c'est le sens qui fait vendre

you haven't packed yet and you have to leave in twenty five minutes and you are just blogging oh come over here and blog me baby yes that's all you do is blog do you think i should go grab agnes' ass and see if she thinks that johnny did it i'm getting out of hand it's your fault you need to get directions to the airport you don't even know where the airport is and you don't know where you will park your car and you don't even have any clean socks and every time you invite everyone over to feast and make merry the house is a mess the day after but that bread was so good i heard the german girl talking about sourdough and different tactics for keeping the starter alive now i'm gonna tell you that i want sourdough because i've never tasted it in baguettes. you sweet, sick, son of a bitch.

let my finger do the walkin' and that uzi do the talking

i went to an aiesec meeting to give nigeria presentation and was shocked to find the lcp-vpf-vpctm love triangle duylinh could not stop encouraging them with her incorrigibly perverse gesticulations

dieu reconnaitra les siens

i don't have much appetite these days today i ate buttered pao dormido it was still good for eating. i had forgotten to mix in the salt so i just salted the top it tasted like soft pretzels and looked like the bread they sell at subway. i keep a bag of semolina flour handy so if i am hungry i just make some semolina porridge and it makes me no longer desire. that was all i ate today until we decided on spring rolls. con grasa o sin grasa me preguntou y le dije que pues sin grasa si se puede sin saber que habia disponible puerco sin grasa para un precio mas alto cuando me di cuenta ella alcanzando la mano hasta lo de $2.99 le dije ah na na na mejor con grasa. we stood in the condiment aisle for a while i says we can save twenty cents if we get him this smaller bottle of hot sauce that fat bastard then i could buy myself something that costs twenty cents. i couldn't think of anything so we got the bottle for ninety nine cents. the mortar is called some word in yoruba and the pestle is called some word signifying child of the mortar. why the child beats the mother i don't know, says mister g.

my dad called concerned that my little brother is talking to a marine recruiter tomorrow. i says they'll sweet talk him and give him a lot of money. mental illness boring there won't be many women in the town with the military base. adventure excitement they'll take the kid over to applebee's and they'll pay for the meal. wait i did find something for those twenty cents i got a generic orange soda and drank it with frank's plastic bottle sojue his friend from the military stationed in korea brought for him. we went to magnolia cafe after the concert with aga's high school friend he says if he knew how many contradictions he wouldn't have lifts up his shirt and shows the tattoo this because i am a man of contrasts and i am optimistic and i believe and this stands for my dogtag says. the guy next to him had bad posture and says yeah but you don't have to resort to capitalism. i says man i just was gonna teach physics then we go back to our pancakes and say things in french but we can't understand eachother. schoolteacher talked about the battle of tet died of leukemia

tending the light at the end of the tunnel

i started as a walk-in tutor. this allows me to spend an hour and a half each day reading novels and another thirty minutes answering questions from students. one of my old students saw me and yelled my name and said i had cut my hair. the girl asking me a question, who i had met that same day said oh, you cut your hair? yes, tell me what time we'll meet next week, it will be a long semester for you. bueno poco a poco me vuelvo a ser panadero profesional. me di cuenta que el clave es hornearlo al vapor y una temperatura infernal (+450F). ademas los boules no se prestan a levantar agradablemente mientras hornear si no se desea quemar el crust, mejor con los baguettes. para hacer el crust menos espeso y con mas sabor, hay que pintar la masa con aceite antes de hornear y sprinklearla con harina de semolina. la chinita practica aprenderse los dichos y creencias nicaraguenses por un libro del estilo lonely planet como "indio comido, puesto al camino," "hay mas tiempo que vida," la maldicion del mal de ojo. le gustaria conocer mas acerca de la gente criollo alla, estirpe descendido de unos indios guerrosos y esclavos fugados de un naufragio portugues. me faltan tres dias para hielopescar

what did we eat this weekend?

sticky rice with blanched peanuts, spring rolls with boiled pork and suya-fajitas a la plancha, hoisin and ground peanut sauce, pistachios, fried cassava chips, roasted leg of lamb with saffron raisin sauce, jasmine rice, stewed goat meat with egusi sauce with semolina and yam porridge, freshly fried tortilla chips with a tomatillo salsa and sour cream, elotes, ezquite, german chocolate with corn flakes, fresh bread and sourdough bread, paletas, maranhon juice, whisky, port, beer, sojue, et des autres refraichements...

also i injured my knee from trying to run too far too soon. i will have to recover before i can get back on the marathon exercise circuit

tarp has sprung a leak

we got tired of eating spring rolls so we switched over to lamb, goat, and whisky

gangsta shit pt. 2

fun with the digital camera

gangsta shit

this is what we have been doing the whole day. rolling and eating spring rolls

O Ministerio da Saude Adverte....

adrian aguilera, formerly of the mexican MC, is doing a traineeship in Goiania, Brasil. He sent me this photo.

caption: Fumar Causa Impotencia Sexual

ilha o isla?

surya likes to talk big about ilha grande, but the better island is panama's isla grande. here a small group of guys have formed a collective to monopolise transportation to the island, so the only things and people that are agreeable to these boats can get there. isla grande has a tiny village of hotel-owning families who spend a lot of time playing dominoes. there is also a black jesus in the water.

los diamantes no quitan el hambre

"The ultimate televised war come to an end, in the Iraq war it seemd that the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein and the final military offensive signified the return to timse of peace. But before, during and after the bombs would fall on top of the Persian Gulf, many other battle fronts were and still are open in other corners of the planet. They are the forgotten wars of the 21st century."

Guerras Olvidadas

This is an excellent photo exhibit from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo about ongoing conflicts which usually don't get much attention. Alas, the captions are in Spanish.

the ballad of the broken birdie records

we are going ice fishing.

transcribing

i had written this in my journal while in San Jose, Costa Rica, for a stopover

I was sitting next to a guy from Panama who was going back home with his head down after failing to get into the U.S. He had bribed his way all the way up through Mexico, but was finally rejected in Tijuana, then he got deported to Guatemala where he said he was from. He speculates that the U.S. is paying commission to Mexico for each Central American they deport. The idea is to let them get up north, then stop them. This allows for maximum bribing. He tried again but only made it as far as Veracruz, so now he's heading back home to be with his wife and daughter. He had lived in California for 21 years, so had perfect English.

don't you don't you

i's chatting with contessa using the vosotros treatment and it comes to be questioned my 'juventud' alongside that of say, agnes or surya. i said that i had thrown nine eggs into my own swimming pool and vandalized my own front door for a practical joke. she says why'd you do it well i couldn't think of an answer, pues sos joven por eso.

on the same note, i will take up marathon running because i often rail against the idiocy of exercise. health benefits aside, you look like a fool running and jumping around unless you are involved in some kind of war or war game or you are trying to kill an animal. but i have to do it because the absurdity of me running a marathon or at least practicing with a team of marathon runners. we will run like six to twelve miles. i have never run more than a mile without stopping.


i was hoping to make it seem so crudely juvenille that i would not be suspected. comitted any crude acts of juvenille vandalism lately?

when it's glass eyes i blue formica halo

yesterday i remember i crawled out of bed this is easy because it is just a matress on the floor, then i went to my sitting couch and something clicked and i got fired up with some sort of angry anxiety so i flipped through cd binders and spindles and threw about a hundred cd's on the ground then put them all in the trash, then i washed all the clothing in the house and made a pizza with some discarded dough i had forgotten about the night before. i used a technique to simulate the pizzeria oven that almost worked. heat the oven to 500F and put a big dish of water inside and the water vapor will improve heat transfer while making the crust crunchier. bake 6 minues or so until the crust puffs up, then turn on the broiler until it gets brown. the next step is to line my oven with refractory brick. i kept pacing back and forth until duylinh brought me to have lunch with her cousin and husband the alleged swingers on the condition that she would explain to them about my haircut as soon as we met. they have a five year old child that only likes blonde girls and mexican girls dancing on the telemundo variety shows so his mother was trying to point out pretty girls with brown or black hair to him.

even supercuts couldn't fix my hair. so last night i was willing to try anything. agnes, full of polish meat balls, egusi, green label and sangria declared that she could easily fix my hair, she had seen her friend do something like this before and she waved her hands around. i says ok but you can't make it worse. kirk says agnes aren't you drunk? i says as long as you don't make it worse and don't cut my ears or my eyes. so she set off like some kind of tornado that was pulling my hair and ripping it out with the aid of manicure scissors and people were looking over and saying ok make that side shorter to match the other one now wait the other side is off balance. but somehow in the end it looked good, better than that fool supercuts.

i have been made assistant photo editor for some manuscript: "Christianity and Social Change in Africa: Essays in Honor of J. D. Y. Peel" so i have to read the manuscript and find appropriate photos, mostly by googling them. i can't afford to throw away any more cd's so i need to keep working

finished transcribing the first third of my journal. some parts amused me:

There are cholitas running around in pretty colorful dresses, and the dresses look too nice and clean for them to be begging of tourists out of necessity. One asks me for a peso and I give her a bolillo I had bought for the occasion and she rewards me with a smile. Everyone here is so short. Walking back from the square I notice I'm moving faster than the cars on these narrow streets. Classes in computation and English, fish in aquariums. A Chinese restaurant I see ... and opening an Authentic Chinese restaurant here. She mentioned me on her weblog hoping my birthday went well. It has been nearly a year since we've seen eachother. I should go visit her in the spring. I got to update the weblog at an internet cafe and it was a good one, with a high-speed connection. I chat with a lot of people. I want to try the black tortillas and I want to stay in this town longer. Though I wouldn't feel right unless I had a flat to stay in and some people I could be around. Maybe with that Chinese restaurant scheme I'd be happy for a while and my nerves would be calm and I wouldn't have to travel anymore. Tomorrow is rising in time to beat the sun to the horizon, and I'll get a ride to Comitan and la Mesilla well I'll just keep going until I'm in Tata's custody or Guatemalan custody or someone's custody

my god comes in a wrapper of celophane

this is egusi. you chop egusi. eba is cassava porridge


now i figured out why african restaurants are so expensive here. egusi seeds come at like ten dollars a pound, palm oil is six dollars for a half liter, goat meat is five dollars a pound, yam flour $1.25/lb, pumpkin leaf is difficult to find. but with i got from this mama i can make all the egusi i want without having to buy the seed. if you buy the ground seed you're paying two dollars per bowl, not counting the goat meat. palm oil lasts a while after you get it. the oil is the face of the soup, say the yorubas. ah but you can't get goat unless you speak spanish or at least remember the word cabrito or travel all the way up north to the halal market. a mexican gentleman kindly told me that i had asked the woman behind the counter for a half book of goat, when i wanted a half pound. me preguntou porque habia pedido yo solamente una media libra y le dije que pues solo lo queria para dar sabor a mi guisada y podes ver que es bien caro. me preguntou si la guisada era para una o dos personas, le dije que dos, mostrandole una pequenha vietnamita que entonces se asomou

each one showing me who i am

last night i went to a dinner party of africanists and african intellectuals and it felt good to be the dumbest person there. the good professor made sure we had plenty of beer, wine, hennessy, and egusi. like one of those dinner parties where people make toasts and everyone in the room has a recently published book or wrote the foreward or one of the chapters in some book. falola runs a sort of halfway house for nigerian professors visiting the united states. he's known as "the professor" in the nigerian community here. the guy who didn't know how to use the modern corkscrew said he's a bushman and then he was explaining to duylinh by interlacing his fingers and saying culture historiography intimately intertwined the convention of feasting poetry.

i rolled up to surya's birthday party and no one was there so i broke in and duylinh and i just wait for surya as he comes back from the liquor store, on his couch, i got my feet up. all the chicago people came back and they were so enthusiastic about their new lives as alcoholics who will bring world peace. agnes affected so much change that for the whole party she sat next to me and cautiously sipped echinacea tea. surya's roommate ensures a constant flow of latinas in and out of the house on a given night. i can tell clarali is older now because she buttons her shirt one button lower.

all during the meal

i finally have the time to start writing, hacking away, squinting, tyring to come up with something palatable. the first step is to transcribe the journal i made some five months ago. the writing is awkward, but i see myself of the past struggling to take on some form. i stumbled upon someone's phd dissertation in theology, about the equivalent or perhaps superior importance of the reader's understanding of the text to the author's supposed "meaning" he put this as one of those quotes at the header of the chapter (someone tell me the name of those):

The professor is there at his desk; in the cone of light from a desk lamp his hands surface, suspended, or barely resting on the closed volume, as if in a sad caress. "Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, pas, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead..."
-Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
the dissertation is called "trembling on the verge of allegory" if you want to google it.

an excerpt from the journal:
"Whenever I have to leave I get this sort of gripping solitude and I don't say anything to anyone and I don't think of anything except how the world is dark, like the condemned man in Li Zhenshi's book, and the life of the drunken poet. Everyone looks like they miss me already, so I know I'm condemned. All I can do is go out with dignity. I don't say anything because I'm already gone to them. I saw this same look on Chris' face as we were gathering our bags in the hotel In Shanghai. She had the look of someone who knows their fate, curses the cruelness of the world, but understands that crying about it only makes you lose face (mian zi). I tried to explain the concept to Bernardo and Mimi, but how can I explain in Spanish if I don't know the word in English. If choosing is renouncing then leaving is arriving. Travelling by land insulates you from this schizophrenic shock. You have some time to forget what you have given up and prepare yourself for what you have chosen. Maybe the road brings me my mental health, or maybe I have chosen and renounced, left and arrived enough that the road is the only place I am not haunted by the cruelness of modernity. Wherever I am, I am faced by a desperation of knowing that I will one day leave that place forever or leave every other place forever by not doing the former. I will one day reject my home or reject all other homes. The limbo is my only refuge."
sarah will be privileged to have the transcript when i finish typing it this weekend.

Li Zhenshi's book is called "Red color news soldier"

unattainable, in the land of the dead

the comments page on my police-hating post went down. the party's over folks.

every time surya would get more frustrated with the delays and the weight of his luggage he'd say i've been travelling two days, i've been travelling three days, after four days of travelling... those new york people are good talkers on the flight you can spot them cause they talk it up and they don't hold back. this one guy yells at me across two seats how bout them hash bars in amsterdam i said man you have no excuse not to go if you live next to jfk then he says we should crack open my green label i say if this delay lasts any longer maybe so. we had to land prematurely in love field to refuel, so all the passengers were left inside the aircraft to stew in their frustration. the stewardess said we can't take off until your cell phones or off. i unfeld mine and put it up to my ear so she could see me then she tells everyone look over here this guy is why we're not taking off. i have a good laugh and show her it's not on. the real reason is that they will interfere with the network and hurt reception for other users. the flight control uses a different frequency from cell phones. my luggage should get delivered to my door soon.

i got up early and i cleaned i am capable of being productive. very productive. then i remember that now i have computer and the internet is fast and it comes on every single hour of the day and i can play all the music i want from my hard drive. i can cook things, i can read bits of news i can swim every day in the pool for fitness if i were inclined. my car battery dead is i expected. i can't go out and buy goat meat, soap, spinach, ink. there are some salvadorean red beans and rice so i'm going to eat beans and rice.

i read all the weblogs. everyone is thinking. they walk and they turn their head one way not the normal way and they see something and it makes them think what ifii put my foot here or wherever i put my foot i can always look somewhere else and it will nullify my last footstep and the only fair thing for me to do is fall down. kai paola saki

down comes the light

i took off around eleven to meet some old friends in brooklyn but i had to be back here by now. just sat around for about 3 hours. we walked by NYPD's historic 88th precinct office, where in the recent past a haitain immigrant was tortured and sodomized with a toilet plunger, whose officers recently put 41 bullets into another dark-skinned immigrant on his way home before determining that he had no weapon and posed no threat.

nothing i went to class mom

o theo
we spent the whole day arranging logistics of goodbyes. in the end we didn't say goodbye to everyone. ama was concerned surya said we should have set up three days of saying goodbyes or make a virtually staggered schedule whereby each person we meet we claim to be leaving in this week or another because saying goodbye to everyone in one day is not possible especially when a phone call will not do. but the most important person of the day is theo. i say what of this theo guy, we just get franco to drop us and zas we get out and get in our plane and we're gone, even it's a bit excessive to have ama and apa come to the airport with us. but everything happened for a reason. we took two cars, theo and apa, then franco with surya and i and ama. for someone who never drives ama seems to know exactly which route franco should have taken. franco acknowledges with his trademark silence or unintelligible mumble. franco is the one who told us of the infamous kogi state masquerades, where the security of the police cannot be guaranteed and they have to leave town.

theo has green eyes and wears business casual, has a leather briefcase and nametag around his neck. we came up to the airport and there's more people in line than could ever fit onto a single airplane. theo go into action.
"i told theo go up to 10,000"
theo snakes behind the lines because like 30 other people he has a friends behind the emirates counter. we hear something they can put me on lufthansa and surya goes to the dogs because he's indian.
the woman who lies on her back does not do it for free.
theo then massages his contacts at KLM and gets us onto a flight to new york, just needs emirates to endorse it. ama is nervous and i say i trust theo.
if the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve.
finally we get endorsed and make it to KLM we go to the office upstairs to get our boarding passes and i cut my finger on the metal grating of the door. on the one hand we will make it to new york in time, on the other hand, KLM does not offer service nearly as good as emirates.
if a man sees a snake and a woman kills it, what matters is for the snake to die.
green line downtown to sulton st, to a train to brooklyn g train hoyt schr clinton-washington myrtle ave 215 willabee right on willabee and dorm thirdxA

plot 220 etim iyang crescent

and under every arcade they were working their jaws or working that glare. it is a maze it has several levels the advantage of this system is that if you bargain with someone you can assure them that they will never be able to find your shop again unless they work this market every day like i do so may as well buy now. to inspire desperation in the vendors in laiki market i told them here's what we'll do show me what you got but i'm gonna walk away and i'll come back if i don't find anything better, i don't even want to talk about price, then i break off a piece of kola i say "take" and give it to the shopkeeper and i say just show me what you got because there's not really anyone here so i just want to look at the work because i carve wood myself and maybe i can give my comments on the worksmanship. you're a good joker, you done give me joking price. look here there's a crack and there's a crack the carver should have checked to see that the piece wasn't checked on the ends before starting... but harmattan sir it's strong i can fix it.. what with your bondo that hole will open right back up, don't worry yourself i'm just looking for my own amusement, and besides i couldn't possibly give you a fair price, it's just poor craftsmanship. do you even have sandpaper? but back in this fish market we were sitting up on our roost it was an old concrete building that either all thar survived or all that was ever build were the floors and stairs and storerooms of concrete and the iron bars to look down onto the dusty street with that car that has been here a year and will never get out. work on my kola nut. when you break a kola nut it feels the oxygen and its veins turn red and slowly spread branching out. i break one up and pass it off to surya and israel and keep the other one with me for when we gonn' walk around. but the mama is strict. she's not the biggest fish head dealer in lagos for nothing, she wants to know what gifts she can give me. the kola apparently was just a gift to give me mental power to sit and think of the next gift. after egusi i said yam. yesterday when we got back from laiki we found a huge stranded polyethylene fiber zippered shopping bag that weighed about 30 kilos, filled with yams and a large black bag of egusi seeds. mary's eyes they sure lit up when she saw that egusi seed and said jesse you no gonn' eat all that yo'self you gonn' give me some. when the first mama was done with us she sent us off and israel took us back into the maze. this is like the place where you take a picture and put it in the washington post with the caption "lagos' squalid slums eight family single room wooden fire" but like i said they have no clue how much money is coming through here. weaving in and out for a while and picking up some pace we all had to sort of sidle around this imposing japanese truck coming to deliver a big load of something. maybe cookware or bluejeans or fine fabrics. but we got to this next momma's place across from the dustiest mosque ever and she's sitting down in this pit on a plastic chair and makes us sit there with us i could take another picture and the newspaper man would capture it lagos poverty bustling amazing spirit day-to-day yam mush. mama doesn't move but she sits there like she damn well owns the entire block and if she says something one of the men sitting up on the rim jumps and a young woman her secretary writes something down and she gets us some sodas says what do you want for a gift. surya says no no auntie don't worry. her eyes look like she may as well have pounded her fist and she says "no. i will worry," stressing the last word like a man at park and shop scolding his sun for riding off that children's powerwheel toy (i will BEAT you). she says something to secretary in yoruba and she hands her a notepad with letterhead, she scribbles a receipt out, secretary shuffles some more and then mama presses an envelope thick with 200 naira bills in surya's hand. says your father is a good man i love him i love him too much. now what do you want as a gift. surya has to keep cool. but this woman is the milk baron of lagos, uncle back at the office is saying there's 3 million naira moving through her empire every day he picks up a highlighter and says if she wants to sell you this she shows you this (the mouse) and sells 'em together. she's big, real big. mama gave such obscenely large gold to the married daughter that they don't know what to do with it. mama stresses i love your father he is a good man. finally it's settled that she will personally tailor us some yoruba suits normally reserved for kings next time we come and we're back. back at laiki the wood sculptor's grandson heard surya and i discuss the price in portuguese and he says hey spanish. i say real good chap you're my friend now, let's try to meet our price here. the bargain goes more smoothly from this point. he points out some regular and says he is spanish i just had this desire to speak spanish because i am deprived and i dream in spanish almost every night. ey buenas tardes. he's surprised and turns around. sos espanhol? no, argentino. bueno, soy de texas, mucho gusto.

israel

israel rolled up and word is we're gonna go say hi to everyone at the office. it is important to offer someone something whenever they come i learned this in the market when i went to the office. we cut through the bank where israel knew the guards and worked sanusi fufunwa to get a taxi we walked alongside one and got in and they wanted to fleece us on account of ibo so we kept threatening to get down and we finally had to make good on our threat then we find a big guy who will do it for 400 so he'll get our ridership. they say don't open the door or look both ways because the okada will find any crack between cars regardless of the direction of the traffic. the cab driver had never actually driven between the market stalls but israel assured him it was fine and the people parted like they're accustomed to cars passing through. this woman she got nudged with the mirror "you don't get horn o!" she yells and israel he yells back "you don't get eye o!" and him and the cabbie chuckle it up. we make it into fareast company hall and there's the banner for fine monosodium glutamate today i ate the chocolate cake and i said it has a particular taste, apa says rum and i say yes that's it, but it's artificial rum, methyl formate, because it smells faintly of that stuff as a kid you would put on the end of the tiny straw and blow these little bubbles that would stiffen and you could play with them. so we get up to the office and hear apa pounding his fist over the phone about those treacherous norwegians and how could you get taken for a ride by them after they tried to sell us the same bad fish heads two years in a row. he says israel take them down to the market take them to buy whatever they want and send my son to each of my dealers so that my presence is there and so they'll know that i'm gonna be wanting that money soon. so israel walks like he knows where he's going i gotta dodge these girls that carry more weight than i could carry on my shoulders on their head and they have it well balanced, they know that the galvanized aluminum tub balances best when it's put at a 45 degree angle they say that you're safe in the market because everyone has money all over them and area boys provide security if a thief gets caught there he can expect to die in a bonfire of old tires, or if the area boys get him at night he gets left tied on the post until morning for the shopkeepers to decide his fate but these are thin thin alleyways and under every arcade the woman nurses a baby or she has a huge pot of oxtails and goatmeat stewing with pumpkin leaf and egusi or girls and men are sitting sopping up this gravy with rice, cassava or pounded yam. tiny trenches run in the middle of the alleyways, all very dark but some bit of sunlight can always make it in, and some people see me and they just want to touch my hand or yell out america or japan. this water can range in color from brown to bright green or rusty red. men sit up on the stoops sharing cigarettes and waiting around the boys play ping pong it's a nice table you know money moves through here and teenagers roll up some joints with their imported rolling papers from france, because everything here is imported from china or europe but the shops we are visiting get all their goods from iceland and norway. when we get close the boys that are usually waiting around are hoisting thirty kilo bags of dried fish heads on to their shoulders and moving it in and out of the alleyways and up the stairs to and from where the big mama sits and she makes us sit on these plastic chairs and insists that we name a gift we would like. i say kola nut and she whistles to the guy across the road and picks the two best nuts out of his basket, sends for them to be washed off and has them put in my hand, i share with israel and surya. she says what else and i say egusi. you want chop egusi right now. no he want take it home to chop it there. a person get it and grind it. yeah like that sha. ok it will be ready in an hour. back at the office they phone and say it's ready to pick up. but i can't finish the story they're making me go out now.

effluvium of pomade

we had an outdoor party of the apartment complex. i interviewed some aunties and uncles about their impressions of nigeria. we ate some fish with a sauce. we went to this auntie house with these young gentlemen it was full remilgos we just talked about what we should do but when it came to the point of deciding everyone sort of backed out auntie rolled up at some point and since we weren't doing anything this would mean we were starving so we had to eat everything. they employed this nigerian girl that curtseyed in front of each guest so that they could take a handful of potato chips before setting them onto the table. finally it came about that we would go to the local shopping mall and everyone could watch me drink a beer. mister tanny said it right that the average uneducated nigerian sees an ibo and thinks he must have pounds sterling or dollars and i will have to deprive him of it, though in years past the ibos were considered ambassadors who had to be treated with utmost respect and cab drivers would refuse to take money from them to show gesture of kindness. patience's braids fell out, they didn't make them tight enough. she seemed disappointed. i have to get a molcajete at the market soon.

quilombo ex optico

the uncle i don't know if to call him master or sir or mister swamy or uncle or if i call the women auntie or ma'dame well the uncle made reservations for eight thirty at the best chinese restaurant for new years' eve the dinner and the madame was late getting dressed so we bumped the reservation well actually surya and i were tarrying a bit with our walking around the cut glass barbed wire stringed compound interior to work off the eba and egusi soup they call it two four here because it keeps you going for 24 hours and the only real reason i was going for the chinese food was so that the whole family could be together and i had to support my new image as one of the profligate sons of a yemeni imam well really this egusi and eba hit me hard i watched mary poach the meat and stew it in palm oil and add the shredded pumpking leaf and ground melon seeds then she made the eba with dried cassava powder i swear we must have slept for three hours straight we couldn't move. but getting back to the dinner we sat down but we had to keep standing up to greet all the profligate gomela sindhis who kept entering the restaurant i doubt any of them even live on VI but they all came and surya had to sport his usual grin but i saw that glint of lust when he greeted the jeweled and painted betis and the aunties sat on one side of the table arun was the only beta there he was in his element with the aunties i am sure his mother was proud of him they were all going to pancho's the fake mexican bar where one could choose to pay 15,000 naira and include dinner or pay 10,000 after 1am for open bar or pay 5,000 after three but the drinks weren't free for you. this is how they could know we were having a good time. but the main thing was that surya's mother didn't eat the lamb, we didn't expect it. she got a bottle of soda but uncle told the waiter not to open it for some reason and it sat unopened on the table the whole time. i swear that was bothering me. maybe it was because i was drunk and still full of cassava. entao a gente vimos a casa e fuimos um ratinho para ver as ruas da VI e disfrutar um porro. those were the days. today all i did was alternately read harry potter and william faulkner so it went something like this.
"so sirius black wasn't evil after all?"
"that's right, harry potter, and you and your friends learned the most important lesson of all, that you did what was right."
"...but when a durn, stinking lowlife jew will refuse to pay an American one tenth of what another American, and a judge at that--"
"why did you sell it to him, then?" the barber said.
"what?" snopes said. the barber was looking at him.
"what was you trying to sell to that car when it run over you?" the barber said
"have a cigar," snopes said.
"harry took the biggest piece of chocolate he had ever seen and thought that this summer would be better than the last."