Profe: Teach

Friends don’t offend.

Friends don’t offend.

Friends aren’t offended.

Letters: To a Friend

Leaving the other page blank, starting on this line, this Saturday at the beach, the lemon beer and the joint I am sharing is my much-needed break.  Writing you something positive and beautiful a break for us both.  Not that my two years here haven’t been beautiful or positive, but they have a very rough surface, such a moist fruit inside almost forgotten at first glance and touch.  Being in Ibiza, now, couldn’t be better.  Rather than revisit her shining and floating somewhere above, I come to her very human, naked and recently woken.  I’m at a narrow, rocky beach with only room for children who tend to the water, and us mortals sustaining the heat with cold beers and sunglasses.  A tan, ridiculous how we go about it.  The children are darker than us all and none of them are lying down. 

When I think of my childhood now, I remember that it was a time of much creativity & learning.  The other night, I’m not even sure how, or why then, she came back to me, and I not only remembered her, but I felt her there, inside me.  My creativity is back and it is bringing with it the joy I’ve been missing and the answer whose absence was starting to crack my head and heart.  But both are here and fine.  But I see that without it, I will walk this earth only a ghost.  It is my air, writing this, expressing this place where we find ourselves.  This dream enamors me and I must speak of it, sing of it, touch it and know it, not for what seems, but for what is.  When I see that it is Marijuana that opens me up like this, I wonder if it’s really such a terrible thing for me to be ingesting.  ‘No, no, time to be working’, meaning time to be sleeping.  I’m starting to think if we put the money down for a minute, stop playing with it, we’d look up and see what’s really going on and not even just that, but a solution.  We would find food all around us, shelter all around us, and we’d run to whoever needed it with open arms.  But we don’t.  Because we are sleeping children, and those are very hard to wake.

I’m going to start volunteering again.  It makes me remember that we are all the same when it comes down to it, it being the emergency of our lives.  I’m thinking about listening to those that wait on the three corners between my house and the water.  I don’t want my first volunteer experience in Ibiza to be at some club.  I hope they will trust in me, and more importantly, I hope I hear them.

Thank you for such a lovely letter and for such true love and support.  I am writing to thank you and to tell you that yes, I’m making music again.

love

Trust again.  

And again.  

And again.  


Jaú, São Paulo, Brasil

Serious Face

Cover Your Mouth, por el amor de dios!

     Heading northeast on the green line, I’m holding my breath and frantically fanning my face with a magazine in hopes of dispersing any strands of the newest influenza supposedly floating from the gaping throats of my neighbors.  My legs stick to the orangey-brown plastic of my seat as I lean forward, searching for fresh pockets of air to sip from. 

     It isn’t children doing the careless hacking this afternoon.  No.  Once again, I find it’s the adults who are out of control.  It is they who are lunging from their seats, hands clamped tight around their thighs, mouths exploding open, admitting a phlegmy roar I thought was locked safely behind the screens of horror films. 

     Take for example the monster seated to my right.  Disguised as a fairly handsome, older gentleman he pulls off casual-cool in green khaki shorts and a wavering concentration in his ‘news’ paper.  His left leg is thrown over the right, leaving the latter’s black loafer (minus the sock) to hang from the toe.  What lies beneath his breast has begun to unearth itself, leaving a few warning signs and me to desperately look for someone to get up so I can move.  He glances at me.  I smile.  He clears his throat and I brace myself, sliding slowly to the left, afraid to taunt him any further.  I bite my lower lip and he pushes both of his out.  And in this moment of my absolute dread, with no means of escape, he scrunches up his nose, clenches his throat, sucks up a massive, rubbery wad and rolls it around in his mouth while, as I imagine and hope, he decides what to do with it. 

I can’t move.  

     Tears come to my eyes and just as the train comes into a station I had no plans of getting off at, a plump woman sitting across from me displays her own set of respiratory ailings, forcing me to jump up and before exiting berate everyone aboard.

     “Hay Gripe!  Hay GRIPE!” I yell, with an unexpected Italian accent and a waving of my hands to match.

From the Road

"Traveling is contagious, and it seems the more you do, the more that stopping seems ridiculous."  Los Angeles, California, United States of America

Contributors

"My problem as a journalist is I'm not much of a journalist."  --Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, United States of America - Las Tablas, Madrid, España

From the Park

¨Mi camino es al revés.¨  España