Mowing Lawn/Bad Leg Getting Better

So I was finally forced last week to take in my lawnmower. It's an auto start that is guaranteed for two years but it wouldn't start. I brought it in and the guy told me the problem was my fault but only charged me $38. No sweat.
   The sweat is that it weighs nearly 90 lbs and with the bad leg and no way to pick it up, I creamed myself both putting it on my Ford Ranger and taking it off. No big deal. So I bled into my flesh-eating bacterial wound. At least I'd taken the 15 bags of fetid garbage to the dump before I opened the thing up.
   And the next day it was ready. So I've been mowing my lawn for five days now. Today was the yard over the bridges by the chicken coop and fire pit: 100 feet by 170 feet. Grass and weeds about 2' tall. Pain in the neck, but no one mowed it since I left for Peru in early June. Now to be honest, this isn't all that hard: It's a push mower--the small tractor isn't working--but it has a lever that makes it go into drive mode so that it sort of walks itself, unless you hit an ant hill or a dip or something like that. Still, it's been an hour or hour and a half a day to get five of the seven yards done. And I only raked two of them, so there is some work to do tomorrow with the rake. Which is really hard work. And boring. And you want to quit after ten minutes. But you don't. You just rake harder. Shit. Sucks. One more bag full please.
    Normally, I love physical labor. But since my intestine exploded five years ago and I had those three operations, including the one where they had to cut out my belly button and give me a fake one, my upper and lower bodies have no relationship. I go to run and my upper body leans forward while my legs stand still and I simply fall over. I go to do sit ups and my legs rise uncontrollably while my torso doesn't move. All that changed in January when Ayahuasca put me back together after the three operations and five years. I was falling asleep, leaning forward, took a breath and to my utter surprise my upper torso straightened out, without me thinking about it. She'd told me to be clean--and I was--and told me to pay attention--which I did--and told me to drink a little to let her do her work--which I did--and she told me it would be important that night. But I never expected that present. Wow! That was fantastic.
   Five months later the flesh eating bacteria came and ate my right calf. So much for strength, eh?
   But everything is getting better, slowly: My wound has gone from about 12 by 15 inches of lost flesh to a measly 6 by 7 inches: And we know that because I have the pictures with the rulers in them to prove it. And I'll get a skin graft in a week or two and close that baby up--if it sticks. If not, it will close in a couple of months on its own, as it's been doing.
    But while I'm trying to get out of my spiritual crisis--see last post--by mowing lawn and so forth, I am physically in pain. And I ran out of pain killers nearly a month ago and thought it better to not ask for more. Why? Cause I'm a stupid macho 62-year-old who forgot that pain hurts if you don't have pain killers and if doctors are willing to give them to you for pain, you're an idiot to not take them. I'm the case in point.
    So someone very generous--actually two people--send me medical marijuana. One sent two joints, one sent about half-an-ounce. I put them away. I have no idea who sent them, they just showed up. That was very cool. And they showed up in vacuum pacs  with fake return addresses so that nobody smelled them and I have no idea where they came from.
    So the other day, I was in real pain after lifting the mower into my truck, lifting it off, mowing lawn and raking for an hour or two. Plus carrying rocks that the people building the road on my property have left all over the freaking place. So, no pain killers? I thought, Now is the time to break into that medical mar stash.
   But you know what? It wasn't there. Neither of them. I mean, I'd taped the half ounce to the back of the box in the freezer that is frozen to the freezer floor, and I'd put the two joint baggie into a bag of basil that was sealed in two baggies. I knew I'd need it sooner or later so put it in a place where no one could find it.
   But then it was gone.
   I called my kids in one by one. I called Chepa. "Chep? Did you happen to find a baggie of marijuana in the freezer? I mean, if your friends were over and they were asking for a joint, is there any chance that you said, "maybe Peter has some" and then went and looked and found it and gave it to your friends?"
   She was insulted. "If I wanted a joint, I would ask, cholo. You think I would steal from my husband, even if we are not together the last 12 years? Who do you think I am? Cholo!"
   I asked Madeleina. I told her that there would be no repercussions and that she could say whatever she wanted but to tell me the truth within 24 hours. Nothing bad would happen, just tell me. I know Madeleina doesn't even know what marijuana looks like but sometimes, when I talk about property forfeiture and such she panics and throws out the frozen basil, the frozen strawberries, the frozen grapes, anything she thinks might cost us the house or might be illegal. She said she hadn't done a thing.
    I gave Marco the same deal: No repercussions for answering truthfully to the next question. If you need to lie, no problem, you can rectify it within 24 hours, still no repercussions....Marco, did you happen to find any....
    "I did it, dad."
    I paused. I wasn't ready for that, at least not so quickly.
    "I don't know what I"ve been doing for a few weeks. I feel lost. I looked for it, I found it. I didn't even smoke it. I just took it and then I threw it away."
   "Were you saving me from me?" I asked.
    "Nope."
    I thought about it for a minute.
    "Marco, if I have a bottle of wine and you want a glass, you're my kid and you are welcome to it, right? And if I have two trucks working and you need one, you're welcome to it, ritght? Okay. But please never never never again take the whole stash, much less two stashes, without a note saying that you did it, and particularly when you know dad is hurting and needs something and there are no pain medications. Okay?"
     "Sorry dad. I'll try not to do that again."
     "Okay, I said no repercussions for the truth. Don't do it again or I'll kill you. Meanwhile I love you. And I hope it helped you through your own spiritual crisis."
      "I think it did, but I don't want anymore. Let's leave it at that dad. I love you too."
      Sometimes you just can't get angry at the people you most want to get angry with. They are the precious few that matter in the long run, and Marco and I? We've had a 20-year run so far: If I'm gonna go crazy over every little thing, or if he would hold me accountable for every time I was less than a great dad, well, we'd hate each other. But if we forgive, and we do, and if we try to forget, which we also do, well, maybe he and I will have another 20 years, and you know what? The good has outbalanced the anger about 100 to one.
      Thanks for being my kid, kiddo. I love you. Dad.

Little Crisis of Faith

I've been in a little crisis of faith for some weeks now, and think that yesterday brought it to a head but am a long way from really out of it. What crisis of faith? The crisis of not being sure that I can do anything. I mean not being sure I can make a meal, not being sure I can wash dishes. Not sure I have the strength, energy or drive to do a laundry or make the calls necessary to get the story done. Things I live for and love to do look and feel like insurmountable barriers meant to hamper me in every way.
    People depend on me to 'sing' for them in the mornings. It's just what I do to say hello to the world, to the medicines, to the colors of the universe, to the spirits, to friends, family, to strangers who ask for help. I love to do my sing--something based on Peruvian ceremony but modified to be strong for me outside of traditional ceremony. But I have avoided it for a month. I say a nodding hello to the spirits who help me and otherwise ignore them.
    I have not called my friends or family for weeks. Too much effort and I don't have the oomph, the pizazz, the joie de vivre, the pump, the push, the oh la la to force myself to do it.
    Part of it is that I hurt. I hurt all over every minute of every day. My knees, my leg, my toes. Standing is a pain, walking is a pain, mowing lawn a pain--though after I'm doing any of those things for more than a few minutes, I'm okay. So the start is slow because of the physical--a lot of which is the side effet of nearly four months of 1500 mgs of antibiotic a day--and that's after the other three antibiotics were cut out of the program. Part of it is just not believing that I can really get anything done. And when I do there is no feeling of reward. It all has seemed pointless. Yes, I've done what needs to be done. But where I normally do things with joy and thunder I'm just getting them done.
    I am not happy about it. I do not want to be this person. Yesterday was very very low. Today my son Marco came over to talk about a similar situation he's been in, so it might be running through the Gormans right now. But I want out of this. I want the spark back, I want the fire. I want the insane joy of living every second no matter what I'm doing. Washing dishes? Scrub those babies!!!!! Doing laundry? Toss each piece of clothing into the washer from 10 feet! Doing lawn? Burn it, baby! Calling friends? Get ready for an hour of good conversation. And writing a story? In the zone. Disappear into the place where Peter Gorman doesn't exist, where walls melt and information I've researched for the story come to me in such a way that I have a hard time typing it fast enough! Sing in the morning? YES! Heal those people or try to heal them. Send out the most positive, deep, worthwhile courage and love I've got to share and then share even more!
      I've never lost an ounce of strength in giving and giving. But this sitting around, getting things done as chores and physically hurting all the time, well, this is sucking the freaking live and love out of me. So universe, give me a hand here, cause I'm about done with this nonsense. If this leg and all the attendant shit is a test, well, tell me my grade and lets get on with living. If I'm just sorry for myself, well, then, self, you really are a sorry muthafugga, so quit it. If it's the weather? No excuse. Time to find those bootstraps and rip it up again in a joyful and meaningful way. It's the same job, the same life, the same work. And I'd rather be doing with while I'm exploding with energy than doing it while dragging my behind.

Just a Little Rant Regarding Fences, Food, and Social Security

A friend of mine from back in childhood and highschool cut and pasted a picture of WWl vets behind a fence being denied entrance to the WW ll memorial in Washington DC. Next to it is a picture of two supposed-to-be Mexican illegals climing into the US over a simple barbed wire fence. The caption reads something like: President Obama Logic 102: He'll fence them out (meaning the vets) but not them? (indicating the illegal Mexicans.
    It bothered me but since he's my old pal and since he rails against both republican and democratic idiocy, I left it alone. That is, I left it alone until someone posted that my friend was racist for posting the pic. So I jumped into the fray with this:
    L: I love you and know that healing--[he just had surgery]--is a pain in the, you know. But, Obama didn't erect any fence to keep anyone out of the WW ll memorial. The republicans shut down the government, which means there's no one to work the memorial, which means that it's closed. So that's the republicans.
    As for the Mexico fence, well, I've been living in Texas nearly 12 years now and all that the fence that has been built has done is make it difficult for families who live on both sides of the border to visit, to see their back yards and so forth. It certainly hasn't stopped a single person coming in, and the reason for that is that our country comes to a halt if there are no illegals to pick crops. We simply starve. We depend on illegals for crop picking, restaurant dishwashing, laying our roads in Texas--hired by the Texas govt--digging ditches, doing all the work no one else will do.
    On top of that, President Obama has deported more illegals than any other president--with a focus on deporting those with an criminal record. So he's been the toughest President on illegals, without question. Hell, even insane Governor Perry here in Tejas doesn't want the fence because it does nothing but look ugly/cut farms in half/cost money. But it certainly has not kept a single person out: You just bring a ladder to the Mexican side and there you go.
    The additional benefits of illegals, of course, is that they'll keep Social Security solvent for 100 years if the Feds stop stealing from it.  That's because illegals tend to use legitimate social security cards and numbers and pay into it. But they'll never collect, and the person to whom it belongs will only receive his/her $1400 a month max, so the additional thousands/tens of thousands being poured into a card like that weekly/monthly simply go into the social security pool. And it's not unusual to find cards being used by 500 people or more. With all of those people paying $20-$30 a week into social security, one card might be accumulating $15,000 grand weekly. So the pic you posted, well, I won't get into the racist thing the first respondent did, but I will say that it's completely inaccurate. And I hope you feel better quickly.

What Happened to My Leg

I've been thinking about writing this for a while, but have not. I think I'm intimidated because there is at least an element of brujeria--black magic--or the possibility of an element of brujeria involved. Which means an awful lot of people are going to write this and me off pretty quickly. It also means that I have to explain some things.
    So I'll give the prior-to-the-leg story.
    Some years ago, I was attacked by a pretty damned negative energy during an ayahuasca ceremony with Julio. He saw it and tried to chase the spirit--or the physical person's negative energy--away while I sang for my life. In the end, I saw two friends/quasi friends who took credit for the attack with the simple explanation "Because I can." As if they were trying out some superpowers and just happened to try out the negativity one on me.
    I don't know that they were really the attackers--in the spirit world spirits hide behind a lot of masks--or we humans, in our attempt to compartmentalize the disembodied spirits we're seeing, give them form. So it might have been a negative energy bought and paid for by someone who didn't like me--in Iquitos, that's pretty common--or it might have been someone directing energy at Julio that I somehow intercepted--and a lot of people wanted him dead when he got very old because they thought--and this is the way it is with curanderos and their spirit helpers--they could steal his spirit helpers if they were there at the moment of his death. Whether they can or not, I'm not sure, but that's the belief system for a lot of people in that part of the world--and it results in good friends trying to kill you if they think you're going to die, just to be there when you actually kick the bucket so that they grab that power.
    On a trip not long after that one, one of my guests put a box into my green shoulder bag--those who know it call it the magic bag because it always seems to be filled with just what you need at the moment you need it--and told me they'd been given it by a friend of mine who said it was a gift for Madeleina, my daughter.
    It was a box with an odd little plastic space man sort of doll in it. I thought it a strange gift for Madeleina but put away in my suitcase in my room in Iquitos with the intention of bringing it to her when I went back to Texas.
    But strange things started happening almost immediately: My team began complaining that they didn't like the energy in my room. They smoked it with mapacho--think of smudging with black tobacco cigarettes--and Agua Florida and sang icaros and shook chacapas--bundle leaf fans--to clear the space. A couple of my team felt ill and vomited in the room in the first days after I got the doll, but I didn't even think of it at the time. But something was going on: There were noises and conversations in the room at night when I was alone; things fell off the thick cement walls that had been in place for 40 years.
    And then one morning when I got up--my team was already in the room and hallway ready to work--I just keeled over. My team got me to a doctor who said I'd had a little "heart attack, a little heart fart" would be a good translation. No big deal, just one of those things. He examined me and said everything was fine, it was an isolated thing I didn't need to concern myself with but that it was lucky that someone did a basic CPR and got me breathing.
    Back at the room, the team demanded to look around. They said it was brujeria at work and were sure someone had put something in the room that acted as a magnet--or directional compass--to draw the negative energy that was so recently prevalent there, to the room. I said the only thing new that I knew of was a gift for Madeleina, and I took it out for them to see.
    They urged me to open the box. I did. The doll was hard red plastic. But out of the box I realized it looked as though you could open it. So I did. And inside was another doll, smaller, I think more or less the same. But when I opened that, there was another doll inside. But this doll was turned in the opposite direction and was completely different except for being made of red plastic. This doll had a knife in a raised hand that was pointed to the second doll's heart from the inside--and that meant it was pointed at the larger doll's heart as well. And there was a note attached to the doll in English. I can't remember the exact words this very second, but it went pretty much like this: "You are my enemy and I will kill you until you die!"
   Okay, that was freaking eerie and we decided that it wasn't the sort of doll I should bring Madeleina--in fact, it might have been the sort of doll that someone would pay a brujo--negative person, generally a fallen curandero who made a living with love spells and being paid to cast concentrated negative energy toward people--to put a lot of hatred and anger into and pass along to me. But they would only do that if they really hated me and they'd only hate me if I'd wronged them. And I had not wronged anyone. Chepa was free when I met and fell in love with her. I didn't take clients from anyone else, ever,  didn't steal money, didn't do anything that would make someone hate me. Hell, I didn't even take my clients for the Jungle Trips to a place used by anyone else.
    We got rid of the doll: Burned it, sang over it, crushed the remains and buried it in the river. It might just have been a doll but with that little knife and that message, well, it wasn't a nice doll.
    Two or three years later, out of the blue, a fellow who'd been on one of my very early trips called me out of the blue. I'd seen him on the street in Iquitos now and then and we shared pleasantries but I always though him a bit distant considering we'd spent a week in the jungle together and he'd had a great time and we'd enjoyed one another's company and so forth. After saying hello, he said that he wanted to apologize. I asked him "apologize for what?"
    He said he knew that I knew he'd gone to work for a well-known ayahuasca lodge in its early days and had helped grow it to something considered very excellent just outside of Iquitos. I said that sure, I knew he worked there and I was glad they were doing well and doing good work.
   Then he told me that many time he and others at that lodge--I knew some of them at least to say hello to--sat around and talked about how stupid Peter Gorman was, how I was a jerk and how my trips sucked. I asked him why they thought that. He said they sometimes saw me drinking or drunk on the Boulevard and I said of course. When I'm in town I'm on my time having a party. And when I have faltered in the jungle setting--and I have, occasionally--I try to make it up to the clients. He said he knew. He also said the trip with me was the trip that opened his eyes and made him want to be down in the jungle, drinking medicine. He said the overnight riverboat ride up the Amazon was the single best night he'd ever had and the medicine he drank with Julio was the most potent, profound and healing medicine he'd ever done.
    I asked him why he sat around and made fun of me and my trips if that's how he felt. He said he didn't know but that's why he was calling to apologize.
   I asked him if it ever got to the level of wanting me hurt--or sending a doll my way. He said no. It was nasty and negative and at my expense but not brujeria. I believed him and that was that.
   The call sort of opened my eyes to the idea of people not liking me. Not that I thought everyone did, but until then I couldn't have imagined that anyone who didn't would have spent one second thinking about me. It never occurred to me.
    I believe he didn't send that doll, but someone gave it to one of my guests with instructions to put it into my bag with the word that it was a gift for my daughter. And it was not a doll that's available in Iquitos or anywhere in Peru. So someone went out of their way to send negativity in my direction. That was disturbing.
    Now the leg. On my trip in June, I had a good group of nice people, and ayahuasca said she had things to teach me so that I should stay very straight during the trip. I did. And as always, before the trip started, I asked the universe--give it any name with which you feel most comfortable--to make certain that if anything bad had to happen on the trip--like a bad fall, a snakebite, a really awful spider bite and so forth--to make certain it happened to me, and not my guests. They were just down for a life-changing experience, after all, and were due home in a couple of weeks and having them hurt would really crimp things. Now I don't like getting hurt either, but I've been hurt so much in the jungle over the years that I figure I can handle it, so it should come my way. Wretched universe is always accommodating and so yes, the bad things always happen to me. Darn.
    We left Iquitos on a riverboat at about 2 PM, headed up the Amazon. The boat arrived at our first destination at about 3 AM, where we disembarked, had all of our food/camp materials and so forth taken off the boat, and headed into the pitch black town. The place we land has no electricity most of the day most of the time, and certainly none at night, so it's really pitch black after you get past the four solar panel-lit lights at the port. But I'd arranged for a restaurant to be open for us and to have hot coffee and tea ready. The owner had two long tables with table cloths and candles set up, so that my guests, probably wondering what my plan was as we walked through the pitch dark of the town, suddenly got a lovely surprise. We had coffee and I bought some of the local cheese and crackers and we had a good snack, after which my friend Juan got them to their simple hotel rooms.
   Now at the end of the alley where the tables were set up--I called it a restaurant but it's really just an alleyway--were the gates to the local market. The market has two bathrooms in one corner. It opens at about 5 AM when the first fishermen come in with the fish caught in their nets. Their wives cut and clean them and strip the scales on long cement tables and push the refuse to the cement floor. Shortly after the fishermen arrive come the people selling plantains and papaya, chickens, bread, and the other things sold in the market.
   Well, the gates had just opened when I had to take a leak. I mean, had to take a leak. Normally, I would have stepped around the corner of the alley and peed there, but a couple of guests had not gone to their rooms yet and so out of decorum I decided I'd try to make it to one of the bathrooms on the far side of the cement-floored market. It was a desperate situation: I'm a grown man and can hold it for hours if I have to but not this time: It felt as though someone was squeezing my kidneys from both sides and I knew I'd be peeing down my pant leg in just a few moments. It might have been the first time in 10 years I got the urge like that, and with my clothes in my backpack being loaded onto the smaller boats in the port that would take us where we were going, I had nothing to change into.
   I strode to the steps at the top of the market, walked with long strides across the floor, and about halfway across felt myself begin to slide. It was as though someone had put a rope across the floor and I'd walked into it: The floor was slippery, but instead of falling with one leg forward, my head stopped abruptly, my legs came together and left the floor so that I was in a perfect planche position, head parallel with both feet for a moment, then fell and hit with my entire body at the same moment. I tucked my head so that I didn't hit that so hard but when I landed I stayed still a moment. "Oh, shit. Something bad just happened," I thought. And I knew it. Something awful had happened and I didn't mean falling in front of people selling fish. I've been embarrassed way too often in my life by my own failures to worry about that. No. This was a deep feeling that something had just gone terribly wrong.
   When I tried to get up I realized I couldn't. I just slid in place. Heck, it probably took me 30 seconds just to turn over. When I did, I realized that what I'd fallen in was the soap and water used to get yesterday's fish guts off the market floor. I was sliding around in day old fish entrails and soap and muck and finally someone passed me a long stick and I grabbed it and they pulled me to where the floor was dry and I got up then went to the bathroom and peed.
    As there was no water, I just brushed as much of the goop off of me and my bare calves--I was wearing shorts--combed the goop out of my hair and returned to the long tables for a coffee. But the nagging sensation that something had gone wrong, really wrong, stuck with me. Who had made me need to urinate that way? So badly that I didn't look at my surroundings when crossing the market floor. Who had caught my neck with an invisible rope that had me fall the way I did. And why?
   That's the kind of "really bad thing" I was thinking about. This was not an ordinary fall. I do that frequently enough to know I don't have any style when I fall. This was entirely different.
    And I knew that it wasn't necessarily someone who hated me. Just someone who sees me come into that town four times a year and each time I arrive I have a huge team of helpers and guests and they might imagine that they should be working instead of my helpers, or that they should have the guests and not me, or who knows what. I do know--I've learned--that negative energy from simple jealousy can have real world impacts. And I know that there are people in that town who don't like me or who are jealous--several have told me I don't belong there even though I've known that town since 1985.
    The trip itself went well. And while I tried to ignore the tugging feeling that something had gone very wrong with that fall, when nothing happened by the time we all returned to Iquitos, I was thrilled to be proven wrong. I imagined I was just getting caught up in my own self-importance and was glad to see the universe was putting me in my place by letting me and the guests and my staff all come out without anything rotten happening.
    I went to bed that night in my room alone, thanking the universe for not letting anything happen on the trip.
    I woke up to angry red streaks on my right calf and a small hole of rotten flesh in the middle of them. By that evening it got ugly; the next night was so bad that Alan Shoemaker sent my friend Jorge to my my room insisting I go to the hospital. I did, but the flesh eating had started and in the end nearly took my leg off.
    Interestingly, when cultures were finally done at the hospital in Texas a month later--and they took more than a week to fully develop--it turned out that there were four different things attacking the leg:
Morganella morganni
a species of Proteus
Pseudomonas
Aeromonas hydrophila
    The last two, while fairly common, often occur in fish--and rotting fish guts and skin and tails that have been sitting in the heat of a metal roofed building festering for 24-hours is apparently a good place to pick them up in open cuts and such. And I've always got some small cuts on the back of my calves in Iquitos because I scratch at mosquito bites and such.
    So I'm not gonna swear that those four bacteria, or even the last two, did the very unusual and became flesh eaters--not their typical action in humans--because of any brujeria. But I am going to think that the fall that landed me in that microbe goop exposed open cuts on the back of my calves to them. And I'm going to say that the fall just wasn't normal.
     And the takeaway is this: While someone who has accrued a good deal of personal power or spirit world juice can wreak havoc on you life after sitting around a cauldron and wishing you ill for three or five or seven days, it really really doesn't take that much effort to mess a person up. Just thinking negatively will send energy out into the universe and that's enough to change the equilibrium of people who are not continually geared to protect themselves.
    So I'm going to ask anyone who doesn't like me, hates me, thinks I suck, to just not think about me, okay? I'm not doing anything to interfere with anyone else's life, so don't waste time on me. Cause I don't want this happening again. Seriously.

Toe in Political Water

I mostly steer clear of politics here. Why? Because that's what I do for a living and when I'm here I want to think/talk/write about other things that interest me. But this morning, a good friend of mine sent me a note about what she thought should be shut down in the government: The NSA (fat chance), Homeland Security (George W's favorite invention) and things like that. I agree with a lot of what she said, though I don't think it will come to pass.
    But at the bottom of her email was a note from someone named Lorraine, in which she talks about what President Obama is threatening to defund if there is a government shutdown--and then goes on to rail against Michelle Obama's expensive vacations. Well, it's such bullshit that I had to respond. So here it is:

Dear T:  What the woman Lorraine wrote is utter and complete hogwash. The president makes no choices about spending money in the United States. All monies are appropriated and spent by Congress and Congress alone. All debt is debt belonging to Congress--including the monies spent for the secret service and Airforce One used by the President and First Family. In terms of presidential and first family vacations, Ms. Lorraine apparently does not know that the actual vacations, the clothes, the food, the house staff, the non-presidential and non-secret service cars, the rent on the places and all party expenses unless directly related to a matter of State--are paid for out of the private pocket of the President and/or his wife. He's made millions on his books, gave the Nobel prize money away to charity, and like other presidents has no problem paying his own way.

   As to Lorraine's claim that the president "threatened not to pay:

    -Social Security Retirees
    -Military Retirees
    -Social Security Disability
    -and Federal Retirees
--well, again it's nonsense. Why? First, because the president does not have a say in who or what gets paid on any level; and secondly, because the things Lorraine mentions are all in the permanent budget: They get paid whether there is a government shutdown or not. As will Obamacare. As will Congressmen, Senators, their aides and so forth. What gets shorted financially are all of the "discretionary spending" items: NEW claims on social security; tens of thousands of non-vital federal employees, the Smithsonian, National Parks and the like. But certainly not Social security or retirees or military retirees. Current military, they get screwed by a shut down, but not retired military.

    I don't mind a good argument. Nobody has to agree with what I believe. But when things like this note from Lorraine get passed around as if there is one iota of truth in it--and then millions of people believe it and pass it on--well, that means there is a lot lot lot of bs flying around. 

    So your idea about getting rid of a lot of the TSA, most of Homeland Sec--just bring back the border patrol, I say--yeah, I can see the value in those things disappearing. But I get put off a bit when I read nonsense and outright lies put out by this Lorraine woman. PS: I'm guessing she's not a real person, but if she is, I'm sure she's nice. So I don't mean to offend her personally. I just wish she would take three minutes to actually look the stuff up before mindlessly copying the abject lies of FOX news, Hanratty, Limbaugh and the rest of the people with a single agenda: Put down that black man cause we whites won't have no black president.

    And have a great great day. It's beautiful here in Texas.

Too Efficient for My Own Good

Well, I'm either getting too efficient for my own good or I'm the laziest man alive. Today is Saturday. I had a list of things to get to and did my best to avoid them. I did toss in a wash early today, then clean up the kitchen from last night and read the computerized newspapers while having coffee, all before 7 AM. Washed a floor, dug out a box of slides I needed and spent time going through them. When Madeleina woke I made us carrot/celery juice, then took a nap. A NAP at 10 AM because I couldn't figure out what else to do. The lawn needs doing but I'm still fixing the lawn mower. The garbage has to go to the dump but I'm not supposed to go to the dump with my leg on the chance I might pick up another infection if I slip in the muck--and everybody slips in the muck at the local building where we all go to toss our trash. The floor is a half-inch deep in other people's rotten chicken and the ick from the occasional dead animal tossed in there.
     Got up from the nap, made three more calls for a story I need to finish by Monday, arranged for friends to visit in early November, commiserated with a friend going through a divorce, wrote emails, got Madeleina off to her marching band duties, came home and made five calls and sent three emails for a cover story I need to have done in a week or two. Got responses almost immediately and now have added a whole new angle to the story--and still have some responses that will come on Monday. Then I headed out to see Madeleina's band play, got caught in a thick storm, which canceled the event, headed over to the supermarket, got some good stuff for dinner (chuck steak, seared black on both sides, then sliced thin and put back in the scalding pan for a moment with garlic, sliced, not diced, onions, lemon and a dash of Worcestershire sauce served with small roasted red potatoes (small portion), a little steamed broccoli and cauliflower and a mixed salad with a shallot/balsamic vinagrette).
     Got home, took a shower, changed my leg dressing, cleaned the cat box and still don't know what the freak to do. I mean, before the leg, this is when you burn off the energy with lawn mowing. This is when you clean the house, but I already cleaned the house.
     So I didn't do anything all day, but managed to kick it quite a bit, really.
     Oh, an after one last search for the photos of a former football player that NFL Films called me about, I managed to find them.
     But I'm still feeling like I cheated because I never broke a sweat.

Gold Mine in the Closet

Someone from NFL films called recently to ask for a photo of a former player that I'd taken some years ago. Well, I looked in all the places I thought it would be--I was looking for a box of slides, really with maybe 6 good photos of the player--and couldn't find it. Which led me to have to dive into the box of slide sheets. Well, once I started, it was hard to stop. Most of the slides deal with Peru: From Iquitos in 1984 through the Cold Beer Blues Bar. The boats I rebuilt and took out onto the Amazon and then up the Jivari; Belen market over the years, Machu Picchu, riverboats, sunsets, ayahuasca, my friend Pablo's Matses camp and the first photos ever taken of Sapo, the Matses medicine extracted from a frog that's dabbed on fresh burned spots generally on the upper arms. There were photos of Matses hunts, and the use of Sapo, and plant medicines, and fiestas on the river and photos of the jungle three days, four days deep into the damp green. Things most people don't get a chance to see. There were photos of a couple of the women that the Matses stole years ago, and which I wrote about on my blog recently.
     And then there were photos from India and Morocco, stories I did for High TImes. And then photos of Leary and Richard Schultes, and a younger Dennis McKenna and Ram Dass with his arm around me and a host of photos of key members of the marijuana movement from the mid-1980s through the late 1990s: Dennis Peron, Brownie Mary, Jack Herer, Steve Hager, my boss at HT, two of the women of the cannabis movement, Debbie Goldsberry and Monica Pratt, and reformers like Julie Stewart who fights so hard against mandatory minimums and Brenda Grantland, who founded Forfeiture Endangers American Rights, and Ben Masel and Dr. Tod Mikuriya and most of the folks who were receiving government medical marijuana at the time.
     I never did find the photos I was looking for, damnit. But I did find a gold mine and wish I could think of something to do with it, because while they're not all the greatest photos in the world, an awful lot of them are pretty unique.

More on Irked...and Guilty as Charged

So a friend of mine has been guarding someone's ayahuasca camp for several months and not been paid. At least that's what he tells me and then he asked me to get in touch with the owner and ask when money might come. I did and the owner responded that it was all a lie.
   Just then someone wrote me about someone being able to make a good deal of money from some jungle products and I sort of blew up--you know, that freaking feeling of being irked again. So off I ran my mouth about people opening ayahuasca centers and being all holy and who knows what and my friend wrote back: "Well, that begs the question of why you take people out to the woods to drink ayahuasca."
    I knew the answer. It's great medicine and the only way I can get my jungle fix. I also knew/know that what I do is not take people out just to drink ayahuasca--I take them out to teach them about the river, the people, the food, the jungle, and in the course of that they have the opportunity to drink ayahuasca. Drink it the way I was taught it: as part of the jungle experience, not apart from the jungle experience.
   And I would say that maybe one out of every six people I take out on my jungle intensive courses does not drink ayahuasca. They enjoy the ceremony as a rule, but don't actually drink the medicine. Which does not mitigate the fact that most people who come on my trip damned well expect to drink good ayahuasca, have their lives changed for the better, and would probably toss me off the riverboat if I didn't deliver. So I'm guilty as charged.
   This is what I wrote to my friend: Yes, well, unfortunately, I was one of the people who started it all and have been remorseful ever since. If I didn't start it, I was certainly there at that point and will suggest that my great friend did. And I agreed to take gringos to the jungle and make ayahuasca available because I'd moved my family to Peru and when I realized I had to feed an extended family of 23 at least three meals a day at $1 per meal--well, they were either going to starve or I was going to accept taking gringos out occasionally.

   BUTTTTT......I keep my place secret--even Alan has never been there and never met Julio when he was alive: I didn't see what good it would do Julio, though it would have done Alan a world of good to have Julio at the first couple of conferences. I also try to keep my guests from talking with any other gringos until after the trip--no false info from people who are willing to share it. We eat at Miriam's or outside of the city--at Miriam's I'm a known commodity but other gringos--and I'm not talking about the regular ex-pat crowd but the new true believers who need to proselytize the medicine, don't talk with them. Then I whisk them out of town and no one knows when we left or where we're headed.

   And Julio's son, our curandero, is kept a secret as well, so that he can mature into a good curandero, rather than, like a lot of the others, become gringo arm-candy at some semi-luxury camp somewhere on the carretera where the object is to keep the real jungle out but keep it looking like jungle.

   Why do I keep doing it now that I no longer live there? It's the only way I can get my jungle fix. Plus, it's gotten to the point where I know a boatload about the rivers, the jungle, the people, the medicines, the food--and I love sharing that with some well-vetted strangers a few times a year.

   So I am guilty as charged. Phony as bad boloney. Hypocritical as a bad pickle. In my defense, I will say I resisted the urge for 15 years, even when good money for private trips was offered. The people I'm angry with seem to get the calling within weeks of airport touchdown and first ayahuasca takeoff, even if they don't speak Spanish. And then they buy 20 hectares or 50 hectares--which truth be known they probably don't actually own because it's very complicated to get a clean title, as you know--and then they tear down a bunch of it, then have people tear down a bunch elsewhere to provide the wood to build their places, then have other people scour the jungle for every inch of ayahuasca vine so that it gets impossible to find, burn tons of wood daily to keep the ayahuasca fire going, try to make gobs of money and tell people they're helping the locals. HA! Bringing people into the money system, unless you can guarantee you can keep them there for life if they so choose, is a ruthless thing. You get people hired by these camps and then camp goes to ruin and they no longer want to farm because it's too hard and they got used to the other life. So you have brutalized them on a lot of levels.

   I guess that's some of it.

PG

I'm Irked and It's Been Pouring Out of Me...

 I'm irked today, partly regarding ayahuasca. For those who know it, my rant might make sense: To others it will be ridiculous so you can quit now--unless you love a good rant. And since I have hurt every day, every minute of every day for the last month or so, well, I'm always in a foul, ranting sort of mood. With that in mind, probably several times today I have received letters, had friends call me and so forth, each with some definite thing about ayahuasca or the jungle. Definite is the operative word and that's what's irking me. One friend wrote about the dolphins and I've already tried to clarify that in an earlier post--and if I forgot to say the dolphins might actually physically transform or become fantastic teachers to some people, forgive me.
    But just half-a-hour ago a friend over for dinner picked up a book on jungle medicines and came out to the front porch and said: "Oh, the spirit of Una de Gato is a big black monkey, eh?" Una de Gato is a shrub with cat's claw like protuberances that's fantastic for improving the immune system and eliminating excess water in the body, among other things.
    Being in a semi-precious, stupid, foul, in-pain mood, I said that was ridiculous. I said I was tired of people who visit one curandero, listen to what he or she says and repeat it as if it's true. That's how bullshit gets spread around. What was true was that for that particular curandero in the book, he happened to see the spirit of Una de Gato as a large black monkey. But in fact, it would be nuts for a plant to have a monkey spirit. What happens is that we humans have to compartmentalize things so our brains don't explode. For that curandero, his brain compartmentalized the disembodied spirit of that plant as that monkey, which also allowed him--in all likelihood--to return to that spirit's presence. But someone else might see it as a wasp, or a rock or whatever.
    So what's irking me are people who get part of a story and repeat it as rote, rather than stepping back and trying to see how that story fits into the larger world picture. How many people have I met who have spent a month in Peru and told me they were called to open an ayahuasca center? Ten? Twenty-five? One is too many. Get your ass down there. Learn. Spend some years, two or three or something more than a month or two before you think you know how to serve people medicine. Want to write that book? Talk to three or five or fifty ayahuasqueros who have 1000 years among them serving the medicine and ask them what the spirits look like: You will probably wind up with a mosaic with a couple of archetypes rather than a list of animal totems that's really meaningless. Pablo Amaringo painted what he saw. Don Francisco Montes paints what he sees. His wife paints what she sees. And while there is something alike among them, they are all quite different.
    And me? I don't know anything, except what I've seen and learned but I know that 1) that's a very small window on a very large universe, and 2) my perceptions are colored by my life experience and should never be taken by anyone for reality, just my perceptions of what occurred. And I guess I'm just old enough to be tired of people who are spreading falsehoods in the name of truth. Even if they think it's the truth, it's just their truth, or the truth of their curandero/curandera, not some measurable truth. I think, and I'm sorry I've been rude in getting here but have also enjoyed it, that's important to remember.

Couple of Things About Getting Married in Iquitos, Peru

I don't know if all of this still applies but because there is a rash of gringos marrying Peruvian women from Iquitos, I thought I'd post it--being someone who married a young woman from Iquitos.
    As a preliminary heads up, let me say this: Remember that you are the hunter, and other than providing food and protection, not particularly necessary. What is necessary is that the women in the family, the tribe (as most are not more than four generations removed from deep tribal life), get to be together all of the time. If your wife has three sister and they live in Lima, well, sooner or later you will live in Lima or the marriage is done. They are the focal point, you are the hunter. You provide, then disappear. It can be loads of fun so long as you know what's coming after the first year or two or marriage.
    On the mundane level, there used to be several papers you needed to get. When you're getting married you have to put an ad in the most read daily newspaper (La Republica) for three days running, announcing the marriage and asking for anyone who know it shouldn't happen to come forward. If you are a US male, you will be sent to Lima to get a Certificate of Bachelorhood, which will prove that you are not currently married, that your divorce has been finalized if you are divorced and that you are not responsible in any way for another woman as a wife.
    The US Embassy in Lima has no such document, but will, after some begging, write a note that says you have sworn you are not married and are free to marry. That has to be notarized in the Embassy. And if you don't know that it is coming, well, it will be a pain in the neck to suddenly have to fly to Lima before you can be married.
     In terms of parties, I don't know if this applies to all Iquitos marriages, but certainly did to mine: We began having parties--or providing cases of beer, anyway--to people about 5 days before the wedding. The first group that had to get lots of beer were people who hated the family I was marrying into and would be willing to hire a brujo--bad sorcerer--to make our lives miserable. So we had to make them happy and keep them drunk until after the wedding.
    The next night was a party for all the families that simply had grudges against the family I was marrying into: Neighbors they'd fought with, authorities that didn't like us and so forth.
    The third party was for people we didn't hate but certainly didn't want anywhere near something as intimate as our wedding.
    The fourth party was for the people we liked but didn't like enough to invite to a wedding.
    And then finally, there was the wedding for the few dozen people we liked--or whom the family liked.
    Very important to keep the bad vibes away and 15-20 cases of beer per night is not a big price to do it.
    Then we had our own parties: At one, my future wife invited all of her sexiest friends and some prostitutes who sat in chairs at one point around the outside walls of the room. Someone starts music. You--me--are told to pick any woman to dance with. They're all dressed to the nines.
    I finally went to Chepa and told her I didn't want to dance with anyone else, regardless of the rules.
That was a good thing, because if I had picked another woman, that would have been reason to cancel the wedding.
    Not long after the wedding, the bride gets in a motokar and drives away alone. She is going to see all of her former lovers. If she doesn't return, it means she was seduced and changed her mind. If she returns fairly quickly, she love you.
    Then there was the US Embasy and the attempt to get Chepa into the US.
    We arrived in Lima, went to the Embassy, did whatever we were told, filled out the paperwork and so forth. The next day, when we returned, I was told I'd have to go to the US to get a letter from my bank, notarized in the city in which I lived, telling the Embassy how long I'd been banking there. It didn't matter, I was told, how much money I had, just get the letter.
    With--at the time--a 37 percent surcharge on flights originating in Lima, I paid about $1500, flew to New York, got the letter and returned in a couple of days.
     The Embassy personnel took the letter, then said I had to get a letter notarized in New York from the people I worked with telling them how long I worked there. I was furious. Who were they to do this to me. They said they were the ones who could give Chepa a green card and just get on with it.
    So I did.
    When I returned they told me to go back to New York and get a copy of my signed apartment leased and have it notarized there.
     When I finished that--altogether, including keeping Chepa in Lima with a sister for 26 days or so, plus getting the AIDS test the insisted she have, plus her fingerprints and all that--I was out about $10,000. And the Embassy person, with a straight face, said something to the effect that most Peruvian women being brought to the US are brought there for sexual slavery. Going rate for gringos was $10,000, so that's what they made me spend. If I was taking my new wife to the US to sell her into slavery, I wouldn't be making money.
     The second issue, the Embassy person said, was hot pants. Gringos get hot pants for these beautiful dark-skinned Latinas. So they make it hard for you to bring them home because once there, you might learn that your beautiful dark-skinned Latina is actually a very short person who doesn't speak English, doesn't know anything about our culture and winds up being dumped by the hot-pants gringo once the hot-pants cool off and ends up on welfare.
    So they do everything in their power to discourage you from taking the new wife to the US.
    I asked why they couldn't tell me that earlier: I was told that would constitute discrimination and they would be open to law suits. So they did it their own way.
    In my case, while it wasn't easy, the first five years of marriage were so fantastic, that it was all worth it.

Dolphin Love in the Amazon

There are dozens of myths in the Amazon basin that have helped maintain an otherwise very fragile social fabric. Tunchis, ghosts, in the woods keep most people out of the woods at night when the predators feed. Chuluchaqui, a sort of Pan character, can confuse you to the point where it might take days or weeks to return to your home from a walk to your fields--chacras. But Chuluchaqui, even if just a myth, is vital, because of the habit riberiños have of leaving their families to visit friends for days and weeks at a time and an inability to explain what they are doing before they do it. Abandoning your family is not good; their boredom is irresistible and they have to go sometimes. Having a convenient Chuluchaqui to blame smooths everything over.
    Dolphins are also vital to the social fabric: The pink dolphins are sirens: They call out to the men and the men cannot resist their charm. The men dive into the lakes and make wild love with them.

    The blue dolphins can transform themselves in the evening to irresistibly handsome young men. When they call to the women coming from the chacras or neighboring villages, there is no way to turn away: You must make love, and it is a ferocious, wild, wonderful making love.

     The stories may or may not be true, but they are a vital element in the social fabric of Amazonia, where making love with people outside of your husband or wife is a pretty regular part of living. A woman coming home at dawn with your breasts and neck covered in hickeys--bite marks--is completely forgivable if you were seduced by a dolphin; it might otherwise lead to a machete or shotgun anger-killing if it was just the neighbor. Similarly, a man coming home drunk with hickeys is forgiven if the cause of the problem was a pink dolphin, rather than the neighbor woman.

    There are no myths in Amazonia that don't have their roots in maintaining the social fabric. They are wonderful survival tools.

Talking 'Bout My Madeleina...

Madeleina, my beautiful 16-year-old daughter, keeps me on my toes. Earlier tonight, after I'd put a beautiful eggplant parmesan in the oven--she's finally old enough to have some things that taste differently from what she's used to, and eggplant, while I love it, is not something an Irish-Indigenous kid grows up with--I told her to get out a table cloth, put on a couple of candles and look for the good silverware.
   "Dad, are we eating before or after you come down from that high you're on?" she asked.
   Tough one.
   Then she whacked me, hard, in the upper right arm--the one that's still black and blue after having had the IV tube to my heart taken out earlier in the week--and said, "Oh, and you know, if this eggplant thing sucks, or if it's good but it sucks because you messed it up, well, I'll just have to kill you while you sleep."
   Tough girl.
   And now, after sitting on the porch swing in the encroaching darkness, watching cars go by on road out front, we came in and I told her I'd gotten my Houston Press Club trophies and that she should open the boxes.
    "Dad, this is just second place for Print Journalist of the Year for Texas," she said. "That means you're a loser. I'm still proud of you, dad, and I love you, but maybe we should move to Canada. They have less journalists there. Maybe you could win there, instead of getting second place. Because, like I said, that makes you a loser."
    You don't think I love that girl? She's the best! She adores me enough to keep me on point and knows exactly how to give me a compliment. That's my baby. And I'm glad she is.

About the Indigenous Matses Stealing People

A friend of mine pointed me toward The Emerald Forrest, a movie about a kid who is abducted by a group of indigenous Brazilians and grows up with them. He asked if it was a true story. I told him there was a kernel of truth in it as the boy who was stolen was a real case, but that the rest of it was Hollywood doing what Hollywood does: making movies that start with a a kernel of truth and then go off on whatever trail they want to follow, so long as it will put fannies in the seats.
     My friend asked if I'd ever heard of people stealing in the Amazon--and he didn't mean the quite typical baby abductions for adoptions by unscrupulous people--he meant like people stolen and raised by an indigenous group to become members of that group.
     I told him yes. I know one whole small village that are the offspring of stolen missionaries, and I know three people, two women and one man who fit his description.
     Out on the river Javari, the border between Brazil and Peru, there is an entire small village where nearly every Matses is blond and many are blue eyes. It took some digging, but I found out that some female German missionaries had been abducted in the late 1960s--I presume the men were killed--and these are the grandkids of those people. The older ones have the regular Matses hashmark jaguar tattoo around their mouths and running up to their ear lobes, making them look like jaguars, and they call themselves Matses and think of themselves as Matses. No one speaks English or German, that's not something remembered at all.
    Elsewhere on that same river--which I love because it's really the middle of the middle of nowhere in the jungle--there is a woman who was locally famous for being an expert Matses hunter. I'd heard of her for years but never met her until maybe 1993, when she no longer lived with the Matses. She told me she'd been abducted as a young girl, maybe seven or nine years old, and had grown up with the Matses at Buenas Lomas, the largest Matses camp. She loved being one of them, forgot her family--who had all been killed at her abduction--and simply became a Matses. But she also became a hunter, something basically unheard of among the Matses. And she lived with them for maybe 40 years, until her husband died, and then she left and built a house on the Javari. She was still a Matses and still a hunter--she served me sahino-, the small peccary in that part of the world that she'd gotten a day earlier. She had no regrets, no hard feelings about having been abducted, it was all just life.
     Then there was--and I say was because she's since died--a woman who was abducted along with one of her young sons. She explained the abduction in a clear way. She'd been born and raised near Iquitos, Peru, the large city in Northwest Amazonia. But she was a chacarera--a woman who lived on the river, fished for food and raised crops to eat and sell when there was enough. I've known a lot of people called chacareros/chacareras and it's a good life but a hard-scrabble life, with food to eat so long as you fish every day and tend to your chacras, your gardens, which are cut out of the jungle by slash and burn.
      She'd fallen in love with a fisherman who thought there were too many people on the Amazon, so they moved hundreds of miles away to the upper Javari, where she had several kids. One day, she told Chepa--I knew her for years but she never opened up to me; it was only when I brought Chepa, to whom I was not yet married, that she told her story--she and her husband and kids were in a chacra of yucca when suddenly, unexpectedly, they were surrounded by Matses with bows and arrows. With little fanfare they fired on and killed everyone but her and a young, still nursing, son. She was grabbed and made to walk, She said she walked hard, long hours for 18 days. The first night one of the men cut her hair off with fish teeth. She bled, she said, because her scalp was cut. But the same man then took her to a creek and washed her head with leaves for hours.
    The next day they walked again and that night she was bathed again. Then the next day and the next, up and down the Javari, stopping at some Matses and Marubo camps but never for longer than a night before they started walking again. At some point, she said, her head stopped hurting and she forgot her recently killed husband and realized she'd fallen in love with the man who had cut her hair and then bathed her daily.
     At the end of 18 days the whole group returned to Buenas Lomas--the same place where the huntress lived--and she started her new life as the man's wife. He was a curaka--a warrior, a healer, a hunter who had several wives and she was quickly accepted by the others. He was a great hunter, able to support all of the children from all of the wives with fresh meat daily. She herself had one more son and then some daughters. She lived there for years, even after her husband died. As she told Chepa, there was no other home, no other place to go. Her sons were Matses men, fully tattooed; her daughters had married Matses men and born them children. Buenas Lomas was her home.
     Sometime in the 1970s, a group of three people alleging to be missionaries flew their float plane into the river in front of Buenas Lomas. They said they were there to help treat the Matses for pneumonia, which was killing some indigenous in the region. The woman said they made a separated area and would take the most ill Matses into it for treatment. But, she said, most often they died during the night. Sadness overcame the large village. And once a week or so, one of the "missionaries" took some large metal boxes, boarded the little sea plane and left, returning with new supplies and new metal containers a couple of days later.
     She said she grew suspicious because she thought too many Matses were dying--she said no one could fool her because she'd been to Iquitos and knew city ways--and so decided to look into what the three were doing. She peeked into their work area one night and saw a Matses with the grippe--pneumonia or the flu--on a cot. The three had put intravenous tubes in the Matses person's arms and bloow was being drawn into needles they kept changing. They emptied the blood into a small round metal canister, and then put the canister into one of the metal container. She said smoke came out of the container and she knew that it was dry ice because she had seen it when she was young in Iquitos.
     She said she realized that for some reason those people were stealing Matses blood and taking it in their airplane.
      They saw her, she said, spying on them, and told her she looked sick and they'd treat her the next night. She said she knew what that meant and that evening got her two grown sons and left Buenas Lomas, heading to Angamos, a Peruvian military outpost at the confluence of the Javari and Galvez rivers--and outpost built at that spot to monitor the Matses who lived on the two rivers.
      It took days to reach Angamos, and no one there believed her story, or even believed that she wasn't Matses, despite speaking fluent Spanish, unheard of among the Matses at that time--and even into the 1990s.
     But she was safe. The son who'd been stolen with her built a camp not far from Angamos. Her Matses son stayed there as well. She told Chepa the story, on tape, in 1993. I'd met her in 1986 but she never told me any of that story. I only knew her sons as Matses, and when I collected plants for Shaman Pharmaceutical, the son who was abducted was the plant maestro of the village, rather than the son she'd borne to the Matses curaka.
     The good that came out of excaping, she said, was that the three people pretending to help the Matses while draining their blood and stealing it, left shortly after her escape and never came back.
      Years later it came out that several anthropologists throughout the Amazon and into Central America were being paid by forces thought to be U.S. CIA to collect blood and other body parts for study in the U.S. so that people here could learn why the different indigenous were immune to certain physical diseases while very susceptible to others. Among those anthropologists caught in that scandal was Napolean Chagnon, famous for his work among the Yanomami of Venezuela.
      I have never been able to find out the identities of the Matses killers at Buenas Lomas, but there are records of a group of three people having been there for several weeks in the 1970s, flying from Iquitos to the upper Javari and back in a float plane regularly.
      And that's a true story of people stealing in the Amazon.

Mariscos Soup Dinner

Okay, so I picked up Madeleina from school, along with a friend. Dropped him off, got her home. Half-an-hour later it was time to get her to piano lessons, and we got there about 5:21, six minutes late. I got home by 5:30 as it's about an 8-10 minute run from the piano place to the house.
    Here, I realized I had to get dinner going. Tonight it's mariscos soup. That's a Peruvian soup--all Latin America makes it and the Spanish and French and Portugese have versions, but I'm making the Peruvian soup--made from shrimp, mussels, squid, octopus and who knows what else. I had already bought a bag of frozen mariscos, but I had fresh shrimp in the fridge that had to be used as well.
    So I'm looking at things at 5:32 and start to peel the fresh shrimp. Just 20 of them, not very large, and I put the shells in a small iron pot to burn a bit. While they were heating up and getting red, I cut some fresh garlic, diced an onion, four scallions, two tomatoes and four sticks of celery. The ends of everything went into the shrimp-peel pot after the peels were bright red. I added water first, then the vegetable ends, along with a bit of crab boil--a hot soup sauce used in creole cooking.
    I got the garlic, onions and celery and scallions, along with some olive oil, into the soup pot and started searing them while the shrimp-peel pot began to boil over and then I turned that down. When the veggies were see through I tossed in the tomatoes: It was 5:54 and I was going to be late for Madeleina, so I turned everything down and raced to get her.
   Not bad. Veggies done, shrimp ready to go, and the shrimp-peel juice nearly ready.
   We got home, I stirred everything, strained and poured the shrimp-peel juice into the soup pot, tossed in a can of Campbell's tomato soup, some water and two packets of Goya's Achote e Culantro powder. Stirred it up and here I am. Kitchen is clean and wiped down, soup's on: I'll add the seafood and a bunch of fresh organic cilantro--minced--ten minutes before serving, along with some vermicelli. I'll do some pepper--it probably won't need salt because of the canned sou--and maybe a few very hot peppers from Peru that are steeping in fresh lime juice to give it a good Peruvian bite.
   It's a good soup, a good meal, and when I wake up at 3 AM, it will be a life-saving snack.
   I hope all of you are eating as well as us tonight. And if you're not and you're in the neighborhood, well, drop on by because we're gonna have plenty.

A Small Thought that Nags at Me Every Day

Okay, so in the last 24 hours, the top 10 countries represented by readers of my blog are: U.S., Canada, Germany, India, China, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Guatemala, Poland, Vietnam. Countries with lesser page views today include Iraq, Russia, South Africa, Camaroon, Brazil, Peru, Egypt, Australia and several others. The question is if people from all those places can get a kick out of reading something as simple as my freaking blog, why is it we can't get along?  I know it's not a serious question, but I sort of wish it were. Left to their own devices, people want the same things: Food, water, health, shelter, enough work, some enjoyment and the safety of sleep without fear. Yeah, some want better shoes or more cars, but people basically want the same things. So why can't we just get along? Why can't we just make certain that everyone has those basics? I know we could if enough of us stood together and made it happen. How to do that? Well, I'm stumped there. But if we got everyone those basics, it would go a long way toward smoothing things out everywhere.
    But then the political writer in me rears his head and shouts: The problem is that some people will do anything to keep other people from having those basics. That's the part we're going to have to work on if we really want to get anywhere. And that part is rooted in deep-seated fear. Fear that the other guy shouldn't get enough to get by because then he/she'd want to take your basics, so you got to keep them down. Fear of other colors so deep that some people don't recognize it's really just a fear of their own inadequacy. Fear of other cultures, fear that your own base desires are the same as everyone else's base desires and giving them a hand up would wind up cutting yourself down. Or things like that. Those fears need to be addressed and overcome somehow if we want to bring peace to this planet.
   And when we think of the 1 percent who want it all, well, they really only want it all because they are afraid of joining the rest of us. They're afraid they'll run out and no one will help them when they do and so they've got to accumulate so much that they can't run out--which is impossible, of course, so they wind up serving only their greed, the symptom of their fear.
   Yeah, I'm rattling on. But this thing irks me daily. It's why I write. There may not be much of a chance of getting 7 billion people on the same page, but if I/we don't try, there is no chance.
   WARNING: RELIGIOUS-BASED STORY COMING
   It all reminds me of the biblical story of Jesus and the Loaves and Fishes. It's a new testament thing--and if I've written this before, forgive me but it fits. The Loaves and fishes thing was the story of Jesus of Nazareth somehow getting hundreds, perhaps thousands of people to a hillside to listen to him talk. There might have been others on the bill but we don't know that from the way the story was written.
   The event was evidently not well planned: No vendors, no foot, no available water, and it seems that most people hadn't packed lunch. Or so it seemed.
   People got restive and Jesus of Nazareth got hold of a couple of loaves of bread and a couple of fried or salted fish. Then he began passing them out and miracle of miracles, says the story, he made a miracle and multiplied those couple of loaves of bread and fish and kept passing them out without ever running out until everyone at the event had enough to eat and were once again willing to listen to him speak.
   I never went with that story, even as a young catholic altar boy. Seemed to me that if you had super powers--I mean, if you were god with a capital G and could simply multiply food at your discretion, you should not have let that crowd--who were there to listen to you talk--get hungry in the first place. And if you had that power, well, then you were just using super power and it wasn't a miracle at all.
   My take on the story was always this, and I'm not saying I'm right, it's just my take. My take is that when people got hungry, Jesus of Nazareth talked to the people and said "You know, I'll bet that some of you brought food and some of you brought a lot of food and water and you're afraid to take it out because then you'll have to share." I'm not saying he used those words, it's just an idea, okay?
   And I'll bet he reasoned with everyone that if they all took out all the food and water they'd brought with them, well, there would be enough to go around. And I'll bet those people did that and sure enough, it got passed around and everybody got to eat.
   Now if he did that, well, that's a miracle! Getting people to share ain't easy. But what I'm getting at is that if we could get all 7 billion people to share what they have, no one would be hungry, no one would sleep in fear. And that's a wild dream but one worth working toward and fighting for in my book.

How the Amazon Fills Up

Well, I was thinking about ayahuasca, brujeria, Matses' stealing people who became my friends, and the rise in the Amazon annually and had about 10 pieces I wanted to write. But dinner--simple sauteed/baked chicken breasts with a light sauce of garlic, olive oil, diced onion, tomato and capers with a side of small baked red potato and an organic arugula/greens salad with a nice balsamic vinagrette--is cooking so I only have time for one story.
     So here is the story of how the Amazon Basin fills up every year, rising up and sustaining an eight to 13 meter increase in height for several months--and having that rise and sustained water happen all over the entire Amazon Basin--close to the size of the entire USA--at the same time.
     While I'm not an hydraulic engineer, this is what I see happening: The Andes mountain on the West of the basin, and the north ridge of South America fill up with water during the wet season. In the Andes, particularly, that water freezed either inside the mountains or atop them as snow. Now you might imagine that when those mountains begin to thaw, the Amazon would start to fill up from just east of those mountains and that water, via the river system, would make it's way across the continent over the next several months. But that's not what happens. When the water rises three feet or three meters in the rivers closest to the mountains, it's also rising simultaneously--or within a couple of days--all across the basin.
     What's happening is similar to your old high school experiment, where you put two small plastic tubs next to one another and made holes between them to connect them. Then you put several sponges filled with water in one of them: The water drained into the second plastic but never overflowed. And as the water in the second plastic evaporated, the sponges put out more, until there was an equal amount of water in both plastic tubs. And at that point there was no more draining from one to another.
     So how do the Andes simultaneously feed rivers nearly three thousand miles apart? Well, it's got to do with the makeup of the mountains and underlying stone of the basin: It's primarily limestone. And limestone is soft enough that water will work it's way through, making tunnels, carving out vast lakes within the mountains and so forth. But the limestone is also beneath the basin and so there are little straw-like tunnels--and larger ones as well--that run from the Andes to the East Coast of Brazil. And those tunnels fill up with water at the same time the rivers on the west do, and feed out through beneath the ground--particularly into lakes, swamps and rivers--filling the entire basin simultaneously.
     Rains may raise a river a meter or two for a day or so, but then that water has washed downstream, and if that were the primary device for filling the rivers and lakes, the lakes on the Western side of the Continent would be empty once the rains stop. But they're not. And that's because they are filled by thousands of springs--holes in the limestone tunnels beneath the basin. And in some lakes you get the fantastic effect of hot and cold springs, by the hundreds, within a few feet of one another. The hot springs are fed by rivers that have been exposed to the warm air; the cold springs are fed by water that's been frozen for months and has never seen the sun since it was rain.
     And that's how the Amazon does it.
     You can all return to whatever you were doing now.

You Guys Did It! THANKS!

Well, you all have done it. You have hit the $15,000 mark--and passed it--on the Indigogo page set up to help defray the medical costs of my bacterial-flesh-eaten right calf. You have sent good wishes, love, light, medicines, contributions and just general great stuff. Thank you all. And then the hospital, Huguley, also kicked in by--for some reason they cannot explain--reducing my costs to date (there will be another stay and another operation or two) from $77,000 or so to $1,500. Plus, the nurses, doctors and everyone at that hospital treated me with genuine care. Fantastic.
    But today, here, I wanted to celebrate you. All of you. What you did for me shows that this small group can come together and do huge things. That is special. If we consider it, you/we--because next time I will be one of the givers and not the receiver--can do anything.
     So please celebrate yourselves. Know that I am thanking you deeply, warmly, wonderfully. If you were all here I'd make dinner for all of you. Which tonight is fresh shrimp with garlic/onions/olive oil and diced veggies (broccoli, tomatoes, cauliflower, yellow squash, green zucchini and spinach) over thin spaghetti. With a side of organic pineapple, raspberries and blueberries in good organic Greek yogurt with a touch of good vanilla.
     And thanks. I'll update you on the progress of the leg as it goes along, mostly on my blog--just look up peter gorman's blog so as not to fill up fb pages. First update: After more than 30 days I finally had my IV PICC (an IV tube with two heads inserted in my right arm and running to my heart which delivered merrem, a powerful antibiotic against the pesky pseudomonas infection, the last of the four to still be putting up a fight) removed. Which means I don't have to watch the IV drip 4-6 hours daily, don't have to worry about "Oh, shit! I just put my hand in the dirty dishwater and got the IV stuff wet with dirty water!!!!" and stuff like that.
    That's for later. Today is just to say thanks. I appreciate it more than you know--being able to buy the meds as needed, pay the home nurse to show up regularly, pay for the docs and labs at the hospital--those things have let me work on healing, rather than worrying about how the hell I was going to pay it. You paid it. You sent love and light. You were fantastic. Thank you.

PS: A huge thank you to Alan Shoemaker, who asked people to send money to my paypal account, and to Morgan Maher, who took that idea and set up the Indigogo account. Neither asked me first, they just did it, knowing that I'd be yelling at them. Those are my friends and I'm lucky to have them.

Strong Kids' Club Failure

When I was a little kid, maybe 7, my sister Peggy was 9; my sister Patty was 11; and my brother Mike was 14. And Mike--who went on to play college baseball for St. Johns, a near-powerhouse in those days, then Vietnam, then became a cop, then a lawyer and finally, on retirement, a part-time judge and the all-time king of "Letters to the Editor" in New York City newspapers, from the New York Times to the Daily News to the Post and every other one--well Mike came up with this idea for The Strong Kids' Club. It was only open to himself, Pat, Peg and me. It just required some painfully Catholic pain-acceptance. There are three key things that I remember--though there were probably others--to becoming a member in good standing of the Club. THe first was getting into the bathtub before dawn. The bathtub was filled with six inches of cold New York winter water and as many ice cubes as we could make. You had to lie in it and not flinch for 30 seconds. If you flinched the timing started again. If the water warmed, more cold water and ice was put in.
   The second was doing cartwheels in your underwear in the snow with no shoes completely around the house. It was a small house but was still probably 54 feet deep and 15 feet wide on the outside. If you failed you had to start over.
   The third was writing your name in blood. Your full name. Which, as Catholics who got confirmed, meant four names. And even though I was too young to have been confirmed, I had to use the name I was planning to take as my Confirmation name. So I had to have my index finger pricked and then write "Peter Thomas John Gorman" with John as the presumptive Confirmation name because it was short (although it did become my confirmation name in the end). But if your blood dried up you had to start over. Which meant my brother sometimes stuck me several times a day before I either wrote all four names or he let me quit.
   And you had to do these tasks every day for that year of the Strong Kids' Club.
   Well, about a week ago, a woman I lived with for a long time--I have referred to her as "my first wife" on this blog I think--evidently saw pictures of my leg at its worst and wrote me an email for probably the first time in 26 years (she was happily married so that was good) and noted that "by now you have to be the undisputed king of the Strong Kids' Club".
    That she remembered that club after 25-30 years blew my mind. That she thought of it as an ongoing competition 25-30 years later and commented on it blew my mind again. What an amazing person to remember that! How fantastic she was/is!
    And when she wrote that my chest swelled up: Yes, I've had malaria, dengue, flesh-eating spider bites, an intestine that exploded and dropped three liters of human waste and acid in my stomach and I've had a small heart attack and was bitten by a baby bushmaster snake and now I have the single most deep and disgusting flesh-eating bacterial wound that most people have ever seen. Yes, I thought, I am the KING of the Strong Kids' Club!
    But then here is the reality: I'm not the king of anything. My left leg, the good one, had a sciatic nerve pinched about three weeks ago and it has left me in pain night and day. I've started with a chiropractor and sleep on the carpeted hardwood floor and have been in agony. Every task I do, just picking up medicines, I tend to take 20 minutes considering before I can screw up the courage to do them, knowing I'm going to be in extreme pain when I do.
    Yesterday, Chepa was over with her new babies and my granddaughter and three neighbor boys and we let them play in the mud created by the confluence of the state putting a new road across my front yard and an extremely heavy rainstorm. It was fantastic! But today, thinking I had to get the hose and clean the flat stones I've put as paths in the front yard and then clean the porch, covered in mud, and then clean my office, which is where people enter this house, and then clean the kitchen and unstop the kitchen sink which got clogged with mud, and then the tub, which got clogged with mud....well, it was all of an hour's work but it took me a full hour to finally get up and do it.
   I don't know if it's all pain or muscular atrophy or simple laziness. But I know it's not the Peter Gorman I know. And I know that if that woman who wrote me could actually see me moving so slowly, so fraidy-cat, she's never have said I was the undisputed king of the Stong Kids' Club. She'd probably just have said I'm a bum.
    So I'm gonna have to change things, because I don't want to be a bum and I don't want to be afraid to move and I don't want to put off chores that I would normally do in an instant, without giving them a second thought.
    Cause just being hurt doesn't make you the undisputed king of anything.

Sometimes Fear Overwhelmes Me

Sometimes fear overwhelms me. The other day my son, Marco, was listening to me go on about how much I had to get done and how impossible it was going to be to do it because I spend hours a day strapped to my IV tubes and then this sciatica kicked in making it impossible to walk 20 steps and each of those was excruciating. When I finished he looked at me and said something like: "Do you know that when we look at you, I mean your family and other people who know you, and we see you have three stories to write, the lawn to mow, tickets to get for guests for Peru, and a million other things, we know you'll get them done. You're like superman. So what if your leg is bad and the other leg is killing you and you have to clean the house and you can't even walk. We know you'll do it. When the infection was eating your leg you still took your group out to the jungle. And sometimes that's why we don't help: You never look like you need it."
   I nearly laughed. If only he saw me the way I see me: That decent 10-year old who lost all the fights he was in as a kid; the 14-year old who was scared to death when I was jumped by three kids, so scared I didn't even fight back; the 16-year old who was terrified of Chris Barker for two years over Diane Zirilli. That's who I see a lot of the time. And I guess I've learned to fake it, and I guess I have picked up some courage and stick-to-it-ness somewhere along the line, but other times, like today, the fear comes and hits me right across my soul.
   I was driving. Going nowhere in particular, just driving to get out of the house. I sometimes feel like a prisoner here with this bum leg and especially with the pinched nerve in the other leg, and a former guest came over and wants to do ceremony tonight, so I thought I'd take a drive and clear my head for it.
   And while I was driving I stopped at Home Depot and got out of the truck to buy my son Italo a wheelbarrow. I walked to the wheelbarrows that were outside the store, picked one out, then turned around and went back to the truck and left. It felt like too much work.
    Then I drove to Walmart to buy some bottled water for the ceremony, if needed, got out of the car, walked halfway to the doors, then turned around and got back in the car and left.
    On the way home I drove down a country road I don't remember ever being on. Lovely, curving road lined with trees, miles and miles long. And I almost turned around on that because I suddenly pictured my truck breaking down and me not being near help. I didn't though.
    Still, I thought about that and realized that neither the wheelbarrow or the bottled water were too much work. I was just scared. Scared that I wouldn't know how to buy them, scared that I was just lost. Scared that my leg is never gonna get better. Scared that I don't know anything. Scared that I am supposed to run ceremony tonight for someone who needs it and who the hell am I to call on the spirits, to ask them for help? And what about the person who is thinking I can? I'm just fooling! I want to scream. I'm just kidding you and me and everybody else! I'm nobody! Nobody!
    And I'll work out of it, but for a little while now that fear has got its goop all over me.

John Are, Get in Touch, Please

Not much of a post for most of you. Trying to reach my fantastic kitchen partner John Are, whose band Cruel Story of Youth had a fantastic, if over-produced album released in 1989. Unfortunately, their Publicity or A & R guy got fired or quit just after the album hit and a single shot up to maybe #39 if I remember right, and that was the end of that group.
    Butttttt.....John and I worked Wilson's kitchen for years together on New York's East Side, and he was good. Like all good partners, he got things done before you asked for them. Anticipation is vital in a lot of endeavors; in the kitchens it's double that.
    In the intervening years he became an attorney, I think an entertainment attorney down near D.C, but I cannot find him for the life of me. And I wanted to say hello. Just realized I did not look in the Legal Directory and I'll do that now. But if John Are happens to see this, shoot me an email or respond to this and drop your email.

Yesterday I was Thankful; Today, I'm Crying....

Okay, sorry to be a one trick pony with one leg but this leg of mine keeps me focused on it all the stinking time. And then, there are days like today: Yesterday I was talking about how lucky I was to have this happen to me. See, the leg hurt but it was a constant.
   Today I want to scream. I want someone to stop this incredible pain. And it's not just the bad leg: I've apparently pinched a nerve in the good leg because of how I'm favoring the bad leg or just because I did and now I have shooting pain through the good leg which is very very unbearable and I'm not sure what to do about it. Maybe I'm dehydrated, maybe I have been sleeping wrong: I get the pain in the good leg every morning but then it goes away. This time it didn't go away. I mean I got to the supermarket and I was sweating and shouting Mother McCree! at the top of my lungs to no one in particular in the car on the way. And once in the supermarket--where I comported myself in a much more refined fashion--I nearly feinted from the stabbing pain. Let's just say it was bad enough that I bought two thank you cards and a beard trimming scissors (since my old beard trimmers are now reduced to wound-wrap cutters) and then split. I mean, I didn't go shopping for the food I went to get. I didn't stop for gasoline, didn't stop for smokes, didn't pick up wine--three, four stores all skipped just so I could get in the car and stay in the car and pretty much scream to my heart's content.
    So yeah, I'm lucky this happened to me, but let's just say that today is not my luckiest day, okay?
MOTTTTTTTTHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRR MCCCCCCCRRRREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

Something to be Thankful for...

Well, this might seem a little strange to you, and it certainly seems freaking weird to me, but sometimes I just look at my flesh-eaten leg and think about how lucky I am that it happened. I mean, yes, it stinks and has taken up a very large part of the last nine weeks of my life--and will, if I'm lucky--take up another nine (more if I'm not lucky) before it's genuinely gone and I can go back to the jungle.
   Buttttt.....I could have lost my leg or my lower leg at least, and there were several discussions about that among legitimate doctors in Iquitos. So I didn't--and knock on wood I won't--so that's fantastic.
   And the infection could have gotten into the bone, traveled and killed me, and that didn't happen either. So that's another great thing.
   Then there was the chance to live with something like this. An awful lot of people live with bad things that take up a lot of their time, I mean a lot, and it has been important for me to be in those shoes, not for a few days or a week like most times, but for so long like this. And then there has been the pain: A lot of people live with pain daily. By the minute. I've been living with it 24/7 for 9 weeks now and it teaches you something. I'm not sure what yet, but I feel like I'm learning a kind of patience I've not had before. And that includes the patience to not take that pain pill just because you can, or not ask for the morphine in the hospital just because you can. Being out of it when the pain is bearable is not my cup of tea. I'd rather hurt some than be spacey all day. So there is something to learn from that too.
    And then I have had this flesh eating thing to a pretty extreme point--which means that you guys who've seen the picture have probably learned that it's not something you need to do--though I think a lot of you are probably at least a little jealous (HA! A LOT JEALOUS!) of the manly look this thing had at its worst. I mean, you could throw up just looking at that bad leg. (The bad thing is that the surgeon says he's so good he ain't gonna leave a scar when the grafting is done. I told him I'd kill him if he did that, cause I earned a really good, manly, scary scar.)
    And I got a chance to meet an awesome surgeon who took my wound very seriously but didn't take himself seriously. And a lot of great nurses and other doctors at Huguley Hospital, and my great great at-home nurse (she's more of a curandero--healer--if you want my opinion) Georgia, who just knows what to do, when to do it, and how. Fantastic!
    And then because the pics got circulated on facebook and other social media I wouldn't even know how to use, probably 20 people I have not heard from in years wrote notes and that was wonderful. I mean, it's too bad it took this for that to happen, but I'm glad it happened and it would not have had my leg not gone bad.
    And I've lost 20 pounds, so for the dope (and you know who you are) who has referred to me in print as "the obese guy", well, I'm not even fat now. And I was never obese. But I've lost 20 and am gonna lose another 15 by the time this is done if I can keep walking hard (short bursts because the leg starts to hurt after a quarter of a mile or so, making me rest for a few minutes) a couple of miles daily.
    And though I was only drinking 1/2 pint of whiskey a day (none on Sunday) for the last few years, I've cut that out this last month, and hardly had any aguardiente in Iquitos this time around, other than the first three days there, which were sort of party days that ended up with my head probably lolling on the table in front of strangers on the boulevard. Ah, nuts, so I ain't perfect, eh? But still, nice to take a break from hard liquor, though I am having a couple of glasses of wine every day. Not too much, just a couple/few glasses.
     And I got to stay in a great hospital, Huguley, which I wouldn't want anyone to have to do, but if you do, go to Huguley. And the hospital eliminated a large portion of my bill--though with all the docs and labs billing separately I'll still owe $40,000-$50,000 by the time I'm done with the next hospital stay and next surgery (surgeries). Still, they knocked off a lot and that's pretty spectacular and I have no idea why they did it--maybe pity, maybe I just got really really lucky, maybe they just liked me, maybe the leg was so disgustingly cool that they chose me, or maybe (and this is probably closer to the truth) they knew that paying them $100 a week for the rest of my life would never pay the bill, so they cut the bill to keep me from being too much of a deadbeat.
    And I could go on. See what I'm getting at? None of this would have happened if I wasn't lucky enough to have these crazy flesh-eating bacterial infections. How lucky was that?
For the record, those infections included:
Pseudomenas (no further identification on the culture chart I have);
Proteus (no further identification on the culture chart I have);
Morganella morganii;
Aeromonas hydrophila
    Okay, thanks for listening. Don't ever get this, okay. It's really painful and scary. But still, some fantastically wonderful things came out of it. And that's good.