So since this is the land of Moctezuma, he has taken revenge on me just as he has on thousands before me. I've been pretty sick the past couple of days. I took a cipro last night and another this morning and that seems to have kicked it, though I still don't have the confidence to eat like a normal person. Ah, how wonderful it is to be in a place with little governmental infrastructure! All those small government types back home can kiss my ass.

(Ew.)

Of course, it's not just travelers who get it. My spanish teacher was sick this week too (and he's on antibiotics) and today I went with him to pick up his wife and son from the doctor's office -- his son is just under 2 years old and he has dysentery. Poor little kid. Now he has to take flagyl to get rid of it. I went with my teacher because he had to pick them up, drive them home, then come back to the center to teach an english class at 4. He asked if it was okay and I said yes, of course. We spoke spanish the whole time anyway. He and his wife live in subsidized housing, which is apparently how most Oaxaca City residents live who aren't wealthy enough to have homes in the city center. This government has nothing but contempt for its people. The corruption runs so deep. It's incredibly sad.

The teachers are still in the zocalo and the surrounding area protesting, but supposedly they're going back to work on Monday so the kids don't have to repeat a whole year. Everyone besides the wealthy here (the PANistas, surprise surprise) are supportive of the teachers, even though their protest has led to horrible traffic and ugly graffiti, even in the historic area (which used to be spotless, especially compared to the rest of the city). There's a lot of talk about how Calderon and the PAN stole the election. Even Subcomandante Marcos made a statement saying he had been contacted by people who witnessed the destruction of over a million votes in favor of AMLO, Obrador (you can see it on DemocracyNow!). The Zapatistas are apolitical -- they don't participate in elections -- but Marcos said that he felt he had a moral obligation to tell what he knew. Given that Calderon is another Harvard technocrat who received oodles of "assistance" from the GOP's International Republican Institute, it's no surprise that votes were "lost" in a way that makes it all seem legitimate, and makes the opposition seem unstable, shrill, and unreasonable. Since so many Mexicans are paranoid and expect bad things to happen (and rightly so -- corruption is everywhere), there's all this talk about needing to "respect the results", blah blah blah, just like in Florida 2000.

It's all so suspicious. I find it particularly so because of the way the US press has been covering the whole thing (and to a lesser extent the Mexican press). Calderon is  the "conservative" who is "pro-business" while Obrador is "leftist," a total pejorative in the states. And then there's the whole thing with IFE (their federal election commission) declaring Calderon's victory before over 3 million votes had even been counted, and how they kept insisting that even with the official count nothing would change, even though the difference between the canidates was miniscule at best. I mean Calderon "won" by around 0.5%, or less than 200,000 votes out of 41 million (that were tallied, that is)! Calederon was hand-picked by Fox, like the old "dedazo" or big finger days of the PRI, and Fox campaigned for him heavily, even offering up all sorts of government money to communities in excange for votes, which I've read is illegal. What the hell is our government doing meddling in other democracies?! It makes me furious.

Oh well. I've had some time to read the web since I've been home sick, which is both good and bad. Good because I know what's going on and bad, bad, bad because I know what's going on. Apparently there's all kinds of American Taliban creepiness happening right now. It's been on Jesus' General, Daily Kos, and Crooks and Liars. This crazy organization in Delaware, StoptheACLU.org, printed the names and addresses of a Jewish family who had asked the ACLU to help them deal with the harrassement they were getting in their increasingly Christian fundamentalist community. They received so many death threats they had to move! One of these fundamentalist wackos even said that someone should "disappear" the family the way an atheist had "disappeared" a while ago. Apparently the woman (I don't remember her name right now) had been a client of the ACLU too and had successful sued to get prayers out of public schoools (going all the way to the Supreme Court) and then she "disappeared," her dismembered body found six years later. These people are as crazy as Bin Laden and the Taliban. They are terrorists -- spreading so much terror that they're driving their neighbors out of town. Sickening.

And on an even worse note, S found out that the last man to go to Afghanistan from his unit (also as an ETT) was killed there yesterday. And that's our "good" war. What a disaster.

We leave on a 7 am bus for Juchitan tomorrow and we've still got to finish packing. I've heard that Juchitan is muy feo (ugly) but has beautiful culture, and is hot hot hot, even when it's not the dead of summer. There is a cultural center in the middle of town that supposedly has wireless internet, so hopefully I'll be able to update from there, and let you all know about the ladies who wear live iguanas on their heads and the proud muxes (transvestites) who work in the markets. We'll see!

We made it to Oaxaca late Thursday night. We're here until the middle of August.  S is studying Zapotec and I am studying Spanish for one week, then working on my other projects the rest of the time. Next Friday we go down to Juchitan, a matrifocal town in the Isthmus that is famous for its iguana-crowned women. Wow!

Oaxaca's zocalo is under siege by the state's teachers who are striking for better pay, etc. The governor, a PRI hack who was elected in 2004, raided the teachers with police and tear gas a few weeks ago, resulting in two teachers dying. Now the teachers are demanding Ulises step down. Francisco Toledo, a local artist and community activist/developer is the intermediary in on-going discussions with the state. The teachers strike every year, and the only difference we can see between years past and this year is the amount of space around the zocalo that is also used up -- there are blue and red and pink tarps strung between buildings in a one block radius around the square, with groups of teachers, their spouses, and their children living beneath them. It's a peaceful protest. As is consistent with most governments these days, the reaction by governor Ulises and his thugs has been dramatically inappropriate for the actions of the teachers. How familiar a story is that?

Hopefully I'll have internet access a time or two again while we're here to update. Our service is spotty at best right now. But the weather is fine!

My jack-o-lantern this year, made from a too small pumpkin, too small to throw through stone hoops in a ball game.

In the Mayan book Popul Vuh, the hero twins, who are the sons of twins, find themselves born in the underworld after their mother, Blood Woman, was impregnated by spittle and chased out of the upper world. The twins, Hunahpu and Xblanque, are clever enough not to lose against the lords of the underworld at a ball game, so they are sent to six different houses for six nights of challenges. The lords were determined to defeat them just as they had their father, Hun Hunahpu. They are sent to the Dark House, where they outsmart the lords with the help of a lightning bug. The next night they are sent to the Razor House filled with knives which they feed with the flesh of animals so they aren't fed on themselves. Then came the Cold House, where they seal off the drafts and survive the ice-center chill. In the Jaguar House, they gather bones and feed them to the jaguars so their own bones are spared. Next, the Fire House, where the twins manage to be merely simmered in a vat of water, not boiled to death. Finally they enter the Bat House, and it is here where their cleverness is not enough. Hunahpu is decapitated by a bat and his head is taken to the ball court to be used in the next game between the lords of the underworld.

Since this is myth, Hunahpu is not dead though he is in the land of death and disease and he is headless. Animals come to aid him. Possum keeps the light away by painting the dawn while the others turn a calabasa, a pumpkin, into a head for the headless twin. The animals and the twins go to the ball court where Rabbit distracts the lords. He points them across the field and while they look, Hunahpu and his brother switch the calabasa-turned-head and the head-turned-ball, righting Hunahpu finally. The game begins again, quickly, and in an instant Xblanque kicks the calabasa, breaks it into countless pieces, and in doing defeats the lords of death and disease.

It's not possible to cheat death, not even when you are twins born of Blood Woman in the underworld of the age before people, so they are challenged again and they answer the challenge by placing themselves on the fire. Their bones are ground and thrown into the river, where they reincarnate into catfish, and then into wanderers who hold the magic to bring back to life all that they have destroyed.

It's curious, isn't it, this cross-cultural desire to correct the most uncorrectable injury, the loss of one's head. Perhaps it is not about denying death, but about losing one's mind, a metaphor for a temporary lack of sanity such as that brought upon by grief, and the necessity to make yourself sane again and therefore right in the world. Or perhaps it is what it is, a story of death and sacrifice and trickery and resurrection and destruction and loyalty, a story not so different than those that pepper our days at the beginning of the 21st century.

I first learned this story and other Mayan stories from S. As a mesoamerican archaeologist, he has had to study the creation stories and ancient books of the Mexica, the Zapotec, and the Maya. He can read the code of the Dresden Codex (at least what has been deciphered so far; many, many glyphs have not been yet), and found a pattern in the Venus Table that no one had before. Venus is the one who is resurrected. Five patterns of travel that star makes, tracked throughout time by civilizations across the world, including the Babylonians who had their trinity of the sun and moon and Venus, a trinity not so different from that other one we all know about according to some archaeoastronomers. Venus comes and goes, appears to never be steady. The five patterns are predictable, but it takes time and patience to find them and track them. It is one star yet seems to be more than one. It appears to die and come back to life, the dream of every person who's ever loved and lost.


Jack Skelington, the Pumpkin King, from one of S's favorite films, The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Santa Muerte/Saint Death

When she gives gifts,
it is said that she makes
no distinction between the rich
and the poor, the powerful
and the powerless,

and neither does Death,
life's mercurial mistress who dangles
our dumb hearts around her neck,
a collection of blood red jewels.

Her face is a Guadalupe X-
ray: cheeks raised, mandible spread
in a constant, wicked smile.

I assure you she is moonish,
                                             unstable.
Even after her struggle with the night
she appears
                  aloof.

She may be

La Chingada, the raped; or perhaps
La Llorona, the crying one; but certainly
she is not La Madre, the one and only
Mother.

Her womb is a cobweb, littered
with empty cocoons.

One night I saw her on the edge
of a broken-down river where
no water flowed.

Overhead, a murder
of crows flew. Their feathers
fell with every wing-tapped
breath, made the sky
                                 moonless.

c Kate Ingold, November 2004, New Orleans.

Coyolxauhqui, daughter of Coatlicue, as a broken woman at the base of Templo Mayor.


Las Lloronas/The Crying Women

As she cried,
she drowned her children,
wrung them breath-
dry in the river
after he left.

He left with cudgels, rifles, and short knives,
perhaps with another woman's
                                                wet
on his lips, she tells me.

I know about crying.
I tell her my words left
under river stones and broken-
down bridges failed
to come up that day.
I found only an inadequate list:
weep, wail, bawl, keen,
a collection of girl-words
soaked in absurdity.

Yes, I killed them, she tells me,
like a man, then I wept
like a woman.

We part at the end of the river
where the water turns
                                  brackish.

Her laments follow me
home, entangle in my damp
hair, sway me to sleep.

I wake when the night
                                   dawns
with a splatter of stars across the ink-blood sky.
Outside, the mourning
                                   doves speak little cries,
feed the young and feather-
cover their eyes. Tear-
stripped naked, I swim
in the river next to her, run
my fingers in the hair
of her first-born son
as he descends.

c Kate Ingold, November 2004, New Orleans


S and I spent the summer of 2003 in Oaxaca City, a colonial town of 75% indigenous population in the thick of the largest state in Mexico, the state Cortes described to the Spanish crown by crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it on a table. To walk through the mountains of Oaxaca, he said, was to walk through that crumpled parchment.

That summer I studied Spanish and S worked at an archaeological site on the road to Mitla about 35 miles outside of the city. The site was an ordinary household in a Zapotec suburb of 1,000 years ago, a collection of patios surrounded by rectangular structures each with the family's dead entombed beneath the patio and in front of an altar. Many of the men S worked with were from a nearby Zapotec village, Maquilxochitl, which means "Five Flower" in Nahuatl. Some day in the future, after he's done with this war, S will do his doctoral research in Maquilxochitl, where families live in the same patio-structure compounds their relatives did those years ago and where the tlyudas are made on adobe stoves fired by craggled mesquite.

I was flooded with the stories of the women I met there, particularly the women of Maquilxochitl who fed us stewed squash with onions, chile, and Oaxacan string cheese, and those miraculous tlyudas made from corn they'd ground themselves on volcanic metates. So many of the stories were about goodbyes. Women had said goodbye to their children years ago before the children went north to cross the border, and some hadn't seen them since. Others had said goodbye to their chidren before they had left to cross the border themselves, returning years later when their children were no longer children. One woman had four daughters and only one was still in Oaxaca. The other daughters were scattered from San Jose, California down to Baja and Mexico City, where one daughter worked in a plastics factory. This woman had crossed the border herself several times, outwitted coyotes and was beaten by one, but ended up coming back to Oaxaca for good and married one of S's good friends, Procopio. Her cousin crossed fifteen years ago and she never heard from him again. He was presumed to be dead.

How many have died in the river of two names, Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, or in the dusty, waterless desert? Can you imagine how many?

I had been reading about Mexico for a few years before that summer we spent in Oaxaca, including books about Mexico's rich religious and cultural heritage. The country is crawling with stories. legends, myths. When I got home, I started a series of poems about women facing what we face at this beginning of the third millennium, and how these stories relate to the histories of our anscestors and my own life. Las Lloronas is one of these poems.

I wrote this poem the day after S was "called up," one week and two days before Thanksgiving last year. They really did call. Early, before 7. We were both still in bed in our leaky New Orleans apartment because it was a Tuesday and neither of us had class. They called on the cell phone we shared and they told him he was to report to his base in Indiana the following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving. We were supposed to leave that day for New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with S's family, but suddenly everything was uncertain, unknown. S was in his final semester of classes in his PhD program. In just a few months he was to take his comprehensive exams then his orals, and then the following autumn (right now in fact) we were to go back to Oaxaca where S was to begin a dig at the temples ringing the small chapel on top of Cerro Danush, the symmetrical mountain that sits prominently inside the village of Maquilxochitl, a mountain that the entire village ascends on May 3rd to celebrate the Festival of the Cross. Now we weren't even sure he'd be able to finish his semester. I was a full-time instructor at University of New Orleans and I knew I had to make some decisions too. Should I stay in New Orleans or go back to Chicago to be near my mother? This all happened in an instant, and as a stark reminder that nothing is constant, all is change, our lives were changed instantly.

Yes, you'd think that there would have been a little more consideration for national guard soldiers, an understanding that they would have to "tie up loose ends" and make arrangements at work, school, home. But no. There was none of that until S and the other four men who were called (the unit had been split up and splintered the previous August, with some of the group sent to Afghanistan and others ordered to stay home to help train new members) complained so bitterly they were given a reprieve. But this happened a few days later, just before we were to leave for New Jersey, and just after we called the airline to see if we could change our tickets (the answer was no, by the way). It was the first of several mid-play changes, some good, some not, that would define our next several months and demonstrate how absolutely incompetent and confused the military brass were.

After that call I yelled at S, told him he clearly didn't love me since he had put our relationship and our future in jeopardy for the army (why he was still in is for another day). I cried and yelled, then cried again. He said that of course he loved me and that he regretted this as much as I did. I had to get away from him. I was too angry, too upset. I went into our roommate Rebecca's room. She was awake and had her coffee, which was curious. Usually she woke much later, but she was studying for her comps too and at the side of her bed was a mountain of books she was studying from. Her days were beginning early and ending late as she filled out note cards and typed out synopses of anthropology and archaeology texts. I went into her room and she took me in her arms and said "What's wrong, honey?" and I told her and she cried with me.

That day S and I talked a lot. We talked about what would happen. We talked about how much we loved each other and how surprised S was because he was certain, dead certain, that Kerry would win and he wouldn't get called up. He apologized and apologized again, and then I forgave him.

The call had come after weeks of disappointment. The three of us were still in mourning over Kerry's loss, still stunned and stressed and dreading another four years with Bush in office. Election night we had sat together in the living room batting away brown june bugs and the occasional flying cockroach that had moved in through the open windows, and watched the results come in. When it started to look bad, Rebecca and I ran around the house and found things that represented the contested states: a Pretenders disc for Ohio; a chunk of cheese for Wisconsin; a book of poems by Florida poet David Kirby. Rebecca had spent eight years in West Africa working with Doctors Without Borders, so she gathered up her super-fine African juju sculptures like the two figures with nails and shanks sticking out of their bodies, and I gathered my Zuni fetishes (buffalo, toad, bear, Corn Mother). We placed it all on the table in the living room then rang the booty with La Virgen candles, curios, small bowls of our just-finished dinner, and several shots of tequila. Rebecca got sage out of the refrigerator and burned it, blew the smoke across the table and at the windows, and we both begged the spirits to help John Kerry win, to help all of us escape the Bush-born madness. As the night wore on and things got even more dire, we knocked on the door of our neighbor George, a voodoo practitioner who had helped Rebecca rid the apartment of evil spirits when she'd first moved in two years before. George wasn't home, which we should have taken as an omen, I guess. When we knew it was over, Rebecca went to her room and we crawled into our bed for a sleep deep enough, we'd hoped, to erase the night and start us over again.

Well, obviously it didn't work. S knew it wouldn't, but then he's much more practical than me. It was that morning after when I started to worry. I knew it would take more good juju than we had in our leaky apartment to prevent S from being called up. Three weeks later I was proven right.

The story of the La Llorona, the Crying Woman, comes from Mexico and it varies from the scorned harlot who kills her children out of revenge, to a scorned woman who kills her children to protect them from poverty, to a woman whose children are murdered by their father, to a woman who has a vision of her children being wisked away by floodwaters, only to wake up and find her nightmare had come true. In every version La Llorona dies, usually from her own hand, on the banks of the river that also took her children. For her crime she is condemned to die and to walk the banks as a ghost. In most versions of the story she feels regret and remorse for her rashness, and cries in longing for the children she will never see again. In the version of the story told around fires and at bedside by malicious babysitters, she roams the banks looking for children to snatch and take as her own.

When S was called up, I became a crying woman myself. The original version of the poem had allusions to the fact that we hadn't gotten pregnant yet (and that I therefore had no children to drown), but the wise ladies in my poetry workshop urged me to take that stuff out, and as usual they were right. But when I let loose the river inside of me and mourned for the forced separation that was to come, I felt an affecton for las lloronas who had come before me, and the thousands who are struggling with difficult goodbyes right now.

(I wonder, even, if Cindy Sheehan feels like la llorona too. She is trying to 'right' the wrong of her son's death, a death she feels all of us, including herself, are responsible for because we allowed Bush to be elected. She is wailing for her dead son on the banks of concrete rivers across the country.)

The photograph above is of Coyolxauhqui, the daughter and murderer of Coatlicue. She is part of the web of legends and myths that La Llorona is a part of. In this picture of the stone at the base of Templo Mayor in Mexico City, she is a broken woman, beheaded and shattered to pieces, the work of her just-born brother. Wikipedia has decent versions of the stories of Coyolxauhqui, Coatlicue, and La llorona.

I decided to post this poem and this story today after reading two excellent posts yesterday about Lashaun Harris, a severely mentally ill woman who drowned her children and who faces execution for her crime. Dr. Omed's wife Elsbeth has a powerful personal essay about living with a manic-depressive, knowing a man who'd "sacrificed his arms to a train," and the possibility for mercy. And Phila at Bouphonia talks about Harris and the question of hearing voices. Of course Lashaun is a version of la llorona and Coyolxauhqui (she is certainly a broken woman), and sadly, her fate may be the same as the women of those legends. She may not die by her own hand, but rather by the groping hands of the state.

Last night I saw Copenhagen at the TimeLine Theatre on Wellington Avenue on the border of Lakeview in northern Lincoln Park. The play, by Mark Frayn, attempts to reconstruct a meeting between two physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in German-occupied Copenhagen in 1941. Bohr, the "father of atomic phsyics," was a mentor to Heisenberg, who authored the "Uncertainty Principle" which according to the notes (I'm no physicist, so please bear with me!), says that we can't know both the position of a particle and it's velocity simultaneously. Heisenberg stayed in Germany during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, working for the German government at the university in Leipzig, while Bohr was forced to flee from Denmark by the Germans because of his Jewish ancestry. In the course of a short visit between these two old friends, a conversation ensued that may have changed the course of World War II, though the details of the conversation are to this day unknown.

It is the question of this uncertainty, the uncertainty of what the two men talked about that afternoon, that is the crux of the play. Heisenberg stayed in Germany and worked for the Nazi regime, developing a nuclear reactor but no weapons. Bohr fled to the US in 1943 and ended up working at Los Alamos and ultimately on the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty years ago this year, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In the play, Bohr and his wife challenge Heisenberg (in the reconstructions of the visit and perhaps in the afterlife -- the opening scene has Margrethe, Bohr's wife, talking about how they are dead now and finally safe to tell all) and accuse him of trying to develop the bomb for the Germans. Heisenberg, who never developed the bomb and claimed to have stayed in Germany to maintain control over Germany's program as to ensure they never did develop nuclear weapons, challenged Bohr to defend his role in developing the bomb and unleashing it on the world. During that afternoon in 1941, Heisenberg supposedly asked Bohr what moral responsibility scientists had during times of war (basically if their loyalties should lie with humanity as a whole or with their country) and the question alone made Bohr think Heisenberg was trying to find out if the Allies were developing the atom bomb and admitting that the Germans were. In the end, Heisenberg was villified for working with the Germans and Bohr and the other Allied scientists were seen as heroes for developing and dropping the atomic bomb. The play challenges us to review this logic by showing both men as they question their own roles and the consequences of their actions. Heisenberg, who by living in Germany throughout the war saw the destructive power of conventional bombs, said he would never have developed the bomb because its victims "could have been my widowed mother...my wife, my son." The two wonder if there will one day be a quantitative physics, one that decides how many are too many and when horrors are justified.

During intermission, my mother and her friend and I talked about the state of uncertainty in our country right now, and our seemingly limitless tolerance for chaos. Her friend said that he thought the neocons, through privatization and wars of choice, are trying to "starve the beast" of government and make it completely ineffective and bankrupt, as Grover Norquist has proposed. I argued that though their rhetoric talks about this it isn't what they actually want, and that instead of dreaming of some sort of libertarian/anarchic hollow government, the neocons actually want our government to be a capitalist/conservative version of the Mexican PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled the country for nearly a century until Vincente Fox was elected in 2000. The PRI is still very much in control and are poised to take back the presidency next year. Unlike the dream of teeny tiny government, the PRI believe in gangster government, one that is about laundering money, filtering it from the people to the corporations and their elite directors. Our government is doing the same thing. We have the largest deficit in our nation's history, yet we have an atrocious lack of services and support. Our government is growing monetarily in ways few "conservatives" could have fathomed five years ago, and most of the money is going to private corporations, subcontractors, who do the jobs goverment used to do less efficiently and clearly at a higher cost. It is a brilliant money-laundering scheme: tax the people, putting a higher burden on the middle class and working poor, and spend that money on corporate contracts and handouts. Say that it is through privatization that a more "lean" government will be produced, and convince legions of "conservatives" that it will lead to "smaller" government while growing government spending exponentially. The money changes hands seamlessly from the people to the government to the corporation, therefore "cleaning" it no differently than Al Capone did in the 1930s or Salinas in the 1990s when he sold Mexico's resources for a handful of campaign contributions. My mom's friend said that this made no sense because it wasn't sustainable -- eventually the system would collapse and the elites would suffer too -- but I pointed out that it seemed it was sustainable, since Mexico, though it is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, goes on and on with its elites gaining more power and more money even as the average person continues to suffer.

If we are going through a "Mexicanization," then our future is even more bleak than we can imagine, seeing that Mexico is going through its own transformation, its "Colombiazacion" as the drug cartels take over law enforcement and other governmental positions. Imagine a future like Colombia's present. My only hope is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to politics and economics too, and that because we're in the middle of this thing we can't know how fast we're going, so maybe we're not careening off the cliff as we seem to be but rather taking a slow enough sail we can turn ourselves around before it's too late. I'm becoming more of a cynic, but I have to have some sort of hope.

Yes, the uncertainty of it all. I talked to S yesterday morning and he's back in Kabul where he'll be for about ten days before heading back to his FOB near the Pakistan border. He told me that he went to take out $200 from his account and was told that he had to have a "permission slip" from an officer E-7 or higher. A permission slip to take out his own money that he's earned!!! It's so completely outrageous and it's new. Before he left for his two week R+R, no one needed "permission" to access their own bank accounts. Also new are soldiers wearing electronic monitoring anklets. He saw two on base yesterday. Apparently they are under house arrest at home, but that doesn't preclude them from being called up for duty in Afghanistan. What the hell is going on?!

We're both rather down these days and our conversation was pretty brief. "I'm feeling pretty bad," he told me, "so I'll have to call you tomorrow. I just want to go to sleep." The initial rebound was easier this time, but I think we're both feeling our loneliness more acutely because we had so much fun together. Two weeks out of an entire year is not enough. We're holding onto the certainty (false, perhaps) that he will be home by mid-February or maybe sooner if by some miracle Afghanistan settles down between now and then. He's ready to come home. And I'm ready to have him home again for good.

Just as Friday turns to Saturday, a photo of decay from San Quintin, Baja.

If only Rita could produce such beautiful and gentle waves. Instead, some have already died and the worst has come to pass in New Orleans, again. The only good news is Rita is weakening and most people have gotten away from the coasts, hopefully to areas that won't be subjected to the storm's land-locked watershed the experts predict will come in the days after. I think the weather-worry is that much worse since we now know (and many of us have known) that we have failed leadership, an atmosphere that compounds disaster again and again.

S and I are having a wonderful time together, though neither of us can stay away from the thrice-daily hurricane updates. In between though, we have gone to some of our favorite eating places, seen The Corpse Bride (wow!) and tonight we're headed to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum for the opening of their Día de los muertos exhibit. A friend of ours, Luis De La Torre, has a piece in the show.

Our friends are safe -- most still scattered across the country after being left homeless after Katrina -- and hopefully Rita will drift away from the most populated places. And this weekend is a massive protest against the Iraq War. (We'll be there in spirit.) If you've not seen it yet, check out Phil Donahue's mop-up job on the O'Reilly Factor. It's almost enough to give me hope.

Being followed by my own footsteps in Baja California.

Here's a Baja photo one day late. I talked to Selma, and Fred is finally home from the hospital. How wonderful! He's feeling great, though tired. I'm so happy he's home. Over three weeks. Horrible. Hopefully he will be well enough by New Year's to go to Baja, where we will celebrate the new year together with cheap Trader Joe's wine, ripe mangoes, and lush mole.


This person lives near my old apartment here in New Orleans. I have parked behind their SUV countless times. Maple Street Book Shop is an independent, small bookstore in Uptown near Tulane. You see their "Fight the Stupids" stickers everywhere, but this is the only one I've seen that has it next to a "W The President" sticker. And with no apparent sense of irony, no less! The "I Care" sticker is one that the city put out in their on-going attempt to advertize how much they care about the problems in this city without having to actually do anything about them. The sticker matters most, I guess. If you say "I care" does that mean you actually do? In our crazy Bush World, yes. "Mission accomplished," "compassionate conservative," blah blah blah. Perhaps he learned how to bleed words of their meaning at one of his many fundraisers down here in the Big Easy.

Cindy Sheehan has had to leave Camp Casey in Crawford to care for her mother who has had a stroke, but grieving parents continue to go there and as she said in her most recent note, the Camp Casey Peace Movement has a life of its own separate from her, and no amount of crazy conspiracy theories made up by Rush, or badmouthing by Matt Drudge, can stop it. Here's an excerpt of her most recent post:


I'm staying with two close friends here, Margarita and her fiance Neza. Margarita is from Cuernavaca, Mexico and is studying to take her comprehensive exams next month at Tulane (she's getting her PhD in Latin American Studies). She told me about Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers of the disappeared in Argentina who, one by one, camped out in the middle of the town square to demand answers from their government during the height of the dictatorship there. The totalitarian regime thought that if the bodies were never found, they could keep the reality of the disappearances from the bulk of the country by denying that the disappeared ever existed at all, not unlike our government shielding us from pictures of arriving coffins, or Rush's newest claim that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey never existed. Will Rush insist that every Gold Star family member is a fraud? It's impossible! There are too many, and sadly, more join their sorrowful ranks every day. Las Madres de Mayo confronted the government and made the rest of the country acknowledge their loss. They were the truthtellers, the unquestionable demonstrators of reality, and they forced Argentinians to accept what was being done in their name.

Cindy Sheehan is not a madre de Mayo, she is a madre de Western White House, but her power is the same. The tide has turned. More and more will continue to speak out and no amount of crap from the chickenhawk right will stop them or silence them.

I will try to write again tomorrow, either a last post from Fair Grinds, or a late-night post from a motel on the Mississippi outskirts of Memphis. On Monday I am going to the Civil Rights Museum before heading north. I'm going to call them and make sure they are open. I can't miss it again.

So close and yet so far...

Fred and Selma had hoped to go down to Baja this week. That was until they mentioned it to Fred's doctor who asked them why they couldn't pick some place in the US. No matter, of course. He's in the hospital still. But the memories of Baja are strong!! I'm going to visit him today and I'm sure we'll talk a bit about that magical place along the lagoon where octopus swim near the cliffs and northern birds come down to winter. In the morning, we're awakened by the pitter patter of quail on the thin roof. It's amazing how much of a racket a handful of small birds can make.

La Lotería is a game of chance similar to Bingo that is played at ferias, carnivals, and parties across Mexico. In Oaxaca, and I'm sure elsewhere, the caller speaks poetry when giving the image to mark on your tabla. Often these are only several lines and give a complex look at the contradictory nature of the images, or personalizes them in some way. Here is a great site about La Lotería and here is a tabla from the set I bought last summer:



Looking through the tablas last night I had an idea for the blog, a media made somewhat interactive by comments. I've noticed there are a number of other poets out there in the blogosphere and a number of writers who may not be poets by name but are by their insight into our precarious, peculiar condition. Why not collaborate?

Please join me in creating an exquisite corpse, an expression of chance itself, out of this tabla in the comments. Choose a square and write your own poetic "call." Here are the choices on this tabla: La Rosa (Rose), La Calavera (Skull), El Mundo (The World), El Apache (Apache -- a representation of the native peoples of the Americas), El Pescado (Fish -- this one is already caught on a hook), La Palma (Palm Tree), El Sol (Sun), La Corona (Crown -- royalty), El Paraguas (Umbrella), La Sirena (Siren of the Sea), El Gallo (Cock), El Diablito (Little Devil -- playful and not entirely sinister, perhaps...), La Muerte (Death with her scythe), La Pera (Pear), El Arbol (Tree), and El Melon.

Your "calls" can be political or not. They can be serious or ridiculous, or even dull. They can be poetry or prose or polemic. All are good.

I think this will be fun. Please join me!

Bouphonia has an excellent analysis of former Salon blogger Julie Powell's editorial from the NY Times this week about the "elitism" of organic farmers' markets and grocery stores.

I have written about our thoughtless consumption and how we rate "cost" over the past couple of years (you can read the entries here, here, here, and here.). Our culture teaches us we are entitled to the shiniest, newest product whenever we want it. Many of us give no thought to the consequences of our purchases or the true "cost" in environmental degradation and human suffering, only the cost to our pocketbooks. Apparently Julie Powell is no exception.