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.