WALKING ON THIN ICE

The carefully calibrated Kathy needs caffeine.

I’d been two months off coffee, and this morning I remembered that coffee used to be the high point of my morning. It makes me smarter, more enthusiastic, bright eyed, less numb, all in all a better person– save for the nervousness.

So I drank a strong cup this morning. Within two sips the yellow kitchen wall had a new depth, a vibrancy. A gray layer, a film, lifted from my eyes. It’s like I’ve photoshopped reality, made everything clean, interesting.

All my life my personality, the core of my being, has been enhanced by this evil wonder drug. Grampa started me when I was four years old. I got up with him before the sun rose, at five in the morning. This was our special time.

“What do you want, little girl? A treat?” He filled a glass with half coffee, half milk. He made me a soft boiled egg. Then he sat with his paper and his potbelly and smoked and moaned about the news, and the room filled up with blue smoke, and I sucked on my coffee and dipped toast in the egg in the bright kitchen light, waiting for Gramma to creak out in her blue robe.

I was wondering why I hadn’t been writing lately, why I felt dumb and numb. It’s because I’ve been high all my life! I’m a speed freak. The majority of my poems came from two vente Starbucks lattes a day. There’s a brown syrupy synergy between me and my monkey, a fine divine wine.

“You’re writing a new blog?” Smith asks. “Again? Two days in a row?”

“Mmm hmm.”

He puts his hand to my head. “You’re warm, you know that? You’re just a bird that burns from within.”

I do have everything I want.

Have you ever seen the movie, “Conan the Barbarian?” It’s also kinda like that. At one point in the story, Conan has fame, money, and is in love, and he doesn’t know how to handle it. He gets so drunk his face falls into his food. Then he gets in trouble again & has to resume adventure.

I have too much time on my hands and I’m still not used to being my own boss. My mind falls to a low set point unless others are making my reality. But it’s my responsibility to make my reality.

“Choose your own adventure” is the name of the game…

I’m in limbo. Smith’s got the bio, and I have no sense of purpose other than him, his life, his past life, and the hope that I will find new places to shoot with my camera. How can I become so jaded and lazy? I’m not even writing any poetry. I have golden lines, but they can’t be put in any kind of sequence and they’re too short to be individual poems - they’re just little blips. And I’m afraid to get sucked into poetry again. It hurts my soul. It makes me crave praise. It makes me compete. I don’t want to compete. I want to be enlightened and calm and I want the honey sun of art and constant new vista.

My art excites me but it’s expensive. Canvas is expensive. I gotta get a show, but who’s gonna buy down here? There are only so many gringos.

I print my photos. More money. I wanted white borders, which they gave me last time, but this time they didn’t and my pictures are cut off. Twenty-five dollars gone. Money money money money money.

I hate relying on his gubment pension for money. I want us to be sufficiently wealthy to continue doing what we’re doing… and at the same time I want more material comforts. I want our own bed and couch and cozy yellow reading light, not this thin light we have here in fluorescent land. I want a kitty cat. I want, I want, I want. Two years without our own things makes me feel impoverished. Our things are immaterial, our talent is a thin cloak. No one sees it unless we prostitute ourselves.

This kind of thinking goes on in my head: I’m smart. I have a high IQ. I should be able to figure out how to survive from my creative efforts. I could write the great American novel. If that doesn’t work, I’ll write thrillers.

Then I think, Smith’s got the real story. Our book is real and it should be celebrated and it could take off and he’s better than Kerouac and he’s a real artist and through and through he’s an artist of life, he’s an explorer and adventurer and he tells stories well. I don’t have anything over him other than I can pry those stories out of him and I’m a good editor.

Lately I want to see the ocean, to see sea turtles. People tell us to wait until autumn to go to the coast, because it’s too hot now. I’m impatient.

I’m addicted to seeing new cities. That and Smith, who’s so darned interesting he makes everything else pale. I do not care to talk to anyone else anymore unless they have useful information or a perspective that helps me on my path of enlightenment. I want to be enthralled, I want to be enlightened. I suspect tho that I’m already enlightened, and this is as high a vista as I’m gonna get. I want to be a pioneer but I’m used to looking for bosses. But people ain’t my bosses anymore. There are no authorities.

Smith’s birthday was yesterday and I didn’t get him a present or bake him a cake. I didn’t write him a poem. I didn’t make him any art. I hate making poetry and art as tho it’s commissioned. I asked Smith repeatedly, “Can I make you a cake? Can I buy you a cake? What do you want for dinner? Anything special?”

“It doesn’t matter. I have everything I want.”

boy moon fly - weathered child’s collage in indigenous village

We just came back from two days in the mountains picking coffee with an indigenous family. I’d never seen a coffee tree and suddenly I found myself in their midst. And vanilla vines, which grow on coffee trees. And many other wundruss food plants and trees. Horses and burros. People dressed in traditional clothes and the smell of wood and cobblestone streets or mud streets loaded with piles of transportation animal dung. Hawks that congregate on a tall dead tree at twilight, stark black hulks against blue mountain and fading sky. At night, all the stars. When I got up in the middle of the night to take a shit, I saw the big dipper from the toilet window. From my compromised animal position I could contemplate the cosmos.

The roosters crow at 4:30. At dawn I stared out the bathroom window to banana trees, more coffee trees growing down the side of the mountain. A red dirt path, and two workers hiking up it already and this is dawn, an hour after the roosters.

stone and surface for grinding corn and other kitchen ware

Our hosts hold their bodies to rake the coffee cherries off the branch and hit the jackpot basket hanging from their chests ching ching ching efficient not a bounce from brow to ground.

Later in the day Elvira and I work together, further from Smith and Tomas. She’s a head shorter than I am, but she bends strong trees down so I can grab them and pick them. I pick them, she picks others, and she picks my brain, too.

“How are you and Smith together? Are you happy?”

“Very happy.”

“How long do you want to live here?”

“At least a year. Smith says longer.”

“Do you have a house in Ohio?”

“No. We don’t have a home.”

cat at the traditional oven

“Did you stay with your mama?”

“No. I had an apartment, and then I moved in with Smith.”

“Did you study poetry?”

“No. I worked with computers. I studied engineering.”

“Did Smith study poetry?”

“No. English and philosophy.”

“Oh, he’s a philosopher?”

“Yes.”

“Do you share the same philosophy?”

“Yes. We believe life is most important. That we need to make happiness now.”

“Do you work now?”

“Sort of. We hope we’ll make money later with the book we’re writing. And we do art too.”

pack-smith

Walking back home, Elvira asks me, “Is this your art?”

“Being here?”

“Si.”

“Sure. Smith says all of life can be art.”

We watch Smith disappear up the road. He carries a bag on his back, secured to his head with a strap.

Elvira asks, “How many pesos kilos do you have free?”

“What?” I have no idea what she’s asking. Maybe she wants to know how much money I have.

“You see this?” She points to my purse. “How many kilos is this?”

“Probably two.”

“How many pesos do you have free?” and she gestures at my body.

“I’m guessing less than 75.”

“75! Wow.”

“Well, I don’t know. I usually use another method of measurement, not kilos. We use pounds. There are two pounds to a kilo.”

I think about how little I eat compared to Tomas and Elvira. They eat probably twice as much, but they also work three times as much. They’re small people.

modern art - child’s drawing in indigenous village, subjected to weather on outside wall

I got bug bit. Wrote our friend Mad Max, “Fun work, but twenty of the little fvckers got me.”

He wrote back: “Mosquito bites are not good. Tell me more about this village. Is it up in the mountains or down in the more jungley part? If it’s where I think it is, up in the mountains, it’s O.K. but if you go down into the the more humid and jungle like parts you need to see a Doctor and get some prophylactic malaria shots before you hang out in that climate.”

Tropical diseases could be some kind of haute couture fad. I imagine Angelina Jolie in khaki, limp and alluring in a sweaty tropical fever under gauzy mosquito net. Or we could set up diarrhea clinics for fat celebrities so they could lose all that extra weight - very quickly. Serve them smoothies with an extra special ingredient, bacteria a la mode.

art made by children

When what you read becomes real, that’s adventure. That’s a traveling life. This past couple days experience has fertilized my brain. I was worrying that I don’t think as much, or as deeply as I used to. I worried that it’s because I’m smoking too much grass, or I’m not in the real working world any longer so my brain has slackened, or that it’s because I no longer have solitude because Smith is my constant companion, my constant silver lining. Though I’d always yearned for a companion like Smith, I used to have cathedrals of thought that I’d built in my fortress of solitude. I had ornate recursion, mania, obsession, brainstorms, vistas. Rabid focus on the future.

Now I have the eternal Now, a big eyeball. An entirely different perspective. A me who I’m surprised to be. And I have an articulateness, a maturity. I remember the old cathedrals were really labyrinths of madness. I have a thinning of think, but it’s a refinement.

“Malaria” - my latest art piece