small headed. But when I extended some kind of look across to him acknoowldeging this, a kind of open look, it went totally unregistered. I had to sit there and speak, deciding whether he had ignored it or missed it completely. In the end though, I got a chuckle out of him. Then I went out and wrote up my sincere report.

south side of the world

Today I was walking in Morumbi, strange newish neighborhood that brings together richest and poorest. When Bush was here he stayed in the Hilton Morumbi, with the above pictured view (yes, I have friends in high places) out on the highway and the favela alongside it. It was the first clear day in at least three, and there was a fingernail clip moon in sky. As I came up to the highway I saw a teenage kid in a baggy favela sweater standing by the red light where exit ramp cars make their first stop.

I had a sinking feeling, thinking I might have to share a long light on the same corner with him, have him ask me for something and see that I'm a gringo, here where you can't even carry a laptop type bag with peace of mind at any time of day. To my relief the light turned red as I came to the corner and the kid went out among the cars as I crossed. As he approached the nearest one he lifted up his sweater and twirled 360 in front of the hood before moving to the driver side window with his hand out. I made out the flour-white face of a grampa through the blue tinted glass, waving him off angrily.

Then the kid repeated the twirl in front of another car. I had first thought it was the beginning of a dance performance, as juggling is a common red light peddle technique among the young, but there was no show, only the twirl. Is he showing his shapely torso? offering his body to a more lecherous grampa? is he showing that he's hungry? Halfway down the block I realized what it was. He was showing that he didn't have a gun in his waistband.

Explicitly showing you don't have a gun is a good practice considering that in this same neighborhood last month a couple was shot to death in front of their 7 year old when they stopped at a red light . Unfortunately it doesn't have the intended effect. Just like the translation client of mine working in a skyscraper near there who made me suspicious when he assured me that I didn't have to worry about him paying me for my work.

I kept walking and there were some pink cumulous clouds low on the horizon, the five or six skyscrapers ahead of them in relief, it looked like a still of a hollywood-sized seismic event that was leveling the city, the stack of cloud a plume of dust, the buildings in the foreground the next to go. It looked so strange that I thought it might be the smoke from the plane that crashed here yesterday, but then I remembered the TV had showed that that specific end of the world event was down to embers and assigning the blame.

In Brazil we have that phrase about the gift horse and it's mouth, but what we really need is the phrase --"don’t wait too long to look at a fox’s mouth or else you will be caught prying at its butthole as it walks away from your henhouse." Only years of cultural acculturation would make this phrase instantly understandable, so let me bring you up to date.

The Buddha above pictured was a gift, though a special kind of gift, a gift from a friend who is selling everything they have to fund a move to another country. It’s a parting gift, a gift that came along with the amply priced pieces of furniture that we took off her hands. A ‘couldn’t fit it in my suitcase, and I love you’ gift.

The giver, a fox both in 70’s and Aesopian parlance, gave us the Buddha. She told us to put it on the fridge and surround it with coins, a charming gesture which instantly reminded me that all religions are equally stupid. Then she stayed at our place for an increasingly tense and unhappy three weeks, during which we saw past the 70’s fox and watched the fable unfold like a slap to our face.

Exactly which animal we are is debatable, perhaps best assigned by another person. Indeed what animal would feel intensely uncomfortable with an already-former friend staying in the house, hogging the computer, bitching dinner guests she’s never even met before, filling rooms with smoke at 9 in the morning, and eating food in quantities designed to be just small enough not to pay for anything, but do nothing about it? Some weak, stupid animal. I go for Donkey. But maybe our petty bourgeois manners and offenses taken fit best with something like a chicken.

Anyway, the moral hit home a few days ago, when the phone bill arrived and the disappeared fox left R$200 worth of droppings in our cupboards, which are now, like the Buddha whose coins went for bus fare, so dastardly bare.

of montreal

Yes yes I am so happy to be here, but OH GOD, I miss our time in Montreal. The city where we met, the city where we spoke all languages possible, neige, duas, poutine, chocolat chaud, iceskating, movie store, casita…
It was us and the world. Sometimes we wanted to be part of outside just to look around, talk to people just to have the big pleasure to come back to our little world one for each other.

Death becomes her...

We are all familiar with death in his above pictured manifestation, black robes worn low, generous if outmoded gillette. I was chatting with an friend this weekend and he was telling me about a short story by Woody Allen, who happens to be very popular in Brazil. Indeed, as Brazil has adopted the Ramones as their own and are proud to say that they're more popular here than Queens, cinephiles with flexable metatarsels are want to say the same about Woody.

Is it really true, as they have told me here, that he can´t find funding for his films in the US? And if it is, would that be for artistic reasons or for those so emphatically stated by Mos Def in his solo debut comparsion with O.J.? (track 10 as stated by my compadre)

One theory goes that Mos had tried to find different director to fit in with his white-people-can´t-be-artists argument, but exhausted an entire rhymebook trying to flip 'Polanski', wisely discarding "couldn't keep it in his pants-ki."

Anyway, as my associate paraphrased the Allen story which in turn parodies the Seventh Seal, since he was speaking Portuguese, he called death a 'she.' This is because death as a noun is feminine, just as for instance, a pen is feminine. Indeed, a direct translation of portuguese would have everyone talking like sailors, "Ah the wind, look at him blow" or "How is your lawnmower? He's a little bit broken."

This is kind of funny because when an english speaker hears these gendered pronouns, we tend to picture pens or chairs or wind with the accompanying genetalia and facial hair, in the spirit world of their essence that is. Or at least I do.

In fact used to play the game- Why is that noun a man or woman? Why is the sea a he? Is the foam his beard? Because he´s strong? Couldn´t he be a girl, a harsh mistress that takes you down into her womb when you drown, poor sailor you? Maybe, I reason, its because when the gender was assigned they didn't know that life first came from the sea, in which case the womb cycle-of-life thing would be a shoo-in and the sea would be a girl.

But what all but the most silly second language learners learn is that when latin-speaker says these nouns, they don´t think about the gender, they assign it correctly as a matter of grammar, but they use he/she in the same way that we use 'it', and not in the spirit of rum-drinking, plank walking, barnacle-bearded seafarers.

So even though my associate called Death 'she,' if he (finding himself in a woody allen type position vis-a-vis the reapster and of a silly woody disposition) were to lift the robes of Death on a prank, he too would expect to find what could only be called a boner.

Say it like a surfer;

boooner

He calls us T and Ta Ta

His first word was Cheese!

Rafael my nephew turned one in February. Today he sat in my lap at the computer and watched videos of himself. Were I as tech-savy as he, I would have filmed him as he watched himself, just to show the calmness on his face.

Remember that movie, Baraka? The best image was the first, the Japanese monkey in the hotspring, soaking in no-minded pleasure as any human would. His look was a little like that, passive, pleasured, supremely calm,I think because the clip we were watching of him he was just chillin, walkin around grandpa´s house and getting followed by the camera. When he sees a video where he is laughing, he laughs again.

Is this because the joke (in this case getting grampa´s hat put on him) is still funny?

Anybody who can tell me what is going on in this 16 month year olds head as he watches himself on video please tell me. He started smiling for photos when he was like 8 months, and now, like the rest of us, he looks at the screen on the back of the camera after the picture was taken to see how it came out. He knows how to turn the electronic keyboard on that was brought out from Her childhood closet to be pounded on and its automatic songs danced to once again. He can also plug a charger into a cellphone with his little hands. Also, he has never complained that he didn't like the sound of his voice on tape.

Today I taught him to turn the little wheel between the two buttons on the mouse, which made the moving picture of him grow and shrink. Its amazing to see how easy it is to learn the relation between button and action. It is easier than, for example, A-B-C. He will rule the world.

What scares me a little bit is that when he points to himself on the screen he says nene 'baby' so there is a small chance that all of this is going horribly wrong and that we and thousands of other over-technologied families are are creating some new sense of the self that will spell the end of all civilization. But then again maybe Rafael is the savior, the only one to actually break oin through to the other side, to run 360 loop-de-loop in the go-kart and not fall at the apex but come sailing through. Having yet to fail at anything, his smile was made for that moment.

I YAM FAMOUS

I found my car on google earth.


44- 29'20. N 73-12, 47W


I left out the last number to preseve a little mistery, after all you could scheme to steal it.


Stupid joke, but seriously. I love that car.

Also, yesterday I was walking down the street and a little fiat came out of a gas station parking lot, with an alarm blaring, only the alarm was blaring a voice, which said, 'this vehicle is being robbed. Please call 1blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And rarely have I been more certain of something as when I said to She, no one is ever going to call that number.



Since thats the way the world works, this is how I roll on google earth.


That sounded like a common line. Even if I had never written that, he read it and then stolen in (all in the near future), even if he had struck it out of the ether rather than me and I thought it for the first time when I heard him speak it, no doubt in the presence of my friend Pete, I would only cock a smile.





.........................................................................Those eyes .

Then I would say to pete, he just said 'google earth'.

And pete, apologetic- or rather, saddened- would say

'I know.'

Song of the day

I was sitting in the bathroom and where the floor is bare in the photo now is a mattress, a mini mattress, the guest mattress, and on it was lying She, in hooded sweatshirt and pyjama pants.
The winter sun was coming weakly though the thick glass of the closed window, bathing her in heat, and she wiggled around, streching. She looked, in a word, gustosa. The whole situation did.

I started to sing the song of the day-

Pandinha no sol
Pandinha no sol
ela veio porque falaron
que en Brasil tem bamboo grande
mas agooooora
fais muuuuuito
frioooooo, agoooora,
quer voltar para China

Pandinha no sol

Ela ficou sem dinhero
e o que e pior ainda
e que uuuuuuurso
tem queeeee compraaaaar
duas pasagem
porque urso panda
tem bunda tão grande
que precisa duas vagas

Pandinha no sol
Pandinha no sol

(Little panda in the sun

She came because she heard
about the bamboo in Brazil
but now its suuuuuper
cooooold and sheeee wants
to go back to China

Little panda in the sun

She got no money left
and what makes matters worse
is that paaaaaandas
have to buy two tiiiickets
just for one panda
because pandas got big butts

little panda in the sun.
----------------------------------

One time we were in a bar and the creative types around us started assigning animals to everyone based on looks, a practice I thoroughly endorse. Indeed, on the bus this morning I explored the possiblilities of writing a work of applied geometry to show exactly why one person looks like a horse, another a mouse. Anyway around that table, She recieved a few votes, I had thought, for panda. But now She, fresh from the shower and now sanding the dead skin off her feet, denies this.

She says it was cat, which we both agree is way off the mark. Especially since there are so many people walking around that every moment you see them you can only think cat, cat, cat and go crazy remembering that they are human, and perhaps can be trusted as much as any other, though certainly not, and even think that if you were to sleep with them they would bite you with tiny sharp teeth.

My vote for She is between panda and puppy.

Her vote for me is, unfortunately,

Today on the street...

I saw an old woman with no nose applying large strokes of her hand to the corner of a pet shop window. A few more steps showed one of the two white kittens inside following it bodily, and then a second look at grandma showed her glee.

Gostusura Maxima no transporte publico

Maximum Yumminess on public transport? Well that's what you get when a little 5"2' ball of goodsiness can curl up in a lap and fit sideways on the bus seat, and nap the whole ride from town back to city.

It's also a translation problem when gostosa, Queen of Positiveadjectivium, presides over all that is good (as food is good), nice (as a day is nice), and the whole underling slangang i.e. tasty, yummy, pleasant etc. But this Queenie, when incarnated, got a nasty side. Because gustosa ain't a good person, ain't a nice person. When gostosa is applied to a lady, it means, I got to say, b-b-b-bangin', and for a gent, 'buff'.

But forget all that.

Ya'll don't know how strictly I speak when I say Gostosura Maxima, way we use it, is in its own world: t-to-the-r-o-p-i-cali- us. For us, it's a state, achieved in mutuality (please say that word as if you were will.i.am before you were behind the front on all that is tasteful) a state where the yumminess of bodies at rest, bangingness of being, is maximized.

This particular session, or invocation, beautiful as it was achived on the Brown Bird coach bus pictured above, reportedly was marred by some rumblings about a left arm flexed for an hour in support of a head, an elbow going sore where bone met armrest under said head's weight. There was also some mention of a shoulder wedged into a stomach, bringing up a steady sucession of burps, but these were silent cries heard by none in the forest of seatbacks, and especially not by the log-sawer lying horizontal. Such imperfections effectively did not exist, and the obvious achievement of G.M. was celebrated when both participants were again awake.

part two, shoot, fish

The first thing one does when fishing, logically, is to throw fish food into the water. This is especially the case when fishing, as I mentioned in part 1, here, for fish of the size caught by that mermaid. My initial hopes were high, because I could actually see fish in the water.

“No teacher, those are carps, they don’t eat raçoes. If you want to catch carp you need to bring somethings like banana, mel... mel?”

“Honey.”

“Yes, things like Honey with aveia, (oats) banana, and I didn’t bring that stuff.”

It was too bad that we didn’t have that stuff because I was annoying to watch them swim by so close, opening their mouths methodically and swallowing nothing visible. I had fun by hitting them on the head with my bobber as I reeled it past them.

You might ask, ‘if you are throwing fish food into the water, what are you going to use for bait?
A brown bead on a hook, obviously.

Then Silvio grabbed the metal stakes that we’d hauled from the car. I didn’t really know what they were, but as soon as I saw Silvio driving them into the ground a few inches from the water I knew. They were holders for our rods.

It then became immediately apparent why fishing is about drinking.

We had been there a fishless half hour when a Japanese-brazilian son and father came, and started hauling them in immediately. The most interesting thing that had happened to us was that I had spotted a monsterous catfish lolling about on the surface of the water, seemingly dying. And one time when I went to the bathroom I came back walking past a pond nobody was fishing and its pan-flat waters reflected the clouds in the sky that themselves were spread thin yet separated like overly floured dough, and it reminded me of all the drugs I have taken to stare at things.

Also, some monkeys had a fit in the trees behind us, though not visibly. I looked back at the trees and mentioned that I really wanted to see some monkeys in Brazil.

“Go to the zoo if you want to see monkeys” said Silvio, surprisingly serious.

What?

“I don’t know about these monkeys. They might be nice, maybe no.”

Ok..... Later…

"I think I know vovozinho’s secret, teacher."

"Vovozinho?"

"You know vovovzinho?"

"Um.."

"Vovozinho is little grandpa over there, the Japanese guy. " To his face he calls him 'San.'

"What's his secret?"

"Yeeeesssss, teacher, vovozinho uses cheese."

So we abandoned the brown beads and went for the mozzarella. A little while later, Silvio got that one in the picture.

Then I got a catfish.

A little while later I had just lost my bait and was reeling in when I saw the monster half dead catfish at the edge of the water right before me. I dangled my empty hook in front of him, thinking of the carp, but he bit. The hook went through his upper lip quite visibly. I started laughing with some horrid teenage laughter and Silvio came over to put the clamp on his mouth. The old fish was real ugly, grey and full of growths.

Silvo said, "we won´t take a picture of this" and I was afraid he despised me.

But it is also possible that catching him was like asking an aged dame now using a walker to dance one last dance of the waltz she always loved.

But, our karma used up, we didn’t catch anything the rest of the day. Some guys came with a mix of shrimp and flour and a bunch of stuff and heaved lumps of it on hooks and caught nothing. Pedro came out with some live bait and caught four of the Dourado, fish that silvio had previously described as every fisherman's dream. He did get pretty excited though.

We stopped at a corn house on the way home, drank corn juice, ate sweet corn jelly wrapped in a corn leaf. While we were there huge thunder started sounding, and as we came back over the mountain the rain started pouring. Then I saw why the Fernão Dias is a dangerous road. The trucks in the inside lane of the opposite direction threw huge waves of water over the concrete barrier and on to our windshield, staggering the eco sport. Mud came coursing down off the mountains and rivers ran salmon beside us.

When we made it back down to Guarulhos the rain stopped, revealing several accidents, many involving trucks. Death is everywhere in Brazil. Then there started appearing shacks every 20 feet advertising a ‘chapa’ and I asked what that was. After a while I understood that the guys in those shacks are offering themselves to help unload the trucks passing on their way into the city. Then Silvio dropped me off at the bus stop, and I took a bus to inlaw’s house!

Like shootin' fish.... Part I

The proverbial barrel is a pond about the size of a goalie box. The fish are fish, albeit with names that I forget as soon as I hear them, being the usual vowels evenly spaced between the usual consonants, the m, the n, the l, t, and c. The ammunition in our cooler sounds more like the fodder for a picnic- hotdogs, cheese, corn in a glass jar, and of course a plastic bag of raw liver. No worms.

Today I woke up at 4:45 in the morning and waited for my friend and student, O Japonesão, (big jap) Silvio, on the balcony watching the cars speed and people walk by, all deep inside their long nights of drinking. He called 15 minutes later and intoned in his Ed McMahon voice, “Hey teacher, you ready for the fish?” Beautiful this phrase, because I think fish was meant as a verb.

When he arrived in his ecco sport, I noticed his hair was freshly gelled, and I felt guilty about not having bathed. He even cracked the window in the first moments we were inside the car together, though I think it was more to let sound into the silent car than air. He shared with me some cookies as we found the highway, a new one for me, the Fernão Dias.

“This is a public highway, it’s not so good.”
“The Dutra (highway that leads to Her parents) is private?”
“Yes, teacher” Of all my students, Silvio is one of the most basic, but he’s a joy to talk to because he turns his grammatical weakness into a lumbering cordial dominance, a grownup fratboy kingliness through which he administrates his monosyllables benevolently. Now, returning to the highway,

“Before, when I worked in Paulinha… everyday. Ishi Maria”.

We left the city by Guarulhos, huge industrial suburb of Sao Paulo. We passed through in the half-dawn, the orange light of the city still dominant, gray pollution-filled mist low over everything and at the far back of the sky a white gold at the horizon, color of a flashbulb. ‘What world is this?’ was a pertinent question, the streets below lined as they were with streetlights and the blotches of trees as they cut through the three-story buildings uphill until leaving a hole in the horizon, seemed like tunnels that we were also somehow inside.

Silvio and I had had dinner the night before, beer and meat brought out on a grill beside the table, and we talked easily about things that never came up in class, mainly about the ragers he used to throw out in the country cities around São Paulo. I could imagine the equivalent of the golf course invasions of my own youth, though with significant adjustments made for the fact that this was a metropolis not a college town hamlet, thus additions had to be made of cocaine and I guess, prostitutes. I think of Paris, I think of the New York of the twenties, times when prostitutes were invited to parties.

I asked Silvio if he brought his parties to Guarulhos, and said “No, no. Because Guarulhos hasn’t women. Women from Guarulhos- Ichi Maria.” And it was understandable, that the women from this place wouldn’t be the best. Soon the highway climbed up into the mountains and the orange was left behind. Now the white dawn was stripped with heavy gray mists on the tops of the tree filled peaks. The pavement wasn’t bad at all, five lanes and winding, and we stopped at a highway restaurant called Rota Norte. There in the parking lot I remembered that rota is also the word for burp, and the joke I made, in English, was hampered by the fact that Silvio didn’t know the word burp, and therefore I resorted to pantomime, after which he laughed so hard that his head rested on the steering wheel.

Bowing to my philosophy of leaving nothing out, I must admit that on getting out of the car I realized I had a problem common to all trips I make when mostly asleep- an erection. Walking into the restaurant I employed hands- in- pockets and stoop- to- bring- the t-shirt- over techniques honed in high school and blessed the emptiness of the place. My good luck was that in this country you often eat breakfast standing against a counter, a posture that seems somehow Italian. Coffee with milk, butter on roll-sized baguette here called french bread. The restaurant was staffed by 5 girls in yellow uniforms. All the customers were men, some seemed like other sao paolinos heading out to fish, others had some business to attend to. When we got outside the day was begun in full, no longer any trace of its beginning. Just a little later we were off of the highway and driving through a two block town, up and out of it, up a swath of pavement and to the fishery. One car was there before us, some nondescript guys, and the manger.

“Pedrão, Pedrão (big Pedro) what´s up man” said Silvio, and we shook hands. Pedro had wide eyes and overlapping teeth, a little like a fish himself, and he helped us bring our stuff to one of the ponds. The sun wasn´t yet above the mountaintop hills rising directly behind us but the air had cleared. As soon as we dumped the stuff Silvio went back to park the car and left me alone with Pedro. He was testing a rod that Silvio had asked him to look at, finding it a ‘little beauty’ without the slightest of problems. I was holding a rod but realized I didn´t remember how to cast it. Pedro started rummaging around our equipment and making some comments, none of which I understood. I liked the note of calm remark in his voice, picture some guy who’s voice cracks on the word ACTually as he starts a sentence, but in the pleasant way of a country fishery caretaker whose small laugh of remark a short woo-hoo also hits that note, and I was frightened and sad not to talk with him. I tried to make the right type of grunt in response what seemed to be comments, but then suddenly he asked me for something called rações. I racked the conversations I had had about fishing with Silvio, in which he often lapsed into Portuguese, and I finally remembered that raçoes is like rations, and means fish food. I opened the cooler and went through the catalogue of baits, but couldn´t find it.

Pedro looked to shout out to distant Silvio, and asked me “What´s his name ?” I was pleased to be able to answer a question and suprised that he didn´t know the answer- Silvio had showed so much intimacy when we were unloading. But now it was obvious, everybody knew Pedro.

He called out and got a thumbs up from Silvio. Pedro then called him a word that I will translate as “screwy.”

A Prize is Won

Cutting her hair in the bathroom, she used the scissors for a microphone and sang the song out. Next thing we know the phone rang, a final decision had been made. And so after a close finish in the Anna Karina sweeps, there has been a victory in the house. Millions concoursed, but the winner today comes from Brazil.

She had won the award for best cover of Karen O, the person.

A pause for the tears of those solid gals just receiving the news at this moment. You still sassy.

But the judges told us that what was missing in all those lipsyncs with friends and lovers was a full, yet fully individual incorporation of the singer. In their words, "was needed the same thing, but in no way crossing."

Spontaneity was also key. If, at any point during at least a week leading up to you performance thought, 'maybe I will win the Karen O cover concurrence while I take this shower' well, clearly you didn't.

But also, you wouldn't.

In our case the CD hadn't been played for a long while, and actually reminded us of our early romance in Canada, and so her performance was one of those clean re-embraces of a well known experience. After all, when something is like riding a bike, of course we refer specifically to the moment when, riding, you realize you can still ride a bike.

Also, what in retrospect seemed necessary to the win was a fundamental absurdity, one that ended, in a gesture of leisure, of lounging in the self, before the point where self-awareness becomes necessary (think: childhood). Thus and only thus is a stage placed in a livingroom with no labor whatsoever and then with no extra effort ultrapassed

Alone time....

The second to last thing you want to say is that you are surprised at how much your married life has come to resemble your parent's. But given the banality of that statement, the absolute last thing you want to say is that you never thought you would be saying that your married life resembles your parents. These are the structures of language and experience that make life earn the adjective ‘crushing’. Tonight, crushed by the work week, she watches TV and I sit at the computer, playing Halo.

I might write a book about Halo. For now I’ll just go through the basics and repeat a funny anecdote about cultures coming together.

Halo is a game where you are like a robocop killing aliens. It’s a first person shooter, which mean, as the literary minded might be able to guess, is that your vision is that of the charater you play. You don’t look down above from them, which would of course be 3rd person, but look out through their eyes. And the ‘shooter’ part refers to the gun. Everybody is kind of done killing aliens, having won the game several times, so they gather instead on the online multiplayer where, instead of a chat room, people gather in a valley called blood gulch to kill each other. A game can hold up to 16 people divided into two teams, and capture the flag is one of the most popular games.

There are tanks and jeeps and appropriately purple alien flying machines that the Italian players seem to favor, which actually makes me uncomfortable. Anyway Halo’s popularity peaked around 2003 I guess, so now there are just a few steady games going on. And for some reason there are a lot of Latin Americans online playing, mostly it seems, from Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico.

I can verify this because when a game ends there appears a statistics screen reviewing the numbers killed and all that, and during this time there is a chat option where players debate if they will play again on the same map or move to a new one, if they will use Rocket Launchers or Sniper Rifles. Yesterday during this down time some Mexicans were conversing on the chat and the host was taking a long time to restart the game. One guy, named Blade, kept retyping AGAIN AGAIN, from which point I will recreate the conversation

MexForca100: Buen juego todos!
Blade: again
MexForca100: Ale, si quieres mandarme un email…
AlejandraXX: Si, pasame tu direccion
Blade: AGAIN
MexForca100: Es es mexforca en hotmail, si tienes una pregunta..
Blade: AGAIN ESTUPIDO
MexForca100: Tu tambien hablas Español?
Blade: NO ESTUPIDO

Miracles

happen everyday. Often it takes us a while to see the beauty in something that might be painful, the victory in what seemed like a 1-1 tie with an inferior club. But when you marry a wife you also marry a family, and with that family often comes a sports club. If you are a contrarian, you can cheer for their rival, spice things up around the TV, or else you can just go along with mom and brother and dad, while their daughter remains distainful of football and any other thing that involves sunlight and muscles. I chose to go with the family flow, helped mainly by the team's colors, green and white. Green and white aren't my favorite, but colors of the other clubs in town- red and black (with white)- are in fact those to which I am diametrically opposed for all life, though for purely aesthetic reasons.

Indeed its interesting when arriving in a large city with multiple football teams, you don't only have color schemes to consider but also the respective class images of the teams. Usually there is a team of the lower classes (Corinthians) a team of the upper crust (Sao Paulo) and a team that figures somewhere inbetween. Here that inbetween demographic turns out to be Italians. Palmeiras, the club pictured above in their first game as a seedling group, is built completely around their Italian identity and has been conserving it ever since thier formation in the 19teens. Current endorsment deal? Pirrelli. Previous? Parmalat. Third color? Red. Formation? 3-6-1 (god save us). Ethic identity of the hoarse screaming man behind me in the stands or the emilio estavez coifed galan just in front? No need to mention. Last name of my new family? ends-in-elli.

The actual word Italia had to be taken out of the name after that whole blackboot affair, and in a country where race divides wealth as neatly as in the US (admit it) the idea of a team conserving its Italian identity so strongly is a little troubling. In fact considering that all three teams have hooligan contingents, the fact that Palmeiras' is the weakest reminds me of some shitty movie where some rawer, hungrier gang comes in and ripps the gone-soft third-generation mobsters to shreds.

So why do I choose Palmeiras? Colors, yes. Also a strange echoing of Seville, with two clubs, one red and black, the other green and white, and me on my visit there choosing Betis, the green one, because of the alligiance of my sister's host family and the player that was spotted by 10 year old Pedro leaning against a church among the crowds that gather in the streets to watch church groups dressed like the Klu Klux Klan carry cadillac-sized wooden effigies of Mary through the streets.

This was my choice, made on faith. And now that faith was rewarded. Sunday I attended my first game with my brother in law, and draped on the fences along the sidewalks to the stadium were all types of gear, and I remember noticing and asking about a flag with a white cross on a red shield on a flag of green. Thats the "Cruz de Savóia." said Bro, and thats what you see in red on the photo at the top, the first insigna of Palmeiras. We got to our seats under a light drizzle, but in true Sao Paulo fashion the weather changed and left us baking in the sun. By the middle of the second half the players were no longer able to run and I was taking turns protecting one forearm with the other from the sun. This incomplete strategy had limited effect, and by the time I got home I knew I was in bad shape. The tender laughter of my beloved only increased the burn. She insisted on a foto, and it was only after seeing it today that I realized the miracle that had been instilled in me. Look below and notice that it was the very cross of Savoia that took form on my chest, set in a field of sunburnt red. Note that the straightness of the lines across my arms is nothing less than miraculous, and that god didn't forget to burn my face and knee caps shiny to make sure the cross was bordered on all sides with red.

As for the trail of hair down the middle that spoils the snowyness of the white, I will just remind you that the donkey has a similar trail of hair down the middle of its back. And some people think that's symbolic too.

I'm not brushing my teeth...

Famous last words to an evening. You see, in some worlds, sleeping is a right. Its justice is quick.

The drinking of chocolate milk (the only acceptable brand here pictured in its true proportion to the landscape) is a rite.

And brushing your teeth is a privledge, one in this case mocked by the Marx-brotherish mustache left from the high tide of Toddy as it chugged down her throat at a speed and urgency usually associated only with baby animals. And followed indeed by a baby animalish sleep.

The morning after...

Taco night.

The shells, soft, imported. Same for the seasoning packet, both brought by one of the many guests making the southward journey to, and for, xenotropia.

I was washing the dishes this morning, thinking of a phone call and a term of endearment that was used on me by the burgeoning rockstar and friend on the other end of the line. Then She (the only capital s She in my life) came in the kitchen and I said, in house Portuguese,

"What's that phrase 'meu bem'?"
"That's a term that only old couples call each other."
"But", I asked, switching temporarily to English "does it really mean 'my good?'
"Of course not. You just say, meu bem, like 'Hello, meu bem. Adeleide always calls for my brother by saying 'Hey bem.' Its cheesy."
"Right, but the word is bem, like in 'tudo bem,' " I asked, making sure I had the right word.

"Of course."
"So it's like 'honey' in English. When you call someone honey you don't mean acutal honey."
"Yes, its exactly like that"
"Well sure, you don't mean they are a product of bees, but honey still means something. You don't call someone 'my evil.' You use the word because its a good word"
"Right."

And she left the kitchen.

It's just another morning in Xenotropica, where we nail stars daily to the cloudy sky.