I can’t escape what is transpiring in Gaza. It has affected every part of my life. I have lost friends and even family members over it. My fiction writing has all but dried up. I am torn to pieces by the choice I know I must make in November. I obsessively read and comment on articles about it.

Everyone says “it is complex.”

I disagree.

Israel is that abused child who grows up to abuse other children.

You can empathise or sympathise with them, and you can understand their motivations, but that doesn’t mean you have to enable or forgive their actions.

The stone was warm against his lower back, comforting, like the supportive touch of a lover’s hand. He allowed himself to relax into it; let all the morning’s stress leave his body; muscles unknotting, heartbeat slowing; deep breaths filling his lungs to capacity with the moisture-laden mountaintop air.

The sun had worked for the better part of ten hours to impart warmth to these ancient stone blocks. He gave thanks, even as he awaited with anticipation the arrival of cooling rain.

The cicadas, who had been screaming at each other from tree to tree in their prehistoric language, were silent; gone off to wherever they go when they sense that water is about to fall from the sky.

Electric charges rumbled from cloud to cloud, and the wind whipped across the plain between the temples. A flash tickled his peripheral vision; electricity kissing the earth in a violent promise of rain.

The rock remained warm against his back, buttocks, and thighs; warming them as it had warmed multitudes over millennia.

The colors of the temples were richer under the cloudy sky, presaging the dark brilliance that would come with the falling rain. Soon, water would cascade down the parched, rusty-brown walls, rivulets following the remnants of intricate carvings, smoothing them into oblivion, one molecule at a time.

A solitary dust devil scurried across the dry plain, fleeing in vain the storm which would bring it to earth in a spattering of dirty droplets.

The ruins were almost empty now; the morning’s throngs of tourists escaping ahead of the rain to their buses and cars. A steel caravan of sweaty, inspired, disappointed, bored, or maybe even angry people, winding down the mountain road; descending from the past into the present.

The stones persisted in their warm embrace, cajoling him to stay. He did, because this was why he had come, to see and feel the rain in this ancient place.

As the first large droplets fell, he closed his notebook and carefully zipped it into the plastic bag he had brought for that purpose. Then he leaned back, presenting his face to the clouds, and allowed his skin to drink in the falling water.

He stood, surrendering the warmth of his stone seat to the cool of the now steady rain, and walked casually towards the exit of the site, stopping occasionally to take a photo with his phone until, finally, it testily informed him that it was too wet, the touch screen no longer responding to his damp, cooling fingertips.

He meandered through the ruins, in no hurry to leave. Near the ball court, he heard an odd, intermittent buzz. Looking down, he saw a cicada, which had evidently not made it to wherever it is that cicadas go, struggling on its back in the wet, soon to be muddy, dirt.

He gently scooped up the two and a half inch, red-eyed insect and upended it on the back of his hand. Its feet felt sticky as it gripped his skin, probably waiting to dry before flying off. The rain kept falling, so flight was impossible. It crawled up and around his arm, looking for a place to hide from the falling drops, but was unable to keep its grip and fell again to the ground. He picked it up once more, this time taking care to keep it on top of his arm,  and the two unlikely companions traveled together to the nearest tree, where he carefully deposited it in a fork at the base of the trunk, and said goodbye.

A few minutes later, he was at the entrance to the park, where tour guides, salespeople, and a few tourists huddled under the limited shelter. He continued on at his leisurely pace, inwardly amused by their incredulous stares at this crazy man ignoring the rain.

Reaching his car, he squelched his dripping body into the driver’s seat and made his way down the mountain, content in the knowledge that this day had been absolutely everything he had hoped it would be.

In late February, 2020, I was in Maine for my father’s 87th birthday. The shiny new Coronavirus was all over the news, anchors breathlessly ignorant and telling us to be afraid.

I still remembered the H1N1 scare of 2009, when a variant of the Bird Flu from Mexico was supposed to kill us all. I drove from Tucson to Guatemala and back that year in this 1987 Toyota:

Along the way I bought a sarcastic shirt saying I had “Survived The H1N1 Epidemic.”

The media have a tendency to cry wolf. That year they had. So, on Feb 28th, 2020, I posted this on my blog:

“It’s not the coronavirus that is throwing markets into a down spiral, it is media induced panic over the coronavirus. 34,000 people died last year from ordinary flu in the US alone. 16,000 already this season.  But at least the media aren’t talking about the rotten festering pustule in the White House who is tearing apart the fabric of the world.”

I and many others, thought it was much ado about nothing. I flew home to Tucson on March 5th, and the world shut down. A week later, I made this post. By April 2nd, reality had set in, and I posted this.

You are welcome to peruse all my pandemic posts if you have nothing better to do. A year after that April 2nd post, I crossed the border into Mexico, two vaccinations percolating in my blood stream and my eighth Social Security check in the bank.

I left a land of rugged individualists protesting the egregious requirement that they protect other people by wearing masks or getting vaccinated and entered a land where everyone wore a mask all the time and people would line up for hours to get shots when vaccines finally arrived several months later. The contrast was stark.

I have lived here ever since, and now have residency. This morning, I woke up dreaming about the beginning of the pandemic, or, more specifically, about posting on my blog at the beginning of the pandemic. Hence this journey down memory lane.

Covid is still here, but has been normalized, much like Donald Trump. Both are still dangerous, but humans have developed immunities to the former. We are having a lot of trouble innoculating ourselves against the latter. He has maintained his infectious grip on a sizeable part of the American population, and threatens to metastasize across the globe if we don’t act sensibly and decisively. Many are acting like I did, back in February 2020, saying “Oh, he’s just another politician, just like all the other ones.”

He isn’t. Like Covid, he will destroy us if we don’t take him seriously.

A while back I posted a story that came to me fully formed in a dream. It is the first of what I hope to publish as a collection of short pieces. This post, accompanied by a photo I took of the lunar eclipse in 2021, is an extremely rough first draft of another piece that may end up in the collection. I haven’t figured out what it needs yet, but it feels like the beginning of something good.

~ Kiko had been warned about the claustrophobia, but had brushed it off. How could it be worse than the lockdowns of the third and fourth pandemics? Months of isolation with only family and the web as companions.

It was way worse. For one, the crew weren’t family. As infuriating as family could be, they always seemed to be able to pull it together and work things out. Well, except for Fila, but Fila was – different.

There was also the fact that, during lockdowns, you could always go out for a walk, be in the open, let off steam with a good run. So long as you stayed far away from all the other stir-crazy and possibly infected humans.

Kiko remembered shouted conversations with friends from opposite sides of the street during the fourth pandemic. That one had been particularly virulent and transmissible.

Going out for a walk was not an option on this floating tin can (apologies to David Bowie). Kiko had tried once, suiting up, mag boots and all, and cycling through the inner airlock.

Prax had come in just in time to override the controls for the outer lock and remind Kiko that they were travelling at about .1 Light relative to the local particulate matter. The hull had no problem weathering the occasional large impact and the continuous tiny ones, being made of a titanium alloy, but Kiko’s suit? It would have been so full of holes so fast that Kiko would probably suffocate and freeze before even feeling the impacts.

Kiko wondered later, back in the privacy free crew quarters, whether that might have been the subconscious plan all along. Choosing oblivion over tedium.

On consideration, though, that wasn’t it. Kiko didn’t want to die. Of course, if a couple other members of the crew were somehow magically perforated, that might not be so bad.

Ten years ago, last fall, I traveled to Myanmar (as the Junta named it), or Burma (as the people call it). I will default to the latter from here on. President Obama had just been the year before, meeting with Aung Sang Suu Kyi. Democracy and freedom seemed on the verge of taking hold in a country where the military had ruled since the 60’s despite a 1988 uprising that resulted in what I would call democracy lite. Elections were held, and parties competed for seats, but behind it all, the military still held sway.

In 2013, it felt to me as if the winds had changed. The military still controlled huge swaths of land, but Aung Sang Suu Kyi had been free for three years and was on her way to win the election two years later. Tourism was flourishing, and even the corrupt generals of the military seemed to want to cash in, laundering huge amounts of their ill-gotten gains into resorts, hotels, bus lines, and the like. People were happy, welcoming, and full of hope.

Almost every Burmese child is sent to the local monastery, because it is the only way they can get an education. This results in a lot of young Buddhist monks and nuns. How Buddhhist they are is up for debate. I traveled the “Road To Mandalay”, which is actually the Ayerawaddy River, from Bagan to Mandalay. Along the way, I took this photo of two young monks.

It isn’t the best photo, but it illustrates the ambiguity of Buddhism in Burma. The monk on the left is smiling and waving. The one on the right is scowling and pointing a gun at us.

I am not sure if there is a direct connection between the military and the Buddhist heirarchy in Burma. Many young men, however, do join the military after school, because it is a steady income with a sense of belonging and power. It is worth noting as well, that the pogroms against the Rohingya at the beginning of the civil war were led by Buddhist monks. Americans might like seeing Buddhism as a peaceful religion, but history says otherwise.

I didn’t notice the gun until I was going through my photos for McGraw-Hill back in Tucson. To the contrary, I found a lot of peace on that trip.

My marriage had ended in separation a few months earlier, to some extent because of my semi-annual trips like this one. I spent a good amount of time exploring the many temples of Bagan contemplating life and love. Death as well because two friends back home died while I was there.

Up the river from Bagan in Mandalay, I had what may have been my most important experience. Historic Mandalay was almost completely destroyed in the Japanese invasion and subsequent Allied liberation. Both armies essentially bombed the city out of existence. Then in the 1980’s, widespread fires took another toll. What I found was a metropolis of relatively new concrete buildings, lots of garish LED signage, and basically nothing of what I was looking for on my trip.

What I was looking for was Angkor Wat.

Not Angkor Wat the place, but the experience I had found there. Angkor Wat was my first time seeing and touching the remains of an ancient culture. It was profoundly moving and inspirational. I spent the next eight years trying to replicate the experience, traveling through Central America and Mexico, Laos, Jordan, Peru. I visited countless magnificent ancient sites, but never found that feeling again.

It was in Mandalay that I realized; you never find Angkor Wat again. Just like you never find that first love again. It is a one of a kind experience, and if you spend life looking for it again, you will spend life in disappointment. Better to enjoy where you happen to be or whom you happen to be with (even if it is just yourself).

My three days in Mandalay were spectacular, despite being devoid of ancient history.

What am I getting at by all this? It seems like alot of people spend their lives in pursuit of some imaginary halcyon days, whether it be me, searching for Angkor Wat, or the MAGA Republicans searching for their mythical Great America (where women and minorities knew their place.), or the Myanmar Junta, longing for the days where the Burmese population submitted to subjugation.

Well, the Burmese people have seen and tasted freedom, and The Junta are not going to find their Angkor Wat. They are slowly but surely losing the civil war, despite Chinese help. It comes at a tragic cost. I’m sure the two young boys I pictured earlier are on one side of the conflict or another, maybe opposite sides, maybe dead.

For what? An unattainable return to Angkor Wat? Better to make the best of what you have in Mandalay and move towards the future.

I am not saying the resistance to the Junta should stop. Far from it. I am saying that the Junta should step down. They are the ones looking towards the past, like the Republican party, like Vladimir Putin, like the remnants of the Castro regime, like Hamas and Netanyahu.

The past is never coming back. You never find Angkor Wat again. Live in the present, move forward, and build a better future.

Palacio del Gobernador, Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico

The idea was to stay in a small town, off the beaten track, in central Yucatan. From there, I would explore the many minor, less-visited Mayan ruins in the area. Uxmal is not one of those. Neither is Chichenitza, which I also visited. I visited the two of them, as well as Palenque, in Chiapas, because I had time.

The thing is, I really didn’t have time. I drove for hours every day, cramming as many sites in as possible, breezing through them taking photos. The sites themselves were wonderful, each spectacular in its own way, even Acanceh, a lone pyramid set in the middle of a town, which, I’m sure, was built on the ruins of many other buildings and temples.

Acanceh

The Mayan architects seem to love rounded corners. I’m not sure if there is a structural reason for this. I only hired a guide once on the trip, but I piggybacked on someone else’s guide once as well. That was at the three sites I visited on my first full day in the Yucatan. I visited Sacbe, Xlapak, and Sayil. I ended up trailing behind a British man and his guide. I wish I could remember their names. I didn’t learn a whole lot, but the conversation was interesting.

Sacbe

Xlapak

Sayil

My ex-wife used to accuse me of “mediating my experience through the lens of my camera.” My response was “yeah, so? I’m a photographer.”

At the time, I actually was. I was a freelancer for McGraw-Hill Education, wth a fancy camera and everything. These days I photograph through the tiny lens of a midrange Android phone. The world has come to a point where everyone lives through their phone, whether it be using it as a translator, a knowledge base, a camera, or an archaic communications device to make phone calls, we are on the damned things all day long, and yes, we do “mediate our experiences through the lens.”

In 2005 I went to Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, where I would smoke my last cigarette after climbing in and out of dozens of spectacular temples. I had my first DSLR, an 8 megapixel Olympus, and took a few decent photos, but largely that wasn’t what the experience was about. It was about being there, exploring, touching, imagining.

My friend Franz and I spent four days in the ruins. We had a tuk tuk driver take us from ruin to ruin, walked the long path to each, past the ubiquitous musical group made up of land mine survivors, and the booths selling chotchkes. We were essentially alone in the ruins, something you can’t experience now, except for the occasional busload of Korean tourists that would drive up and disgorge 50 passengers. They would swarm into the ruin, take each other’s photos sitting, standing, and posing on it, and swarm out. Franz and I would look on, bemused, and then go back to being there, exploring, touching, and imagining.

Angkor Wat

Back then, it was a curiosity, a quirk of Asian culture, the penchant for taking photos of oneself and one’s friends at landmarks, as if to prove one had been there. Nowadays, the selfie is ubiquitous, and “influencers” hire photographers (my friend calls them Instagram boyfriends) to take pictures of them in famous places in the same poses as all of the other influencers. Ordinary folks will line up to be in the right spot to pretend to prop up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for example.

I remember being in Machu Picchu in 2010. I hiked up to the very top in the fog to watch it rise up. I have a wonderful series of photos from that morning. Then I descended to what is called The Gardener’s Cabin, where most of the iconic Machu Picchu photos are taken, and I sat and watched a procession of tourists stand in front of that spectacular view and strike ridiculous, derivative poses. The era of cheap, digital photography had arrived.

Now I will be sitting on a rooftop terrace in Oaxaca, eating mole with a friend, when we hear a buzzing sound. Looking up, we see a drone hovering 20 feet away, recording the couple at the table next to us. Or, I will be walking through Palenque and encounter a man with his cellphone on an 8 foot stick, filming his passage, and everyone else’s, through the ruins.

I got some good images on this trip. I’m fairly good at knowing when the light is right, framing images, finding unusual angles, etc. I do enjoy photography, even with a thumbnail-sized lens on a smartphone.

Xcambo

I could make a comment about religion here, but I’ll let you figure it out.

Two days into the trip, I ingested a bacterium, and came down with Montezuma’s Revenge, thus named, I suppose, because White people occasionally getting diarrhea is supposed to make up for our obliteration of mulitple cultures and the deaths of millions who lived here when Columbus “discovered” the Americas. I drove in to Merida, which I had also not planned, to buy Ciprofloxin. You need a prescription to buy it, but every pharmacy has a doctor next door. I took it twice a day for six days and Montezuma was conquered yet again. I did not build a church on his temple.

I have been wanting to make this trip for some time, and was excited when I left, but now it feels rushed, spiritually empty, and as shallow as a selfie in front of Machu Picchu. I’ve lived in Oaxaca for three years now, and never tire of visiting the Zapotec sites around the state. I always find something new, I feel the culture, still alive in the countryside. The Yucatan didn’t have that feel for me. I did too much too fast, maybe.

Soon, everyone will be able to do too much, too fast, in the Yucatan, Campeche, and beyond. The Tren Maya, AMLO’s controversial project, is already partly open, and will soon connect most of the sites in the region by rail.

Tren Maya station under construction in Campeche

The project is controversial because it has been run through miles of virgin forest. Detractors cite environmental concerns. I’m not sure about this. Right now, dozens of roads criss-cross the area, taking cars and buses to these same sites. Arguably the train will be better. It will definitely bring more tourists. That will benefit the economy, but also put a strain on INAH, who are responsible for the care and upkeep of the sites. Regardless, the train is here. It will be finished, especially as AMLO’s chosen successor is almost guaranteed to be Mexico’s first presidenta after elections in June.

I drove home through Chiapas, with a stop at Palenque, which I last visited in 2009, on an epic road trip from Tucson to Lago Atitlan in Guatemala and back. It is still spectacular, but I was disappointed that I could no longer climb all of the temples. Increase in tourism has shut down access to many areas of all the Mayan sites (as well as places like Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu). This is good, of course, from the point of view of preservation. It’s not so good for the experience we should all be having instead of taking selfies.

Temple Of The Foliated Cross, Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico

I stayed overnight in San Cristobal De Las Casas and then drove across the isthmus, past the region’s largest wind farm, and through the mountains to Oaxaca.

It was the last stretch, through the mountains, which may be more responsible for my ambivalence about this trip than the rushed manner in which I visited the ruins.

Along both sides of the winding mountain road was group after group of migrants, walking towards Oaxaca. They were groups of young men, women, families with young children being carried. It was brutally hot, over 90. The desperation was palpable. Every quarter mile or so was another group. They were who knows how far from their origin, still days from Oaxaca, where they would be another 1600 miles from the US border where most will be turned away. It was and still is heartbreaking. These are the descendants of the people whose civilization I have just been visiting and celebrating, that civilization that we “conquered” with disease from our unwashed European bodies and then demolished to build our churches. I wanted to stop for every group and offer a ride, but it is illegal to do so, thanks to agreements between Mexico and the US. I suppose they think that making it harder will make people stop coming. If I had picked up that young man who leaned so far out into the road that he almost fell and I had to swerve, I would have been stopped at the next checkpoint, lost my car and my residency, and been expelled from the country.

I wish those gun toting yahoos playing patriot at the Texas border could live for one day, even one hour, inside the mind of a parent who feels so desperate that their only option is to walk thousands of miles with their children to reach the US.

Migration isn’t going to stop. Climate change, the consequences of American drug laws, and our generations of meddling in the politics of Central America make it inexorable. Somehow, we need to stop playing politics with these people’s lives, welcome those we can, and make it very clear whom we cannot, streamlining the process for vetting, both at the border and at consulates in their home countries. It could be done, if we only had the will. We must also try to help repair the damage we have done beginning with United Fruit and ending with the War on Drugs, to all the home countries of these people. Nobody wants to walk halfway across the world. People prefer to live and thrive at home. It should be possible for them to do that.

I don’t know what more to say. I am going back towards the mountains to visit a pueblo out there in the coming weeks. I will load my car with bottled water and pass it out on the road. It seems the least I can do.

I have not put brush to canvas in years. In 1980, I found a focus, my non-repeating organic pattern that I later dubbed “farbelism.” I followed that focus for almost four decades, until I felt I was done.

I briefly branched out into other ideas, but quickly realized that the magic, while long lived, was gone. So I focused anew, this time on photography.

This lasted about ten years, with a concentration on travel photography, thanks to McGraw-Hill Education, who essentially paid for me to explore the planet for a few years.

Then impostor syndrome reared its ugly head, and still remains strong in me regarding photography. Too much of the work is already done for you in a photograph, and too many people have cameras.

I was never much interested in staging images or heavy manipulation, in camera or out. I was and still am a point and shoot kind of guy, although now I point my phone instead of a camera.

My creative focus now is writing, specifically science fiction, and more specifically, this series.

Last night I picked up a brush – three, actually – dipped them in paint, and applied that paint to a canvas. Not only did I do that, but, for the first time in my life, I painted a portrait.

The venue was a “class” at my friend’s mescaleria. Eight of us sat across from one another and, with instruction from a teacher, first sketched and then painted each other. Then we gave the result to our model. Snacks and drinks were provided.

It was a very enjoyable evening, and it felt good making art, in a nostalgic sort of way, and, despite the mediocre quality of what I made in an hour and a half, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I still have some rendering skills.

Don’t get your hopes up, though, if those hopes involve me taking up my former mantle of painter. I have a book to finish.

Here is the portrait my model did of me. I love that he made my beard black, shaving (pun intended) years off my age, and I would absolutely wear that shirt he imagined.

I’m not going to post the mugshot, as it is now the campaign poster for P01135809. This post isn’t even about him.

A column in the Washington Post this morning included this statement:

“In order to save the GOP, voters need to destroy it — with a crushing defeat in 2024.”

Why would we want to save it? My first vote was in 1976. Since I have been politically aware, which is farther back than that, the Republican party hasn’t done one good thing for me, my country, or the world. Sure, individual Republican actors occasionally do the right thing, like McCain saving Obamacare on his deathbed, or Cheney and Kinsinger standing up to Trump, but even those stopped clocks are wrong the rest of the time.

Let the GOP die. The non-MAGA Republicans can join the aging old guard of the Democratic party to become the conservative wing of American politics. Progressives, led by a few new stars and a few older standouts can form a new left party.

Save America. Move the discourse left.