Just Got Really Lucky with a Copperhead Bite

Just got very, very lucky. Was out mowing the very back portion of the yard. It's invisible from the house and is where we throw lawn cuttings from the fenced in portion of the yard behind the house--but it's still one of the 8 or 9 lawns and needs cutting now and then. Well, I was in a tall grass corner and had to move some old Christmas trees that we'd thrown over the fence into that wild area, and then I had to step into the tall grass to turn the lawn mower around. I thought I'd taken a good look at things before I did: I was looking for a tree branch I might step on or a broken bottle the neighbors might have chucked over the fence. Didn't see anything so stepped into the tall grass. The moment I did I felt a weight on my right ankle and kicked furiously. I knew what it was from experience: A snake.
    This one was just a baby copperhead and it got away, but my ankle hurt like hell. I kept mowing for 10 minutes, then got weak, scared and so forth and went to the front porch swing to sit for a while and check it out. The wound was more of a scrape than a full fang bite. In half an hour I felt weak but there was no appreciable swelling or difficulty breathing. What there was included a headache and shooting pains originating at the point of the attack running up my right calf every five minutes--the same calf that the infection tried to eat last year.
   When I felt well enough I went inside and took my sock off and washed the wound with alcohol. Then I looked at the sock: Two fang marks on the outside of the sock, maybe 3/16ths of an inch apart. They matched two dots of blood on the inside of the sock. But below the tiny exterior fang holes in the sock was a yellow stain the size of a large thumbnail. That's what that baby was going to give me if it had a moment more to hang on before it was kicked off.
    So I got real lucky today. THANKS UNIVERSE! THANKS SPIRITS! That was super cool.
    And now, four hours later, the headache is nearly gone. The pains up my leg will continue for a week. Ah, but the lawn got mowed and I am not in the hospital. What a great day! I hope all of you had even better days!!!!

Madeleina gone, what's a boy to do?

Well, with Madeleina at Disneyworld this week--or whatever you call the Florida Disney place--I've sort of been alone. Well, not quite. On Monday, Italo, my oldest, came over to take a look at the sink that's stuffed up and which I couldn't get open no matter what I tried. He brought his baby, my granddaughter Taylor Rain and Chepa, my wife/ex-wife's babies Sierra and Alexa. So I tended kids and fed them while he worked.
    Tuesday, I came back from running errands to find Chepa, her sister Amelia, the kids, plus a niece, plus Italo all here. Chepa was cleaning the kitchen--which I'd just cleaned but what the heck. Italo was cutting new pipe for the sink. I took care of kids, entertained, fed them and then at about 9 PM fell asleep. I woke to the banging everyone was making--the kids had decided that they should have a "pot drumming session" and were banging all the pots with spoons--and nearly lost it.
   For penance, I was ordered to bring a meal sufficiently large enough to feed everyone at Italo's house, where a fence was being built. Italo, Marco, Chepa, her sister Amelia, Italo's wife Sarah, and all the kids, of course, needed food and needed it now.
   By chance I'd just bought 5 lbs of good chopped chuck and a bag of great burger buns and made a dozen 7 oz burgers. Before I put them on I threw half-a-dozen chicken legs in the oven and a pot of good rice on the stove.
   An hour later I had beautifully wrapped--individual baggies--cheeseburgers and a pot of baked chicken and rice. I also had baggies of sliced organic tomatoes, burger pickles and sauteed sweet onions for anyone inclined to add those to the burgers. I didn't have one but man, I was dying for one. They smelled so darned good!
   At the same time I put the chicken in, I put a duck in for me. It was meant for Madeleina and I so it was a fresh duck going on four days, so I knew I had to get it cooked. This was how I made it:   

   After a good cleaning,  I rubbed it inside and out with sea salt and cracked black pepper, and minced garlic in olive oil. Then I stuffed it with a cut up slice of perfect pineapple and a cut up super sweet orange. Baked it at 325 for 1 1/2 hours, then squeezed fresh orange juice--from the fruit--onto it, scored the breast to eliminate fat, reduced it to 300 for another hour or so while I went to Italo's to deliver the food and help with the fence. Came home, made gravy, cut a half-breast, served it on spinach with the sweet sauce. Man, that was good. We used to sell the hell out of duck when we ran it as a special at Wilson's Restaurant on 75th and 1st Ave in New York every 10 days or so. The slow, slow cooking is the trick. And the fruit stuffing that saturates the meat and keeps it moist and sweet. And cooking it on a bed of celery and onions. And making a great sauce or gravy. Trick to the gravy is to pour the pan juices into a container and put the container in the freezer for 30 minutes to get the fat to congeal at the top so you can get rid of that--or save as schmaltz if you're so inclined--and then use the essence for the gravy or sauce.   

    Tonight? Not sure what I'll do. I've got most of the duck and sauce left, but I'm leaning toward a few shrimp with garlic, diced tomatoes and scallions sauteed in a touch of olive oil on garlicky couscous with a nice green salad with blue cheese and balsamic vinagrette? Maybe, after I mow some lawn to earn it.

    PS: The family loved having their dinner catered by me.

Madeleina going to Disneyworld

Most people brag about the first person in their family to graduate high school or college. I'm gonna brag that my daughter, my now 17-year-old daughter Madeleina, is the first in the family to go to Disneyworld. She is going with her band, or most of them, and insisted. I relented. I'm very proud of her, even if she doesn't see it. She went to the State tourney for flutes and the chamber group she helped put together got a "1", which is the highest you get at state. Her solo got a "2", which is great. A music professor from University of Texas at Arlington told her to be in touch, that there might be a scholarship for her. Then she got her grades: She's in a lot of advanced classes and after six months of screwing off, she went to work and is leaving with all 90+ grades.
   Now she's going away on her own for the first time in her life for 9 days. She'll be chaperoned and all that but I'll be alone here for the first time  since 1994. Wow. Gonna be fine. Just have to do a few projects.
   A friend wrote to ask if she was getting ready for tomorrow's trip. This is what I wrote:

Madeleina has spent $300 of her money; $200 of mine; $50 of Chepa's. I gave her $300 for seven days and she said: Dad, you suck. I can't buy anything with that....and then fell asleep on the couch behind me. 

   The living room is a mess. Her room is worse. I've cleaned the bathroom short of scrubbing the tub--did scrub the toilet top to bottom, inside and out--and Sarah, Italo, Taylor Rain, Chep, Sierra, Alexa, plus Marco and her sister Amelia and daughter are coming in an hour.

    I was making a duck for Madeleina and I. Now I've got four burners going: Hot sausage, Polish beef sausage, two whole chickens in the oven. Cole slaw made. Rice cooking. Veggies in a pot, ready for fire. Shrimp cleaned. Salmon ready. Brussel sprouts with bacon ready to fire. All this with my right arm not working. Pulled something a few days ago and can't do anything with it. Changing gears in the car was an exercise in masochism. 

   I guess that means it's perfect. In a weird sort of way.

   No one will come over. I will give Boots all the food. Madeleina and I will have a nice duck with a good dressing and a side of rice/slaw/salad.

    I know how these stories end. 

    This is my family and we are a crazy lot. Catch us on a good day and boy, you've never been treated so well. Days like today, well, I generally do the work then hide because I know it ain't happening the way I'm told it was going to happen.

    Have a great time in Disneyworld, Madeleina. Report back to us Luddites, won't you? I love you, Dad

Hit by Lightning

There is a video going around of a storm chaser who was filming a storm when hit by lightning. From what I gather, he lived. I've only seen one person hit by lightning, and that person died. This is the very short version of that story.
I was probably 12 and the ballboy on my older brother's semi-pro baseball team. They were playing in, I think, Crocheron Park in Queens, NY when a thunderstorm suddenly and unexpectedly came up. Instant torrential rain and lots of lightning. The coaches told the kids to walk off the field: As we did, an old couple walking on a cement walking path appeared. The woman, probably 80, and the man, same age, were holding hands. She released her hand from his and reached into her purse and took out a tissue. She wiped her face from the raindrops. In that instant a lightning bolt hit a tree in front of them and jumped to him. He was bounced off the ground and flew maybe 10 feet high and 15 feet forward from the impact and hit the tree, then fell. When we got to him he was dead. His pant legs on both legs were burned open on the back; the meat of his exposed skin was purple/yellow. The soles of his shoes had been blown off at the heel, exposing his purple/yellow feet. I never want to see another person dead from lightning again. The poor woman was inconsolate.

Meaning of the word "ayahuasca", from my point of view

You know, I'm gonna weigh in here on the word Ayahuasca and its meaning. The Quechua language was not a written language. It was only verbal, which means it was very fluid. My thoughts are that Hoasca, or Huasca actually were adapted from the German soldiers of fortune who came for the rubber boom and for whom "wasser" meant water. Hoasca or Huasca, in my mind, are bastard versions of that. Aya means soul in thousands of dialects from the Panoan language group to Quechua to the Ayamara. So to me, ayahuasca means "soul water",  not vine of the dead or anything else. Just: "Soul water", which is good enough for me.

What the heck is the complaint with Obamacare?

 I’ve heard a lot of bad things about the ACA, aka, Obamacare. What I don’t understand is this: 

The passage of the ACA guarantees that everyone in the country who has medical insurance, not just those who signed up, but everyone, now has an insurance company that has to prove it’s spending 80 percent of its money on actual health care, not dividends, salaries, advertisements, etc.

No insurance company, whether you have it on your own, through your company, via Obamacare, can turn you down any longer for pre-existing conditions.

No insurance company, whether you have it on your own, through your company, through Obamacare or any other way, can now tell you you’ve used up your lifetime amount of insurance.

No insurance company can cut you off for any reason except not paying your bill. No threat of medical bankruptcy if you can make the payment.

All kids, regardless of how their parents happen to have insurance, can now stay on their parents insurance until they are 26 years old.

In other words, there have been five major, unprecedented changes in how medical insurance is provided to everyone in the United States who has insurance, regardless of how they happen to have it–all of which are benefits that cost nothing to the consumer.

What is the complaint? Everyone, you won. You’re now winners. You were able to complain about Obamacare and still came out a winner. What’s the darned issue? Why are people so angry about getting a better deal? I’ve been trying to figure it out for five years and still can’t see the argument against it.

If I were a democrat running for office, I would crush my opponent on these points alone. There is no rational argument against reining in an out of control industry that was leaving people to die. I would crush my opponents. And if the dems don't do that, if they distance themselves from the brilliance of this, well, they will only have their own sorry asses to blame for their losses in the mid-term elections.

My upcoming column in Skunk Magazine

So here's a tasty new column that I feel like sharing. The magazine is Skunk, published in Canada, a pro-pot magazine; my column is called Drug War Follies and it's been running about 9 years now. Wow! How lucky did I get?

Drug War Follies #76

Life for Pot Brownies? That ain’t sweet, but it is Texas. Oh, and the Rev. Roger Christie just got 5 years for his church work in Hawaii. And then there’s a family of Medical Marijuana users in Washington facing federal charges that carry 40-years. Goddamn! Now that’s the good ol’ USfuckingA, eh?

By Peter Gorman

It’s a pity that in this freaking day and age we still don’t have to look very far to find people who are being crucified by drug laws. Thirty years ago, having a joint got one poor sucker 40 years in a Texas prison. And while I was working for another marijuana magazine, I regularly covered cases where people with little or no marijuana were killed by police who’d been given false information by informants looking to buy their way out of their own problems. Others were locked up for 20-30 years on the word of those informants who claimed to have been in a criminal conspiracy with the defendants—often when there was no marijuana to prove even the slimmest connection between the informant and the poor bastard on the other end of the stick.

    But hey, pot’s legal in Colorado and Washington states, and medical marijuana is legal in more than two dozen, and hell, even in Texas they’ve gone soft: simple possession of less than 2 ounces gets you a max of 180 days in the county jail. So like, things are fucking cool now, right? Not for the illegals, of course, where a joint will get you up to five years in a private prison cell while you await deportation.

   But for the rest of us, it’s like no biggie these days, right?

   Well, no. Not right. People are still getting screwed left, right and center. One of them who popped up onto the radar recently was Jacob Lavoro, from Round Rock, Texas, who’s facing possible life for making pot brownies.

   He probably made a zillion and sold them to kindergarteners, I bet. He deserves what he gets, the bastard!

   Not exactly. In fact, Lavoro only had a couple of grams—but it was hash oil. His recipe evidently called for the oil rather than pot—and in Texas, hash and hash oil is considered much more serious than marijuana. A gram of third-rate Moroccan still gets you two years in Texas. But then here’s the twist: When using hashish in making food, the entire weight of the food is counted. Remember that carrier-weight thing with LSD, where the paper was included in the weight of the LSD you were charged with? Well, paper is bad enough. But in Lavoro’s case, there was butter, flour, a couple of egg yolks, sugar and chocolate all going into the pound-and-a-half batch of brownies he was making when busted. So he’s been charged with possession with intent to distribute 1 ½ pounds of hashish—which carries 5 years to life. Damn, and he’s gonna have to have that heard in front of a Texas jury, notorious for going for the max.

    I feel like getting real snarky here, but the other part of me just feels awful for Lavolo. And ashamed and angry at the prosecutor who would go that route with a couple of grams of hash oil. And embarrassed to be living in Texas and not having fixed this. Just a bad bad deal. Good luck, Lavolo.

    Yeah, okay, but like that’s not happening anywhere else, right? I mean, everybody knows Texas is a state where stupid people rule the roost, right? The rest of the U.S. is better than that, right?

    Well, no. Not really. And even in places that are cooler than Texas—everywhere but other parts of the South—federal law can come in a totally fuck things up. In Washington State, which, like Colorado has not only legalized medical marijuana but recreational pot as well, a family of four and a close friend are facing up to 40 years each for a legal medical pot grow. Yes, you heard that right: 40 years each for a freaking legal medical pot grow.

    Larry Harvey, 70, his wife Rhonda, 55, their son Rolland Gregg, 33, and his wife Michelle, 35—along with Jason Zucker, a family friend, had a legal med-mar grow on Harvey’s land, way out in the boonies next to a national forest near the Canadian border. Legal, in this case, means that all five had a legit medical reason for smoking pot, doctor’s recommendations for it, and a license to grow it.

   The shitstorm started when a flyby from the state’s Civil Air Patrol noticed the grow in 2012. When state law enforcement paid the Harvey’s a visit shortly afterward they counted 74 plants—the law allows for 15 plants per patient—but told the Harvey’s they would have to remove a few as collective grows had a limit of 45 plants, regardless of how many people were part of the collective. The officers removed 29 of the plants and left. No charges were filed.

   Unfortunately, a week later the DEA showed up and weren’t nearly as nice. They seized the remaining plants, dried marijuana and some pot edibles. And an old car, a motorcycle, a shotgun, a hunting rifle and a legal handgun—which they use for protection and hunting in an area where cougars and bears abound. A couple of months later, they were charged with six felony counts each, including manufacturing, possession, and distribution of marijuana, along with the kicker: possession of a firearm in the furtherance of drug trafficking. And the feds upped the manufacturing from the 45 plants they had to “more than 100” by claiming there was evidence they’d grown previously and added those imaginary plants to the real ones.

    All defendants have turned down plea deals—which can backfire badly since they won’t be able to discuss medical marijuana and their legal grow in federal court. So five people acting well within the law on a state level are facing an aggregate 200 years in the big house.

    Way to go U.S. You really suck sometimes.

On a more positive note, though still sad, Reverend Roger Christie, minister of the THC Ministry, which utilized marijuana as a sacrament, has taken a plea deal which might have him out of prison in the next several months.

    Christie has been held since in the federal lockup in Honolulu since July, 2010, when he, his wife and a dozen others were indicted for possession and distribution of marijuana and a litany of related charges. The plea deal, for five years plus four more years of supervised parole and drug testing, will give him time served, so he should only have to do several more months. His wife Shere, who has been out on bond, is expected to get 27 months when she’s sentenced in her plea deal. A dozen other church members were also busted and took a plea.

    Hard to imagine calling it a “more positive note” when we’re talking about a good guy and his wife who never hurt anyone and helped an awful lot of people getting five years in prison. How is it that we live in a world where that really is good news because it sounds so reasonable compared to the 5-to-life for a couple of grams of hash oil or facing 40 for a legit medical marijuana grow?

    This is really a mess, people. This needs fixing and it needs fixing fast. We’ve lost millions of man and woman years to the pot war. We’ve created a monster with the private prison industry that thrives on the souls of non-violent pot and drug users. We’ve allowed the unfettered growth of militarized police forces that storm houses where pot is suspected to be grown with military assault tactics.

    This needs cleaning up now more than ever. Inroads have been made and that’s good. But the backlash is severe. We’re gonna have to stick it out till a whole new paradigm is in place, one that does not punish good people whose only crime is preferring to get high on pot instead of beer.

    The Drug Enforcement Administration won’t like seeing their numbers halved once pot is really legal. They will drum up monstrous horror stories about the new and stronger pot, the killer pot, the whatever marijuana to justify keeping cannabis on their Schedule One list and themselves in business. And local law enforcement is not going to like seeing their easy pickin’ forfeiture monies, the monies that pay for all that military equipment they’re sporting these days, disappear. They will fight tooth and nail to keep those funds rolling in as well. And even if some politicians come around because they can see the potential of marijuana’s tax revenue, that money won’t go directly to the policing agencies like forfeiture money does.

    So keep moving the ball down the field, but know that resistance from the private prison industry, from police agencies, from the DEA is coming. And do your best not to let them come for you.

It would all be funny if people weren’t dying and the prisons weren’t full.

Happy Mother's Day, all you moms out there

Happy Mother's Day all you moms out there. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting for the rest of us.
    I got to go mow some lawn before the storm comes--the whole way back yard across the creek hasn't been done in nearly three weeks!!!! But I was checking the blog today and noticed, like I do almost every day, that today's visitors included at least a couple of people each from Russia and the Ukraine. So for you who are reading: I'm sorry about the current troubles. I wish you could all somehow get along peaceably. I mean, if you few are all reading this blog, then you guys/gals would obviously get along on at least some level. So what about your pals, and their pals.
   I'm pipe dreaming, I know. But aggression and holding grudges, nationalism and fear have never produced anything positive--yeah, I know things like the Volkswagon came from wartime, but you know what I mean--hate spawns hate. Time to eviscerate hate. Time to overcome it with peace and love and you're gonna need to be at least as aggressive with those as others are with their negativity if you're going to make a dent. Be brava--which, in the Peruvian jungle meaning of that Spanish word, means Aggressively brave.
   I wish you peace.

Upcoming June and July Amazon Jaunts

Step right up! Step right up! Sign on the dotted line for an amazing, provocative, wild, exhilarating, life affirming medicine trip! See the Amazon in all her glory! Risk your life for an adventure worth living! Suffer mosquitos to be rewarded by a chance at an entirely new and more rewarding life! Step right up! Step right up!
     I've got two jungle jaunts of 9 1/2 days each coming up in June and July. Both were pretty full. These are the trips where you get dirt under your fingernails, get to drink ayahuasca, utilize the Matses medicines sapo and nu-nu, maybe enjoy a few local magic mushrooms while on an overnight riverboat ride on the Amazon; go night canoeing, some high jungle hiking, swamp walking and anything else we can fit in. These are the jaunts that have a touch of magic and real, no-fooling deep Amazon jungle. These are fantastic.
    And, unfortunately, several people have moved their trips to next January or February, leaving me slightly in the lurch for guests, particularly for June. The June trip starts on Saturday, June 14, and runs through the morning of Monday, June 23.
    The July trip starts on Thursday, July 10 and ends on the morning of Saturday, July 19.
    Cost for each trip is $1900 and that includes everything except your airfare and walking around money. We pick you up at the airport, we outfit you head to toe with what you need for the jungle; we pay the hotel in Iquitos, the riverboat, my staff, the ceremonies, your food in Iquitos and, of course, in the jungle. We serve great food, can accommodate any dietary needs and still keep it delicious.
    These are great trips and they were both near closed until this unexpected shakeup has opened some slots. So feel free to take one or two. You can reach me at peterg9 at yahoo.com
    A lot of people forget the 9. If you do, the note won't reach me.
Thanks for listening. This is really an outstanding trip.
Peter G

A Little about Julio

Someone heard a tape of my friend and teacher, Julio, singing during an ayahuasca session. It was from 1996, and the ceremony was just Julio and I. I asked him for the ceremony because my son Marco, then probably 7, was in his third week in the hospital in Lima because his kidneys had failed. Steroids were bringing him back and after he was stable--and more or less the doctor and my wife, now my wife/ex-wife, Chepa--threw me out of the hospital for being so demanding regarding Marco--I went to Iquitos and from there to see Julio.
    So the person asked me Julio's lineage when they heard the songs. I told her the rough outline.

Julio was a mestizo who sort of did the work on his own for much of his life. His family was probably from Contamana or thereabouts, in the area of Pucallpa. He was shot in the war, went to a vegetalista to have his leg healed, realized the man was poisoning him and left. Reentered the war, was shot again, heard about a curandero in Iquitos and went to him. The man worked well. Julio left and finished his mililtary stint, went to return to study but the curandero was no longer in Iquitos. So Julio went out into the woods near his brother's place on a small river and began to work with the plants, trying to figure out what the man made the medicine with. Julio got it, got songs from the plants and started to work. He did later spend some time learning from someone in Requena, which was a small river town when he was there.

    So some songs he learned from others, some were his own--now copied by a lot of people who want to claim they were students of Julio's. He always changed his ceremony by adding or deleting different songs; a lot of that depended on what work he needed to do, which directed him to use different admixture plants when making the medicine, which then each had their own songs.

    

This is where I started, and it's still perfect

It's 6:31 AM on a Tuesday morning. I've got a story to put to bed by 10 AM, so I've been up since 5, working at it. Half-an-hour ago, Madeleina got up to use the bathroom and I called to ask her if she'd washed any clothes last night that she wanted put into the dryer. She said no.
    A few moments later she called to ask if I was up. I said I was. She said, "then I'm coming in there to sleep with you." Which meant that she wanted to sleep on the couch I sleep on while I sit at the computer.
   "Dad, this is the second night in a row that it took at least an hour to get to sleep. I don't know what's wrong. And I wake up every hour it seems."
   Then she plumped down on the couch, pulled the comforter around her, and fell asleep instantly.
   When she was younger, I loved her sleeping behind me while I wrote. Just having her nearby made my heart soar. And now, at 17, while it doesn't happen often, I still love it. I love hearing my daughter breathing that calm breath of sleep. My daughter sleeping. Have a good dream, Madeleina.

New Book in the Offing

I've been away for a couple of weeks. Partly due to the immense pain that has accompanied a pinched or something sciatic nerve. It's kept me from appreciating life while I wince continually. Somehow, I've managed to get several stories and the lawn done. More stories on the way.
    But I'm also putting together a book of some of my blog pieces. You guys already read them, in all probability. I've picked about 80 out of the near-800 entries and in the last week have tossed 10 of those in favor of 10 others. It's a bit of a buffet, rather than a specific entree: There is stuff from New York, from my bar in Peru, from the family, from the Amazon, from Ayahuasca, from politics. It goes without saying that except for the best 24,374 books written in the English language, this is the best book ever. You'll laugh, you'll cry,  you'll want to ring my neck. Don't do that last thing, okay? That would hurt.
    The tentative title is Observations from a Peculiar Perch. I've got Johan  Fremin designing it; Morgan Maher illustrating it--this time with wild art rather than sketches--and all four of my hateful but fantastic editors lined up to tar and feather me. So it's the same team that did my last book.
    The pieces here will be polished up some when they need it, though I don't want to get away from the simple urgency of the feel of blog pieces.
    We all think this can be done by early July.
    So if you want a signed copy, send me $25 bucks via paypal to peterg9@yahoo.com and include an address and I'll put you on the list. You'll get the first copies from the printer. If you're in Europe or Australia, that's $30 because shipping alone is about $10 or more.
    Monies sent will go to feeding the kids, my Madeleina, Boots the Blind Wonderdog, the cats and those damned editors. One dollar of every 20 will be reserved for cheap wine.
    Actually, I've been working on this project little by little for about a year and then intensified wildly when I returned from Peru in early March. So now we're on the way. I think I've got a good team and I think it really will be a good book, no fooling. Just yesterday, Easter, Madeleina went over the table of contents and came up with four stories I had to include and five she said were boring. So it's coming along.
    Thanks for listening.

Can't Sleep for Panic, Not Happy

It's 4:45 AM. I've been up since 3:15. Before that I was up at 2 and then earlier, at midnight. It's been this way for several weeks now--it's been a little like this for a couple of years but only this bad since I came back from Peru. I've had apnea for a while--my nose gets stuffed up and I stop breathing and wake in a panic. My friend Claudia told me to put the bed on a slant, raise one end, and that would help. It did. It was perfect for more than two years. Slept good three and four hour chunks twice a night, just getting up to use the restroom and check the house once or twice.
    But now, now is different. It's like my lungs are full of water an I'm drowning all the time. I drink wine and so can go to sleep early for a few hours--maybe 9:30 till midnight. Then another hour and another. And then it's done. So I'm exhausted every day. My ankles and feet are swollen from not laying down for a long enough time. I start to panic just thinking about going back to bed.
    I try to embrace the fear: I see myself entering a tunnel that gets smaller and smaller and I want to turn and run but force myself to come to the end and start digging my way out. And sometimes I dig right into open sunlight and think, 'good, now I'll sleep' but that's not how that works. I still wake in a panic, not breathing.
    I sometimes put a pillow on the desk and sit back in the chair and put my feet up on the pillow and sometimes that works but not tonight. Tonight I just feel like I'm drowning and I'm not happy. I want this to stop. I want my own body back, my own ankles, my own sleep patterns, my own alertness during the day, my joy of living every moment. I am tired of being tired and grumpy.
    I'm going to do some sapo, frog sweat, on Saturday morning to see if I can't get this body to do a reset. I've got too many calls for a new story tomorrow to fit it in during the morning. I don't know what else to do. I can't sleep for panic and I'm not happy.

Learning to Win and Lose

Well, Madeleina came home from the regionals in extemporaneous debate yesterday and boy was she pissed off. The job was to take three or four poems, weave parts of them into one piece, read it and then be able to debate about the value of the pieces, the reason for your selections and so forth. Well, she went with the Beat Poets, which was a good choice because I have some of their books around. And she came up with a great piece which she could read very well.
    So she got picked to head to what I think are the regionals--kids were coming in from a few different counties, it looked like, and if it all went well she would have moved on to State--which is apparently a big deal here in Texas, though I don't remember even having it in New York when I was a kid in the last century.
    Evidenty she did fantastically at the reading and was held over to debate her choices. She didn't fare well there and did not make State. She said that her debate judges included a school bus driver and someone else not involved in teaching, and then one debate teacher. I think that's what she said. And the three of them, while saying they loved her reading, said the Beat poets had no value, no impact, and so were a very bad choice on her part.
   She took umbrage at that.
   They were lucky that's all she took.
   "Dad, excuse me but they were out of their flipping minds. Not important? Howl by Ginsberg is not important? Kerouac is not important? Dad! They were the social voice of the day! They were the white counter part of the civil rights movement! Ginsberg declared war on those who put down gays! They demanded the right to speak their minds in public and were willing to go to jail, like Lenny Bruce, for that! Not important! God, this is the worst day of my life!"
    They were wrong and she was right, of course. The Beats were very important. But maybe not out here in bucolic Joshua, Texas. Maybe out here they're considered as valueless as hippies and the Occupy Wall Streeters and the like.
    I tried to console her with the thought that she's still going to State as a solo flutist and as part of an ensemble. Not bad.
    She wasn't buying it. "Dad, they took some kid who read Christian poetry over me! God, I hate them!"
    She's got a point. But then, this is Texas. And learning to lose with grace, even if you're cheated sometimes, is an important lesson in life. Learning to lose isn't a good lesson by itself, of course, but learning how some people will cheat you out of what is rightfully yours--and figuring out how to make that not happen next time, how to keep standing up for yourself--well, that's important. Winning is great, but losing is where the real lessons are.

This House is Fallng Apart....

Pretty much my favorite song is "This house is falling apart" and I have no idea who does it. But the singer talks of the house where he/she lived/loved/rattled this town. What a freaking house! They're gonna rattle this ghost town even though their house is falling apart. Now that's something special.
    And my house is falling apart. The damned water pipe is leaking again, as I've noted, and today I went and bought rope to make the tree swings work again but I can no longer climb the tree to put it in place so I had to call Italo to ask for help. And then I had to call Marco to help with the damned leaking water pipe since I don't really want to put my leg in that shit. I felt like a sissy but justified it by putting a lot of hot sausage/peppers/onions/garlic on the stove to go with a nice marinara and mozzarella on hot Italian sandwiches and made several pounds of good chicken thighs to take home to their places.
   Then they both showed up, like the freaking mafia, sunglasses, radiant shirts, tough guys and I was just about crying because  I'm such a sissy and it was so nice that they came to fix things and they're at the store now buying parts and I'm sitting here just sobbing from loving them and how cool they have turned out. You guys are fantastic! Thanks for being my kids, kids. We fight, you two fight, but right now, right this minute, you have more love coming your way than you can imagine. Share it. I love you guys.
Dad

Abundance of Ayahuasca and Admixture Plants

Someone has been writing me private notes saying they want to move to the Amazon to study ayahuasca. Their enthusiasm outreaches their experience, so I suggested spending a month or two in the jungle--they want to live away from people, alone in the jungle--before they sell everything they have and move there. I was being nice, because the jungle doesn't accept everyone. The bugs are difficult to deal with. The work, so easy for people who were born to it, is nearly impossible for Westerners to learn to do. Simple things like carrying water, making a dugout canoe, building a house when you don't know what kind of trees will stay strong and not rot in six months; weaving leaf-roof sections and all that jazz. Sure, if you go in with lots of money you can get it done--and people do, though most discover they didn't even know how to hire the right people and so everything falls apart the first time or two. Like a lot of things, experience counts. Imagination is wonderful when grounded in a bit of reality.
    So the most recent letter from this person thanked me for explaining that you can't just grow a garden in the jungle. Some jungle will grow plantains and yucca; the neighbors' land, just 500 feet away, might grow wonderful peppers and cilantro but won't grow a plantain at all. The next neighbor over might be able to grow corn and papaya but nothing else. Depends the nutrients in the soil and a host of other things and those might well depend on the high water season of rushing river depositing topsoil on your property.
   But the fellow also suggested that at least ayahuasca and chacruna--the two key ingredients for making the jungle medicine--grow in abundance, as did the admixture plants. I was forced to respond and here it is:
Dear X: Actually, no, ayahuasca and chacruna and the admixture plants do not grow in abundance everywhere. And they take a long time to grow and they have been way, way over harvested in the last several years. Used to be, a curandero on a river might have five mature vines; when he cut some from one, he or she always left the roots, sang to it, smoked mapacho to thank it, then planted one or two sections of what he or she had cut to insure that more would grow--even if that growth was going to take several years.
    These days, some camps are indiscriminately asking people like the members of my team to go get them 100 sacks of vine--and that might have been every vine including roots, of every ayahuasca plant on an entire river. So no, things are not good that way.
    Over the years I've planted hundreds; most have been stolen by people collecting for the big camps or internet sellers. They are the only ones looking for that volume.
    Remember that traditionally, only the curandero drank, not the people at the ceremony, so a few good vines could be used for years. Once you have 30 people drinking nightly at each of 100 camps, plus 10 times that many drinking in the US alone every night--well, you're cutting very deeply into the supply of something that takes years and special conditions to grow. And since typical admixture barks, lupuna negro and catawa, for instance, are trees coveted by lumber men, well, they are getting in short supply as well.
   It's not a disaster yet, but in five years if things continue as they are, it certainly could be. In 10 years, it will be. Where we used to routinely use vines that were 1 1/2 inches or two inches thick, many people are now using vines that are 1/2 inch thick. Those are too young to have learned very much. They need more seasoning to be great medicines. But the demand is there and people who dream of having an Ipod will cut every specimen down if they think they'll earn enough money to buy one. That's just the way it is, not just in the Amazon, but everywhere. In the Amazon, though, the balance tends to be a little more delicate and so needs more care and attention to keep it from becoming something awful.

Our House

I stumbled on a beautiful website today--maybe while reading Huffington Post--devoted to beautiful homes. Some of the 57 homes pictured were on ocean coasts; some were on rivers; some were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. A couple were built as replicas of small castles; one was a really gorgeous log cabin on a river. A lot of them had fantastic pools or moats; some had bowling alleys or two-story libraries. These were beautiful homes. Look at any one of them and you could picture yourself living there in bliss forever. Just fantastic architecture, fantastic settings, thrilling designs.
    My house sprung a new leak in the water pipe last night. It's the second leak in three months. The first came about when the crew building the new road in front of my house moved the water meter in the ground with a Bobcat, breaking the line. I have not figured out why the new leak happened, but it left us with filling up a couple of 5 gallon pots with water for cooking/dish washing, and filling the tub with water to flush the toilet. I'll fix it tomorrow, but today I had to work on a story so couldn't.
    A few years ago a leak in our hot water heater went unnoticed for a week or 10 days and that put so much water under the house that the cinderblock foundation re-settled which sort of bent the beams which threw the whole house out of whack. That caused cracks in the roof and the kitchen floor, which led to rain coming in and dripping on my desk on heavy rain days and led to spaces between the kitchen floor tiles. It also almost dropped the pantry--where we have the washer/dryer/tools/junk--right off the house. That's now held onto the main structure by duct tape and a couple of well-placed beams to keep it from falling. The bend in the beam also caused the bathroom to move on angle. Not pretty.
   So I was looking at those houses and they were fantastic. And I remembered being invited to a house in Connecticut some years ago that was owned by the wife of the Russian media magnate--in prison at the time--which was a real castle and worth something like $40 million with another $10-$20 million in paintings and furnishings. And they were gorgeous. I'd like one.
   But you know what? I'll take my broken down house with the drip on my desk from heavy rains over all of them. Know why? Cause this is where my family laughs. And yeah, you all know my family is as broken as my house, but still, they all come over sometimes and we laugh and dance and paint and watch tv and eat like pigs and I just don't think there's a better house in the whole world than mine. Even though, I realize, nobody's ever gonna put me on a website devoted to gorgeous houses.

Madeleina as Guardian Angel

So I was cooking dinner--a simple rice/chopped meat/garlic/onion/zuccini/red pepper/yellow squash/spinach/achote/white vinegar/good sharp minced cheddar/cilantro mix stuffed into poblano peppers--when the phone rang. Madeleina answered and jumped for joy when it turned out to be Aruba--our friend Otmar--on the other end of the line, checking in. I heard Madeleina's answers and realized he was asking about my leg: "Well, if you didn't know anything you'd think he's got a piece of rotten jerkey below his knee, but actually it's pretty good compared to what it was."
    Then I heard her say: "No, you can't do that. You can't even mention that. No way."
    A minute later: "All we need is you to call once a year so we know you're okay; nothing more, and I mean it."
    And so on, until she passed the phone to me.
    Otmar, who calls me Uncle Peter and has been on one of my trips and has met me in the jungle several times, told me about his new girlfriend, about planning to see me in July when I'm in Iquitos and so forth, and then we hung up.
    After we hung up, I called to Madeleina, in the other living room, around the bend in the kitchen, and asked: "Madeleina, did Otmar say he wanted to send us money because of my leg?"
    "Yeah, dad."
    "And you told him no, right?"
    "Of course, dad."
    I hesitated, then said, "Well, there's 72 percent of me that adores you for knowing the right thing to do. But then there's 28 percent of me that hates you for turning down free dough!"
    "You couldn't do it, dad."
    "I know, but I could have had a moment to consider it before saying no, couldn't I?"
    "No dad. Better to get temptation out of sight immediately. That way you can't fail yourself. And you're weak. You might have given in. I had to save you."
    That's my baby. That's my Madeleina. That's my girl."

Something I just found and I think it's worth sharing

So I went to an ayahuasca board on which I occasionally post and found an interesting topic and saw that I'd posted there a year ago. Surprised me. It was a discussion of whether organized retreats in Peru were better than simply arriving on your own and trying to find a healer. Well, the conversation disintegrated over the course of 150 responses until it kind of became an argument of "at what point are  you ripping off locals?" That's when I interjected my comments, which didn't fill the bill exactly, but gave an indication of where you're ripping the locals off. I used the metaphor of the indigenous Shipibo who sell the most beautiful woven telas, cloths. They take a long time to make and I'm always upset when gringos chew them down in price to the point where the work that went into them is nowhere near getting paid for. So this was my comment and I'm sticking to it.


Someone here is talking about the price of a Shipibo skirt in Pucallpa versus the skirt in Iquitos. I would say that if the skirt took two weeks to weave, you should pay the person 10 days wages--at 20 soles per day, plus one meal a day, the minimum wage in Peru--so that would come to 200 soles and 10 meals at, let's say, 3.5 soles each, or 235 soles.
That's the minimum for two weeks work.
Now to ship that skirt to Iquitos will cost 5 soles. To have someone pick it up at the port at 3 AM will cost 5 soles. The cargondero who carries the box of skirts will charge 5 soles, to that's, let's say, 1/2 sole.
The woman in Iquitos selling her sister's skirt will walk around, with her two kids, for a day/two days, before she sells it. So add another 40 soles, plus meals for the woman and kids--just one a day at 3.5 soles, or, let's say 10 soles.
So we've got 235 soles, plus 10.5 soles, plus 50 soles. That's 295.50 soles. So then they offer the product for 180 and idiot gringos, looking at three weeks of work, chew them down to 70. The 180 came to about 65 dollars for something you will cherish for the entire time you are alive. Why on earth would you back them down to the wall of desperation? The number they will accept but which will force them to email their sister in Pucallpa and explain that they got ripped off and therefore the sister won't get any money for her two weeks of work or the 40 soles of material and thread she put into the piece?
On my trips there are four rules.
1) you ask for cocaine, talk about cocaine, you're off the trip and forfeit all your money.
2) No complaining. If you complain you are off the trip. You do have the right to punch me as hard as you want between the elbow and shoulder to get my attention, but the minute you complain about anything vocally, you forfeit your trip.
3) No sex with anything, anyone under 18. In Peru, as a lot of people know, courtship lasts about 1/2 bottle of beer. But if you take that chicken home, you had better be able to show me a birth certificate of 18 years old or you forfeit your money.
4) No bartering with Shipibo women. You may barter, but only under the awareness that you will promise to pay double what they asked when you finish. So if they start at 180 soles, and you get them down to 90--and that gets your rocks off, fine, but then you have to pay 360, to ensure that the woman and her children and the sister who made the tela--the fancy woven cloth--will actually all have enough to eat. Break the rule and you forfeit your trip money. All of it.
I think those are good rules. I've tossed probably 10 percent of my guests off the trip over the years, like one per trip or two, for breaking the rules. Are they surprised? You betcha. Do they learn to come and ask how they should really behave? You betcha.
We take care of people, we don't steal from them just because we can. And I think that's found somewhere in the golden rule....unless I'm mistaken.

Once More on the Keystone Pipeline

Well, a friend of mine posts a lot of stuff on facebook meant to push my buttons--and he's very good at it--he recently posted a poster of Obama's scandals, nearly none of which hold even a drop of water; a poster that said something along the lines of "Welfare was never meant to be a career decision"; another that said something like: "Stocking shelves, flipping burgers and washing cars were never supposed to support a family. Some people get it, some don't. A lot don't."
    Anyway, he knows I want to strangle him because he's supposed to be really smart, and he is, but he's not intelligent. He wallows in Rush and thinks Sarah Pallin is a real politician with good ideas. And he thinks Barack Obama is Black! Yikes!!!!
    Today he posted on the Keystone pipeline. Now, I am a journalist and I try to remain neutral so that I can see both sides or all nine sides of a nonagon.

This afternoon's nonsense from my friend included this:
Obama continues to delay a decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline -- or perhaps his reticence is his decision. Maybe it's because he's dedicated to a different type of drilling. So typical of liberal progressives to shun an evident means to promote our energy and national security. 
He went on to rant on something completely different that I did not address. But I did address his opening comment. Here's what I wrote:

Well, with TransCanada's own company doing the supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) and still saying it sucks, and with TransCanada currently claiming, in the environmental report, that there will be 35 permanent jobs--all going to Canadians--and then what with the southern leg completed now and not having produced a single job for anyone who was not already working, and with all of the tar sands oil--some of which we in the US now use--being shipped to China and Japan and Korea, which will raise the price of domestic crude by maybe $0.15-$0.40 per gallon, well, I'm not sure why you think this will promote our energy or national security.
     I'm not seeing the upside in any direction. And remember, I've talked with and printed interviews with TransCanada's spokespeople, and I've read the 44 page summary of the SEIS several times and talked with the pipe layers and the Chinese making the pipe that's shipped to Canada and then brought to the US for trimming--and then being called US pipe. But I can't seem to find an upside: No tax on the bitumen because it's going to the international freeport of Port Arthur, no jobs beyond guys already working being diverted to the pipeline for a year or two, no permanent jobs except for the HAZMAT people who will clean up the messes; southern line had more than 47 percent of its welds having to be redone, no oil for the US. Just exactly what's in this for us in the US? I'm serious. What do you think is the upside?

So Today I Performed a Wedding

Every now and then I'm asked to be a minister who marries people. Maybe three or four or five times so far, not often. And each time I'm asked I try to think of something different, something cool to say to the people getting married. It leaves me a wreak.
    Today I was marrying my cuñada, my sister-in-law, to a guy she's crazy about but whom I've never met. I haven't been with my wife/ex-wife's side of the family much in the last 18 months, not since Chepa's boyfriend moved into her house. He's okay, I guess, probably very nice, but I just don't feel like partying much with him.
    So I tried to cop out of doing the Universalist Life Church Minister thing today but no one would hear it. Amelia wanted me to do the ceremony, period.
    So I got back from Peru last week. And in the last week I wrote the Forward to a friend's book, went to truancy court with Madeleina, scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom floors, scrubbed the tub, took the garbage to the dump, vacuumed like a wildman, cooked like crazy, scrubbed the fridge, dealt with the company building the road out front of the house about the watermain--mine--that they broke, started a feature story for the Fort Worth Weekly that's due on Friday and did a zillion other things.
    But yesterday was the day I had to sit down and write what I was going to say at the wedding. And I did and it came out nicely. At the risk of boring you all to tears, this was a part of me that came from my heart--not because I've ever been a good husband. I was rotten to Clare and lousy to Chepa; but I have learned. I've learned what not to do if I ever get another chance with either of those or someone else. So I think my preamble was nice. Here it is. I improvised off this script but this is the gist of it.

Dear friends and family, we are gathered here today to witness the the marriage of my cuñada, sister-in-law, and friend, Amelia Aguliar to David Leiter, a man she tells me she loves very much.

And I’ve been asked to say a few words about marriage and love and I’m happy to do that, though god knows why someone would ask me!

I think love is a great spark with which to light the fire of marriage.

But I think that marriage itself takes more than love.

It takes work,

It takes confidence,

It takes trust,

It takes respect,

It takes generosity of spirit.

If your partner, for instance, comes up with a cockamamie idea for a color to paint a room, do you  say that’s a rotten idea and call them stupid, knowing you’ll hurt your partner’s feelings? Or would you rather encourage your partner with love, have confidence that your partner has an idea, trust that his or her idea seems a good one to them and then, with a generosity of spirit, allow them, help them even, find that color and paint that room.

You can always repaint it if it comes out as badly as you thought it would. But you can’t always take back the erosion of love that can be caused by stomping your feet and telling your partner that their idea was stupid to begin with.

The thing is this: Love and marriage both require constant care—picture your love like a garden: You need to weed it; to water it, to fertilize it, to care for it, to nuture it. You can’t just plant a seed or a million seeds and walk away: if you do, when you come back you might find that the birds ate all your seeds and your garden is fallow; or it might be overgrown with weeds. Or the neighborhood kids used it for a party and left beer bottles and other garbage all over it. Whatever the case, what I can promise you is that it won’t be a garden anymore.

Same with love and marriage. So take the seeds of love and make your marriage something you’re proud to be part of. Something you like tending. Something you love to nuture. Make it beautiful—and when hard times come, and they come to all of us, remember to work gladly, to have confidence, to trust your partner, to respect their needs and wishes, and to never stop giving joyfully the generosity of your spirit. If you can do that, you have a chance to make a marriage work. If you don't, you don't have any chance at all.

More directly, if I can give you three short but vital tips:

Try never to go to bed angry with one another, even if it means staying up all night.

Try to have two good laughs for every tear that falls.

And try to do one new thing every day to keep your marriage fresh—just one little thing that will let your partner know how much you love them. how much you value their partnership.

And now, its time for the ceremony.

Does anyone here know of any reason why this marriage should not go forward? If you do, please speak up now—or forever hold your peace.

Now, Amelia Aguilar, cuñada, do you take David Leiter  to be your lawfully wedded husband, for better or worse, in times of richer or poorer, sickness or health till death to you part?

And, David Leiter, do you take Amelia Aguilar to be your lawfully wedded wife, for better or worse, in times of richer or poorer, sickness or health, till death do you part?

May I have the rings please?

David, can you please place this ring, the representation of the wholeness of your love, on Amelia’s finger…

Amelia, take this ring, the representation of the circle of life and love, a circle with no beginning or end, and place it on David’s finger.

I now pronounce you, in front of all your friends and family, husband and wife.

And yes, you may kiss the bride.

Eight Months, One Week on Antibiotics, Coming to an End

I started on three antibiotics daily on July 1, when my leg began to look like it had a serious problem. And, having had flesh eating bacteria previously, when I said this looked bad, it looked bad enough that Alan Shoemaker sent Skinny Jorge, the best paper-man in Iquitos, to my home in Iquitos at about 11 PM with orders to take me to a clinic.
    From then through end of October, I was on three to four antibiotics daily; generally one was a drip and the others were pills. They switched them frequently. After the end of October, once it was clear the skin graft had taken on my leg, I got cut down to one antibiotic daily, taken orally. I did bactrim for a month, two 1500 mg pills daily. In February and for the last five weeks, I've been on ciproflaxin, just 1000 mgs daily.
    My stomach never went bad from the antibiotics, but I will tell you that it was swollen badly. And my joints hurt. I mean, it hurt, particularly when I was on cipro, in my bones, like they were all dried up. I hurt getting into the car, getting out, standing up, bending over. I'm hoping those symptoms go away now that I'm on my first day free of antibiotics in a long time. I look forward to wanting to exercise, not dreading it. I look forward to getting back to walking a few miles daily rather than being frightened of even trying it for the pain. I know other people have it a lot worse than I do. I hope their pain goes away before mine; I don't mind standing in line. But some time, I would love to not feel bloated, not hurt just typing this, not dreading having to get out of bed at 3 AM to take a leak because my ankles hurt so much.
    Silly, right? But I'm telling you, I forgive everyone I ever thought was faking it with chronic pain and I hope they find it in their hearts to forgive me. This shit stinks. It makes life unenjoyable much of the time. If what you spend your day doing is trying to stop hurting, well, that stinks. And I'm hoping my rehab is ready to start and my medications are over. I see the surgeon in 13 days. He'll tell me if I have to go back on antibiotics. I think I'm okay, but I'll take his word. He's a genius in my book. Saved my leg. I adore him. But I'll hate him if he puts me back on.

Forward to a Friend's New Book on Ayahuasca

Well, I'm back from Peru. I hope all of you had a fantastic time while I was gone for the month. My boss didn't want me to go because, as she says: "The jungle is trying to kill you." My wife/ex-wife Chepa puts it another way: "Oh, the jungle loves you. The only problem is she loves you to death."
    They both might be right. The list of things I've caught, been bitten by, had invade my system is a list of nearly every ailment one can get in the jungle. Still, this time my bad leg held up, I don't think I've gotten any parasites or new flesh eating bacteria or spider bites, no snakes bit me. Hoping I'm not jinxing myself but I think the jungle was very gentle with me this time out.
     Now there was good news and bad news when I got home: My beautiful Madeleina is going to State, the state of Texas competition, both as a solo flute player and as a member of a 13 piece ensemble, one of only a couple of dozen kids in bands across the state who can boast that. The bad news is that in practicing for the contests she skipped a few days and so she and I got summoned to truancy court for a March 5 appearance. That's gonna cost me several hundred bucks. Damnit!
     Now while I was in Peru, my friend Alan Shoemaker's new book, "Ayahuasca Medicine: The Shamanic World of Amazonian Sacred Plant Healing," came out. It's published with Inner Traditions, a good house and I hope he sells a million copies. I happened to write the Forward to it. But also while in Peru, another friend, asked me to write the Forward to his upcoming book, "Diary of an Ayahuasca Skeptic". I said okay and today I got down to it. So here it is.
Diary of an Ayahuasca Skeptic

Forward by Peter Gorman

I first met D.L.Walker in early June, 2013. It wasn’t a pleasant meeting. I had just flown into Iquitos, Peru—the Amazonian city which can only be reached by plane or boat—to take a couple of groups out into the deep jungle where they would have the opportunity to learn about the Amazon river, Her people and medicines over the course of a couple of weeks. Among those medicines they’d get a chance to utilize was ayahuasca, an extraordinary elixir that can give the user the chance to get through the equivalent of five years of psychotherapy in three or four hours. More on that later.

     My team of workers met me at the airport when I came in and we’d gone directly to the Belen market—the sprawling heart of the heart of Western Amazonia—to begin supplying for the first of the two trips. That done, my team retrieved the dozen or so large plastic containers that held my basic jungle stuff out of storage, brought them to my room, and we’d spent several hours going through hammocks, mosquito nets, blankets, towels, boots, rope, medicines and a host of other necessities for taking groups into the jungle. By the time that was done I was exhausted and went to the Boulevard, a touristy park lined with expensive restaurants, to have a drink.

    Several people I know were having an animated political discussion at the next table. If I wasn’t so tired I might have joined them; instead, I said my hellos then sat and ordered an aguar diente—cane liquor—with lime and a side of water. I was wrapped up in what I needed to repair and replace and needed to be alone for that.

    Suddenly I heard the discussion turn to President Obama and the tone was pretty negative, I thought. Actually, I thought it was fucking outrageous and I told the lout who was making the comments, a big fellow I didn’t know who had his back to me and who wore a hat and had a salt and pepper pony tail, that in my presence Obama would be referred to as Mr. President and treated with respect—whether the guy liked him or not. Well, the guy—who turned out to be Dag Walker, took umbrage at my outrage and told me to go fuck myself. I responded in kind and after a few moments he stormed off, pissed off.

    I asked the others at the table—guys I’d known for years—who the guy was: They said his name was Dag Walker and he’d been in Iquitos for months while I was not there, was a writer, and a good one, and that I should have kept my mouth shut.

    I was probably on my third drink by then and said I didn’t give a hoot whether I’d pissed Mr. Walker off or not.

    Next time I saw Dag—who doesn’t drink alcohol—I was again tired and slightly in my cups. He sat and we introduced ourselves and he explained that he’d read—or tried to read my book “Ayahuasca in My Blood—25 Years of Medicine Dreaming” but that while it was well written he couldn’t get through it. Thought I was full of shit, basically, and had made up a whole lot of nonsense to sell tourists on coming on my trips. That set me off: I loudly explained that for the first 15 years of coming to the Amazon I’d been a collector of indigenous artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, a collector of medicinal plants for Shaman Pharmaceuticals and whatever other credits I might have. Then I began to tout my national writing awards and so forth. Dag Walker wasn’t impressed a bit. In fact, he was so appalled that I needed to justify myself that way that he would shortly write—and publish in the local Iquitos English language newspaper—that shortly after my outburst I fell off my chair in a drunken stupor and lay with a stray dog on the sidewalk, blissfully asleep. I still hate him for that exaggeration.

    But while we still sat at the same table, he with a Fanta and me with an aguar diente and water, he announced that in his opinion the whole tourist trade centered on ayahuasca in Iquitos—which is huge these days—was hype, phony, a complete lie because, in his opinion, ayahuasca did nothing for anyone except help river people puke to eliminate stomach parasites and worms. He was so sure of it that he himself was writing a book about ayahuasca in Iquitos and to that end he’d interviewed more than 100 people who’d used the stuff. He said he’d heard nothing of interest other than some stories of people who claimed to see demons or gods or both—things he was certain they’d conjured to justify having spent all that money to come to Iquitos to drink ayahuasca and see those things.

    The next time I saw Dag was after my group came out of the jungle. He asked them what had happened and while most of them loved the overall jungle experience, only a few claimed life-changing events occurred with ayahuasca—and those he later dismissed. But we didn’t argue that night, which was good. And the next day when my group had returned to their homes in the States and Europe, and I was reading an Elmore Leonard novel, he paused at my table to say that at least I had good taste in writers, as he was a Leonard fan. I offered to give him the book once I’d finished. That made him happy. It also eased the tension between us.

    He soon told me that after talking with all those people about ayahuasca, he’d realized that he would have to try it himself to give his book legitimacy. By that time I was ready to take the second group out. Unfortunately, I’d developed a bacterial infection on my lower right calf that was eating my flesh—I was on intravenous antibiotics—which was getting nasty. And by the time I got the second group out of the jungle, my leg was pretty awful and Dag said he’d drank ayahuasca a couple of times. He didn’t like the look of my leg, and he didn’t like ayahuasca. “Nothing. I got absolutely nothing from the experience except to confirm that there is nothing to it. Complete sham invented by people trying to make a buck off suckers,” he said, or something quite like that.

     I disagreed. I didn’t disagree that many of the folks building lodges where their guests could drink the medicine without ever getting a single mosquito bite had no business doing that because they lacked sufficient experience. I also didn’t disagree that with so many ayahuasca lodges having recently opened in Iquitos and environs that many if not most of the curanderos, the healers, actually serving the medicine were complete fakers, who’d never actually had the medicine but had none the less hired themselves out as curanderos to those naive lodge owners without the experience to know the difference between a legitimate healer and someone who’d learned to sing a few songs and fake a ceremony.

    What I disagreed with was Dag’s insistence that ayahuasca had little value other than in cleaning out parasites. I explained that in Northwest Amazonia, the general belief system among locals regarding illness and bad luck is that illness, bad luck and so forth are seen as the symptoms of a disturbance on another plane of reality. That was what my mother-and-father-in-law believed, as did their friends and lots of locals I’d met over the years. But my mother-in-law and the others could not access those other levels of reality, so they went to the curandero, told him or her their problem, and the curandero would then drink ayahuasca and access those other levels of reality. Up there, he or she could talk with plants, animals, spirits and they would help him or her to see what the disturbance was that was creating the illness or bad luck on this level of reality for the patient. The curandero would then ask those spirits what the patient needed to do to quell the disturbance, which would lead to a disappearance of the symptom. Armed with all that information, the curandero returned to this level of reality and told the patient—or patients, as many times curanderos will see a dozen people at a time on the traditional Tuesday and Friday ceremony nights.

    The example I gave Dag was this: Years ago while I was visiting my friend and teacher Julio, the curandero or local healer on the Aucayacu River a man came up in a dugout canoe. He said he’d heard that Julio was a powerful curandero. Julio chuckled at the complement. The man said that someone was giving him the evil eye. Julio asked how the man knew that. The man explained that every time he sold his yucca or chickens or anything else the man fell down and got hurt. It was often his knees but sometimes his elbow or head as well. “You need to see who’s jealous of me and tell me and I’ll stop them,” the man said, or something like that. Julio said he’d try, and that evening he drank ayahuasca. When he came out of his dream, he was chuckling and the man wanted to know what he’d seen that was so funny. Julio looked at the man and said that no one was giving him the evil eye of jealousy. He said that he’d seen that every time the man went to town to sell his yucca or chickens and had gotten his money, he went to drink at a little cantina with a broken step he fell on when he was drunk. “So you have two choices,” Julio said. “You can either stop drinking at that cantina, or you can fix the broken step.”

    To me, that’s classic ayahuasca healing. Julio really “saw” the man falling and the broken step in his dream and came back to explain how the disturbance could be fixed to eliminate the symptom of falling and getting hurt.

    The problem, I said to Dag, was that when Westerners got wind of ayahuasca, they demanded that they drink it, rather than just the curandero drinking it. So we’ve stood the paradigm on its head, and as a result, some people have such vital experiences that they become instant true believers and feel the absolute calling to open lodges to serve other potential true believers. Which can really water down the whole thing after a while because there are not very many good curanderos out there—certainly not nearly as many as there are lodges.

    Dag was unconvinced but said he’d determined to keep drinking until he either “got it” or felt he’d proven it nonsense—at least the way Western tourists were doing it.

    I went home shortly after that—after giving Dag a second Elmore Leonard book—had several operations to save my leg, and didn’t see Dag again until six or seven months had gone by and my doc gave me permission to return to the jungle.

    When I did see him again, he asked if I’d read his ayahuasca manuscript, which I reluctantly agreed to do. While I read, I began to edit a bit. I edited because Dag’s storytelling was very compelling but he kept feeling the need to quote academics to the point where I wanted to shoot him. By the second section of the book I was eliminating whole pages of quotes that seemed to me to interfere with a wonderful, surprisingly wonderful and insightful take on the ayahuasca phenomenon. The less he quoted others, the better the read and the pages began flying.

     There was just one hitch: He’d decided that to complete the manuscript he’d need to drink ayahuasca with me. That was a terrifying proposition—firstly because I prefer other people run the ceremonies, and secondly because as he already described me as an obese drunk who lay on the ground and cuddled with flea-bitten mangy dogs, I didn’t want to open myself up to what he might write if I served him ayahuasca and it had no effect. “Gorman proven phony! World’s biggest liar! Tourist money thief!” Except that he’d be much more colorful in his negativity toward me than I could ever be.

     Nonetheless, I agreed to serve him after my tour group had finished. By chance, the curandero I work with had come to Iquitos with the rest of my team—they’re all one family—and I asked him to run the ceremony, which we were going to do in my large room in the middle of the city.

     On ceremony night, the curandero sang for about an hour and then I took over—if I was going to get blasted it might as well be me doing at least some of the ceremony—before turning things over to the curandero to finish up.

     Dag has not said anything to me about his experience that night. And he has not shown me the chapter he was going to write about it. So I’m writing this Forward having read most of this book. And I will tell you that it’s a damned good read. How it ends, I have no idea. I’ll only say this: If it ends with me sleeping on the street, he’s making it up. But the rest of the book? He’s done his homework, been his own guinea pig and written something pretty special. Enjoy it.