After the Writing gets Done

Have been knocked on my ass rather handily by an influenza bug lately; and finishing up my TEFL course, scheduled about 8-9 hours daily until the final on Friday. On Tuesday night now, studying a bit, breathing and reflecting. Have been having a bit of a hard time describing the night the Flu hit me; a twisting, freezing, sweat-pooling, spasm-racked evening the nadir at which I claimed to myself that I peered for an instant into a sort of complete point. The Alephant into which I felt myself realized, densified down into a dark-glittering gray pinky nail of entropy, was my breaking point. I’m clear that I at least dreamt a very scary breaking. I’ve definitely been more clear, lately. The buses scare me now, as though my logical fear of them before had been blunted by routine. A bit of a jolt of feeling cursed can make one count oneself pretty damn lucky when one feels they ain’t.

Getting back to the feeling of a secure near-future hangs largely undulating in the doubt.

I’ll have another title in my hands, granted Friday evening comes along, and with significantly less disillusionment than the usual. So to chat with the Colombians for a while, accepting their sweet, heavy wine, and praising his new bad-ass backpack that he’d received for the holiday season. But it’s been a week now, since the dark gray point, and one must celebrate a bit, too, so to dial in the English station radio reports, and pour one glass too many, just-if nothing else-to believe I’m alive, not just getting along and getting by, but feeling the way one should when they are as they are, because of the challenges, because of their world telling them so.

So, to live again, once again, like one should; that’s the best game.

Aguardiente and a little of the pata from the previous nights’ session should even out the stress.

Back to the studies in the morning, to study a bit more about how to teach the way I talk
After the little writing gets done.

La Vida Bogotana

I agree it's been too long since the last post. Life in Bogota presents both a bottomless source of material to contemplate as well as endless distractions to prevent one from doing so. Recent lights include

-a bus driver taking the opportunity provided by a stoplight to direct his assistant to lift the cover to the engine (located just behind the two front seats) to adjust the breaking system

-one's miscalculation of a recent bus route landing one in a rather sketchy neighborhood inhabited by a ‘6 ”4 transvestite hooker dressed in a black bra and jean mini-skirt, and a painfully unstable dealer offering his goods as if unaware of the army patrol less than a block behind him

-late weekend nights draining deep into early weekend mornings filled with wild writing fueled by random encounters with booze and coke blasted compatriots

-stretching calves slowly under a latter morning sun in front of the small school chapel on the hill; its door closed; its stained-glass not yet more than beautiful potential

-the power going out mid-afternoon; the line just snapping and dropping to the ground as I am napping before class

-the Oregon-thick or thicker fog and breath-revealing cold of an early Monday morning burned off in an hour and a half to be replaced by high mountain sun, threatening melanoma

-the Sacramento gringo who claims to be 24 but looks ten years older expounding his ambitious life plans that place one’s own in a pedestrian context

-the semi-hapless Cleveland gringo classmate whose mere presence provokes the street-dwellers to extend their filthy hands hopefully

-the bargain-basement yet professional English teaching course that has been educating me simultaneously on the finer points of lesson planning, as well as the massive deficits of my own English grammar education

-a bargain-basement yet professional English teaching course where beers during the last hour on Friday are de rigeur and only in keeping with a broader education regarding local customs

-the local bar/cafe that one has made one’s own on certain days of the week, to shake hands with the harried owner, order a strong cheap drink, settle into a corner table and scribble furiously in the hope that eventually it will add up to something more than it feels like