planetcecil

TEACHER`S DUTY

2012-01-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

Being out of the classroom is one of the worst things that can happen to a teacher, surpassable only by death. In a country where teachers are not valued, where they are underpaid and mistreated, it is often a tempation, in order to keep body and soul together in one piece, to succumb and be drawn by the siren chant from institutions that convert us into parrots and at the end, the kick is duly bound. If you read Homer, you will remember that Circe and her club were the downfall for many a good sailor. Same thing happens to teachers.If education is a religion, our classroom is the cathedral, the holiest place where we can be. Don`t ever let society, or the dollar sign, or a lazy husband trick you into anything, do not allow yourself to be bullied by the family.We have been given by our own endeavors and kismet the authority to transmit whatever knowledge we have learned in any possible way. That is the sacred duty towards ourselves and towards society.

my students, my children

2012-01-26T13:08:00.000-08:00

The teacher`s pearl necklace consists of her students, each pupil a peerless pearl. Maria Montessori

HIGH QUALITY TRANSLATIONS

2012-01-26T12:42:00.000-08:00

TRADUNIC COMES OF AGE

Founded in 1998 by his director, Edwing Salvatore Obando, the Nicaraguan enterprise TRADUNIC has established itself firmly as the leading entity for translations. With a vast experience as a translator and language teacher, Edwing Salvatore Obando has provided a much-needed service in our country. Offering translations in 8 languages, including our native Miskito, TRADUNIC has guaranteed that its name becomes a synonym of excellence. Along these fourteen years this translation outlet has provided simultaneous interpreters and translators for numerous important events, many of these linked with the government and international institutions. A brief list of the customers includes government ministries and agencies, NGOs and multnational enterprises alwaysrequiring only the best. Planetcecil strongly endorses this company due to its punctuality, good service, fair pricing and solid staff of professionals. You may contact Mr. Obando at Valle de Santa Rosa block B14 house 290,( from the crossing to Cuesta del Plomo,3.5 kms.west, telefax 22645019,email tradunic@ibw.com.ni or cellphone 88614084. It is with great pride that planetcecil presents this striving company as one of our best Nicaraguan enterprises.

MY OWN MARY SHELLEY ADVANCED ENGLISH LEARNING PROGRAM

2010-05-03T15:35:00.000-07:00

Putting into practice the same methodology by which I learned my English, I created the Mary Shelley Advanced English Learning Program, and after undergoing a detailed perusal by my teacher Sir Ian Heathstone Armstrong, I started putting it into practice. Currently,several students are being tutored by me using my own methodology, deemed too "pure" and "essential" and non profitable by those who believe education is fit only for people with a lot of money. Here are the students who have been studying with this experimental method.

FRITZ

2010-02-18T19:44:00.000-08:00

FRITZ
For Frederick II the Great of Prussia
“The first thing she had a mind to ask me, while I was still writhing in pain reside her dormant husband, was why I was searching for her. I felt sorry for having sunken my fingers into her spine, pulling strongly on the vertebrae in an outward direction. Weren´t the natural pains of a galloping diabetic neuropathy enough? But I needed her, I told her, and maybe because she was a historian and her name was Wilhelmina, and she reminded me of the woman I most loved in my life. Vilma, please, I´m known as Vilma even if on my birth certificate I am Wilhelmina..she hissed while her husband continued sleeping at ease in the enormous bed without having an inkling that his poor wife was struggling with me, her star nightmare of the week. It was then when I decided to resort to her intellectual´s ego, throwing aside any compliment having to do with her womanly self-esteem. I didn´t tell her that she had fascinating eyes, or that she looked better alter having lost 10 kilos of weight…you see, nobody like her could submit to paper the anguish that I went through so long time ago for the mere fact of having loved beyond measure.
“That about love without measure struck a response in her. She sat upright on the bed, smoothing her long camisole with a drawing of Taz the Tasmanian Devil, she lit her dark green night lamp with a graceful tap of her long iguana-like hand and she smiled for the first time. She reached over for a glass half full of water, swallowed a white pill and a small light blue capsule,and she said she was ready.Let go, she said, paper and pencil ready. I sat on the edge of the bed and she handed over to me a flat yellow cushion with Pikachu on it..Fritz,she said, just let yourself go, we will yarn.
“Fritz. Since how long ago had I heard my loving nickname pronounced? And she mentioned it with such a particular softness. The iridescent Nicaraguan Spanish got stuck in my German tongue, but I tried to speak to her in the best manner possible so she wouldn´t escape again before I could give her my testimony. Where could I begin? Okay, you know that my Dad was one of the greatest disciplinarians in history, and his rule began at home. My mom was told that he could FIRE the housemaids and she should do the laundry with her own hands. That was my old man. He saved even the last penny, and he had traced a plan for each one of us from the moment my mom´s belly bulged with child .We were 14, not all of us lived. It was the usual thing back then. I didn´t hassle my tutors, I got good grades, I loved history, but there weren´t big plans for me because there were males older than myself. I ask myself if I could have been happy if my older brothers hadn´t died. Once that all hopes befell on me, between one army training and a session of document signing, my dad started to pay attention to me. Too much I would add. But this attention was not like the tender handslapping going on with his huge sergeants who were over six feet tall. There was nothing I did that was right, according to him. My mother howled in horror as she saw him come in with the best disposition to get his hangover out on me, battering me, and afterwards I would weep on my sister Wilhelmina´s lap(she was three years my senior).
“Soon my outbursts with my mother and sister were not enough for the blonde adolescent that I became,To make things worse my hormones were activating, and it felt like hell candy to have my dad hitting me all the time in public, over things that I hadn´t even done yet. Who could understand what I felt? It wasn´t possible to do it with Doris, the daughter of my music teacher…not alter the beating my father gave me in public and throwing her in jail so that she never CAME too closet o me again) I tried escaping to France. Well, I spoke the language of the Louises better than my own native German, and it could be possible that on one of my dad´s work tours I World take advantage to cross the borders .But I needed the help of some youth who was bold and daring like myself. I spoke of my plans to my friends Keith and Katte, who agreed that I could not continue being my dad´s official punching bag anymore..
“But with Katte, who had stormy skies in his eyes, and they made me think of things that I could not confess, something strange happened. While we were planning my escape, I felt that his silky white skin was more myself than my own body and if I didn´t smell his odor of fresh sweat and incense. I could not find peace neither day nor night. At age 18, my fingers still had the suspicious chubby roundness of my fat childhood, and Katte World chuckle when I asked him to open his mouth and let me rub the edge of my short nails on the living rose satin of his inner cheeks. In fact, it was even too much coincidence that the sound of his last name, Katte, was so like the English word for cat. I always loved cats, and for me Katte was like a big white cat with dark blue eyes, a cat I always wanted to cuddle. Everything was ready for my escape,
I had already cried saying goodbye to my sister Wilhelmina,
When somebody blew the whistle on us to my dad .Keith managed to flee but Katte and I were caught. Days before this happened, my sister had warned us that we were playing a game way above our heads,too bold a plan, and Katte, with luminously shining eyes,had repeated to me that if he lost his head, life and everything for me it was worthwhile. A good thing he had though likewise, for the sake of both of us whose disgrace was about about to come.

“My father interrogated me as if I were the worst convict. I told him I wanted to go because he wasn´t like a father, but like an executioner. He told me I was a disgusting deserter from the glorious Prussian army. And that was the reason why I had no honor. It was then that I told him I had as much honor as he did and I couldn´t bear to be treated like a lowly slave, precisely because I had honor. My father wanted to kill me, and I think his foreign friends really exerted pressure on him not to do so and that saved my skin. He even told my mother he had killed me, although later he had to confess that he had only jailed me at the Kustrin fortress. Perhaps it would have been better if he would have killed me then and there, because I had to be the witness of something that exterminated my soul. Katte was taken before my window at the fortress and I was forced not to close my eyes and watch the horrible reality: my father had Katte beheaded. A true barbarian, right? It is not the same thing reading about this on a text, a cold historical Fac., than to have me tell it to you with tears in my eyes, Vilma, or Wilhelmina, or as you see fit to call yourself. Down there on the courtyard was that beloved body, more adored by me than if it were my own flesh. And the head! A sad and bloodied roundness, the stormy eyes with no final peace, the mouth opened in one smothered scream muted forever! Never being able to put my chubby fingers along his inner cheeks while he laughed. He was taken away and I could never keep his head like when Queen Margot de Valois saved the head of one of her lovers. I was alone now,jailed, without being able to do anything else than fainting after he died, crying and crying afterwards. I hated my own body that continued living, although I told myself that Katte had only loved me beyond measure. I had nightmares, and in them the headless corpse of Katte would follow me, ominous peals of laughter sounding from a head he no longer had, from a bloody mouth that wasn´t there anymore. A chaplain was brought to me so that I got religious books. Do you think at these heights that I had any wish to pray?There was born the philosopher that many insist that I was, but there died the man that could love I could never have a restful sleep anymore,and I couldn´t love anyone after Katte. Afterwards I was wed to a sweet dummy Isabel Christina, and although I was adored by my wife I could never love her nor beget children with her. I ruled and I was called the Great, the forger of what my nation is today, but in truth, although my palace was called Sans Souci(no worries,,I wasn´t but a tenuous peel of what I could have been. In fact, when I left this world, after having hemorrhoids and awful pains on my legs, I didn´t have peace either. And I haven´t had any throughout so many years of not existing except like a reference in history. When I left that time in 1786, I felt that my essence or soul or what you want to call it, fled from my skin through a tunnel that looked like Katte´s open mouth when he died by beheading. I have sought for him everywhere that I go gravitating, in this nothingness and there are no lengths to which I won´t go ,even waking you up from your well earned sleep, so that if by coincidence, like a transparent and gentle entity that navigates among the red hairs of your cats and the subset, Katte returns and he should know I´m looking for him. Let him know that I will never give him up for good, Don´t you think have justified myself for having disturbed you even knowing that I shouldn´t have caused you more pain than what you already have to deal with? You say nothing, Vilma. You just want to cry even though tragedy has never knocked on your life´s door, never like what happened to me. Forgive me, forgive your Fritz for this hassle and continue talking about me to your students the way you have done, with so much love and tenderness, mention that I loved cats like you, I´m your colleague as historian and military. But when you say that Frederick II of Prussia was a great king, think about it. I like the flattery…but remember how much I suffered and still do for what I was. Now, put away your notebook and your pity, go back to your bed, let me place your Pikachu pillow below your painful knee, the pills will start working and your column will straighten again, hug your husband and try to sleep, because later you will pour this nto writing even though you might have smiling desires to cry and tearful cravings to smile, because even though you may peg me as a sadist, we finally met.”

Fritz, through CeciliaLevallois
October 25 th, 2003. I was getting out of my straitjacketed wheelchair

My Specter of the Rose

2010-02-18T19:34:00.000-08:00

MY Specter of the Rose
Whether we are a filthy capitalist or a communist now so out of fashion like me, the real thing is that merchants have really spoiled our lives with that custom of having a perfect Valentine´s Day having all the possible gifts that your beloved´s wallet can afford, or if he or she chooses to give you something…and even if you´re poor I stick around. What would handsome Roman Valentine say, he who had the habit of marrying couples even when Emperor Claudius II had the macabre idea of forbidding weddings for his soldiers, if he knew that nowadays we are only in love on his namesake day and nothing more? Was it all in vain, getting killed for being a matchmakers, or wasn´t he aware that a marriage certificate is barely a free license that authorizes people to inflict the largest damage possible onto their spouses without any risk of going to clink for this? All these things were running through my head, through the patient and well-balanced head of auburn hairs, letting you know that the I is s Adrith Fourrel de Méndez, a fortyish teacher who still wears miniskirts because her husband is “updated” and her prodigy of a daughter looks like a Byzantine princess..
But that doesn´t allow me to keep my anger down when at lunchtime, I took out the gift for Valentine´s Day for my husband and he left the soup spoon halfway up to his mouth, staring at me in shame and with an idiotic look which is his trademark every time he realizes he is far from perfect. He almost choked up on the soup, and he reluctantly said he had not yet gone to pick up my gift . which was still being packed at a boutique. I almost died laughing. Boutique. I have never found anything pleasant about them, he wasn´t even able to bullshit properly. He should have rather told me that he would go by the bookstore to pick up my book, my gift, and it would have been more believable. I smiled like Mona Lisa-because poor Gioconda undoubtedly was a Renaissance woman at the mercy of her husband, a receptacle of pleasure-and I wanted no hassle. I had too many things to do. I had to be at the uselessly overexpensive school where I worked on the afternoon and evening shifts, and I wanted to get there early so I could write up a few reports. I faked as if it didn´t matter. It wasn´t any secret that all soups get cold, and that surely applies to marriages, even for those matches that were formed based on a hormonal pseudomagic provoked by pheromones in a state of insurrection.
Once at school, I updated my grades, printed a few English grammar exercises for my students on the 4 pm shift and I tried to digest the slight. It wasn´t worth dying for. At 4 pm, the 10 pre teenagers that I had in my level 11 class gave me a nice surprise. They brought an enormous cherry and chocolate cake, pleasantly heart-shaped, and a few cold beverages to celebrate Valentine´s Day. It was curious, these kids whom I had not given birth to, had remembered it was a day for love and friendship…After the grammar quiz, in which not all of them sailed with high colors, we had the little party.
Jordan Vázquez, my pet student and not exactly because he had the best score, as usual started to behave like a monkey, and he spilled his glass of soda on the hem of my dress. Y went to the ladies´ bathroom, which was 4 doors away from my classroom. After rinsing the hem with cold water and liquid soap, I tried to dry it up by turning one of those hand driers which make more noise than hot air by turning it upside down. I decided that it was useless to dry it this way.
One in the hallway walking to my classroom, I saw at a distance along the hall a figure. It was a man with a huge bouquet of red roses. He was wearing military uniform, he wasn´t very tall but he was brawny, with a muscled build that even Arnold Schwarzenegger would have envied. The uniform looked like one of those worn by soldiers during World War II, and he was wearing a poilu helmet like the ones worn then. As I approached him, I saw that he was very young, maybe around 24 years of age. He was swarthy, with fiery hair and stunning green-blue eyes. I had the impression of having met him ages ago, since who knows when. The man got closer and when he was only inches away fro me, he extended his arms to hand me the roses and he smiled radiantly. At this precise moment, man and roses disappeared into thin air. After a few seconds, I was still open-mouthed, and I managed to run to my classroom..
The students gaped at me, surprised.”Hey you didn´t see the devil himself, teacher!”-said Jordan Vázquez. Another of my students asked me,” Did you find the man, Adrith?”
“You guys saw him too?” I asked while seating myself at my desk..
“Of course, he came to ask us where you were, and we told him you were where the King goes alone,”quipped Almalila, the best student..
Jordan Vázquez approached me with suspicion written all over his face.”Hey, that guy is not your husband.”.
“Of course not, he is my father, ”I replied, recalling my father´s pictures of himself as a young man in the midst of the horror during D Day in Normandie..
Jordan Vázquez sat down next to me and took my hand into his.”Teacher, your dad died in the SAHSA plane crash at Cerro del Hule in Honduras in 1989, you told us yourself. Your mom died there, too.”
“But it was him. Ok, your parents don´t pay ir order to have me speak about ghosts. Let´s go to page 34 in the green book and let´s get down to business,” I concluded.
Concluded? Oh no! Not at all! At 6 pm when the class was over, I knew that the whole thing was far from over. I put my books into the bookbag and I got ready to go to another classroom, where I had a first level to teach to adult students in the shift that concluded at 8:30 pm. I was turning off the fans when Mayra poked in her round Little candy face. She was the chief charwoman.”A man was looking for you, first he came by the administration with the accountant, and he sent the guy over here. Did you see him?”
“Sure, Mayra. I saw him. Did you?”
Mayra slyly smiled.”It was impossible not to see him properly, how would I miss a handsome man, so reddish and hairy and with those eyes?”
“Well, don´t fash yourself. I did see him. Now I´ll go, I have to go and get these photocopies run before I enter the other shift. See you around, good evening, dearest Mayra.”.
Once in my other classroom, I tried to concentrate but couldn´t make it. My dad had had the custom of sending me roses on all Valentine´s Day, even after I had married. He used to tell me that every woman´s perfect man was only her father, and he wasn´t mistaken. He had promised that even after he died, he would come back for me. When he said this I would just keel over laughing, and I would tell him he was just a doting old fart, how was it possible that two materialistic and atheistic old communists like both of us would be believing in specters and clatfart? We didn´t even believe in gods, which was a socially accepted form of hysteria and collective deception..

The simple reality was that my husband had simply forgotten to buy me a gift and although I hated to admit it the idea really vexed me. Frankly speaking, the unique perfect love was the one coming from father, maybe because it had no sex included. Hormones were all to be blamed for this.
But it was really too much coincidence that the head accountant, the chief charwoman and 10 kids had seen my father in all his splendour, young and radiant as he was when he was the European sub champion for weightlifting. Wearing an Allied soldier´s uniform, as he was during World War II. And with 13 roses for me, as he used to give to me every Valentine´s Day. Collective hysteria? Mass delusions? Compensation coming through ESP? Your own husband didn´t even give you salt for a xocote and your father crossed over the Great Divide to bring you roses? Hey, dummy, you aren´t Tarzan´s Mom! I believed only in what I ate, wore and walked on.I believed in my salary because I always had i ton time. But I believed in nothing else.
When I got home, my husband and daughter were all dressed up to the nines.”We are eating out, even though it is almost nine, but it still is Valentine´s Day,”said my worried consort. I saw my daughter´s enthusiasm and I didn´t wish to disappoint her. It wasn´t worth it anymore. I accepted with a humility in which I didn´t believe, because I knew I was not going to forget and least of all forgive. I let out a sound that was more of a snort than a peal of laughter, I put my bookbag on my desk and I went with them to eat 5 blocks away from our house, to eat what they wanted to eat, not what I wanted to eat, of course. It was part of the mantra for family peace. Was it Emperor Tito, the guy who concluded the construction of the Colosseum which was begun by his dad Vespasian, who said “family sucks”?Greetings Tito. I chewed automatically, but I was satisfied. It was ironical, but the Perfect Man had crossed scores of kilometers of inexistence in order to cheer up my life with 13 roses.
Once back home, I brushed my teeth. I felt slow and heavy. I went into the kitchen to drink some cold water. After I shut the refrigerator, my blood ran colder than the freezing water I had just drunk. Poked into a blue Chinese vase, which used to belong to my grandmother, was a huge bouquet of long-stemmed red roses. 13 roses. As I was getting into bed I thanked my husband even while I knew that he would never do something like that.
“I didn´t bring them. At 5 pm they were brought here, without any card. I have no idea who sent them. You were at school teaching. I hope you liked the book I brought you.”
“Oh sure, although this is the first time I hear that books are sold at a boutique. Thanks. Well, good night, we have to get up early tomorrow.”.
The roses took a very long time to wither, one month. I still keep one of them, dry yet still odorous, amidst the pages of a World War II history..

Cecilia Levallois. Managua,7 de febrero 2006

MISSING IN ACTION

2010-02-18T19:30:00.000-08:00

M.I.A.
(MISSING IN ACTION)

Cecilia Levallois

The first thing my daddy taught me was to avoid trying to hide the sun behind one thumb because of the impossibility of this. That is why today I shall speak to you about War, although I must make it clear that nobody likes to speak about it. Among military terms you can find abbreviations and euphemisms, and in all languages in which aggression is practised. One term in English that has always bewildered me is M:I:A. Missing in action. Disappeared during combat, or while in action.
How much use of abuse was given to this during World wars, or during the French intervention to Chad from where my uncle returned home with no more appetite for red meta, or during the Vietnam conflict from which many blondie gringos never came home, and who knows if it was destiny `s retaliation charging its unpaid bills and on that occasion it deemed necessary that all those lads who went to fight in order to wolf down the southeast should be trapped in tunnels, o water clinks o who knows how…

But War, as I speak to you about it, as I saw it through my astonished eyes, anyways always turns you into a M.I:A. Something from you gets stuck in the slime, which is thickened by blood or that piece of human kidney that you unwittingly stepped on with your boot, over there in the battlefield, without realizing what it was, only that it made a strange and nauseating noise when you walked over it. No, sirs, don `t ever misguide yourselves by humming that tune about beloved, suppose that I go far, so far that I shall forget my own name, beloved, mayhaps I am indeed another man, taller and not as old….

The Sweet Abyss is a masterwork of the new Cuban troubadours, but War is not so. Y beware, the one who stays behind enemy lines is the lady while the male of the species goes to face combat. We always handle War terms in masculine, forgetting the Celtic women who were the best warriors, even outdoing men, or beautiful Boadicea swallowing poison before Paulinus Suetonius could lay a hand on her. Or gorgeous Nzingha of Ndongo and Matamba fighting against the Portuguese so that they wouldn`t convert kingdom into an endless source of slaves for the colonies, or Candace the empress of Ethiopia astride an elephant commanding her troops and scaring away blond Macedonian Alexander the Great, who preferred not to battle than to end up being the laughingstock of everyone because a female would have beaten him.
WE must be clear that War is feminine, it is a man`s game according to sexist males like the paunchy general who, barely fitting into his uniform like a sausage in pork`s tripe, would rudely scold me saying that it was ugly for a women to speak about War, only to mask the fact that he was terribly embarrassed because he couldn`t know who William Wallace formed his troops , ready for battle.

But thus is how things work, and I have told you that we World have a yarn about War and I have been droving the skittish goats of my old spites. There are things in the everyday life of combat, whether you are just a war correspondent as were D`Annunzio or Hemingway, or as a soldier, that turn us into M.I.SA. as veterans of all barbarous actions, we will never again be the same, and no tale ever wrought by Lovecraft, no bizarre tale write by Poe with two liters of moonshine dancing between back and belly, no dead is dead said by Stephen King, can be compared with the horror of War. The photogenic smile stays the same, but behind the light pupil, if we really focus on it, there are the debris of fear, beyond what is never a sweet abyss of memory there is our instinct for survival, tense, drawn tight like a cello string ready to burst. Our bloodiest mementoes are the permanent guests of a memory that still trembles, its mailing address is the last remote corner of our eyelids, next-door neighbours to the oniric World of our dreams. They visit us as soon as we drowse, sometimes in full color, with their own soundtrack and with credits for lights! Camera! Let`s get the action rolling!. All this at the end of the latest session from midnight atwixt the sheets. We arrive punctually for the summons made by our traumas.

And in my dreams I am again in the north, by Jalapa, covered with blood with the rank, dank smell of copper, so drenched that even my bones seem to dissolve amidst the 170 pounds of my Rubensian Venus plumpy, and it is not the wetness of a storm that has abated, but blood, fortunately not mine, but it still pains me. And how can I explain that incident in La Penca, when I spent a whole night gabbing about the most diverse matters with a soldier, in the middle of the darkest night, but when the chopper finally came to evacuate us the man was dead with wide open, and when we brought him to the morgue in Managua the forensic doctors determined that he had been dead for more than 12 hours, and since he couldn `t have opened his mouth to deny that thus ended the story. Conversation with a dead man, and that is not the name of a good Hitchcock flick.

Often, even after so many years after Teotecacinte, Jalapa, La Penca or Operation Danto, revulsion smacks me in the face with its Tyranosaurius Rex visage, between the preparation of the mushroom sauce and the seasoning of the filet mignon with which I Hill agreeably surprise my family for lunch, and the violent and gaping red meat resembles the wide open, always bleeding wound of War. Even after so many years of not wearing a comfy pair of Jungle boots, Way is like an old pal from kindergarten, it returns with its round-trip ticket and unexpiring visa towards daily terror that lives in my nightmares. I want to say that I have gone back to normal life, and I really do enjoy it when my daughter sees the ad for a new war flick and we go to enjoy it together, saying that the bloodier, the better. I don `t want to affirm that I cry ,hiding so no one sees me, when I wake up, shaking and drenched in cold sweat, with Wide gaping eyes, because it is not really that what bothers me anymore. On November 11th, Veteran `s Day because on that precise date in 1918 ended the First World War , I wear a red paper flower on my breast and I want to convey a cheap sentimentality that I am far from feeling but that is very much in fashion nowadays

If my father were alive, he would dig out his medals and he would put baby powder over his tattoo with the number that was engraved in pain on his elbow in Auschwitz, and he would wink his eye at me. But he would, also, caught at that precise moment without warning, be forced to admit that he as well as myself as well as all war veterans,
Up to a certain point continue to be soldiers who are missing in action, no matter if our bodies did come back and that now, we truly enjoy our nests and our families. Maybe we might never know what we left behind on the battlefield, something that Frederick of Prussia didn `t mark on his military maps, nevertheless something that visits us, from one night to another, in our nightmares or during our day-to-day life with our reflexes and fear of having someone approaching you from behind without making noise. We too, even though we may now enjoy the right to live in peace as so Uncle Ho yearned for, are still M.I.A.

5 Oct. 2000

THE LOST BULLET

2010-02-18T19:22:00.000-08:00

THE LOST BULLET
for Chele Marcos
"The bullet which shall wound me shall be a bullet with a soul...”Salomón de la Selva
I do not know why, but since I was born in the United States, I just knew I was destined to live one of the weirdest romances of all times. Nothing in my appearance or configuration distinguished me from so many thousands, so many like me, I was not anything special, but from that very moment I recall that I told myself I was going to be special, memorable, unforgettable. It was not a Mae West syndrome whispering for you to come up and see me sometime. I would have to go and look for that unfanthomable destiny, incredible, unique, unrepeatable and inevitable. I was just one more golden gringa, that was it, but something told me that I was destined to be a one of a kind protagonist. I spent a lot of time just holding on, bored, I felt tied, like stuck in a case of nothingness, gravitating as I waited for the event, for that magical moment in which I would be catapulted into an unique and decisive event, expected and feared, both at the same time. I understood what the ovules gravitating into maturity in a ovary feel, or what a fetus does while he waits for the waters to flow outward and he can dawn into the world. But the date for my encounter was already pointed out by what the Arabs call kismet, destiny. If you please, call it fate.
In 1984 I met the great love of my life. She was wearing loose camouflaged pants, a video camera slung from her shoulder and she exhibited jungle hair in several shades of mahogany. We met in Jalapa, Nicaragua, so far away from my birthplace in the United States. She was being followed and since she was rather chubby, she had a hard time climbing up the ladder that went into the military helicopter that would return her, other militaries and 4 European war correspondents back to Managua. An amalgam of noise which was made of triggers, whistling bullets and the hissing blades of the helicopter disoriented me a wee bit, but when I was able to find myself, the encounter had already happened.
The woman settled herself inside the helicopter next to a blond Frenchman who was stinkier than all the onions of the world put together. This blondie looked at her in alarm and told her to look al the bloody pants. Instinctively, the maiden looked at her crotch, the logical site if you are a woman in a fertile age. The Frenchman had the decency to blush to say no, it was somewhere lower. That was when the woman looked at the left leg of her pants, all torn, and a sea of blood oozing from behind her knee. ”But I felt nothing, merdouze,I felt nothing and they hit me!” she would recite as if she were quoting Walt Whitman or Guillaume D`Aquitaine if that is who pleases you most.
It was as if her dignity was upset because she had been shot and she had been so stupid as no be unaware of the fact. Beside her, a blond Nicaraguan with the rank of captain took out a big bandanna and a tourniquet was firmly tied in order to avoid further loss of blood. The blond Nicaraguan held her head in his arms and crooned, ”That`s it, fatty, stop it, Bat! We will take you to the military hospital but take it easy, okay?” It was pretty obvious that this man had a very difficult time trying to handle soothing words, but it was evident that he was terrible worried. He continued speaking to her in English all along the chopper`s flight, and I was understanding what he was mumbling. Some of the things he said were not to my liking. Who was he to touch the love of my life, and she to allow him to do so? I did not know that she and the blondie, whom many called Eric the Red, were chums since they were both babies, and a gust of jealousy swept over me.
Once in Managua, the woman was taken in a noisy ambulance to the hospital, Eric the Red went right along with her. Far from the foreign correspondents, the man finally burst into tears.”I shall never forgive myself if your leg gets amputated, Bat. Shit, you have such nice legs, you bitch, your father will kill me for this! ”The woman twisted and turned on the stretcher and she had a strange fey smile on her face, but she would utter nothing more than a hissing shut up! Up to this point, a huge anguish was getting into me.
What would happen to me? Getting the woman into the doctor´s hands, Eric the Red stayed outside promising the woman that he would call her parents. The physicians inmediately stripped her of her boots and pants. They cleaned her up and I heard them say it would be a difficult case. It was not until around 7 in the evening, after countless exams, x-rays, hurries and lots of fidgeting that I could be at peace. The doctors` opinion was that due to the way that things happened, and since the bullet was sitting exactly at the point where femur, tibia, fibula and patella converge, it would truly be an impossible task to extricate the projectile from there. There was a man with transparent green eyes who chain-smoked next to her bed.
There was no question of amputation, and nothing about extricating the bullet. The woman would learn to live with her bullet as of that moment. As weeks and years went by, the orifice of the entry would leave no mark on the perfectly formed leg. She would have a bit of pain during the new moon days, with air conditioners and the cool airs of December, and she would set off the alarms when she visited banks or went through the airport check -up, when the metal would be detected.
“At least it did not hit you near the arse, like your uncle who was on D-Day,” said her father when he took her home from the hospital two days later. There had been Eric the Red, whom obviously had not been thrown in jail or anything like it.”Bat, can you forgive me? It was I who took you on mission, ”said the blond, with a tearful look in his gray eyes. ”Fuck off, Eric, stop giving me bullshit ,”said she while I writhed around in jealousy.
From then on I learned to know her. And I started loving her with such a vicious possessiveness that I never believed I could be capable of feeling. She was again out as a war correspondent at La Penca and she almost went lunatic when she yarned with a chap named Rubèn, who had a profound gash on the chest. Bat would affirm that she spent the whole night yarning with him, but it was quite scary when she returned to Managua with the recruit`s corpse and the forensic doctor told her that he had been dead for a good amount of hours. She wept for hours in her father`s lap and Eric the Red snarled at her that if she took the military service recruitsnwho died in combat so seriously, she was going to spend the rest of her life with her stormy eyes as swollen as frogs. Once in a while her mother would have her visit several doctors to see what could be done about her bullet. Once she was given pills which made her vomit even what she hadn`t eaten in centuries, to say the least. I felt guilty because I couldn`t mitigate her pain. I never wished to hurt her, but I adored her so much that I couldn`t bear the thought of being wrenched away from her.
After her parents` death in a plane crash, there was no more mention of going to the doctor. The only one who could have convinced her to visit the hospital was Eric the Red, but the poor chap was so enmeshed in his own troubles because he had to deal with his own psychosis. I get the impression that Bat sometimes got a little fed up of playing wageless psychotherapist, and even though they were together at the same military unit after she decided to become a full-fledged military, Bat never overspent her patience. She deal with Eric the Red with an endless sweetness, just like a mother had to deal with a hyperkinetic baby. Eric the Red would seat her on his long sofa in his bureau, he would hand her a guitar and would ask her to play the instrument. I remembered Farinelli singing to soothe away King Philip V of Spain`s melancholy. “You are my Orpheus and I am the beasts for you to tame...”said Eric the Red.
Years later, when Bat left the army without signing a single document, Eric the Red continued to be hooked on her emotionally. One afternoon, she was translating confidential documents for a multinational when he called her, sunken in despair. Taking into consideration that she had many bills to pay such as energy, water service and phone, with the threat of getting those services cut off, Bat said that she could not abandon the translation because at the same moment that she finished, she would get paid in cash. Eric the Red lost his marbles and he insulted her, yelling at her that if he committed suicide it would be as if she herself put the bullet in his head because she never had time for him. Bat surely had heard similar nonsense after so many years of friendship, so she didn`t do more than hang up. The following day, Eric the Red was dead after having swallowed a bullet in the best Hemingway style. Bat, this time, was unable to cry. She had too many other things to do, and pain was not included n her agenda. She just undertook the burden, a burden which was made of guilt, heavier than anything that Atlas had to carry, including the whole world.
Pain should have been included in her agenda because when many years later she was diagnosed as a diabetic, she would have it. The neuropathies, those shameful bolts of flashing pain that people with diabetes suffer, would be worse in her left leg because of the bullet. Again, it was brought up that maybe by extracting the bullet that she had since 1984 maybe some remedy might be possible. Bat this time wanted to know about the possibility, so she went to the hospital to have an ultrasound performed on her. Lying down on a couch, she turned her duststorm eyes towards the screen. It was the first time that she saw something like that. She remembered her pregnancy, when she was expecting her rowdy twins, and a wave of maternal feelings swept over her. There she was, tiny,well- nooked, shining. Like a fetus. Bat, recalling that on one occasion she was almost aborted, got up from the couch and cuddled her knee. She felt pain, but she smiled. “Under no circumstance am I removing this thing from my body. It would be as if I aborted my kids. I am not a criminal. She stays there. I love her. No more talk about this.”
I could finally breathe, relaxed. I was loved! Here, inside Bat, despite her high glucose level and her pains, I have the honor of being cocooned in an eternal, loving pregnancy. When she dies, I shall be buried in her same tomb, a privilege that not even her own husband will have because he will be laid to rest beside her, in a separate crypt. Well, one thing. Keep me a secret! I will never tell her that the 22- caliber bullet which dashed her friend`s life, Eric the Red, when she refused to listen to him, that bullet was my own sister.

Cecilia Levallois

LEVEL ELEVEN´S TRIP NICARAGUA IN ENGLISH

2009-11-08T16:09:00.000-08:00

as good patriots and even better students of English,we should know our typical Nicaraguan foods, places and legends in any language.My level 11 students from the Saturday course and I took a field trip to Lake Cocibolca, Granada and Catarina last October 31st.

the golden lock

2009-06-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

March 28th,2009
THE LOST EPILOG FOR THE COLONEL´S SCRAPBOOK

1660 Georg Ludwig German monarch of Hanover who became the famous /King George I of Great Britain after the Stuart line came to dead end,is born
0193 Roman Emperor Pertinax assassinated, he had been luckier as military than as emperor
1881 Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky Russian officer and composer, dies on his birthday at exactly 42,from cirrhosis, after leaving us with Boris Godunov, Pictures at an Exhibition and Night On Bald Mountain

AFTER ME THE DELUGE SAID LOUIS XVTH

What was that deluge about, I wish I could ask the handsomest king of France. Was there an awful lot of water or just emptiness for you? If people believe god made the world, was this the feeling the deity had after making man? Was he aware of the monster he had created? I sit here, still trembling with rage and chagrin. I´m supposed to be bulletproof, invulnerable, above feeling demeaned by petty things. My mind is reeling with stupefaction.. Is there no end to the silliness of men? I don´t want the make any more questions. I´m the Cheshire cat, smile disappearing in the midst of a windy mist. As I came I go. Not on tiptoes this time but stomping my way out, boots making a lot of noise on the way out. I want to lay claim to my time, to my right to choose and not compromise, to stop leasing the world even if the world is reduced to one single being. Can one person mean the world to someone else? And if that world crumbles at your feet because your idol had feet made of clay and you caught him or her with pants down grunting on the toilet…just like anyone?
I look at my camouflaged uniform,blue and black and light blue,splotches of indigo,and I realize it has been there for so many years and it isn´t until now that notice how well it covers my so many time injured body, this is the first time I see the beauty of its pattern. I´m not wearing a slinky black nightie, not a teddy can compensate for an ugly face, ever. Cheap silk and nylon cling to your body like unwanted sweaty skin, unsexy, undesirable, sticky, yucky. Rather dead in combat than ever being caught in that attire. Why do women want to be so ridiculous? I take out a small hand mirror and scrutinize my thousand ethnias mixture of a face. Still unlined in the year turn 50. “You, incongruously pretty face above a heavy uniform, like a Japanese doll that is so expensive and dear,” said a Honduranian lieutenant colonel to me, a man who sports his grey hairs and wrinkles with such debonair elegance. He sees me, nevertheless, adrift, worrying about my time, there is such a gaping hole in the middle of my painful emptiness. It is so hard to let go. It is so difficult to slam doors and then think about opening them again knowing that you will slam them anew.
I felt like this in July 1996. My best pal was gone, he had committed suicide, and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. Unconsciously, I would lift my hand and dial his number, and then I would remember no phone company has been able to connect to our memories…No longer there. His uniforms and shoes still hung in his closet at home, and at three o clock on Fridays my stomach would rumble in anticipation because at that time we would get together for tea. I know the feeling again. My noontime is mine now and I don´t want it. At 5 pm I get skyline anxious, it is like retreating and kicking a drug habit. You still get the heaves, the shakes, the drop in blood pressure. But somehow you know there is no turning back.
I am left with a long awaited babe in arms, and now born, I just want to give it up in adoption, as if once the father is gone there is no reason for his existence. Babes and kittens can be adopted by others properly without any harm coming after, but a book?
I cannot even drown it…not even in my own tears if I have any left. You remember the scene in Francis Ford Coppola´s Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein when the monster played by De Niro drops into Victor´s nightchamber on the doctor´s wedding night, and when the doc turns him away the monster pounces on still virginal Elizabeth and wrenches her heart out ? That is the exact feeling I have when I leaf through this book for which I am writing this epilog. I was aborted by an unknown hand,torn out of my womb but unlike Zoroaster who was said to have been wrenched from mommy´s womb by a monster and then survived for years eating homemade cheese(who made it? Religious stories are so incongruous and stupid sometimes, they offend our natural intelligence), I have no sense of what to do next. I´ll go back to my short stories, good down to earth money makers and providers of the red and black wings of fame that hover above my uniform and grant me comparisons with Choderlos de Laclos, and Dostoyevsky, two officers turned into writers.
I feel the gentle shadow of Modeste, my Modeste Mussorgsky whose music I have always loved so much, up to the point that I gave him a short story about his wonderful heart. He lays a skinny emaciated hand on my shoulder and upon his touch, the anger flows out. He was born and he died at age 42 on a day like this. Like Michel Praetorius too, great German composer of the Renaissance, born and died on his birthday. Is that the ultimate gift from kismet? His shadow in Russian officer´s uniform sits in front of me, crosses his knees and smiles faintly under his mustache.
Mussorgsly says to me in his Russian accent,” I will take you further into immortality, kitten.. My Russian heart tale will always be a reference, who knows if this crazy hooky diary of this colonel you were won´t be forgotten, is there any guarantee that the entries be kept in order by the person who motivated it? Would it be a bad surprise if I told you the dearest reader might as well lose it, or get it deleted, or never mind it just to show his lady friends boasting how crazy and naïve an intellectual can be? I saw something similar in Russia, something which made a laughingstock of old Peter Tchaikovsky with his famous piano concerto no.1 WE sort of had a courteous enmity with him ,for I was a member of the Group of 5 Nationalists with Rimsky, Cui, Balakirev and Borodin and Peter preferred Western style music….You remember Peter had tailored it for the great pianist Rubinstein, a big jerk if there ever was one, pompous asshole, we hated him. So foppish Peter presents his concerto for his so called friend, and the guy listens in silence, frowning ,grimacing. At the end, Rubinstein gets up and tells the poor Peter he hates every note on it, that the concerto is vulgar and crass and sloppy and stupidly sentimentaloid, so Peter just gets up and storms out of the room in tears. Back home, Peter wrenches off the page with the dedication to Rubinstein, and when the German pianist Hans von Bulow premieres the piece, Peter dedicates it to him. Peter had been so slavishly addicted to Rubinstein, and he discovered like many others did, he had been pissing up the wrong tree. It happens. You have a phrase. Shit happens. No kitten, no need to make your eyes water. Not my intention. I´m just telling you it is not the only case in history, I want to make you feel better. Now I want you to don your uniform again, with no apologies, and smile like your colleague Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia mentioned, that it is good to smile because it existed and never mind that it ended. You have something strong in your hands, never keep the grenade. Throw it or it will blow up in your face. Simply an officer to another officer´s good advice.” I glance at the chair and only a ray of sunlight is there, Modeste has left me again. With a cupful of sound and logical counsels in order not to disgrace myself.
Dead is dead said Stephen King in Pet Sematary. I looked into my file for projects in the short story area. I had three lined up and wasn´t going to practice Nicaragua´s favorite sport: procrastination. If I had the time now it was for my use, and I would lay my uniformed shoulder to the weird wheel of producing phantoms. I just hoped I hadn´t lost my touch. If I had gotten out of a wheelchair before, against all odds, I would get out of this post partum depression sooner or later and the best medication was available: more words, more letters, more literature-I wouldn´t be a writer´s block victim or a literary cripple. It may still bother me to remember what the French said that only when the flower adores does it bear the fruit. But still there was the phrase from that lousy husband but great guerrilla fighter Che Guevara, onto victory always.

2009-06-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Taller de Bordados Rubén Darío
Porque también con aguja se hace poesía
Masaya capital del folklore nicaragüense
Tel. 00 505 88236333 , e-mail bordadodario@yahoo.com
Desde sábanas, manteles, ropa de cama, servilletas,cortinas y faldellines
Hasta trajes de boda, guayaberas, cotonas, huipiles, chales y pañuelos.
Bordados a mano y a máquina.Al detalle y por mayor.
Operando desde 1987.
Propietarios: Juan Markovik y Mercedes Brenes de Markovik

FRESH FROM THE OVEN

2009-06-07T18:51:00.000-07:00

Newest poems by Adolfo Beteta

THE ANCIENT FEMININE LEGACY
For María Alejandra Jirón Vílchez

In your Herat exists a legacy that transcends the rivers of time,
And this inheritance is clearly reflected in your left eye.
It is the throne you majestically sit upon,
A birthright,
Of the divine being that you are.,

And the delicateness of your touch is pure,
An indication of the tenderness you possess
For those who surround you;
A microscopic glimpse of the inmense compassion
That you carry in your soul-
An ancient soul-
Who spiritually resides in the vast dimensions of such a beautiful moonchild
Who tends to hide behind the dawn
In order to avoid the negative energies
That occasionally attempt to disturb your inner silence.

But you shouldn ´t fear,
Because those anonymous to your frequency will be chased away
Efficientl,
By the lunar eclipse of the amber katana
Of your personal Ronin.
And this Ronin will never rest until you reach your full bloom
And become what you are ordained to be-
A living embodiment of your sublime feminine mysteries.

GENERATION LOST

There´s a strict type of repression in certain times.
And sometimes,
These lines become personal letters of a decadent generation
Who tend to roam foolishly
Like unlearned jaguars in the midst of a Mayan jungle.
(And to what extent?)

This is why I collect your thoughts for future reference,
(Along with the exquisiteness of your stare that penetrates me the furthest)
And this profound knowledge enables us to be,
Together,
In a coffin like state of inner peace.
(This child cries in the penumbral shadow of Isis´ throne)

And despite the fact that I´m invisible,
You can clearly read between my veins.
(Something different)

And the identification of a lost soul
Does not need any savvy technology to be identified.
It´s a lawless rule in a decaying world
That refuses to heal because most prefer to drown
In their private indifferences.

How do they manage?
Most allude to religions
(the easiest escape for self-doubting individuals)
And others to materialism.
(And this materialism comes in all shapes and forms)
This has been the downfall of many generations-
Sadly,
I have been a witness to all of them.
(Particularly my own)

The greatest gift is breathing,
But breathing is NOT easy
And if it is NOT easy,
Then I shall be the first to do so for my generation-
I just hope my efforts are not in vain.

WHEN EYES SPEAK AND LISTEN

The invisible light of Ra breached my right eye this morning
As I was riding the 119,
Sitting on a thought,
Basking in a dream.
This light revealed to me the end of men;
But not an apocalyptical end like you learned in Sunday school
Or from overzealous radicals who attempt to persuade your spirit through fear,
But instead similar to Ragnarok,
Where most men and gods alike will be devoured by a wolf-
A noble wolf.

And this end heralds the beginning of
The Amber colored daffodils that rotate piously into oblivion,
And the faster the revolution,
The more it expands-
Like a divine consciousness.
Thankfully,
I´ m not allergic to wildflowers¡
(Although I´m allergic to forced literature¡)

This is why I dream upon pauses that harbor a continuous subtle prowl

That I occasionally scrub off as if they were historic stains,
Like the Crusades.
(this scrubbing usually occurs during the quarter moon of the Autumn Equinox.)
Thus,
The unanimous solitude that envelops me is quite fashionable nowadays,
Especially in selected Egyptian circles where,
If it weren´t for the Christian gossip,
We´d have no identity-
Yet alone an existence¡

This poem is proof that prophecies disappear in the midst of civilizations,
Of how they are ignored,
Like Cassandra´s,
Yet the civilized are the first to burn and plead to the universe for forgiveness-
But the universe is deaf to your supplications
Like you were, on the crucial Saturday dusk
WhenApollo´s warning echoed from the chosen lips of the Trojan princess…
This is why I choose to live with the incurable disease of listening.
And I don´t want a cure,
Or medical diagnosis,
Nor prescribed tablets by unlearned men.
Ok,
Maybe a tablet,
But it better be Emerald.
(Enough ¡This poem must be perpetually halted because it is heading to the unborn tears
Of your next verb!)

“Perhaps the calamities of humanity CANNOT be solved by the daily application of
Shaving cream”.

(This was the academic reasoning of one Billy Flannigan from Worcester, Massachussetts, who, before his fantastic death, uttered these last words of hope for Humanity´s sake with an unmoving godlike conviction.)
I believe Billy could´ve been right,
If he only would´ve learned to listen properly.
But what do I know?
After all,
It is complex(but not impossible)to listen clearly when your left eye is trying
To understand your right one.

POETRY BY ADOLFO BETETA

2009-05-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

It is a great pleasure for me, as a writer and lover of poetry, to introduce you to the young poet Adolfo Beteta. Born in Nicaragua but raised in Massachussetts,USA, he is also an outstanding English teacher and a great connoisseur of literature. From his book Autumn Whispers I took these poems he wrote.

Self Portrait

Advancing.
True bigot controlling his element
Forever vibrant in a poetic coma.
Dismal backgrounds encircle the flagrant ghost of his chapters.

Unknown heritage impregnates the jargon of his silence
Leading it to milestones beyond normal.
His katana orbits the mind patiently waiting to decapitate the queen.

Abel felt the wrath of Cain,
Bringing an end to certain rules.
Still elevating.
Runaway scenes tantalize the unchallenged valor that yells with zest.

Spasms of an Impossible Love

My life sleeps helplessly in your kiss.
Never will I be born to see the crystal tulips growing from your hair awake,
Freely, gently flowing, streaming madly in my face.
In a rubber prison bouncing from lunatic rage
Transparent love incarcerated in your eyes partake.

Black sun enter.
Shed misery on the weeping cherry trees leaning towards the sky.
Dying fields nurture withered magnolias falling from the lips of time
To a silver screen of scorching hailstorms trickling from
The eyes of invisible hummingbirds that encircle buried tombs.

I hear you calling from ivory mountains floating blindly in a sea of flesh
Splashing ruby colored water drops extinguishing your fears.
Grab a comet by its tail and make it change its course.
Swim in the forbidden
And as you drown in its erotic fury you will resurrect in bliss
And emerge triumphantly like a golden Phoenix out of ashes you will rise.
Naked immaculate lunar eclipses hail the butterfly rainbow chariot.

Pandemonium sleep!
Pandemonium sleep!
Pandemonium sleep!

Snowflake

You fell…
From an Olympian haven descending slowly you reached
The path I trek alone not knowing where it will lead
My feet listen and never speak
Until the day we met along my journey.

They spoke to you of past lives,
Different phases,
Romantic escapades in the forest of my thoughts
And mythological heroes immortalized in stars.
They spoke of Promethean fates and Heraklean feats,
Poetry’s paradoxical nature and the poetic justice of my life.
Alexandria still prevails in the shadow of time.

They spoke of revolutions that sparked enlightenments
And of cunning philosophers who dared to think,
Of exotic and rare poets who never kept silent
Despite the criticism society links.

They spoke of great migrations,
Cross continental tides of flux for a dream.
The route of silk they know in texture,
A frozen tundra they’ve endured.
Tropical heat waves they have suffered
And felt soft meadows of green grass grow.
Industrial changes they’ve encountered,
They have adapted to social wars,
In city pavements they’ve been nurtured,
They’ve been oppressed and said no word.

And now they’ve stopped to greet your presence,
To wonder if you’ll respond at all,
But all you did was sit and listen
And watched the Summer turn to Fall.

In spite of this you didn’t melt…

They were amazed by your performance,
A role of Oscar worth and more,
The epic soundtrack of your poise revealed to them the many doors.
They opened one and then another,
Divinely contemplating every room,
Every corner,
Until they knew that it was finally the time to rest.

I’m gently falling like a feather,
In the ravishing emptiness of your abyss;
My feet have stopped their endless journey
To rest inside a prolonged bliss.

Orgasm

Ghastly images sustain the linguistic tongue's
Granite like delivery of the humble poet.
His verses implicate the process of Evolution
Putting it in jeopardy.
But the poet's destiny is unaffected
For it is guarded by the cosmic lectures of truth.

The morbid morale of infinite thoughts brings fear
To the skeptics who doubt the notion of the impossible.
Therefore,
The outspoken poet paves the endless quest for realization.

He frantically writes the words he receives from an inspirational frenzy,
Savagely inflicting pleasure upon the paper.
This is how he reflects his theory of life,
By unloading an exotic realism only a voracious vigilante can conceive.

His weapon is yesterday...
That personal zone that amplifies his addiction.

Emptiness

Living painting,
Dashing through your woods like an autumn breeze,
Encountering the Willoping people
Who dangle like a string.

Vicious vultures circle the wondering spirits
Waiting to feed off the innocent soul.
My range is precise...
Invisible bodies invade the coliseum of Karma seeking triumph
Just to get defeated by the perception of Kronus.

Thoughts hung on emptiness,
In silence,
In the pandemonium of night.
Capricorn dwells in Saturn,
In the home of Time.
No origin is one
Complete
Whole.

Blank Page

It starts from loneliness, from an undisturbed meditative solitude inside.
I sit there curled in a grown fetus position waiting for something to occur, but nothing does.

I am surrounded by space, starless space, colorless lifeless space
Yet in the barren horizon lingers an idea that wants to exist, to emerge from emptiness.
It wants to be grasped, understood and nurtured, but it is still invisible and complex,
And in the process of deciphering it,
I discover a levitating mirror forest lurking in the midst of my evolution.
Confusing images swirl from mirror to mirror laughing, crying,
Yelling silent echoes heard only by windpipes running wild.
I close my eyes and hope to awake…

I’m still here yet not exactly there when I stopped to stare at mirrors speaking to me in strangely familiar riddles. Clink, clink…clink, clink, clink the sound is near, behind the grove the memory fragmented waterfall speaks my years in a tongue only I can understand. Piece by piece they fall like feathers gently to the unconscious lagoon whose banks I am kneeling by reaching down to grab a drink, but the holographic transcendental moments of my life slip through my fingers trickling back where they belong. I thirst, but can only contemplate my collage of nature versus nurture.

Sitting on a thought watching life pass before my eyes in rapid multi-colorful flashes of light dashes that flow within and without you bringing you closer to the glory of death in every breath I inhale, but not necessarily meaning that I will exhale and prevail to escape the clutches of my lungs… but I don’t really care if life is zooming by at such an accelerated haste.

I carefully observe the world from my placid mental state and choose to flow according to my natural rhythm. I’m all about keeping it real to myself for health, but that’s ultimately the biggest wealth one can ever attain, so I won’t refrain to what I just felt in this passing second of my existence, inner peace and great persistence to all those minds out there who demonstrate resistance don’t you fall into the void, stop, get out, and find comfort in your joy. I do declare you sit back, relax, and lend my words your ears and glimpse the process of a particular existential awareness. This is an idea that just wanted to be born from a blank page and become a rhythmic smooth poetic rage, but not against the machine that produces all these dreams of heart pumping, heavy breathing, erotic fiction – before you answer think: Am I turning you on? Wink, wink. You never felt this kind of friction, and if I haven’t satisfied you yet then you weren’t meant to read my diction.

Parthenogenesis

2009-03-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

90th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on March 26:
1479 Vasili III great prince of Moscow (1505-33)/son of Ivan III ,father of the monster Ivan IV Grozny,did he have any idea what he would beget when he jumped on top of Elena Glinski?1577 Elisabeth of Nassau daughter of Willem I & Charlotte of Bourbon, not as silent as her dad the Stadholder of the Netherlands
1911 Tennessee Williams Columbus MS, dramatist (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Tramway called Desire)one of USA´s most charming gays
1931 Leonard Nimoy Boston MA, actor (Spock-Star Trek, Mission Impossible),Mr.Spocl from Vulcan, with the Pointed Ears, delicious. Idol of my childhood
Deaths which occurred on March 26:
0752 Pope Stephen II dies only 4 days after his election, shit poor guy didn´t even live to enjoy his power
1566 Antonio de Cabezon composer, dies, somehow I like him even though he was Spanish
1827 Ludwig van Beethoven German composer (Appassionata), dies in Wien (Vienna) at 56,raging at the storm, fist threatening the storm,what a colossal way to die
1892 Walt Whitman poet, dies in Camden NJ at 72, father of free verse, blue eyed gay who was one of the first to wear jeans
1918 César A Cui Lithuanian fort builder/composer, dies at 83 ,was so mediocre no one could even say Cui about him1923 Sarah Bernhardt [Henriette-Rosine Bernard] actress (Qn Elizabeth), dies at 77,the Divine Jewish Diva
Happened today
1526 King François I returns Spanish captivity to France, and the coward sends his son Henri (future King Henri II) to take his place
1942 1st "Eichmann transport" to Auschwitz & Birkenau Camps,train chockfull of Jews, for extermination.WE SHALL NEVER FORGET

Parthenogenesis…Look Ma; no male!

I knew that one day I would be destined to produce something without the physical aid of a sweating male getting his own good pleasure on top of my exhausted body. My father would laugh about it when he said I would be capable of parthenogenesis. Asexual reproduction. My father, like my blond boss Lorenzo, so long gone, fatherly miens to understand how complex the lack of penis can make us humans who are denominated females. I subrepticiously see the stars on my shoulders and I am sure of something: I did it all alone. I owe it all to myself. Could every woman chasing falling stars or being infatuated with someone write a book? No, sir, the world would then be a library. And it isn´t. The only stars I have ever touched lie not in my each day more deteriorated hazel eyes, but on my shoulders. Dust to dust, everything goes back t where it came from .I wallow in the loose and splotched comfort of my air force camouflaged jacket. Paradise found again, not Milton´s Lost Paradise. Paradise as described to me among chimeras doesn ´t work. I ´m the freak on my own leash. It is only fair. At the end,the acknowledgements are there but passed over. We want to get to business, ma ám,says the cadet.I just wanna read the book, he says in his embryo English. Someday he will learn not to contract and say want to.
How many times we feel sorry by all those who stand up to receive an award and hear them blab about thank you wife, thank you dog, thank you milkman? Everyone gets credit because we creative people, specially those of us who wear breasts, are inured to the fact that we should be cooking or washing the floor instead of writing, we are told that the time we spend writing stuff should be given to another baby or being nice to the mother-in-law. NO NO NO:I wrote this myself .It came in a bubble of sunlight and it goes on into an arid steppe, a puszta once inhabited by delibab. Dust to dust. Only a nut would write to a muse he has never even smelled. Try smelling the muse-if you ever catch her- after a dust storm, says an imp that lives beneath the third star on my shoulder. This imp is a minion of mirth, and is constantly laughing at me. But is always so intrinsically right that it scares me. It is the same imp that tells me this creation was just another way of reached self-glorification, an easy road to self gratification. Literary masturbatory practice. Why not? Taboos are being lifted from ipsation in the physical sense. Why not lift the barriers that take writers to masterpieces..?
Books don ´t die. They have an immortality that flesh and blood will never possess. Muses get flushed down the toilet every day along with other waste materials our life produces. Did Hector Berlioz ever regret having met Henrietta Smithson and dedicating his Symphonie Fantastique to such a mediocre moneydigger? Well, his pocket certainly suffered. All to end in despair and disappointment. Can he call me as welcome new member to his club, along with Dante cuddling a doll who looks like Beatrice or Petrarch with his mummified cat still longing for Laura? No. I never took my muse to the barber, nor shared a breakfast with the shadow. As much as nobody can get pregnant from watching a greedy Mahgreb gigolo ejaculating against the wall through a webcam, you cannot take responsibility for someone who has never sneezed over your left cheek. Fairy tales are only that. Sorry. But they can yield interesting products, such as these words that now you devour. Someday my grandkids will pay their college fee with money given by this non fiction book written by their crazy yet pragmatic ancestress, and they will invent stories about a shadowy phantom dancing in the background, but whose bloodline they aren´t related to.
There is no labor blood around my ankles. No placenta to show . I gave birth alone, like a hen who saw the shadow of a rooster and laid a white egg, as my grandma used to say. I used lots of music, my knowledge of history as the historian I am, the circumstances given every day to me by life, sometimes on a silver tray, other days with a kick in the ass. I almost deluded myself sometimes into believing there was a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, or a happy ending like an American Hollywood blockbuster film. The almost made all the difference. Translation into Spanish is one penstroke away from this. A hard or soft cover is only a matter of choice. The pictures will come easily and the book is done. Elton John wrote Your Song. I wrote this scrapbook, and all the time it was focused on one person: the me that I became while I was life ´s avid student.

The road untaken

2009-03-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Entry 89 for the Colonel´s Scrapbook

Birthdates which occurred on your SELECTED date of March 17:
1473 James IV king of Scotland (1488-1513)was so unlucky as to be killed on the battlefield of Flodden leaving 4 bastards behind and among his legitimate kids the useless James V
1787 George Simon Ohm physicist (discovered Ohm's Law), thanks Georgie
1834 Gottlieb Daimler Germany, engineer/inventor/auto pioneer-designed 1st motorcycle, and since then so many people have ended splat
Deaths which occurred on March 17:
0180 Antonius Marcus Aurelius [Marcus Verus], Emperor of Rome, dies at 58, of dysentery ,unlike Vespasian who died on foot despite having loose bowels, he died in bed and not poisoned by his not biological son Commodus0461 St Patrick patron St of Ireland, dies in Saul (according to legend), what a lovely saint
0432 St Patrick, a bishop, is carried off to Ireland as a slave, for his benefit and that of the Emerald Isle
1836 Texas abolishes slavery, legally…but is it real?
1960 Eisenhower forms anti-Castro-exile army under the CIA, old squirrel hater couldn´t do without barking orders, maybe to vent out his frustration over his impotency and his frustrated love for Kay Summersby

WRONG TURN
The driver who was behind the wheel of the car which took Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his beloved morganatic wife through the streets of Sarajevo took a wrong turn and delivered these people to the gun of Gavrilo Princip, the TB-ridden patriot who dreamt of a free Serbia. Some wrong turns are not as drastic, though.You can always unwalk the path and get back to the main artery of your life. All of you know that I am not religious. Today is Saint Patrick´s Day and green Ireland is afeast.On a day like today he was abducted to be taken as slave to Ireland. Had he stayed in his native isle, would he had become the formidable, honest to god saint he became? He converted the Emerald Isle to Christianity pushing aside the Druid religion, and supposedly got all snakes to leave Ireland.Was he aware of the steps that would guide him when he was abducted? He was barely over childhood, and out he went into the world, not exactly by choice.
Choice. Women have less choices, perhaps because of the double standard. If a man sacrifices his family to duty he is a patriot. If we women do it we are heartless egotistical bitches in search for crazy glorification. My uniform is in the closet, peeping at me, the stars twinkling on it. Have I ever been out of it, even when I don ´t officially wear it? I can´t imagine if there really is a choice once you get so far in life. Once I read Virginia Woolf´s short tale Solid Objects. A guy leaving all he had for something supposedly meaningless for everyone but himself. Some things wil never make sense to everyone at the same time. If you are running after freedom on a wild goose chase, running wild, dropping things on the way while the finicky quetzal of freedom flies into a tree, lands at a pool of desire, winks at you…how much do you have to shed to fly like it? Once obtained, the bird is just a sad creature. Heart pulsing like mad under fear, trembling, a fistful of feathers, clinging hopefully to life, begging for one more minute of life, asking you to spare him from beady eyes. It has lost its charm because freedom that is attained only to seek for a new type of slavery is worthless. No parakeet wishes to change cages, it longs for the jungle only. That is what I have always meant, and the bird is bird with or without feathers of whatever colors it may be. What I´m trying to say is that with or without military uniform the same discipline is there, the same sense of following my own code of Bushido One of my friends, now retired, says that you can leave the army but the army inside never leaves you alone.
Patrick comes to me again. Not in the religious sense, because I don’t believe in that kind of sainthood. The man who was Pat, the tall and burly redheaded who always had a jovial smile. I have a little chat with the historical Patrick. He would tell me nobody leaves all for all if all is relative. He´s about to smack my bottom and say that woman, that was a mess but it is easily arrangeable. I can still retake my path. He will laugh and comment that I painted myself into a stupid corner. Risking all for chimeras isn´t only stupidity, it is suicide. He would remind me that another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, would say, centuries after Patrick lived, that innocence is a fragile blossom and if you touch it the bloom is gone. Virtual is a delicate blossom and reality when it touches it wilts it off, is my version. I´m back in my old office, the air conditioner hums softly. But these are only the trappings, the physical skins of power or what we think is power. We have access to our dreams by what we sacrifice for them in reality. But dreams come in two versions, sweet ones and nightmares. Nothing is worth making sacrifices for nightmares. Remember how they make us scream. Words have a way of developing iridescent curves when we see them on a screen. Real concepts don ´t temptingly snake a belly dance for us. They are solid and concrete and have seven seals on their bent backs.
No, I can unwind my wrong turn. In fact I just did today. Was green-clad, redheaded handsome Pat there? Probably, as well as all the living dybbuks of my Jewish past and a few hand picked jinns from Muslim legend that my ancestress Fatma Osmanli took in her bags when she married my French ancestor? Somehow many people long to go back to the womb. A sense of welcome comfort engulfs me. My Pikachu glucometer on my desk, my Taz cushion. The iced tea, Lipton, already foaming in its pitcher in the small fridge. I take my Jungle boots off and doze off. Dreamlessly I wade through unconsciousness, until I wake up again and realize it is reality. I have just exited a murky swamp of confusion. My next class is in three minutes .I don ´t have to apologize for being me or having no time. Like Lot´s wife I want to turn around, but my computer screen confirms me I am ok.The image of my long dead ocelot floats on the screen and a smile suddenly has no choice but to explode upon my face...

monarchs to ourselves

2009-01-24T21:05:00.000-08:00

88th entry for the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates for January 24:
0076 Publius A Hadrianus 14th Roman Emperor (117-138)m the lover of Antinoo, animal assassin through his circus shows, oppressor of the Jews 1705 Farinelli "Carlo Broschi" Andria Italy, castrato, favorite of King Philip V, whose melancholy his voice drove away1712 Frederick II (the Great), king of Prussia (1740-86), the perfect man, great historian,soldier,philosopher…too bad he left no issue 1732 Pierre de Beaumarchais France, playwright (Barber of Seville), a man of great wit 1746 Gustav III king during Swedish Enlightenment (1771-92) Gustav was assassinated by a conspiracy of noblemen.Gustav III was a benefactor of arts and literature

Deaths on January 24:
0041 Caligula [G C Germanicus], Roman emperor (37-41), assassinated at 28 ,he got stabbed in the balls,and he was the guy who named his horse Incitatus consul of Rome0661 Ali ibn Abu Talib kalief of Islam (656-61), murdered, was the cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, who ruled over the Rashidun empire from 656 to 661
events

1328 King Edward III of England marries Philippa of Hainault, but in her old age he would yank her jewels away to have them worn by his mistress
1568 In the Netherlands, Duke of Alva declares William of Orange an outlaw, because for Spaniards back then being a patriot was a sin

THE PRIVATE KING WE HAVE

One of the men I have most admired in history is Frederick II of Prussia, the Great, the enlightened despot, my Fritz. Once he told his friend Voltaire that we all had a king navigating inside our bloodstream, and that once or twice in life the ordinary man or woman were liable to feel the weight of this kingship. After many quarrels between monarch and French writer, after time has not totally faded the memory of those deeds left behind by this extraordinary king, I tend to agree with Fritz. His kingship went unhampered until he died, but before that he had lots of ways to show what stuff he was made of.
I sit alone at my PC, where I should always be left alone as a matter of elementary decency and respect for the privacy I am entitled to as a living creature, and meditate over my kingship. I remember another sovereign, Louis XIV th of France, who managed to keep his sense of monarchy even when surrounded by courtiers and cronies who would pester him even when he was grunting at the chaise perceé. Hoe many papers can you sign when you are having trouble relieving yourself? How valid is it when someone says he is going to the place where the king goes alone? The toilet? Was Louis ever alone there? Is kingship a trap like any other, stifling like marriage when your body doesn´t seem to get rid of the hormonal Alzheimer and continues feeling after you should be decorously indifferent? Is it like being a pillar of society, a stout matron who shouldn´t be wearing miniskirts after she removes her work clothes? Is it like a ball and chain similar to the married name, furthermore stifling when you have become famous under the husband´s name, the scar on the Miura bull ´s shoulder pr haunch? Atrocious, dearest reader, the Miura bull goes to the bullfight where it shall die with that mark, drowning in his own blood while only one person in the crowd-me-cheered when the bull drove his horn into the matador´s ass and nearly sodomized him in public. Silently my husband´s cat comes in to this room where I write to you, and he passes his tail over my legs. He doesn´t poke his head into the PC as others do. He sits amiably next to me and he starts washing, grooming, cosseting himself. He is a sovereign unto himself. Is he also seeking refuge from the loud invasion of cheap ranchera music that invades the living room, violating our exquisite taste for Vivaldi and Shankar? Kingship has often been raped and mutilated, in everyday ways and greater ones too. Remember the iron hot rod pushed into King Edward II of England´s ass? Or the imprisonment of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine? Or poor widowed and white-haired Sha Jehan imprisoned in the Red Fortress by his son Aurangzeb? Kingship has its own inbuilt trappings. Being a public figure runs the same way. It is a cage. No way out, not being able to fart silently while walking on the street even though gases may be killing you.
Kingship is funny. It teaches you to play god until you become addicted to the practice, unless you are wise enough to stop the jump midway. It is a mortal jump. Sometimes you are already mid air when you realize there is the abyss that pride always lays at your feet for it to swallow you alive. No net below, you kill yourself instantly. Overbearing helps you jump over the cliff. The blows and bruises I have gotten over time have shown me you can never be too stubborn. There are never higher walls than when you build them around yourself, and the first thing you must know is that if you built them from inside out it will be worse. We often paint ourselves into the corner, and we don´t always have the wings to fly way above our footprints of mistakes.
Kingship is not for everyone, which is perhaps a rather harsh thing to say. Kingship is not the same as the condition that leads someone to be a tyrant. Being a dictator is the utmost vulgarity that can exist. Nicaraguan men have a strong proclivity for this, although they would rather die than confess to it. They still mistake kingship for dictatorship. It is throwing the soup into their wife´s face because they wanted a masculine meal with lots of cholesterol and animal death in it, a meal “fit for an engineer” as rudely expressed by my stupid maternal uncles to my weary grandmother when once she had the temerity to serve delicious spaghetti. It is imposing rules with no sense in them, or trying to control the economics of a household even when they are not the main breadwinner. Not kingship, sir, only dictatorship, and we all know how dictators end up, pathetic shadows like the sad finale of Fidel Castro or Nicolas Ceaucescu, echoes of their worst times shitting into a colostomic bag. Only kingship can dignify most decisions, dictatorship alone demeans us.
Kingship is rising above our nimious details of everything suffering, shedding the old dry skin of past complexes, dusting your mind freely without being able to run scared from your own mistakes. Kingship gives a crown to our most minimal intentions,a nd puts us apart from all the miseries we have as a natural burden. Kingship is not god given,we snatch it from kismet´s hands and wear it as a crown.If the crown has thorns, well, it is up to us to goldplate them.

On Daríos birthdate

2009-01-18T17:37:00.001-08:00

87th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on January 18:
1641 François Michel le Tellier French statesman (Marquis de Louvois) was the French Secretary of State for War for a significant part of the reign of Louis XIV. Louvois and his father, Michel le Tellier, would increase the French Army to 400,000 , an army that would fight four wars between 1667 and 1713.Classy warmonger-wasn´t he?1795 Anna Paulowna Romanova daughter of czar Paul I really as useless as her dad
1841 Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier France, composer (Le Roi Malgré Lui,España Rhapsody)pre impressionist composer
1867 Rubén Darío national poet (Nicaragua),born on an oxcart befote arriving at Metapa, now named alter him Ciudad Darío
events
1486 King Henry VII of England marries Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, together they would manufacture Henry VIII
1535 Francisco Pizarro founds Lima Peru, he was the guy who got Atahualpa killed
1644 Perplexed Pilgrims in Boston reported America's 1st UFO sighting, at least they didn´t believe it was Jesus landing with buckles
1943 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto begin resistance of Nazis, was about time

WRITER´S DAY

As sweat pours down my back like the rapids of the San Juan River-I am not allowed to use fan anymore in my writing room, words shall pour out in sweat because being a writer shall be hard work-I sit down to write this entry about the difficult path a writer follows. It is January 18th, and our national poet Rubén Darío made his entry into this world on a day like today. He was born on a oxcart, and legend has it that his parents were having one of their usual quarrels when sir hit the lady on the belly and hurried Felix Ruben García Sarmiento into this valley of tears before it was his time. Of course, later on it was said that he had been born in an old adobe corner in Metapa, the first city where Rosa Sarmiento-his mom-stopped after delivering him. Not convenient to mention those sordid details about an author coming from such a dysfunctional family. White wash everything, dearest reader, don´t mention sexual transgressions or divorces, it gives a bad read! Rosa disappeared from Rubén´s life while he was a toddler, and someone saw fit to blacken her name by saying she had eloped with another guy and left the future bard with some relatives in León. Whatever was, had to be,and our Rubén signing himself as Darío,ended up being the Prince of Castilian Letters, showing the Spaniards that an indigenous man with slack black hair can master their perfect language better than they ever did. Father of modernism, the mediocre Costaricans have tried to usurp his birthplace, and Chile and Argentina -where he lived during his youth and published his first works-also love to lay claim to him. Excellence always brings those claims, along with the green snake of envy.
I know what the green snake of envy,with its tongue of ignorance, wreaks. It is the same element that makes a husband prefer a well done steak over a new short story, and if the short story is good he will call you a pervert- It is the young woman who inherits the writer´s streak from the oppressed mother but is too comfortable to fight alongside. She wants to keep the optical illusion of a perfect home intact, although her dysfunctional family is a walking bomb prone to explode at any minute. No wonder SylviaPlath stuck her head into the oven. She spent so much time smiling cheese. But gas is too expensive to be wasted on suicide and I have never believed doing myself in will benefit me, so that is ruled out. Young talents. So wrapped up in their own perfume. So much to learn. It is so difficult to compete sometimes, specially when one is not sure if one will fulfill the promises that the fairy godmother of talent may have made. Poor comparison, but remember the Dream Weaver by Gary Wright?Bloom for one single spring, reminds kismet. It can happen to anyone.
Does walking home with a medal or a trophy compensate for the perils of a writer´s endeavours? Praise is a soft glove, over a wooden hand or iron fist. I don´t want praise. I only wish for a respect of my individuality, whatever makes me myself and not another figure in a uniform or with a degree hanging over her desk. Speaking on the phone a moment ago with my good friend, novelist Ricardo Pasos Marciaq, he tells me he had almost forgotten it was our day. In a country like ours where people don´t read and those who do only learn the newspapers in chips by heart in order to further their own lowly interests, the criminals of the story are us the writers. Hated at home for not being in the kitchen serving food to the family, viewed as freaks by our own children who think it would be more useful for mommy to be out at charity meetings, or seen as freaks on a leash by people who don´t want to shed their ignorance, writers in Nicaragua are a class apart. Pasos tells me his super blockbuster The Brothel of the Pedrarias is already into its ninth edition, I rejoice. I have caused scandal with these entries of this book, I know I could even go to jail for some of the things I say. If I were Islamic, I could even be repudiated for my views, or lapidated in Saudi Arabia.
Writing can be more complicated than the worst high risk pregnancy. But I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. I have been censored at a cheap lampoon by a directress who hated me writing about the cross dressers of history because in her family she has a lesbian and a gay sibling. I have nothing against people with different sexual choices, it is just that she still has double standards. I quit over three years ago, and that was the best thing that ever happened to me. I have been denied access to information by government sources, my internet has been clipped off, my yahoo and hotmail messengers wrenched out of my PC by a rabid consort(who has never written a single piece of literature in his life and probably won´t even do so), my mailboxes opened, every bit of correspondence read. I have endured, but not without a black sediment of spite. You are reading part of it. But it is the sediment, not the essence.
The essence is like the product of our small Mariola bee, which produces the sweetest and most golden honey of all. I am the real alchemist to change the rubble of everyday life into the gold we so cherish, golden words. Not magic, simply the act of creation.
I wrestle with demons or angels, but come out battle scarred and happy. The writer is not married to anyone, although once I made the mistake-a big one- of using my married name to earn fame. Writers are also people with feelings, something forgotten by many. Writer´s Day sees me without gift or congratulations from the people who by kin are closest to me, with whom I live under the same roof. It happened the same for my birthday last October. But rather giftless than receiving charity, no candy in jail.
I remember Charlotte Bronte writing Jayne Eyre, with her stern husband resenting every moment she wasn´t taking care of him. Do you wonder how she could have died in pregnancy? Or Agatha Christie, with her envious husband who loved to humiliate her in public.
Being a woman writer seems to bring out the executioner in the men who share our lives. We have something they may want yet are unable to possess. Minds should not fit into pretty bodies, they may think. Or into any kind of body who should have yielded babies and not short stories.
Loud, we are scandalous by nature, women writers. My consort for over 21 years standing shooes me away as a tse tse fly, afraid I will infect his brain with who knows what while he memorizes the newspapers and has wet dreams of becoming a judge before he is finished with law school.. He wants a yielding body and total service. Every piece I write should carry a dedication to him, even when he hasn´t earned it. He is by default the muse, can´t have his dark wifey bearing literary children to others. Keeping dog so it barks for others, no way-He has to eat all the profits of my work. He pokes his nose over my shoulder to see what I am writing, because he was never educated to respect anybody ´s privacy.
I know that women will be reading this and realizing that their cases may be clones of mine. Today I have been bold enough, brazen would men say, to admit that this scrapbook was not incubated in marriage. I have taken locks from your hair and made them into quills to write this. I have come out of the closet and I have kissed and told. It has been as daring as having my own child for and to myself, although that kid and I now have to admit that being someone´s ancestor doesn´t guarantee we will like each other, get along or agree on anything. There is no Spanish Inquisition-officially- so I don´t go to the stake. Physically. I am already being roasted in many people´s opinions, and that gives me a sense of satisfaction. Will I be the one here to put the bell around the angry cat? Too bad my cat Diriangen died yesterday and as a faithful companion of my efforts at the PC, he would applaud if he could read.
A hale mind has always brought upon desires to squelch it by those who cannot even think on their own. Envy is the tribute that the mediocre pay the genius, said Oscar Wilde. I didn´t even get a cheap pen for my day from the person who has most benefited from having a scholarly writer at home. But life always has the bad habit of kicking later on, when one reaps the rewards of exactly that which has been sown by us.

I still would

2009-01-12T20:29:00.000-08:00

86th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on January 12:
1483 Hendrik van Nassau-Dillenburg en Dietz Governor/Viceroy of Holland , how much did he really rule?1562 Charles Emanuel I the great, Duke of Savoy,let´s take the word he was great
1729 Lazzaro Spallanzani Modena Italy, physiologistmpriest,father of artificial insemination,my idol
1751 Ferdinand I king of Sicily & Naples, poor crowned head
1808 Paul "the Great" Taglioni Vienna, ballet choreographer,the best thing he did was father María,who invented toe dancing 1810 Ferdinand II king of Sicily, so much hassle

Deaths which occurred on January 12:1517 Vasco Núñez de Balboa Spanish conquistador/admiral, beheaded at 41 afyer he called the Pacific Ocean “el Mar del Sur”, his last name is remembered in Panamanian currency1519 Maximilian I of Hapsburg, dies, he was a real strong guy who could lift a horse
events
1684 French king Louis XIV marries Madame Maintenon, his solidité who make him revoke the Edict Nantes, the prudish bitch who never became queen, morganatic wife
1755 Tsarina Elisabeth establishes 1st Russian University, of course it had to be a woman to treasure learning

Drops and toys
The crystal drop comes down from the bottle into the translucent tube, down,into me. For one moment it is not my body, it is not the serum I must take to get rid of this hemorrhagic flu which marked the beginning of this year. Scientific curiosity nestling into me, or seeping from my pores? Today it is a year since I broke the two malleoli on either side of my ankle. But Lazaro Spallanzanni, the most useful priest I have ever heard of, was born on a day like today. Here he has me, sweating, thinking of him and the cat he loved, Romeo Amore-given to him by the Emperor Joseph II of Habsburg-and how his friendship with this Manx cat brought him to become the father of modern artificial insemination. Father.Pretre Lazaro, father of no children of his own because the silly dogma of his church demands celibacy(did he really follow it…let me laugh) but such a prolific dad of meteorology, gastroenterology, meteorology and vulcanology, and indirectly of the radar because he discovered how bats fly… I look at my almost imperceptibly twisted left ankle and a wide smile spreads over my face. The music to Father Antonio and his altar boy Andres by Ruben Blades keeps me company. Like the Salvadorean prelate Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated by shitty rightwingers, Lazaro was a useful priest. Not being Catholic nor believer of any faith, I would have felt comfortable having either one-Romero or Spallanzanni hear confession from me. Even if I had to blush. At 49 can I still blush..?
At any age, everything, including 49,blushes come handy. I guess even animals blush. When my cats fall out of a tree or turn around at the wrong time, I try not to laugh in front of them. Cats have as many imaginary drops and toys as I had when growing up. One of the greatest drops I saw was protagonized by my russet Torta. I shared a bedroom as a kid,and it had a bathroom incorporated. I usually cleaned the toilet, but one day my sister miraculously did so. She neglected to shut down the lid. Torta,accustomed to my thoroughness, assumed the lid was shut. She used to nestle there on the fake fur that covered the lid. So Torta made a pirouette in the air and fell headfirst into the blue water of the soapy toilet. I don’t think she broke anything by falling so violently in an Esther Williams fashion into the perfumed water of the bowl, but her ego was very warped. I helped her out of the toilet and let her on the rug, so she quickly crawled under my bed without even looking at me, so ashamed she was. She spent the whole day there, not even coming to eat (and she was a glutton, mind you my dearest of all readers).Her stomach churning with starvation urged her out of there around 8 pm. Torta would be prone to lots of accidents further on because she usually had a bad sense for calculating the risks involved in all her pranks. Some years later she decreed, as the queen of the house that she was, that the cuckoo clock my dad had so lovingly brought from Normandie, was doomed to die. The birdie must perish in her claws.
The clock was made of old polished wood, was very precise and every hour a blue and yellow birdie with a stupid face came out to sing cuckoo. For weeks, Torta chose to sleep on the sofa in the living room where the cuckoo was. Usually she slept on my bed. But she needed to collect intelligentsia about the ways and habits of the hated cuckoo. He was to die. One day my cat must have consulted some kind of feline oracle, for she decided it was her D Day. She had a flair for drama. She chose to let my dad know how much she hated Norman cuckoo clocks, so at the precise hour that he was leaving for work, after having lunched and napped, when it was 2 pm she jumped from the corner table, so she flew. It was like watching a stingray float gracefully in shallow waters. She caught the silly birdie in her mouth and wrapped her four paws around the clock. Cat and clock fell down to the living room Persian carpet, and once there, Torta wrenched the birdie off and proceeded to slap it mercilessly against the floor, meowing loudly in victory. She was heaving audibly, with a demonic glint in her green eyes. It was the look of an orgasmic woman, dearest heart. My father was speechless, my mother came out of the kitchen, her face covered with ghastly flour, like a phantom, for she had dropped the sack of flour when she heard the crashing noise. I came from my room to find my cat rolling in delight on the floor with her trophy. My father was the first to lets out hysterical peals of laughter, even though he cherished the clock beyond doubt. He picked up the remains of the clock but left Torta to enjoy the birdie while tears of laughter streamed down our cheeks. The clock was fixed at an exaggerated sum but the birdie was kept by Torta among her toys and when she died,it was buried along with her with military honors.
What would Lazaro Spallanzanni have thought of Torta? He was so in love with his own Manx given by his friend and protector. Romeo Amore would be put to copulate and when he was about to spurt, Lazaro would put a small cup under him to collect his seed. Poor guy, coitus interruptus. But thanks to him today couples who can´t have kids the normal way can still become parents. Romeo survived his associate by 5 years, and Lazaro died in 1799,the same year the Brits would slay the Tiger of Mysore Tipoo Sultan of India.
In my sick bed I always bring Lazaro to my side.I have his same curiosity,only I was not brave enough as an adolescent to continue on in science. Winning 5 science fairs was enough, even if one of my master projects-based on the small book of gardening by Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror-got me in trouble with the damned teacher staff at the expensive American Nicaraguan School where I had the disgrace to attend high school. I was playing god and ended up not believing in god. I never forgave. Nor forgot, not even in my bed convalescing from a hemorrhagic flu, remembering the silly way I broke my malleolli one year ago.
Still saying if I had to do it all over again, having the same toys and drops. I would do it again.

The Firefly

2008-12-30T19:31:00.000-08:00

85th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
December 30th
Birthdates which occurred on December 30:
0039 Titus 10th Roman emperor (79-81), conqueror of Jerusalem, the darling of Rpme,the guy who finished the Colosseum and wasnt allowed to marry his Jewish Berenice
1851 Asa Griggs Candler developed Coca-Cola originally as medicine
1865 Rudyard Kipling Bombay, author (Jungle Book, Gunga Din,Kim-Nobel 1907)what a wild imagination he had 1867 Simon Guggenheim philanthropist (died aboard the Titanic)patron of the arts
1904 Dmitri B Kabalevsky St Petersburg Russia, composer (In the Fire,The Comedians)I adore him for the incredible Galop in his Suite called The comedians
deaths
1931 Tyrone Power Sr actor (Big Trial, Test of Donald Norton), dies at 62, he was Erroly Flynn´s darling
1916 Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin is assassinated by gay Prince Felix Yussoupov, Russia´s greatest love machine, his penis is now in a museum in Saint Petersburg

The fly

Her original nickname, as soon as the test arrived with a positive result,was the Egg. My grandmother,still alive, said that even though I could feel the certainty it was a girl,what would happen if it turned out to be a male? So my only offspring´s first nickname was the Egg and I was finally going to lay one,like a good hen that could be repudiated, thrown into the soup of male spite if I didn´t produce the heir. After six months of anguish,waiting for my belly to yield, I was pregnant. We all marry for the wrong reasons,dearest reader.Even the illusion of love is a wrong reason because nothing is forever. Let alone that everyone throws you into the marriage ringside with your mouth protector in bad conditions, your socks poorly rolled and the mitts not correctly placed. It will be a championship fight.One of you will end up in knockout.Or both.But only us women get knocked up. Curious that I should use that expression, when the real reason why I was married was to have a child. Funny that a medic called Lombardo Martinez, more a connoisseur of the arts than a real gynecologist,told me I was irreversibly sterile after sticking his hand up my privates without any lube nor mittens nor anything. He sent me home in tears and I landed in my already crippled grandmother´s lap,who laughed so hard she pissed in her wheelchair. Nobody had been barren in the family.
Patience, she recommended, and get that husband into bed more often,she preached,but not during Holy Week or you will end up stuck like dogs she admonished me. She was a fervent Catholic, and even though she knew I had been born a Jewess and was a practical atheist,even dared to suggest we please her Jesus by marrying in the Catholic faith. Desperate to get with child, I admit I would have eaten chicken shit if that would do the trick for begetting a baby. Since church was slightly less unsavory than eating any kind of dung, a simple white cotton and satin dress was procured for me and a stylish snow shirt called guayabera for my spouse, and a revolutionary priest called Jose Arias caldera married us in his church. My spouse had undergone a makeshift naptismal ceremony in Saint Anne´s church(the favorite worship place for the narcs here) and gotten his hair wet with Yuri Gagarin´s name. The nest man and godmother were chosen by a lesbian pair of relatives and I feel that ceremony never had any validity.It was on April 9th and on April 11th, after two weeks of thermometers to measure my ovulation my baby was ordered on a rickety bed with some enthusiasm but nothing else to season it. I knew I was into the pregnancy bit finally and that it would be a girl. I started counting the days and when I finally got my positive gravindex test I finally felt complete. Fortunately I had no nausea or any other bothersome symptoms that expecting women have. I didn´t even show much at the beginning. Most women dream of having a baby for and by a certain man that drives them crazy with love,lust or whatever you wish to call it. In my case, I raved over having a baby to see how well I could breed,to show off my pedigree, to pour into one new version all my rich heritage.
The father, if we dare to be honest,is mostly a mere accessory.In the case of lust or obsession being present, a momentary and fleeting satisfaction. Supreme act of narcissism?Probably, my spouse still throws that in my face and says I am worse tham Kim Il Sung of North Korea or Khadaffy of Lybia, personality cult. But no personality cult cam exist if the person really doesn’t have outstanding characteristics, and that is what has made my Fly what she is.
I started calling her fly when she finally began to walk and would fly or run into anything in her way or out of it.
Fly was extraordinary from her bellyhood. No nausea or vomiting for her mom, no pain, only sleepiness and excessive hunger. No wonder she had to be shooed out of me at 8 months because she gained too much weight inside. I drank almost a gallon of pink grapefruit,sour orange juice and coconut drink to evict her, and I paid through the nose.
39 hours of pain but natural birth, even though it was a dry birth.She came into the world at 230 am on December 16th,1988, 92 years after the mad pseudo monk Rasputin plunged into the river in Moscow,poisoned,bleeding from the bullets that Prince Yussoupov´s cronies had gotten into him,and already missing his crown jewels of his groin. At the moment of my labor pains I called my dad, never the man who had gotten me pregnant. The hatred was too big,and no matter how many women say they don’t hate their partner at that moment I will not believe it.It was sheer,bublling and radiant loathing. Almost eleven pounds, my baby had a full crown of dark hair and came out almost purplish in shade. When the obstetrician threw her over my belly,all the air was knocked out.
25 stitches were given to close the episiotomy.To be honest,I never felt anything when I was being cut to let the Fly out. Hours later my parents tried to bribe a doctor to let them take her to replace me at their home, but somehow the medic said no. Today I am glad they were never able to take her, because if they had been able to abduct her, nine months later they would have taken her to Miami on that fateful SAHSA plane which collapsed in Honduras,the plane crash in which they died.
20 years after giving birth to my only child, pristinely legitimate, incredibly beautiful and awesomely smart, I cannot say I have been a model mother.I haven´t given her enough time due to my difficult job, but I have tried to set an example of hard work and honesty for her. The good thing is that somehow she and I can never be really rid of each other, and the bond we have is as inevitable as nationality or the heart pumping blood until we die. Mother hood for me has been the most exciting of my creative processes, and having a genius is something that never lets you rest for a second. It converts you into a shark,always swimming in life to keep yourself astride.
This entry is not meant to be an apology or a sugary literary piece. Being a mother makes me feel superior to men because I could make life and they can only participate,sorry, in the most ephemeral of ways. More tha a housefly to land on cakes, she has been the Firefly which guide the best of historian´s paces through the night forest of every day.

GUIlty of what?

2008-12-28T16:13:00.000-08:00

December 28th 2008 63rd entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
births
1855 Juan Zorrilla de San Martin Uruguay's diplomat/poet (Tabaré) 1856 [Thomas] Woodrow Wilson Staunton VA, (28 President-D-1913-21, Nobel 1919)
1872 Pio Baroja Y Nessa San Sebastian Spain, writer (Camino de Perfección)
1895 Auguste Lumiere twin brother of Louis who opened 1st commercial cinema 1895 Louis Lumiere twin brother of Auguste who opened 1st commercial cinema

Deaths which occurred on December 28:
1446 Clemens VIII [Aegyd Muñoz] Spanish anti-pope (1423-29), dies after being one of the most pragmatic chaps
1622 François de Sales French bishop of Genèva/writer/saint, dies at 55 1694 Queen Mary II of England dies after 5 years of rule, at 32, no wonder she died so soon,her husband William III was a living torture
1937 Maurice J Ravel Swiss/French composer (Bolero), dies in Paris at 62 after the surgeon couldn´t pick out a brain tumour
1947 Victor Emmanuel III king of Italy (1900-46)/Ethiopia, dies at 78, how was he bold enough to claim ownership over Ethiopia?

Events
1836 Spain recognizes independence of México
Catholic church commemorates another anniversary of the Massacre of the Innocents when King Herod tried to find baby Jesus

TODAY´S INNOCENTS AND CULPRITS

It was kind of eerie tat last night, remembering it was the first anniversary of the magnicide against Mrs. Benazhir Bhutto, one of the women I have most admired in history, I went to sleep in a state of shock over the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. I dreamt of Benazhir inevitably, and no matter what you or anyone tell me she did when alive, I cannot get her out of my mind or evict her from my feelings. It goes beyond simple descriptions and sensations, as happens with my wave of shame that the Israeli government can kill women and kids. Those are the things precisely that sometimes make me feel red faced over having been born a Jewess. Judaism is never that, Zionism is in the bad sense of the word. But it is curious how we play on the chessboard of guilts or innocences. When we become as mean and cruel as those who hurt us, we are playing smack into their bloody hands, dearest reader. When we accuse blameless people, people who care and feel as hurt as anyone else affected by the deed itself, and we take out our frustrations and rages on them, we are being as criminal as those who killed ,raped or insulted.
A slap across one´s face hurts more when you are not to blame for anything, but it will hurt more for the conscience-if the slapper has it-later on. When a Tang dynasty vase is broken, no matter how precious it was or how well glued back together it gets, it will never be the same.
Many people assume you are guilty of something unless you go out of your way to demonstrate that you are innocent. Prejudices, ignorance and her son bigotry play a huge role in that. The more uncivilized a mind is, the largest the threshold it has for harboring hatreds and cruelties. Discrimination is based on stupidity, that is for sure. That is why the bigoted person, in a fit of irrational rage, only strikes out against the first thing that happens to fly, crawl or walk by. It is shapeless, indomitable and leaves a trail of broken shards that can shred to bit anything that walks on it. Tears are not balms to heal the scars, which may bleed for the rest of our lives. Unfortunately, for small wounds, cat´s saliva works better, it is a secret I whisper here.
Wars, skirmishes, invasions. What an agitated story each country has, well, some more than others. History wouldn’t be history without them, but have you ever realized how many valuable lives all these conflicts ended? Not only human lives. How many animals perished there? They are never mentioned among missing, casualties, losses. As Leonardo Da Vinci said, ”Life, whether it is a baby or a kitten, is precious always.” Only a few of us historians pick those stories in which animals are included. It is like with religions. Have you noticed that none of them speak about the well being of animals? At most, they are mentioned in passing. Nothing else. Once in a while you find someone wonderful like Mohammed, loving his cat so much that he tore the sleeve off his robe so his cat wouldn ´t be disturbed, or Thomas Aquinas mentioning that on Judgement Day we, who believe ourselves to be stronger now, simply will be judged by the animals. Being a historian sometimes can be as disappointing as being a doctor, trying to win over a patient when death finally nabs him and takes him. No matter how many wars we count there will always be some updating needed! No eternal peace reaches us until that day when our ashes get thrown into the San Juan River we loved so much. And then, no guarantee of that anyways. Who has ever been certified to have come back from the Great Beyond to leave any testimony of what goes on over there? War casualties leave enormous holes in the texture of our lives. All those innocent victims torn to pieces in Israel, or anywhere else, will always be testimony of humanunkind´s humongous cruelty, which comes from its enormous stupidity. The slap I got from whom I thought to be my Arab friend still hurts. But his hand, and his remorse, will pain him more.

The Quake

2008-12-22T18:47:00.000-08:00

83rd entry to the Colonel´s Scrapboook
Birthdates which occurred on December 22:
1459 Djem Sultan son of Turkish sultan Mehmed II, poor chap,he stayed in Rome to avoid his brother Bayazid II but Pope Alexander V(Borgia)poisoned his pilaf and could never create havoc for his brother

1515 Mary of Lorraine France, pro-French Regent of Scotland, nasty mommy of Mary The Hot Queen of Sccots
1639 Jean-Baptiste Racine French dramatist (Andromaque, Phedra),loved to make people cry

1643 Rene-Robert Cavelier La Salle France, French explorer (Louisiana),named the southern part of USA after King Louis XIV but was destined to be killed by three of his own hired helpers
1819 George Eliot England, Victorian novelist (Adam Bede, Silas Marner)back then it was best for ladies to write under names with balls
Deaths which occurred on December 22:
1440 Bluebeard pirate, executed at last1603 Mehmed III sultan of Turkey (1595-1603), dies at 37, did his 16 brothers whom he killed await for him at hell´s gates?
1913 dies at age 69 emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia, negus negust,he defeated the Italians in the Battle of Adwa
Events
1894 Debussy's "Prélude à l'apres-midi d'un faune" premieres with great scandal because Nijinsky simulated masturbation onstage
1972 an awful earthquake shakes Managua, capital of Managua, somehow I survived it

THAT FATEFUL NIGHT

On December 22d,1972 hell came up to visit Managua. I was 13 years old, and it was not the first time that I came into contact with such a monstrous and Dionyssiac force of nature. A few years before, an earthquake had already hit the part of Managua called Centroamerica Colony. I had been visiting a classmate who had gotten her appendix removed, and she was so enthusiastic about having the teacher and several of her friends visit her that she got out of bed and ventured into the small living room of her house to have tea with us. Precisely on the pillow where her head had been before we came fell a huge block from the wall, something which would have certainly killed her. Our presence had saved her when she decided to get out of her bed. That had been in the sixties.
By 1972 I had grown very tall. The fact that I was into weightlifting had helped to develop my strength and stamina. Two important birthdays were in December, my sister´s on the 19th and my dad´s on the 21st. That year my mom had decided to throw a bash as there had never been one before,so she had stashed away goodies for around 200 people or more. The party was planned for the 23rd, because she and my dad would never miss the end of the year party thrown by the French Alliance in Managua. I remember that for the small dinner party she had for my dad´s birthday she had ordered me to make enormous bags of water to put to freeze for the upcoming celebrations. I had decided to disobey her and I put the bottles of soda into the freezer, planning to retrieve them before they burst. Somehow I forgot about them and 20 bottles of Coca cola exploded inside one of the fridges. I had to clean the glass and mess, almost cutting my fingers. That earned me a chastisement. I would be grounded and not allowed to go to the French Alliance party with the rest of the family. I would be left behind with my grandmother, who owned a huge house in the middle of downtown Managua. If I wished I could take my cat Torta in order to be in good company. So I did, knowing not even my dad would wheedle anything favorable for me beyond that.
It had been swelteringly hot for days before the earthquake. Our pets had been behaving strangely,particularly my Torta. A man even predicted that there could be any natural disaster. Others said they had seen like fireballs over Lake Xolotlán, the lake right next to our capital city. But many people were so busy partying and partying has been occupation number one in Nicaragua. It would prove fateful for many. My whole family paid not much attention to the heat and at 7 pm they went to the party,leaving me with my grandmother. At 8 my grandma,Torta and I had dinner along with a priest we used to call Padre Guaruso(The Drunken Father), a young Spanish priest who was assigned to the nearby Saint Anthony Basilica. We had a delicious brawl soup which made the priest sweat like a molten candle. After dessert of Three Milk Cake (called so because it contains evaporated milk, condensed milk and powdered milk among its ingredients), the priest went to the dormitory in the rear part of the church. My grandmother and I went to bed, and I was tucked in by my grandma along with my hairy cat. At 10:30 pm I was jolted out of bed by a strong tremor. The bedrooms were in the second floor, and the house had been built in the early forties. My grandma poked her head into my bedroom asking me if I was okay. She said she was a bit scared, so she asked Torta and I to join her in her enormous iron bed where she had manufactured my mom,four uncles and three aunts. We hoped everything would get normal again. Slowly the three of us dozed off.
We were violently awakened after midnight by two more quakes,this time much stronger.Ritcher 6.25. Felt on the second floor of a house, it was awful. The earth moaned like a hurt animal. Electricity went off, and debris from the walls fell all around us,making it difficult to walk. I remembered I had a small flashlight so I went to fetch it. My cat remained on the bed with my grandma. My mother´s mom had been a very grand lady who had never gone through hardships. It was difficult for her to walk on the torn bits of wall and ceiling on the floor. She demanded I bring her slippers. She said she wouldn´t walk barefoot. I knew that there was the risk that at any moment another shake could come and tear down the house. So I decided to lift her over my shoulders.She was a small chubby woman, so it wasn´t too much weight. My cat was also terrified, so she climbed on top pf my head as a Cossack hat and drove her nails into my scalp. The staircase had separated from the burnished wooden floor of the second story of the house. A huge gap almost 1 meter wide separated the staircase from the floor. So I geared myself for the jump with one person and one cat atop me. Somehow I made it even though I have always been lousy for long jump. The with the flashlight grasped between my teeth,I slowly went down the stairs. We finally crossed the huge dining room and went into the living room. Only one month ago my grandmother had changed the front door for a new one with the image of Diriangén in bas relief. It had cost her a small fortune. Now that door was stuck. We would have to tear it down to get out or the house could fall on us and bury us alive.
I decided to go to the backyard to get an iron pick in order to knock down the beautiful door. When I informed my grandma about my plans she burst into tears. Nevertheless that was the only way,so I proceeded to do what I still remember with disgust. It was the only way out. The splintered door fell away with a crunching noise and we were out on the sidewalk. All our neighbors were already out. We sat on the sidewalk in the dark, the dust making an eerie halo around us. To amuse my grandmother, I would shake Torta´s fur and tons of dust would emerge like a cloud. That finally got her laughing. By the time my parents and rest of the family finally came to see what had happened to us, we were chatting amiably and even making jokes. That is the Gueguense in us Nicaraguans, we are able to laugh in the middle of a great tragedy. It was the fact that I had been grounded that had saved my grandma´s life. If she had been alone,she would have died in the second floor unable to get down. Curiously, she had always criticized my dad for getting me involved in weightlifting because she always said it was not fit activity for “ladies of quality.” From the moment I picked her out of her bed, she never made any more disparaging comments about the sport and became my first fan. So when I started winning medals the first one to beam proudly was my grandma.
The huge town house my grandmother lived in and 7 more houses she had for rent in downtown Managua didn´t collapse, but were devoured when a huge fire came in from the San Miguel Market, 5 blocks away from the townhouse. My grandma had always refused to live with any of her married children, and now she had to move into my parents´house while she could solve her dwelling situation. For a proud lady, it was a low blow that destiny slammed into her solar plexus. A dusty kick in the ass,to be sure.
We never know how life chooses to teach us the hardest lessons, dearest reader, but life is sure one hell of a professor.
More than 50 thousand people among dead and missing.70 per cent of the downtown buildings in Managua collapsed. There was risk of epidemics due to the rotting corpses, some of which couldn´t be dug out despite the rescue teams we got from other countries. Help started to pour from everywhere, and the dictator Anastasio Somoza´s cronies stole it like crazy. Managua would never be the same. The Christmas celebration has been killed instantly. The cemeteries were full and new places where to bury the dead, sometimes in mass graves, had to be found. Whole families lay beneath the rubble. The scar on the Nicaraguan psyche would never heal, to the point that we now say “before the earthquake” or “after the earthquake” to pin time down. Of course, there had been another big earthquake in 1931, but the Quake is the one in 1972.
Ever since, I don´t fear tremors. My spouse may run out the shower only dressed in his shampoo suds without a towel, so afraid of tremors although he wasn´t in Managua when the Quake shook us.
Managua before the Quake was a small,compact,clean and safe city. Now it is a huge octopus with slums as tentacles, with a dead hole in the middle, and fear nestling among the cracks left by the fault that tore our lives apart in 1972. It is ugly,dusty and dangerous. The Quake not only gnarled the city apart, but marred the innocent bloom of the lifestyle we had, never to be naïve as the Managua before the Quake which I knew as a kid. Sometimes in my dreams, that compact Managua where I lived as a cosseted rich child comes back to greet me. It even sounds like Charlotte Bronte´s first lines of “last night I dreamt I went to Manderley.” Like my broken column, the Quake snaked along the fault it left on the city of Managua. It broke our lives into shattered glass shards through which we remember the Managua that will never be again.

On my father´s birthday

2008-12-21T18:01:00.000-08:00

Colonel´s entry for December 21st 2008

1117 Thomas Becket archbishop of Canterbury ,poor fellow,does being canonized by the Catholic Church erase the fact that you were hacked to ieces just because 4 courtiers wanted to brown-nose King Henry II?1537 Johan III king of Sweden (1569-92),despite having two wives he was Magnum when producing bastards with his mistress Karin HansDotter
1874 Juan Bautista Sacasa President of Nicaragua (1932-36) still not quite considered a good politician1879 Joseph Stalin [Dzoegashvili] Russian dictator; murdered 11,000,000, provoked his second wife´s suicide
Deaths which occurred on December 21:
0918 Conrad I Duke of Franconia/German King (911-918), dies after leaving his throne to King Henry the Fowler1375 Giovanni Boccaccio Italian poet (Vita di Dante, Decameron), dies after scanalizing prudes with his Decameron1429 Jacquemart de Bléharies Tournay "heretic", burned to death, when the church still battled ideas with cruelty
1945 George S Patton US general (Sicily/Normandy), dies in very suspicious car accident in Heidelberg at 60 , maybe it was the government who had no use for a hero1948 Seishiro Itagaki Japanese general/Minister of War, hanged for crimes of war…but isn’t all war itself a crime?
Events
1620 103 Mayflower pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock,shaking from a beer hangover(it was the only thing they could down on board during the trip)
1866 Cheyennes, Arapaho's, Sioux, Fetterman Massacre, as usual whites massacring Indians
1898 Scientists Pierre & Marie Curie discover radium, and both would get Nobel award but it was Marie who did the kitchen work

THE PERFECT MAN

Incredible though it may sound, he did exist. Perhaps because he was perfect he accomplished the huge task of raising me. He was born in 1920 in Rouen , Normandie, in northern France, on a day like today. It is hard to remember him without missing him, for he has been physically dead since 1989. Unlike cats or deafs or boors, he always answered when called upon. Never left you talking to the hand nor picked up messages, dearest be.The magic of his presence was always his knack of being there, at the right spot on the right day at the right time. I honestly don´t understand how I have been able to live on without him since that fateful morning when the radio announced that the TAN SAHSA plane going from Managua to Miami had crashed into Cerro del Hule in Honduras. My mother and my dad were gone in one single stroke. The inevitable had happened. But it was precisely this strength he gave me that enabled me to continue my own path through life alone, and it is the band of fireflies emanating from his teachings what guides me and makes anything or anyone else completely superfluous to me. Yes, I can have company along life, but that is an accessory. Like Coco Chanel, also French, would say, ”The dress is the basic thing. Accesories come a lowly last second.” My father dressed me with his courage and invincibility. He is still the provider of my coat of mail, the sword of the samurai who secretly lives in me although many don´t even know the Code of Bushido exists. He was the Julius Caesar who has helped me cross the Rubicon of all the vicissitudes in my life, from broken bones to silence, from indifference to injustice, or whatever may have come along. “Nothing is worth your vexation, minou” was his favorite expression, and how right he was. Now, as the luminous shadow behind every single letter I write, from articles to fiction or this self same book, the real author and muse of my Dionysiac literary fertility is my father. I am the monster my father created in a Frankenstenian effort to make something out of the ordinary. “Pumpkin head,” he would say when he saw me studying late into the night, always avid to acquire more knowledge. That strange blob of pragmatism, atheism and laughter that I am is Bernard-made. From a trip to France that he made only taking my mom, he brought back a small statue made of see-through plexiglass. His hero, Vercingétorix, more beloved in France than the dumb Joan of Arc, because that guy being a teenager almost defeated the legions led by Julius Caesar. He put it on my night table. When I entered the military, he taught me to insert a candle inside it so it was lit from within. I knew he was an atheist, and I told him that lighting a candle with a saint substitute was like a syncretism of what the papists did.” No”, he said” .I believe in Vercingetorix as I also believe in you, and while the light is on, you will return safely from the green beyond.” As soon as I would leave on mission, he would rush to light the candle inside the hero. Somehow I always came back, in one piece, although I may be shot or broken. He would never pry for details, just waited until my mom had gone into the kitchen or early to bed, and the two war veterans we were could talk, man to man as one of my friends would say. All the traumas would come out, roll around dying gracefully inside a cup of tea, and evaporate like ghosts who desert us when the dawn comes in dancing. That was something only my dad could do. I fell in love with history through him, when he would not read stupidities like Cinderella or Snow White or any fairy tale princess yarns in which girlies marry princes only to live impossibly happy ever after. How he would laugh at sweet girl stories, saying that real life began with a wedding, not ended with one. He would only mention all he went through in his experiences in World War II. Nothing was left out, not even the sordid details. Perhaps that was the root for the habit of calling things by their real name, something that so irks bosses and men who unsuccessfully try to gain a hold over my heart or my hand or my bank account which I don´t have. I became the perfect candidate for historian because I was the daughter of living history.
No wonder all men still pale like faltering bad specters next to my dad´s figure. As the Italian singer Eros Ramazzotti gargled in one of his songs,”No puede haber, desgracia semejante, donde la encontraré”.There cannot be, so disgrace be, where will I find someone like you. I have given up long time ago. There can be nobody like Bernard. He was all the great men I have admired in history all crunched together into his former weightlifting frame, and by having had him as father I am convinced that god cannot exist because if he had been created by a god, the deity would have envied him too much. Imagine Oda Nobunaga and Patton,Vivaldi and Tipoo Sultan,Lautaro and Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, Ataturk and Jose Eca Maria de Queiroz , plus a dash of Lincoln and Osceola and Benito Juarez and King Henri IV all packed into a figure with red hair, freckles and green eyes? Too much competition for any mortal male, but that was him. No wonder I even gave up the search for any shadowy imitation of him, being realistic enough to know I will never find even a pale photocopy of him anywhere.”I know I ask perfection in a quite imperfect world, and I´m fool enough to think that ´s what I´ll find!” sang Karen carpenter in one of her hits. My mother was lucky enough to find him. That could be the story of my life until I realized that the perfect man would only be my dad.
I´m aware that my dad was a real titan, having to become a lion trainer in order to raise me properly. It was the only way out, and he coined the phrase “iron grip in a silken glove.” It worked. I am the living testimony of how much this worked, Frederick II of Prussia´s doctrine melded with Guillaume D´Aquitaine´s poetry. How did I get so lucky for kismet to give him to me as father, as the author of what I am now?
I was aware how loved my dad was not only by me when he died and his body was brought back to Managua from Honduras. The workers he had so benefited at the building materials factory where he had been a general manager cried as if their own mother had died. I still find people who worked for him that get cloudy eyes when they remember him. The respect and affection he got from his people would have made him a true statesman, but he chose to do his own in his own way without ever aspiring to anything else. His example still guides many, and his funny remarks still make him a most popularly quoted wit here in Nicaragua. It is the same man who decided to homage his newly born little brother Silvio in 1930 by parading his prize winning science project(a dreadful live cockroach farm) in front of his mom while she was breastfeeding wee Silvio. Years later it would be the same man who risked everything by smuggling the nazi officer Hans out of Auschwitz as a deaf mute until they reached Rouen, a way of thanking the German for having saved his life during his imprisonment. That is my Uncle Hans Schneider.Levallois who still lives in Paris and who almost had a heart attack when he heard my parents had died in the plane crash.
Bernard. Cachimba, Venancio. Who ripped away the door from his office when he became general manager so any worker could pass directly into his bureau and talk to him without formalities. The founder of the company store with permanent discounts, the workingmen´s league, and the leftist union in his factory. The man who played catcher in his baseball team made of workers, and the fan of the Boer Team in the national baseball league, the man who cried in public when his team lost while I nearly shat in my pants from shame at what he was doing. The chap who during a grand opening speech of General Anastasio Somoza, the dictator who owned Canal Cement Company(the parent company of the factory where my dad worked), let nature have his way and farted shamelessly while everybody laughed, excusing himself by saying that when Tsarina Catherine the Great had accused her dead husband of having died from a stick fart nobody had raised an eyebrow.
I mention him and he looms humongously like the Himalayas over India, casting his cool and comforting shadow over my life. I bask in the shade of his eternal protection, knowing that he is the deity other people say I should have. He was there when I learned to walk again, and he is there, everywhere, like his favorite singer Edith Piaf sand in her hit Tu Est Partout(You are everywhere).The fact that it is what would have been his 88th birthday is only an excuse to show him off to the world as only magnificent pride and unique love can do. Public words to convey a simple idea of the god I had living in my house, for the private Bernard only I had.

2008-12-21T09:05:00.000-08:00

These are the students who like pearls from a parure,form the crown jewels of myself as a teacher.I thought I should let them know how important they have been and will always be for me.

What Luddie wanted

2008-12-16T20:43:00.000-08:00

81st entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook Birthdates on December 16:
1485 Catherine of Aragon Spanish princess/1st wife of Henry VIII,involuntary mother of the Anglican church because her husband Henry VIIIth was in such a hurry to legitimize Anne boleyn´s supious belly that he had to break with Rome
1770 Ludwig van Beethoven Bonn Germany, composer (Ode to Joy, Fidelio) The most colossal of composers1775 Jane Austen England, novelist (Pride & Prejudice), few men can write beeter than this lady1775 François-Adrien Boieldieu composer,love his harp concerto but the rest of his production….ok let´s leave it there
1882 Zoltán Kodály Kecskemét Hungary, composer (Psalmus Hungaricus),great folklorologist too along with his buddy Béla Bartók
Deaths which occurred on December 16:
0714 Pippin II of Héristal, Duke/prince of France, dies, how brief was he really?
0999 Adelheid the Saint German empress of Otto I/saint, dies at about 68,mmmmm,saint and crowned head, let´s try not to go into details
events
1773 Big tea party in Boston harbor-Indians welcome (Boston Tea Party)and the tax on tea just watered off into something else
1877 Anton Bruckner's 3rd Symphony in D, premieres,big deal,because I have never liked this child molester´s noise
1884 Great Britain recognizes King Leopold II's Congo Free State, did the Lords and Commons also get buttered hands?
1997 President Clinton names his Labrador retriever, "Buddy", the eternal shadow of the cat Socks

DEMOCRACY IN CULTURE,THE IDEAL OF BEETHOVEN

It is sad to realize that the elite has never been cultured nor thinking properly. True, the church and nobility, now also joining into this elite the great capitalists, love to pose as patrons of the arts. It is fashionable, like a young girl who loves to preen in front of the mirror while spraying on herself the latest fragrance launched by Paris Hilton. ON a day like today came into a valley of tears a man whose ideal of the total democratization of knowledge and culture I respect so much: Ludwig van Beethoven. Okay,I wont lie to you,dearest reader. Not all German things or people are yucky. He isn´t my absolutely favorite composer because I had previously given my ear and heart to a redheaded horny priest from Venice who is Vivaldi. Nut Old Deaf-as-a-wall, as his nephew called him, was someone to be reckoned with.
The midwife who would later bring him into this world of struggles had recommended his mom to abort him, because there were nuts and people with syphyllis in his family tree and his dad was a slattern. Thank life the lady in question didn´t listen to such absurd advice, or we would have missed the honor of having the most human of composer´s music.
Curiously, in capitalism the one who consumes most of the fine things of art is usually the filthy rich capitalist who thinks paintings ought to be bought by the meter. Owning objets d´art for them is another way of bragging to others how much they own. The more you own and boast to others, the less gray matter there is inside your skull,used to say Karl Marx, who really knew what he was talking about. Inversely proportional relationship would have said to me that wonderful blond peasant from Englad,Sir Isaac Newton.
Cultural expressions are born from the people, and it should be the people who shall enjoy them. Beethoven came from a humble family, yet nobles and kings vied for his attentions. He couldn´t care less. How disappointed he felt when the dwarf Napoleon Bonaparte not only refused to help his rocky isle to become independent(that is why he is hated there, their heroine is Letitia Casta ,the sexy top model) but also, forgetting his mom Leticia had borne him on a worn sofa in the living room of their house in Ajaccio, got himself a crown atop his head to be called emperor. No wonder Beethoven erased the dedication to Napoleon and replaced it with the epitaph like phrase “ to the memory of a man who could have been. “ Beethoven refused to bow to anyone. I agree. We all should bow to him. It is the bad habit of the tycoons to try to steal the proletarian aspects of any bright mind who may leave poverty aside to produce masterpieces. We can never forget where people come from, many times for our benefit.
Years ago I worked at a garage university where the rectress, a poor woman who hid so much ignorance and folly under démodé turbans, taught the students to hate our poet Ruben Darío instead of contributing to the real popularization of his verse. Not having a single degree to her name, and lots of uppity attitudes at which her own sottish husband laughed when he was drunk off his ass, she called her Darío hating class Ruben Dario Master Lesson.For the final circus at the end of the quatrimester, she would demand her students(mostly from working class extraction) to spend loads of money on suit and tie, blazers, manicures, stockings, high heeled shoes and cufflinks for the final presentation,as if Darío had ever voluntarily dressed thus or even had the money to do so. The suit in which we see him in his portrait as diplomat was rented at great sacrifice for the occasion.Sorry,folks,Darío was an American Indian who taught Spaniards to better use their own language by founding modernism, but he wore caites(the open faced sandals from Monimbo). Darío doesn’t belong to the ignorant and cruel “so called high class” of Nicaragua, with their fake surnames of Lacayo(the servant),Chamorro(shaved head) and Cuadra(the Negroes´ work squad). Darío belongs to our working class, for he had always been exploited by the rich and filthy politicians. He, like Beethoven in music, was great with his pen and protested against the exploitation of men at the hands of other men. But now it is fashionable for those who have monopolized hunger and misery with their blood money to pose as gentle patrons of the art.
Illiterate beasts loaded with money have never been able to truly sing, write poetry or really know what a sculpture is about. Sorry, and I won´t recant about what I am saying. Time has shown us how cruel the church, nobles and even kings have been in their effort to play at the role of patrons of the arts. How many backaches curved Michelangelo in pain while he finished the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel for the sodomite Pope Julius II who was always yelling at him? Was empress Isabella of Spain, the alluring yet unfaithful consort of Charles I, always in a good mood for Tiziano, although she loved posing naked for him when her libido was up? History does teach us useful lessons, maybe sometimes we are too blind to see them and learn from them. Even though my feet are firmly anchored to the ground, a little dreaming of the day when art be destined for the self same people who created it makes life easier. Meanwhile,we will always run up against mercenaries like the blond idiot from a funeral parlor who said he was “helping me charitably” by giving me a little monetary push, and Beethoven will still be crawling, tossing and turning in his grave in Vienna.

the battle of the shoes

2008-12-15T20:55:00.000-08:00

80th Entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook Birthdates for December 15:
0037 Nero Claudius Augustus Germanicus 5th emperor of Rome (54-68), he was a wonderful actor and supreme clown,too bad he burned Christians and married a eunuch after he kicked to death his pregnant wife Poppea
1735 Cesare Beccaria-Bonesana Italian lawyer and philosopher, granddad of poet Alessandro Manzoni
1657 Michel-Richard Delalande Composer, he provided the garnish for Louis XIVth`s dinners, for he was the music master after JeanBaptiste Lully died after he hit his own toe with a baton and rotted awat
1832 Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel French engineer (Eiffel tower), so famous for his tower, so infamous because the French effort for the Panama Canal failed and landed him in disgrace along with toady Lesseps
1859 Ludwik L Zamenhof Russia/Poland, physician/linguist (Esperanto),did he really know what he was talking about
Deaths which occurred on December 15:
1025 Basilius II the Bulgaroctonos, Byzantine emperor (976-1025), dies Basilio II, cruel warmonger who blinded 99 out of 100 Bulgarians, the spared one would be a guide to the bblinded bleeding guys1230 Ottokar I king of Bohemia (1197-1230), dies ,he had succeded his dad Wenceslao to the throne after they had lived half their life tearing at each other`s hair1515 Alfonso de Albuquerque viceroy of Portuguese Indies, dies,after having the famous exquisite mango from Indies named after him(mango Alfonso)Author of a famous diary in which he washed himself clean from the accusations his king had made against him
1675 John Vermeer Dutch painter (Love Letter,the Girl with the Pearl Earring), dies at 43,after having his wife`s family living off him like parasites and producing several classical pictures
events
1916 French defeat Germans in WWI Battle of Verdun, it was about time1917 Moldavian Republic declares independence from Russia, as King Stefan Cel Mare would have dreamt

THE GLOBAL CLATFART(THE NEXT WAR WILL BE OVER SPITTOONS)
Splat went the shoes near George Bush jr`.s head when he had the nerve to visit Irak after all the bloodshed he had produced in that millenary culture. That he had the lack of tact going there is not to be held as surprising,because his dad went to cry over Indira Gandhi`s funeral when everyone knows the CIA has paid the sikh who finally shot her. These Bush presidents have never had any shame or dignity,so they never expect people like the Irakis, just because they are brown, to have any dignity. Feet being considered as baser than the rest of the body, the journalist who threw his shoes at the shameless criminal president simply dealt him with a worse insult than if he had thrown a tray full of shit into his ugly wrinkled face.
When I got into my evening English class tonight at the language center where I am an hourly teacher, my seventh level students had their tongue ready to laugh,gossip and criticize anything related to international affairs, which made for a very interesting session. Forgotten were their quarrels with grammar, pushed aside the hassle with preposition and they went straight ahead into a very agitated debate. Being a historian, it was a delight for me, dearest reader. I wished with all my heart that you would have been there, for you would have laughed. One of the students,about to graduate from high school, told me that history could be fascinating as long as the teacher had humour combined with knowledge ,and didn`t drone on covering with prudish lies all the subterfuges and farts the royal personages had incurred into.
Talking about Irak, we brushed over the long war of the 80s when USA had created monster Saddam Hussein in order to make the Ayatollah Khomeini`s beard go grey with worry. The truth about the internal struggle between Sunnites and Shiites cam afloat, and the way Kurds are kept from having their own nation too. We moved along the globe and another student asked why India and Pakistan were constantly snarling over Kashmir, and I explained why the “roof of the world”, so beautiful and rich in minerals, has been a headache for both countries because they were born as twins when Nehru and Gandhi achieved their independence in 1948. Muslims went to Pakistan mostly, the rest stayed in India, and the snarl has been going on even before Nehru croaked out of a heart attack in 1964. We went on to discuss the Tibet`s possible independence and how valid was it for the Dalai Lama to be pushing himself into politics when he should be worried about the souls of so many Buddhists in the world. Not that Tibet doesn`t deserve independence, mind you, along with all those giant pandas who need to be protected.
That Irak`s occupation was a question of sucking up its fuel led us to believe our next world war would be over water, but a few conflicts have been over territories like Kashmir. Look at our treaty Barcenas Esguerra, by which my Nicaragua ceded the isle of San Andrès to Colombia, who converted it into a tourist paradise. Now absurd rulers brag that they will recover this isle, which is as stupid as asking the son to be given back to the unnatural mother who gave it away as a baby once the son is rich and handsome and famous. We were dumb enough to give San Andrès to Colombia, we now deserve to cringe in rage and learn the lesson so we don`t lose the San Juan River to the smarmy Costa Ricans. Some invasions were propelled by the greed for wine, ridiculous as this may sound. If not, look at flatulent and lazy Selim the Sot, the sultan who succeded his wonderful dad Suleyman the Magnificent, who sent his troops(he stayed in bed at home) to fetch Cyprus because some good wines were produced there. The worst of this was that his imbibing in so much wine was harim according to his Islamic beliefs. This was the same sultan who stayed at home with his cats and women while he sent someone else to do the fighting against the Christian League in Lepanto on October 7th,1571, a battle which was lost by the Ottomans. The only thing Selim the Sot could boast of after his navy got the shit beaten out by the bastard of Philip II of Spain don John of Austria was that the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra got his hand so blasted off that the author of Don Qixote was nicknamed the One Handed of Lepanto.
Fights, battles, skirmishes, ambushes. Wars. Will the next global conflict be over water or over spittoons that we throw into each other`s faces? Will Nicaragua learn anything about her previous mistakes that led her to lose Guanacaste, San Andrès, the disputed territory in Honduras? Or will we let our southern neighbors easy talk us and snow us into letting our San Juan River falls into their sugary traps? But we had fun today. All of us who hate imperialism laughed our guts out over those shoes.If shoes can fly like that in Irak, maybe Obama,whether he wears a Hawaiian grass skirt or hula hoops his way out of fixes, can finally get sense into the government`s head and pull the troops away from thelatest Vietnam that the Americans created.

beyond the scar

2008-12-14T17:14:00.000-08:00

79th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates for December 14:
1363 John Van [Jean C] Gerson French theologist ,deemed by many top have been nuts beyond control

1503 Nostradamus [Michel de Nostre-Dam] FrenchJewish medic,chef,astrologer/prophet

1546 Tycho Brahe Knudstrup Denmark, astronomer (Golden nose) ,so beloved by kings

1553 Henri IV the Bourbon king of Navarra (Henri III)/France,the best king France ever had,a vert Gallant who adored ladies and his signing of the Edict of Nantes cost him his life

Deaths which occurred on December 14:
0872 Adrian II Italian Pope (867-72)/last married pope, dies at about 80 but not exercising his marital rights as legend has it

1077 Agnes of Poitou German empress/wife of emperor Henry III, dies, a domineering shrew if there was one,and it surprises me she was buried in Saint Peter`s Basilica1136 Harald IV "Gylle Krist", king of Norway, murdered after having his eyes poked out ,sooner or later it was bound to happen because his daddy sired too many bastards, lesson to be learned about never trusting half siblings I tell my kid

1542 James V king of Scotland (1513-42), dies at 30 after being told his wife had given birth to the future Mary Queen of Scots
1591 Juan de la Cruz [de Yepes] Spanish Carmelet/poet/saint, dies, lovely poetry,too bad he wrote for the church
1754 Mahmud I sultan of Turkey, dies at 58 , probably sick and tired of fouling himself up1760 Kacic Miosic Croatian poet (Razgovar Ugodni Naroda Slovinskoga), dies ,don’t miss reading him1788 Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach German composer, dies at 74,although not as good as his daddy,has a few great pages to his name
1788 Carlos III King of Naples/Spain (1759-88), dies at 72 ,after having told his dumb successor and son Carlos IV not be be such a blind ass and stupid cuckold

1799 George Washington 1st President USA (1789-97), dies at Mount Vernon VA, at 67,from a throat infection, doctors really helped him to die sooner
1861 Albert prince consort of England & husband of Queen Victoria, dies at 42 after he discovers their heir has been partouzing like crazy,see?Prudery does kill
1862 George Dashiell Bayard Union Brigadier-General, dies at 27,such young generals in the Civil War, did they know what they were doing? No wonder Americans are so damned afraid of having a war on their own territory so they export it to Vietnam or Iraq
1984 Vicente Aleixandre Spanish poet (Historia del corazón), dies at 86,wow. I sure loved his erotic poetry but never his looks
Events
1490 Anna of Bretagne marries by proxy Maximilian of Austria ,but this marriage was bound to never be consummated because they never got in bed, later she successively married two French onion-smelling kings but didn`t manage to keep her Bretagne independent, poor lady she died trying, love her for that

1575 Polish Parliament selects István Báthory as king of Poland,fast way for a plebeian to become king ,since then many horses in Poland are called Bathory, wonder why?
1977 Egypt & Israel representatives gather in Cairo for 1st formal peace conference, but that doesn`t mean they weren`t staring daggers at each other as Arabs and Jews still do nowadays

THE QUIRKS WHICH WE DISABLED NEVER ADMIT IN PUBLIC

Whether I like it or not, I am a disabled person. Mind you,I sport no outward deformity nor ugly scar anywhere on my body, but if you take an x ray of me, a full bodied scan, you will probably sit down to cry or ask yourself how this me still walks and laughs and has no pains. Along with the fractures, the shrapnels ,the bullets which were never pried out-out of cowardice, laziness or simple medical impossibility-come the foibles, the quirks we never confess related to our injuries. Funny, .something which never entered my body was a sense of bitterness, or self pity. Never was I one to wallow in that venomous syrup. as many do. Covered up to my nose with a sheet in bed while I had malaria in 1984 after Indira Gandhi was killed, I read a quote again that I had forgotten,and made it my motto. It was about DH Lawrence saying that a bird can freeze to death in the midst of a snowstorm but you will never see him feel self pity. Of course, Hollywood later used that quote on the cheap movie GI Jane starring a shaved but still alluring Demi Moore, which somehow made me laugh because gringos have always had so much self-pity after their War of Secession that they had made up their mind never to fight on their own territory and they rather export their war. Of course, now their generals are older, not like the youngsters who mismanaged the Civil War and thus even ended up being killed by accident by their own troops(like Stonewall Jackson,although not precisely a youngster,still acted like a stupid teenager).
The least of my accidents happened not during war but during the battle of overcoming my strange adolescence. In March of 1974, my mom was driving her cream Rebault bug with me next to the driver`s seat, and in the back seat was the quirky, unstable,greedy and quarrelsome woman who was my mom`s younger sister. Suddenly this harpy started opulling my mom`s hair over a whim and my mom drove smack into the back of a bus,by Lindavista,western end of Managua. The impact was such that a handle got into my left knee,opening my skin. Three stitches given at the Velez Paiz hospital, I was left with a small outward scar. I still hate it when someone by accident brushes my knee.I feel a jolt of electricity, which means the nerves never mended well. If you want to anger me, pose your hand over my left knee, as if you are trying to rudely seduce me. The sock in your face won`t be delayed. Involuntary reaction, sorry, dear. I have hated by brown-garbed, old dyke of an aunt since then and every time I have had the torture of having to see her, all my chagrin and anger well up inside me and spill over. It is a gut feeling of hatred you may never understand. I blame her for the subtle marring of my left knee, and although now the scar is imperceptible, the old rancor still stirs and spits out violently. I thought I was unique in my reaction.
No sir. In 1983 I was drafted into the army against my will. My boss had scrunched up hands because during the insurrectional struggle, a contact bomb was held too long. He could barely sign with his hand, and he was so painfully self-conscious of this crippled condition of his hands. When I started working I was advised to never stare at his hands, something which I obeyed 99 percent of time. But curiosity is a cat which lives inside all of us. One day he lunched at his desk and immediately fell asleep. The linen napkin was on his lap, but his poor hands were uncovered. Nobody else was in the office. I had been working with him for over a year,and things had eased a lot since the first time we met. I slowly tiptoed around him, his feet were on the desk beside the plates he had lunched from. I took off the dirty napkin and put in on his desk. There were The Hands. He was snoring ,two pearls of crystal sweat forming on top of his forehead,and two others atop his Hitleresque mustache. Slowly, ever so perceptibly, I took one of his hands softly into mine. I perused it quietly while I thought of the pain he must have felt. The year before, I had been bitten by a snake on my left foot. I held his hand tightly in mine as if I could erase any vestige of pain he had ever felt. It was at that moment that I felt I had finally accepted him as a person. I took the other hand from his lap. Almost without moving he opened one eye and a small smile formed on his mouth. He knew that I felt he was awaking, but didn`t scold me or push me away. He was enjoying my inspection. But he gave no evidence of being aware that I was inspecting him. He obviously didn`t feel threatened. I laid both hands back into his lap, and brushed his forehead with my left hand. I tiptoed out of the huge office and went to my desk. I was confused, and in awe. I started a new translation, because the one I had finished had been left by me on his desk on my way out. He awoke half an hour later to find me busily translating the other documents. He walked over to me and patted my head in a fatherly manner. I looked up at his eyes and smiled. Here it was what had been missing.
How to explain the igniting of that magical but real spark of empathy, the arrow of recognition, the embryo of tenderness? It wasn`t anything we could put a name on. From that day on, we would quietly work in silent harmony, safe in each other`s presence. Not a single word was uttered by any of us about my inspection.
Time always has a way of levelling things. In 1984,while climbing onto a helicopter during a combat mission in Jalapa, in the northern part of our country,I was shot in the left knee, the small 22 caliber bullet entering from behind. I was not aware of the entry of this projectile. My best friend was on the helicopter too as a translator, so he took off an old bandanna and wrapped it around my wounded knee as a tourniquet while we could land back in Managua and get me to the military hospital. Once there, a Cuban medic saw to my wound. I was bandaged and put under observation. It wasn`t until I was allowed to go out to the emergency reception room on a wheelchair that my blood-stained, sleepless and shaking best friend was finally sent home to bathe, change and sleep. Three days later, with a small bandage, I went back to work
I was ready to leave at 7 pm, already worn and with red eyes from so much translating, that the boss came to my desk. He told me I never slept naps, so he would never be able to catch me unaware. He asked me to take off the wound`s dressing because he wanted to see. I couldn`t stop laughing. He softly took off the bandage, lifted me long Indian skirt(I hadn`t worn pants yet again) and after he had inspected the wound, put the bandage back on with butterfly wings on his hands almost. He was satisfied I was healing well. .He told me that he had died a little when he had been told I had been shot.
Then added,”Try to never get hit again. Every time something happens to you, it will hurt more on me than on your own flesh.” He accompanied me to the gate, lending his arm for I was still limping a bit, and saw me get into my mom`s cream Renault, this time driven by our faithful driver-messenger and gardener Alberto.
Suffering, specially physical pain, has a way of bonding people as we may never suspect. The wound behind my knee was sealed with time, and is now invisible. I wear my miniskirts without any problem. But I still don`t like anyone to touch my knee. It is a sudden electrical response. The bullet would be followed by shrapnels in 1986,along my spine. A broken spine would be due for 1985,and my wrists would both have to be reconstructed in 1986 after a freak truck crash. In 2003 I landed in a wheel chair and stayed there for several months before I could walk again. It wasn`t until then that I realized how much respect we should give disabled people, dearest of readers. You really do have to walk a mile in someone else`s shoes in order to know what they really feel.

THE SAMURAI WHO BROKE PEARL HARBOR

2008-12-07T21:09:00.000-08:00

78th Entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on December 07:
1542 Mary Stuart Queen of Scots (1560-1587),her dad died in chagrin because she was female
1761 Madame [Marie Grosholtz] Tussaud created wax museum in which stars look better than themselves
1917 Helen Gurley Brown editor-in-chief (Cosmopolitan), extraordinary pen
Deaths which occurred on December 07:
0983 Otto II the Red German king/emperor (973-83), dies at about 28 ,wasted his time trying to crush the Saracens
1894 Ferdinand de Lesseps French engineer/diplomat/earl, dies at 89, poor toady,he was ready to ass kiss stupid empress Eugenie de Montijo but she didn’t let him go past her gloved hand during the opening of the Suez Canal that he had built, she just scatted him away when he called her “the Isabella the Catholic of Modern Times”
1917 Leon Minkus composer, dies at 91,and not in shame even though he made some of the cheapest ballet music ever tolerated by ears
0043 -BC- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman writer, gets his head & right hand chopped off by Mark Antony's soldiers , no anesthesia used
Events on today`s calendar0185 Emperor Lo-Yang, China sees supernova (MSH15-52?),great,most rulers don`t even see their people`s needs
1741 Elisabeth Petrovna becomes tsarina of Russia,she was the vigorous daughter of Emperor Peter I the Great and one of the best known crossdressers of history
1877 Thomas A Edison demonstrates the gramophone, no dog included yet
1941 Japanese attack Pearl Harbor (a date that will live in infamy, yowls from his wheelchair FDR)under the command of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

In Nicaragua, it is the Catholic celebration of the Virgin`s Feast.

LESSONS GREAT AND SMALL

While we live we are prey for journalism. Depending what we do in life we can be prey to that huge mauling lioness which is history. She has the habit of putting everyone in his proper nook or place, pegging us with labels many times we won`t like. Firecrackers explode on the sidewalk, my bitch Athenea,who is a Pitbull and much wiser than myself, heartily and barkingly protests against all this noise pollution and being exposed to the danger of a firecracker snapping off near her sturdy ass. I understand her better than anyone could imagine,for animals don`t fall prey to the folly,the awful denigrating opium of religion although they may be the direct victims of it when a goat,a lamb or a whole calf may be offered to a god`s bloody fangs in the name of blessings. I have never been able to understand how a god can be all love and also demand the death of the creatures he or she made…Butit is precisely this folly which allows me to be free of ties, isolated, warm in my old camouflaged jacket, unhampered by anyone who believes in pheromone ghosts or anything half as ridiculous. I am again myself,no receptacle of twisted pleasure, no decoration on anyone`s page, no calendar with peeled shoulders. The simple act of writing again after so many days away from my keyboard declares my independence from anything like incense,alcohol,opium or testosterone. My cat Timurlenk heartily approves,he has me to himself tonight.Why not be happy? He paws at the image of Isoroku I have onscreen. Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, with his imperceptible missing finger and a sad smile on his face while he looks at a world globe. He would be assassinated as a consequence for having too heavy balls and iron guts.
The military who lives beneath my yet unwrinkled complexion sighs.I have always admired him,even the fact that he was adopted, that he lost a finger form one hand, that he was balding when he attacked Pearl Harbor…even to the detail that at first he was reluctant to do it.You didn`t know that,right,dearest reader. Fact. I listen to KC and the Sunshine Band belting out I`m Your Boogey Man, and yes,yes, Yamamoto in the short time that he survived to his audacious attack on Pearl Harbor,was really the Boogeyman for Americans. Particularly to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who literally jumped out of his wheelchair when he got wind that PearlHarbor had been hit on that Sunday December 7th 1941 morning, he yowled like a kicked lion, infamy,infamy, something that could only be trilled by the tongue of a white man when someone slightly darker could hit and run. Of course, he had known before that attack that sooner or later something was going to go boom on he Pacific, the intelligence had already fed him enough soup, yes FDR. But he was itching to get into World War II, it wasn`t enough just helping the British RAF,he needed something stronger, any excuse to get into the conflict and he was afraid because he had just pulled USA by the hair and the skin of their teeth out of the Depression in the previous decade. So Yamamoto and his kamikazes hit and run, killing over 3 thousand people and wrecking the American Pacific fleet right on the spot and FDR finally got his way USA was officially at war after FDR got the declaration of war against the Japanese.
But I go back to Yamamoto. Somehow his figure has managed to haunt my dreams.He sits on my left shoulder-somehow he is never far away from me. Is it because as a child I read so much about the Code of Bushido followed by the genuine samurais,and he was the last great samurai in World War II? Once USA had entered the war, troops went with a vengeance after the Japanese. Several important battles were won by the gringos, and the Japanese were starting to wonder if they had poked the beehive with a stick that was too dangerously short.
To boost morale following the defeat at Guadalcanal, Yamamoto decided to make an inspection tour throughout the South Pacific. On 14 April 1943, the US naval intelligence effort, code-named "Magic”, intercepted and decrypted a message containing specific details regarding Yamamoto's tour, including arrival and departure times and locations, as well as the number and types of planes that would transport and accompany him on the journey. Yamamoto, the itinerary revealed, would be flying from Rabaul to Ballalae Airfield, on an island near Bougainville in the Solomon Islands, on the morning of 18 April 1943,which by the way was to be a Good Friday for the religiously observants.
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to "Get Yamamoto." He was drooling for blood.so Knox instructed Admiral Chester W. Nimitz of Roosevelt's so Christian wishes. The due procedures for this in the South Pacific were carried out, then authorized a mission on the seventeenth of April to intercept Yamamoto's flight en route and down him.
The 339th Fighter Squadron of the 347th Fighter Group, 13th Air Force, was assigned the mission, since only their P-38 Lightning aircraft possessed the range to intercept and engage. Pilots were informed that they were intercepting an "important high officer", although they were not aware of who their actual target was. I guess if they had smelled who they would go after,they would have shat in their pants and roundly refused. It was the Boogeyman himself.
On the morning of April 18, despite urgings by local commanders to cancel the trip for fear of ambush, Yamamoto's planes left Rabaul as scheduled for the 315-mile trip. Shortly after, eighteen specially-fitted P-38s took off from Guadalcanal. They wave-hopped most of the 430 miles (692 km) to the rendezvous point, maintaining radio silence throughout. At 09:34 Tokyo time, the two flights met and a dogfight ensued between the P-38s and the six Zeroes escorting Yamamoto.
1st Lieutenant Rex T. Barber engaged the first of the two Japanese bombers, which turned out to be Yamamoto's plane. He sprayed the plane with gunfire until it began to spew smoke from its left engine. Barber turned away to attack the other bomber as Yamamoto's plane crashed into the jungle. Afterwards, another pilot and ace, Captain Thomas George Lanphier, Jr., claimed he had shot down the lead bomber, which led to a decades-old controversy until a team inspected the crash site to determine direction of the bullet impacts. The official record of the engagement gave half a kill to each Lanphier and Barber, imagine how lowly these guys were that they even had to snarl like angry bitches to gain recognition over such a cowardly assassination.
One US pilot—1st Lt Raymond K. Hine —was killed in action.
The crash site and body of Admiral Yamamoto were found the next day in the jungle north of the then-coastal site of the former Australian patrol post of Buin by a Japanese search and rescue party, led by Army engineer Lieutenant Hamasuna. According to Hamasuna, Yamamoto had been thrown clear of the plane's wreckage, his white-gloved hand grasping the hilt of his katana sword, still upright in his seat under a tree. Hamasuna said Yamamoto was instantly recognizable, head dipped down as if deep in thought. A post-mortem of the body disclosed that Yamamoto had received two gunshot wounds, one to the back of his left shoulder and another to his left lower jaw that exited above his right eye. Despite the evidence, the question of whether or not the Admiral initially survived the crash has been a matter of controversy in Japan. The killing had been achieved on a Good Friday.As usual,cowards hag to bunch together to kill a guy with big nuts like Isoroku.
While other military leaders in Japan and elsewhere avoided the image of being "soft", Yamamoto continued to practice calligraphy, just like Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent of the ottoman Empire, and wrote poems, though his poems have been criticized by some as being monotonous. He and his wife, Reiko, had four children: two sons and two daughters. Yamamoto was an avid gambler, enjoying shogi,, billiards, bridge, mah jong, poker, and other games that tested his wits and sharpened his mind. He frequently made jokes about moving to Monaco and starting his own casino. He enjoyed the company of geisha, and his wife Reiko revealed to the Japanese public in 1954 that Yamamoto was closer to his favorite geisha Kawai Chiyoko than to her, which stirred some controversy. Isoroku`s marriage had no t been a happy one. After his death, his funeral procession passed by Kawai's quarters on the way to the cemetery, perhaps with hidden purpose that wasn`t so hidden to anybody who knew how much the admiral loved Kawai. Despite his fondness for other pleasures, Yamamoto was a teetotaler.
No man is perfect. and male flesh was never designed to be a sample of perfection and Isoroku was no exception. But somehow he managed to achieve greatness through his military genius and his understanding of people who were gofted for art and music. No wonder he admired his Kawai so much. When I was studying in college, I had to make translations of his love poems to her. Later on, when life forced me into contact with weapons, I came to understand him better. In an era when real samurais were scarce, he had the guts to be one. He lived as much as he could by the code of Bushido, and gave a good example while he did this. Such a great example that I have had no more remedy to confess that he has been a role model for me not only as a military but also as a person.

Winston

2008-11-30T18:21:00.000-08:00

77th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on November 30:
538 St Gregory of Tours chronicler/bishop,always sweating oil1466 Andrea Doria Genoese statesman/admiral, too bad his namesake ship had such a tragic end
1667 Jonathan Swift England, satirist (Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal),only he could have imagined the Lilliputians
1835 Samuel Langhorne Clemens [Mark Twain], author (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn) ,top cat lover1863 Andres Bonifacio leader of 1896 Philippine revolt against Spain …finally someone wide awake

1874 Sir Winston Churchill (C) British PM (1940-45, 1951-55, Nobel 1953),my darling Bulldog,I care not if he knew about German torpedoes and thus Lusitania sank, I love him,I worship him
Deaths which occurred on November 30:
30 -BC- Cleopatra Egyptian queen commits suicide,the most envied woman because she was so superior to men 1016 Edmund II Ironsides, King of the Saxons (1016), dies at 27,poor guy,what if he had lived longer
1900 Oscar Wilde Irish author, dies in Paris, with a goblet of champagne in his hand

WORLD HISTORIANS DAY

I`m a historian. I feel more than a kissing cousin to god, who I am sorry to report,doesn`t exist for me. I hear my agitated spouse nattering about how wonderful it is to be a lawyer or a medic and my fleas dance around in my fur. I was born to be a historian,and I would never be anything else,dearest reader. I love ancient gossip, Herodotus is my model, Churchill my idol and my memory , to the awe of everybody including you, is photographic. Today was chosen to celebrate us freaks who according to dirty politicians should be on a leash simply because in 1874 a big rambunctious redheaded baby almost killed American doyenne Jenny Jerome while making his dèbut in this valley of tears…Winston Churchill- Born with a golden spoon in his mouth at Blenheim, Winston was destined to be a supergenius, the saviour of England during WWII(that is why I call him the British Bulldog,and I have to admit his heavy jowls in old age also help for the choice of name), adored by so many and hated by others like my daughter, who wants to barf noisily at the mere mention of his name. My dad had the enormous privilege of meeting him shortly before Operation Overlord(D-Day,the greatest amphibian military operation in history) and even puffed on the same cigar as The Churchill. Even if my father would have died upon the shores of Normndie, he would have died in peace after having met Churchill,Eisenhower and Patton. I turn green with envy. Churchill. Single malt scotch, cat hairs, Rose of Herzegovina cigars and ink: the male aroma of Churchill. I inhale and I have him near me, this man I never met for real. My role model, my inspiration., my bowl of laughter.Normally I don`t like white men, but Churchill is god. Envied by so many, because he won a Nobel Prize for Literature for his History of the English-speaking Peoples, Gabriel garcìa Màrquez snarled that he had won that award because the Swedish Academy couldn`t by any means stretch truth so much as to give him the award for Peace.
I have loved Winston since my dad mentioned him in a bedtime story when I was a little girl. I imagined him getting spanked as a young soldier in Africa, during the Boer War, when he got jailed. Writing his first articles, with his mom being his first critic and accomplice. He could never be without a pen and a cat nearby, same as I. How could I avoid falling in love with his exhuberance,his joie de vivre, his capacity to withstand even the worst things and get back on his feet? Was he really aware of the dangers of the German torpedoes when the Lusitania was coming back to Europe in 1916, with the Spanish pianist Enrique Granados and his wife aboard? Were some people right to call him a criminal who was fit to be judged for those lost lives? My daughter still bears a grudge over that, or maybe it is simple, elementary misplaced jealousy.
Winston and I also share that galloping passion for cats.He had so many of them, including the rosy Rosalie who once shat into his top hat and then he poured the excrement on his balding pate when he put the hat back on, having everybody laugh at him. Jock waited for him at the steps of the house and dined with him. Once he went into a cellar after the Germans bombarded London, and he rescued in his hat three kittens and their frightened mom. That is the Winston I love, with a big heart and a baby`s smile. The same Winston who had to be restricted by the king so he wouldn`t hop into one of the ships and go off into Normandie on D Day. Even at his age ,he was able to defend England as the best of medieval knights. No more men are built like him, Winston belongs to another epoch. I hoped to find one like him for myself and failed miserably, but my dreams cannot be censored even by a wedding band and Winston continues to be my great intellectual turn-on.
Winston gave us an example on how to get things into perspective when writing history. Through his pet student Danielle Rocher, who was my teacher in college, I ñearned that no idol misses having clay feet and noticing such a detail doesn`t make you any less a historian. When I started publishing short articles on different personalities and topics, placing them in a scarcely read pseudo-elite little newspaper, I left no head standing on shoulders, and I had to be ready to survive all the attacks from people who couldn `t understand iconoclasts and people like me, who love to call things by their own name and no euphemisms. I wonder what Winston would have done now in the age of internet. Would he have more blogs than those I have?
Winston guides my every step although I never had the great honor of having him puff his cigar in my face. Today, on Historian`s Day, I have felt his presence like a gentle cloud descending like a Jewish shawl over my shoulders. At age 49, I realize that the best choice I made in my life was to become a historian.

suicide

2008-11-26T20:12:00.000-08:00

Entry 76 to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on November 25:
1845 Born in Portugal Jose Marìa Eca de Queiroz on the wrong side of the blanket(his parents weren`t yet married),author of Cousin Basil and TheCrime of Father Amaru.
1970 Kimitakè Hiraoke,more known under his pen name of Yukio Mishima,great Japanese novelist and show off, commits sepukku in public before lunch in Tokyo.He almost got a Nobel prize,was the author of Patriotism,Sea of Fertility and Confessions of a Mask
Born on November 26th
1607 John Harvard England, clergyman/scholar, major benefactor to Harvard University (library & half his estate), tried hard but Robert de Sorbonne did a better job in France
1912 Eugene Ionesco France, dramatist (Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano),considered the father of modern theatre of the absurd
Deaths which occurred on November 26:
1883 Sojourner Truth abolitionist, women's rights advocate, dies, even Lincoln admired her so much1939 James Naismith Basketball inventor, dies, that was a shot he couldn`t avoid1970 B O Davis Sr 1st black general, dies at 93 in Chicago, it was about time a black had been in charge of troops1973 Albert DiSalvo Boston strangler, stabbed, so die those who slay

WHEN SOMEONE FLUSHES HIMSELF DOWN THE TOILET

Who do we blame when someone literally flushes himself down the toilet? Commits suicide, buys the farm with his own money. It`s funny that we are always ready to criticize, swashling around the mud of our western principles, Christian based hypocrisy, saying it was a sin against god, god who has so many crimes to his name because many people wreak havoc on his behalf. Yukio Mishima did it on November 25th,while so many housewives, including his own spouse, prepared lunch unaware of what was going to happen..I am so familiarized with suicide, people. Not because I have ever made an aim at it, nor do I think I will ever plan it for myself. Not for me, folks,no my cup of tea. My poor mom had enough trouble getting me into this world, almost dying herself in the effort, for me to waste her endeavours by doing myself in. I try to get into the slightly yellowish hue of Yukio Mishimàs alabaster skin that fit his muscles like a silken glove. I was a pre-teenager when I saw his head separated from the body, with a hachimaki around his forehead, on the cover of a famous magazine,with some blood under the head. My dad showed it to me,and my mom screamed. She said he was a barbarian showing that to the little girl. Did I ever had childhood?Was I really a kid when I saw that? Good questions I make,dearest reader,while I wonder if not seeing you would be pallid excuse for anyone to ask me to think seriously about disenboweling myself or poking my head into the gas oven my kitchen doesn`t have. Not Sylvia Plath, frustrated wife of poet ted Hughes, not Anne Sexton, either. Shit, I am not even a poet to merit the gas from my oven!
I guess I had a crush on Yukio Mishima from the first day I read his short story Patriotism. I was about 8, always precocious,always poking my nose beyond my age. I started collecting his pictures,specially those where he is working out at the gym to convert what he considered his slender body as ugly. My dad had approved my reading his works,and soon managed to get them all translated into French or English. Food for his literary genius in embryo. So what a shock when Yukio, in his last protest against the occidentalization of his beloved Japan, decided to go with some of his beloved soldiers of the Tatenokai(his private army)and take over General Mashita`s bunker just outside Tokyo to make his last grand show. Of course his gay lover and student was there, and would follow him to death. There is one illogical,insane nucleus of my inner brain that understands him. I have many things in common with him, the love of a good show, the narcissism. Hey wait, get your glasses back on and don`t glare at me like that.I haven`t said I will follow his footsteps, I am not issuing a departure ticket out of this filthy world the way he did. But I guess I know what was rolling through his head when he went there,read a speech while the soldiers booed or cheered,and then got down to his fundoshi,took out the sword and finally his lover decapitated him. November 25th. In Nicaragua, we honor that date with the absurd name of Day Against Wife Battering and violence against women. Just the name lets us know we have a sickly absurd society in which we women are abused,verbally,physically or psychologically. We get llosened teeth, passwords stolen in the name of family stability and marital fidelity, our webcams are shattered, our salaries gobbled by a man who doesn`t love the workingwoman who works hard for the money so you better treat her well as Donna Summer once sang. What would Yukio Mishima have said of the existence of such a day in a country where woman hitting is more of a national sport than gossiping, baseball, bastard-production and boxing. Would Eugene Ionesco laugh and say that when he created the theatre of the absurd he meant it only onstage and not offstage,in the small black cameras of our households?
But let`s get back to Mishima and suicidal people. Japan, where seppuku is an accepted form of leaving this world after your honor has been sullied, never got over this suicide.
Mishima left everyone shaking in his shoes. It left me so too. How often do you blame yourself when someone does himself in?Shizue,Yukio`s overabsorbent mother who was always his best accomplice, laid all the blame at the widow`s door.She never liked her daughter-in-law.Welcome to the family Yoko, I know lots about this,my lady. When my best friend Oscar Cortez did himself in Hemingway-style(bullet in the head)I blamed his wife too. That couldn`t take away the pain,the anguish,the loss. It was Yukio`s suicide again, although I never sang to Yukio or loved him as a close friend. My Oscar departed in July 1996,and still less than one year later, while I was the blazer-clad,stocking-footed flamboyant spokeswoman for the Ruben Darìo National Theatre, I chose to pull Yukio out of my closet and clean up his skeleton. That is why I wrote the short story Kim The Samurai Angel while I was so olympically unhappy as the spokeswoman of the maximum temple of culture ion Nicaragua. This story was brought upon by several consecutive nightmares, in which Yukio, wearing only his fundoshi and smiling sweetly, would walk into my kitchen to ask me for a dish of breaded shrimp I was cooking. He would eat and then ask me,please,pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease kitten,a short story for me,you said you loved me,prooooooove it. So I wrote Kim during my office hours, feeling I was ripping off my people because I was a public servant but I was using time paid from the taxes my people got bitten off to write.Crime.Fraud. But Kim was written this way, and the same day I ended it, Yukio came back to eat more imaginary shrimp and thank me. I have seen him again in my dreams, inevitably, but never with the intensity of those days in 1997. Three months later I would quit that awful fake job and feel free. Kim had been written in captivity.
As I have been aging, I feel I understand Yukio MIshimàs sense of alienation better.
The perspective is totally different ,but the comprehension is there. I have come to share many characteristics with him ,like the love I feel for photography, the sense of giving a good public face, not so the homosexuality nor the inclination for suicide. My literary production has grown more open-minded, and now I am not afraid of broaching any subject in my short stories or here in my own non fiction scrapbook. I somehow understand why Yoko was never enough for him, through a wry smile I acknowledge that. I wish I weren`t an atheist, so I could invent a heaven or hell where Yukio and my best friend Oscar discuss their suicides from a philosophical perspective. But it is just fantasy. One place you surely go to after death is the cemetery. Yukio was reduced to ashes. I want the same, so I can be thrown over my beloved San Juan River. Yukio and I also share an absurd sense of patriotism that irks you beyond measure, but I cannot extricate it like I cannot live without my almost useless pancreas.
The 49 year old matron I am now is still vexed over the blow Yukio gave me as a child when he did himself in. The responsible, dutiful housewife I was when my best friend shot himself in 1996 got herself another punch that still hurts. When someone you love decides its better to go off rather than live with a shadow of the time you can give him or her, it is time to think. I don`t mean the cheap drama of a manipulator who tries to scare you by punching a pen into his wrist ifn front of a webcam so that you feel forced to do what he wants, too much Egyptian soap opera without reaching the greatness only Om Khaltoum could sing in her songs. I mean the real emptiness, the body no longer harbouring that warmth you so loved. No dear reader, there is no pain like that. I hope you never feel it. When someone chooses to flush himself down the toilet of life, we realize something is awfully rotten in the sewages of this society,and we may carry this guilt like a weighted sack for the rest of our lives, even if we learn from the experience.

Never as well served as by own hand

2008-11-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

75th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook for Nov.15 and 16
Birthdates which occurred on November 15:
1397 Nicholas V pope (1447-55); ended schism, founded Vatican Library , was a very useful priest1708 William Pitt the Elder (Whig) UK PM (1756-61, 66-68) `Great Commoner' , great with or without wig1738 Sir William Herschel astronomer (discovered Uranus), you do more than get torticolis from star gazing 1815 John Banvard NYC, painted world's largest painting (3 mile canvas)thank heavens Picasso never dreamt of inflicting similar torture on us
1887 Georgia O'Keeffe Sun Prairie WI, painter (Cow's Skull), nice flowers, although they look like something else
1891 Erwin Rommel German field marshall (WW II-African campaign),poor guy,sweating so much in El Alamein on an upset stomach,and at the end Hitler ordered him to drink poison.Poorly does the devil pay to those who serve him well.
Deaths which occurred on November 15:1280 Albertus Magnus German scholar, dies at 87, after many mistakes 1630 Johann Kepler German astronomer, dies at 58, his neck still hurting
1958 Tyrone Power actor, dies of a heart attack at 44,but not in Errol Flynn`s arms!1963 Fritz Reiner conductor (Chicago Symphony Orchestra), dies at 74, very good baton 1978 Margaret Mead anthropologist, dies in NY at 76
1984 Baby Fae who received a baboon's heart, dies at California medical center

1492 In Spain, 6 Jews & 5 Conversos are accused of using black magic, of course horny Isabella was delighted because that gave her where to draw money from to finance her Columbus`voyages1660 1st kosher butcher (Asser Levy) licensed in NewYork City then (New Amsterdam)
1889 Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, deposed; republic proclaimed,after he gave the golden rule to free the slaves
1939 Nazis begin mass murder of Warsaw Jews, first draft of what they would do later on
Birthdates which occurred on November 16:
42 -BC- Tiberius Cesar 2nd Roman emperor (14-37 AD) , he was on his seat when Jesus was sent to the cross, poor pervert1766 Rodolphe Kreutzer France, composer/virtuoso violinist (Paris Conservatory) he had his way with the bow1873 W(illiam) C(hristopher) Handy Alabama, jazz star (St Louis Blues),only he could sound like that
Deaths which occurred on November 16:
1885 Louis Riel French rebel who fought against Canada, executed at 41,poor chap didn`t live to tell1960 Clark Gable dies at 59.leaving piles of females like me crying over him
On this day...
1532 Pizarro seizes Incan emperor Atahualpa after victory at Cajamarca,locks him up,shows him how to play chess and ends up having a crush on him before having him executed1676 1st colonial prison organized, Nantucket, Massachusetts, good clink for not so good gents
1908 Arturo Tuscanini begins conducting NY's Metropolitan Opera, to everyone`s delight

SELF RELIANCE

Personne est si bien servie que par sa propre main, say the French,in a great truth as big and oily as the whole universe. Nobody is as well served as by his own hand,why do the French always manage to nab the truth,pin words on it and make it as real as nothing in the virtual world can be? Then the final shot, the coup de grace, came when James martin, wise as only a handful of Americans have ever had the luxury of being, smacked a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson into my seventh-grader hand with a Cheshire cat grin and said,”This was written for people like you.” I open the Emerson book and James wafts out of it like a welcome genie,the book being Alaeddin`s Lamp. Teachers like him we all wish to have but only a few of us are lucky enough to be chosen in order for such an honor to be bestowed upon us. I imagine him now, his silky hair almost completely white, wearing thick glasses and perhaps a cane for elegance more than for anything else, because no matter how hard he tries I get the feeling james martin can never be old. A few weeks ago, being an underestimated, underpaid teacher with a writing course destined for people who hope to fulfil their American Dream of studying in USA,unaware it can be the first episode of a truly continental nightmare, I fought against laziness, indifference, mediocrity and impunctuality to get them in front of a PC that probably belonged more in a museum of cybernetics than in a language center computer lab, and I smacked them with an Emersonian website so they could at least brush the myriad plumes of the quetzal of self-reliance. Somehow I had the impression I was blowing some gunpowder on plain vultures, but the effort was to be taken into account. At least by me. It brought me to this question: why aren`t we self-reliant? Why must we be surrounded by creeping jennies, poison ivy trying to consume our breaths, thirsty anacondas reading to suck us whole into their turmoiled stomachs? Arms promising love hold us like lianas from a tropical jungle tree, we get smothered, choked,.asphyxia blues us up. Help me, I am dying in the arms of love! Is it excuse enough?
No people. Nobody can be smothered by love, and if it smothers it isn`t love but a monster. The thing from the black lagoon, a school of rabid piranhas, a bloodsucking bat. Noooooooooo, get off me. Too many things that are nasty are executed in the sacred name of god or love, which for many is the same but not quite equal, as the Cuban troubadour Silvio Rodrìguez says in one of his songs. No, Russian legend has the hut of the Babayaga on chicken`s feet chasing all prey, but no, I can`t belong, I cannot be asphyxiated, my lungs need their air. As Rod Mckuen said,”I only own myself but all of me is mine.”
Let me tell you one little story. I have been born and have lived in a very narrow-minded little country of the Third World where religion,particularly the Catholic faith, has been an octopus over people`s opinions. It hasn`t been strong enough to wipe out squalor ,promiscuity,bastards or any other forms resulting from disorderly living or loose morals, but it suffocates enough to make people gossipy,opinionated and very hypocritical. So when my dad dropped into my lap the book titled The Crime of Father Amaru, by the great Portuguese novelist Josè Marìa Eca de Queiroz(by the way a communist,atheist and a bastard born ahead of his parents`wedding), many people said he was perverting me. The wretched love story between the handsome and young priest Amaro and the mealy-mouthed, sexually repressed Amelia has the saddest of endings, when Amelia is forced by her pseudoreligious lover into aborting the baby they so hornily made. When I finished reading the book, I could understand Amaro`s point of view. Selfish as only men can be(perhaps because they don’t give birth), Amaro forces the village girlie to be butchered by a quack and she dies as her lifeblood spills over where she so much enjoyed weeks before. But sorry, I understand Amaro. Why be saddled by something you didn`t sk for? It`s true, he could have avoided the whole thing by wearing a Trojan.But he didn`t. And the world is full of women who give all of us bad names by their beggar attitude,marry me, hold me,keep me,support me,give me.
Self reliance is a forbidden word for them, clinging vines who turn silken ribbons into iron chains. No self-respecting macho Cromagnon Australopithecus Neanderthal will ALLOW his lady to work, but when she asks for something over the budget he will howl like a shot wolf.
Recently I was observing the human circus in the internet, and an Italian chap with nice beard, blue eyes and the foulest mouth I have ever cyber met was announcing that he wanted a female(not a woman, mind you) and he was a dominator and whoever opened his webcam and legs to him had to know how to obey blindly. For him self reliance was only conjugated in the male form, and woe to the woman who ever dared challenge that absolute truth written with seminal ink from an upright male penis(hopefully upright).A true piece to be remitted to any anthropological museum, too bad he is loose on the cyber waves and doing so much damage to weak minds and pliant bodies that he should be shackled into Alcatraz(reopened for his benefit, because now it is a museum).
Self reliance has been the only way out for men and women since the world has been so called. Knowing that everything you do will be for your benefit and that of others is a dish that can only be so relished. Knowing that you own your inner space is a great feeling,specially when you realize how many people are deprived of their right to privacy in the sweetish name of love. Many husbands and wives believe they have ownership over the consort, and that kills love, if ever there was such feeling, in the name of togetherness or so called fidelity. When compliments become obligatory, and presence is required the way a drill sergeant calls his soldiers, self-reliance becomes a scratching dog trying to rid itself of all those ticks and fleas.
One of the reasons why I love cats so much is because they have their own sense of independence, never toadies or brown- nosers, never slaves to humans, never there as a doormat but as your peer. You cannot get 20 cats to pull a snow sled but the servile dog does it, poor chap with no sense of self-esteem. A dog may be kicked by you and you can get him back at your feet again. I wouldn`t recommend you do that with a cat, well not with anyone or anything.
Being self-reliant doesn`t mean you will turn your back on those who may need your help, but the fact is that by being self-reliant you can improve whatever help you may give. My associate on the historyarte website, Adolfo, often repeats that by helping the weak he never learns to be strong. I tend to agree with him, as 49 years of life in this crazy valley of tears that is the world has shown me. No use coming back for more when a door is slammed shut in your face, you have your own resources to seek for whatever you were looking for elsewhere, preferably where a bit of self-reliance and consciousness of how to interact with others exist. Nobody or nothing is indispensable in life but life itself to continue living. Usually we Nicaraguans, those of us who are self-reliant and do do homework in groups in order to be failed as a bunch, say that when a door slams shut a big garage door is waiting for you, gaping wide open, elsewhere. So no use crying over spilled milk if it was destined to land on the floor anyways.

at the edge of the glucometer

2008-11-14T20:35:00.000-08:00

74th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on November 14:
1765 Robert Fulton built 1st commercial steamboat (or 0819), and went on steam ahead1776 Henri Dutrochet discovered & named process of osmosis, hard working chap1779 Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager Denmark, poet (National Poet 1849),still Hans Christian ndersen is better known for his little Mermaid1840 Claude Monet France, impressionist (Water Lilies),I would die for any of his paintings
1889 Jawaharlal Nehru 1st Indian PM (1947-64),the real father of India without having to pose naked with young girls to prove he was impotent 1896 Mamie Doud Eisenhower 1st lady, poor woman, having to tolerate Ike`s philandering and cavorting with his Irish born lady chauffer
1900 Aaron Copland Brooklyn, composer (Billy the Kid, Appalachian Spring).Jewish,excellent and with the awfullest teeth I have ever seen on anyone
1927 Narciso Yepes, Lorca Spain, guitarist (Orquesta Nacionale 1947)great interpreter,good Composer too

Deaths which occurred on November 14:
565 Justinian Roman emperor, dies at 82,still m,issing his ex circus girl turned empress Theo,whom he adored so much and who really ruled for him
1935 Hussein ibn Talal I king of Jordan (1953- )a good king

1851 Moby Dick by Hermann Melville was published, a novel I have always cherished so much
1959 Kilauea's most spectacular eruption (in Hawaii)what a blast!
1921 insulin is discovered as a resource for the treatment of diabetes,yessssssss,thanks Best,McLeod, for saving my life even before I was born and became diabetic

DIABETES WORLD DAY
I am a diabetic.Type 2 fortunately. It would have been easy for me to be born with type I diabetes,which ruins your life from childhood because your pancreas simply doen`t work at all. It runs in the family, my maternal grandmother had it. Sooner or later, my genes were going to act up and it sure helped that I was a candy addict in my teens, a wageless assistant chef for my mom, and I have always had a sweet tooth. Diabetes Day. A world day. To celebrate some very smart guys found the relationship between insulin and the well being of those with diabetes. The news about this discovery was given on a day like today back in 1921. The day itself was introduced in 1991 by the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) in response to the alarming rise in diabetes around the world. It all began in the decade of the 20s in the xxth century.
It wasn`t easy at first.At Toronto General Hospital, 14-year-old Canadian Leonard Thompson became the first person to receive an insulin injection as treatment for diabetes. Diabetes had been recognized as a distinct medical condition for more than 3,000 years, but its exact cause was a mystery until the 20th century. By the early 1920s, many researchers strongly suspected that diabetes was caused by a malfunction in the digestive system related to the pancreas gland, a small organ that sits on top of the liver. At that time, the only way to treat the fatal disease was through a diet low in carbohydrates and sugar, and high in fat and protein. Instead of dying shortly after diagnosis, this diet allowed diabetics to live--for about a year, at the most.
A breakthrough came at the University of Toronto in the summer of 1921, when Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best successfully isolated insulin from canine test subjects, produced diabetic symptoms in the animals, and then began a program of insulin injections that returned the dogs to normalcy. On November 14, the discovery was announced to the world.
Two months later, with the support of J.J.R. MacLeod of the University of Toronto, the two scientists began preparations for an insulin treatment of a human subject. Enlisting the aid of biochemist J.B. Collip, they were able to extract a reasonably pure formula of insulin from the pancreas of cattle from slaughterhouses and used it to treat Leonard Thompson. The diabetic teenager improved dramatically, and the University of Toronto immediately gave pharmaceutical companies license to produce insulin, free of royalties. By 1923, insulin had become widely available, saving countless lives around the world, and Banting and Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Countless figures of history were diabetics, beginning with the beautiful yet treacherous Greek general Alcibiades, who always knew that his glucose was high after he pissed,for the ants would gather around the wet spot he had left on the ground. Along would come others, like the Empress Theodora of Byzantium,beloved consort of Justinian who died a day like today. Wu Chao,empress of China,almost lost a leg to diabetes and King Louis XIVth,the glorious Sun King, would hide behind curtains when he was eating sweets that his doctor Fagon had prohibited him to devour. Even in his privileged mind, British writer HG Wells couldn`t imagine a cure to his disease, even though he was the dad of modern science fiction. But diabetes didn`t stop Ernest Hemingway from consuming huge quantities of booze, and he often levelled off his high glucose by playing with his cats. I tend to think that the possession of cats does help diabetics, because cats take stress away and many times diabetics get lots of stress and their glucose goes up.
Even though I knew sooner or later I would become a diabetic because it follows hereditary patterns, I wasn`t quite ready when the diagnosis came on January 31st,2003 for me. The world fell at my feet. I had a count of 235,when the normal level is between 75 and 110 when you haven`t eaten in the morning and between 75 and 120 one hour after you have eaten. I would need a glucometer to measure my level every morning and that meant pricking myself. Welcome pain, daily routine. Goodbye desserts. Why didn`t anybody tell me about neuropathies?Those are pains,shooting pains in your legs, your toes go numb. When the sugar –loaded bloodstream passes by the myelin surface of your nerves, it acts like sandpaper and wears off the insulating myelin away, so it is like having peeled up cables that bristle at contact. This causes something like electroshocks and these in turn produce pain ,itching, tingling,stinging or burning sensations. Sometimes these pains are so great your muscles grow weak and flabby and you may have that extremity impaired for walking. Diabetes sweeps away whatever lifestyle you had before,and turns your world upside down. I was hitched onto insulin shots to begin with and get balanced. Months later Milagros, the best doctor in the world and now one of my best friends, unhooked me from insulin and gave me pills:glibenclamide and metformin. I still take them every day of my life.
I would be a liar, dearest reader, if I said I don’t eat sugar anymore. I have no more painful neuropathies, but I get up to pee up to 3 times per night, stay away from Cocacola, and watch as others gobble the desserts I make. Nothing more painful for a cook to be unable to eat her own desserts. What diabetes does to your libido is a sad story and the bad news is that gentlemen who were satyrs may end up being perfectly impotent. Depression is another common side effect,but in my case I have been prone to optimism instead. That got me out of a wheelchair and would not allow me to ever feel sorry for myself, even when a flabby, horny and bitchy ministress of social security called me a “lovely garbage sack of bones to be forever useless.” I refused to feel self compassion when my husband went out with his friends all day on August 1st and July 19th-holidays in my country-to booze and whore his way dry while I was in bed at home, accompanied by my cats and my daughter.
I don’t suffer from the typical diabetic`s bad temper. Many people use this malady as a simple excuse for being rude to others. No way.
Today, I have celebrated my World Diabetes Day by staying safely out of danger,optimistic and healthy. Why not?In another century I wouldn`t have lasted even for this day.

Armistice Day

2008-11-11T20:36:00.000-08:00

73rd entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on November 11:
1050 Henry IV Holy Roman emperor (1036-1106), how Holy was he really?1636 Yen Jo-chu Chinese scholar of Ch'ing dynasty m a real thinking man if ever there was one
1744 Abigail Smith Adams 2nd 1st lady, that was one writing lady as wife of John Adams 1748 Charles IV king of Spain (1788-1808), good for nothing, syphyllitic idiot who couldn`t even rule,spawned a freak on a leash like Charles II
1771 Ephraim McDowell surgeon (pioneered abdominal surgery) ouch ouch and more ouch1821 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky Russia, novelist (Crime & Punishment.Karamazovi Brothers),the advocate for the poor and oppressed,sublime epileptic,former army lieutenant and foot fetishist
1883 Ernest Ansermet Vevey Switzerland, conductor (Ruilles de Printemps) ,best ballet orchestra conductor although he looked like a dancing circus bear1885 George S Patton general "Old Blood & Guts", great general, great slapper and too bad USA had no more use for him after WWII so faked an accident to get him out of the way1896 Charles "Lucky" Luciano Sicily, NYC Mafia gangster, a man to reckon with
1911 King Hussein of Jordan,lovely king,sweet man, met him in Paris and he won my heart with his simplicity
1922 Kurt Vonnegut Jr author (Slaughterhouse Five, Sirens of Titan), God bless you without rosewater
Deaths which occurred on November 11:
1831 Nat Turner former slave, led a violent insurrection, hanged in VA, so end all freedom fighters
Events
1811 Cartagena Colombia declares independence from Spain ,good,was about time!1860 1st Jewish wedding in Buenos Aires Argentina, did they live happily ever after?
1918 Armistice Day-WW I ends (at 11 AM on Western Front) ,signed in Paris, and thus it is all War Veterans`Day ever since1921 President Harding dedicates Tomb of Unknown Soldier, little did old Warrùn as his awful wife called him, know that death was ready to gnaw at his heart pretty soon, and not while having Nan Britton in his arms in the closet of the Oval Office

WAR VETERANS DAY

Today, ever since the armistice that put an end to World war I was signed in Paris in 1918, is War veterans`Day. All over the world, all of us who have been in one or another war, celebrate the fact that we are still alive-whether in one piece or missing many- and we grieve and honor the fallen ones. It is funny how sentimental people can get about their war veterans in civilized countries like France. Many of them diet for months so they can get again into their old uniforms. But in countries like mine, we are viewed as garbage or freaks on a leash, the people who deal with social insecurity,excuse me,security hates us, want us to be dead. Sometimes there is a small ceremony so we try to suck in our bellies to look good in the old uniform, parade around like preening roosters showing off our medals. But the scars, outward or inner like in my case, pinpoint us as those who returned from the great Beyond, from the Sweet Abyss as Silvio Rodrìguez sings in his song, and we will have sequels for the rest of our lives. Take my dad, for example, veteran of World War II, with so many condecorations that he looked like a ligh5ted and walking Christmas Tree, he had a tic that made his left elbow shake imperceptibly when under extreme stress. He sported his tattoo made by the Nazis, on the inner part of his left elbow, and in the number was the exact day of my birth, engraved into his skin in 1944 when he had no inkling I would be born to his supreme delight. Later on, when I was born, he would say he was fated to have me, and a radiant sunshine smile would make his visage even handsomer. As war veteran he had so many stories to tell, he was never embittered nor shaky. He said he was so thankful to have survived, and he even had the tender soul to risk everything in order to save his German friend Hans Schneider, the officer from the Hitlerian Youth, who had hidden him in the kitchen and saved him from starving, being sodomized again or even sent to get baked. He managed to get Hans across Germany after the Russians freed the Auschwitz prisoners by saying it was a deaf and dumb peasant who couldn’t speak either, hauled him to Normandie, sheltered him and gave him his last name to add to the one he had. My Uncle Hans Levallois Schneider is still well and alive inParis, a true French citizen now, because the war vet my dad was at age 25 gave him the gift of life again.
If life were a competition, I could never race against my dad`s war record. I am a veteran of the war between two Nicaraguan factions, the Sandinistas and the counterrevolutionaries who did not want a totalitarian state to get established. To be honest, I side with neither.I can never approve brother fighting against brother. I was just a war correspondent, escorting and translating for the journalists from world networks who came to find out what was going on here. I was on the warfront since 1983,shortly after I returned from France with my degrees, and was drafted into the army. I was there when we made the big blunder of stepping into Honduras from Teotecacinte, shot on the left knee during conflict in Jalapa, fell off a chopper in La Penca in 1985, where one year later I would be shrapnelled. I saw things I had never believed possible on the battlefield, and cried my own tears of blood too. I was in and out of the hospital so often that I almost considered it my bedroom away from home. Broken column, snake-bitten feet, shattered wrists, shrapnels and a bullet almost converted me into a Bionic woman. I am still looking for any male of the species who has as many war injuries as I do and still feels the urgent need to laugh when the circumstances under which it all happened are mentioned. That is when I realize that the Celts were right to include the women in the battlefield, just like the Zulus. Wise rulers also count on women to reinforce their armies, dumb ones try to shun us away. We are used to blood…remember that menstruation inures us to blood. Few men can be as bold as colonels like Pampata of the Zulus or Manuela Saenz, the liberator of the Libertador Bolìvar.
As a war veteran, I am grateful to live for having loved me so much that she couldn`t bear to let me go from her. I consume with relish all war movies, and the traumas are well hidden under a picture perfect smile. For the rest of my life my shrink said, shortly before dying himself aided by his own stepdaughter in one of the most scandalous crimes of Nicaragua, I will have my two nightmares per night, in full colour, with music and special effects. Out of these nightmares have come some of my best short stories in the genre of horror, and produced fame and money for me. If life gave me lemons, I sure have made good lemonade too.
The fact that I am a war veteran has changed my perspective of life, and also my ideas on the supposed weakness of women. I will never meet a male-unless I go to the thousand times heroic nation of Vietnam-who can even dream of matching my record of war injuries and still look the way I do in pictures, or indirectly, smack in front of anyone. I have a retarded aging process. In fact I lament that my body sports no outward scars.I would be proud to wear those medals of the flesh. My numerous fractures are well covered by satiny sallow skin that refuses to wrinkle. This old lion still loves to pose and seduce the camera, vain witch that I am, a shameless narcissist as you, dearest reader, so well know. Never for me the drab , graceless servant like uniform for office worn by bureaucrats of the army. Only camouflage or the virginal white of a corvette captain. I earned it. Yet now in my forties, I have never felt more at ease than when wearing my long flowered Jewish dresses with their shawls.
Being a veteran is like sailing against the wind in countries like mine, where we are not the semi gods that veterans are in France or England. The worst of all ios that if I were given a choice, to be reborn again, I would still go through all my war experiences again. The feeling of having kisses death`s bony hand and lived to tell about it is a thrill that not a single drug in the word can give you. The pride is the size of a lion`s shadow at dusk. Nothing can ever come close to it. One day, hopefully no war veterans will exist,but only because war may have died forever. Difficult but possible. Just a dream but dreams and hope are the last thing we lose.

KEMAL

2008-11-10T18:27:00.000-08:00

72d entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on November 10:
1483 Martin Luther ,in Eisleben, Germany, founded Protestantism. But ended up married to an ex nun and a complete sot1668 Francois Couperin Paris France, composer/organist (Concerts Royaux) ,so admired by the Regent Philippe II of Orlèans

1683 George II king of England (1727-60), who hated his son so badly he said he wished “that ass`death”, a coomon situation in the dysfunctional Hnnoverian dynasty of England
1759 Frederich von Schiller in Germany, poet/lyricist (Ode to Joy), Beethoven`s Ninth Symphony catapulted him to world fame
Deaths which occurred on November 10:
1938 Kemal Ataturk ,1st President of Turkey, dies at 57 of cirrhosis, was a real forger of the nation,and an example of a statesman
1982 Leonid I Brezhnev Soviet 1st sect, dies of a heart attack at 75
On this day...
1674 Dutch formally cede New Netherlands (NY) to English, this will be the Dutch origin of New York 1775 US Marine Corps established by Congress, “the few the proud”, what a joke for an intervention force
1928 Hirohito with his four eyes,ugly scrawny figure and alligator`s mouth is enthroned as Emperor of Japan, one of the worse things to ever happen to Japan who would have to see him parade on a white horse and after World War II have to admit he went to the toilet like every mortal

India : Guru Nanak's Day-1st teacher of the Sikhs

THE LEADERS WE SHOULD HAVE

Riots explode in the streets of Managua and other cities, while the Frente Sandinista-which has been the worse thing to ever happen to Nicaragua-tries again to make a fraud of the elections for mayors. A child was killed in fights between parties, and it seems like if we are destined only for havoc and despair. I wonder what kind of leader we have if he can even be called like that, and on a day like today I feel visited by one the memory of the man I have adored most in my whole life: Mustafà Kemal Ataturk, the gentleman who forged modern Turkey. I curl into a corner of my translator`s desk, a moment of solitude yet in the company of a gentle.clear eyed ghost with blond hair. Catalogued by ignorants as a dictator, he comes to me in the middle of a drowsy moment after I have lunched, the dessert I didn`t eat, dressed in jeans and accompanied by mu dauighter`s cat who recently died, a gentle figure asking me with a charming smile for this entry and a few cannelloni left over from lunch. IN my dreamy haze, he enters my kitchen and goes to the oven, and helps himself while my daughter`s cat entwines between his long legs and almost knocks him over. That is the reaction The Grey Wolf-as he was called by his troops- got from his followers. Even those of us who never had the inmense privilege of having a handshake with him. We are like curling cats at his feet. I don`t know if you have ever felt this,dearest reader, and least of all for a politician, because people in politics ignore that politics is the art of doing good for the community and they generally become disgusting fatsos who seek only their utmost satisfaction.
Not Ataturk. The fact that I have worshipped him is my dad`s fault,who had the knack of keeping me away from Brothers Grimm`s absurd fairy tales that so much damage cause on female minds, and his proclivity to read me as bedtime stories the biographies of great leaders or telling me in lurid details all his experiences as a soldier from the Allies during World War II. I was barely 4 years old when I heard his sobriquet Ataturk, father of all Turks, given to him after he started on a series of reforms that wouldn`t only glue the remaining pieces of the Ottoman Empire after World war I but also forge the modern republic that Turkey is. My dad would value top workers over anything in life, industriousness for him was an earthly godliness, and as such he valued people like France`s Philippe II of Orleans-the regent who held the kingdom together after Louis XIV`s death until his great grandson Louis XV grew up enough to be crowned. Ataturk was in his good books, and he often wondered what role the blond Turkish statesman would have taken if he had lived enough to see World War raging rampantly. My dad had been in 1937 in Turkey and seen the already ailing president at a weightlifting match and after having won a medal, had had the honor of getting a bear hug from Ataturk, who had been a devoted swimmer, chess player and a promoter of sports.
I understand many of Ataturk`s decisions because we share something in common more than our love for hard, honest work: the need for solitude. Perhaps that is why his marriage lasted only 3 years and there was no issue. Later on he would adopt 7 girls and one son, as he needed children around him. Many of his best hours were spent curled up with a book, or watching his animals come and go.he adored horses, as well as the famed Angora cats that have been a symbol of Turkish beauty. He wrote poems, too. He was a really privileged mind from whom we learn what a good habit of reading can do for us, something we so urgently need in my country. Those who read know that knowledge is power, and with power in your hands and knowing what rights assist you, nobody can swindle the results of an election. We need someone like him in Nicaragua, so that our ravaged and war-torn country can finally lift its forehead and proudly get to work.
Many years ago, I published an article on Ataturk`s life. As a historian, I knew how important he had been as a patriot,the forger of a new country, the liberator of women who had up until then just been receptacles of pleasure and brood mares only. It is now in that Indian Summer of my premenopause, while my lifeblood slowly trickles out of me, and I stare appalled at what political violence can do to us, that I get to understand Ataturk better. Now I see why many clocks in Turkey still fix their hands on 9:05 am. The hour he left this world only physically. I comprehend the hero worship that many Turks still have of this guy. If he was Muslim or a Jew-as has been speculated recently- I care not, because I have never been a bigot or superstitious. I love him for his perfection-Kemal- which was put upon him by his math teacher. I love him for his beauty-inside and outside-his elegance, his enlightment, his constant desire to always move forward and offer his best. The patriot I am still has an everlasting crush on him, the stateswoman in the making that lives on my left shoulder as a shadow admires him and has too much to learn from his example. Ataturk, contrary to his sobriquet of Kemal, wasn`t perfect as a man although perhaps this was what made him such a wise and sound ruler. He died at 57, still being a workaholic and an intellectual. He disappeared only physically. The results of his procedures, reforms and laws are still everywhere in his country. The respect and dmiration we feel for him is not limited for his countrymen, and now, in the middle of turmoil, between one translation and another, he has come to me in a dream to remind me that Bertholt Bretch, the German playwright, was right:”There are men who struggle for one day, and they are good. Other strive and fight for many weeks ,months or years, and they are wonderful. But there are those who struggle all their life.Those are the utmostly indispensable, the necessary ones.” Ataturk was definitely one of the greatest crown jewels of Lady History.

Lautaro Toqui Mapuche

2008-11-09T20:24:00.000-08:00

71st entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on November 09:
1731 Benjamin Banneker Ellicott MD, black mathematician/surveyor (Wash DC) , in an era when the slavery-stained USA still thought “niggers” belonged nowhere near a pencil

1802 Elijah P Lovejoy American newspaper publisher/abolitionist, he certainly knew what he was doing! 1818 Ivan Turgenev Russia, novelist/poet/playwright (Fathers & Sons),one of the greatest literati of his time
1841 Edward VII king of England (1901-10),the playboy and glutton king
1928 Anne Sexton Newton MA, poet (Live or Die),the housewife poet,destined to do herself in by gas
1934 Carl Sagan NYC, astronomer/author/professor (Cosmos, Broca's Brain)one of a kind,definitely
Deaths which occurred on November 09:
1874 Israel Bak created 1st hebrew printing press, dies .Thank you Rae1952 Chaim Weizmann 1st President of Israel, dies at 57,certainly had ahard time1953 Abdul-Aziz ibn Sa'ud founder of Saudi Arabia, dies (born c 1880),one of the greatest satyrs of all time 1953 Dylan Thomas author-poet, dies in NY at 39,after having written many truths in verse
1970 Charles DeGaulle French President, dies at 79, he may have been a hero,but sure was a nasty dictator, no wonder the students hated him and revolted against his repression, nevertheless my dad named my darling ocelot after him
1991 Yves Montand actor, dies at 70 from a heart attack, after nearly causing multiple attacks in women due to his sexy crooning
On this day...
1526 Jews are expelled from Pressburg Hungary by Maria of Hapsburg, oh as usually happened
1918 Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates after German defeat in WW I, and flees shaking with fear to Belgium dangling his useless arm
1927 Giant Panda discovered, China for eveyone`s delight
1938 "Kristallnacht" (Crystal Night)-Nazi stormtroopers attacked Jews, Night of Long Knives when the Nazis as usual were so kind to Jews

NOVEMBER 9TH

While everyone rushes around,brawls,screams and lets their political passions get vented, I quietly observe how absurd we humans are. Animals are wiser than us, dearest heart. Vut even though they are loaded with wisdom,they have to die someday. I don`t know why but the dateof November 9th has always been a deadly one for me, and I don`t know if it is the shadow of that night in1938 when in Germany, the Nazis decided to make an attempt at wiping out all vestige of Jewish knowledge,prosperity and life itself in what became known as Crystal Night or the Night of Long Knives. Businesses, libraries, homes, all invaded, ripped to shreds, life torn away from my people. In my personal life, November 9th has always meant a good deal of grief. After my parents died in a plane crash while trying to reach Miami in order to flee from a totalitarian government, the order for total confiscation of their properties, the brutl snatching of their full estate, was issued and carried out on a day like today. Although the president back then, Daniel Ortega, who is now in power again due to the ignorance of my people, proclaimed he was democratic,he sure fell in love with my parents` wealth and took all he could away. That is democracy Nicaraguan-style, or democrazy?
In 2002 my cat Niña Mary Shelley died after pining away for her mate Joseph II of Habsburg, who had died in April that year. I still believe we could have done more for her, but sometimes our veterinarians are worse than any quack you find along. She died on June 9th,2002. The emptiness after her death would be huge for me. She left behind her three female kittens which were her adoptive kids, and the one in charge of raising them properly was Pharaoh Evander Holyfield, a green eyed Egyptian cat who had been a gift from my husband`s friend Angelica in an effort to provide consolation and company for the bereaved Niña Mary Shelley after her mate died.
In 2005, on November 9th we had a worse cat-related experience. One of our neighbors was an ailurophobe and since she never managed to get my husband into her bed, hell hath no fury as that of a woman scorned. 12 of the more than 20 cats we had were poisoned by her while we were out shopping, and when we returned home there was some of them lying there, already dead, others in the process of having convulsions before the Black Camel of Death took them. I couldn`t stop crying for days, and we buried them in a nearby baseball field. Carrying all those dear furry little bodies to their grave was an experience that will forever live in my nightmares. We still had some survivors left, but the memory of those hairy little angels will be with me even after I die. Of course, telling the police about it would do no good at all, since we live in an uncivilized country where cat hating is a national sport due to the ignorance of my people. The wicked woman who poisoned them was said to be a “pillar of the Pentecostal church”. That is why I am convinced that excessive religious zeal is always a mask for the basest, most disgusting of people.
Today is November 9th, and cat death has knocked at my door again. While we lived in an ugly place called Lindavista, our next door neighbour was given a small,grey tabby kitten. Knowing that her dogs weren`t used to having cats around,she did a wise thing. She gave the little beast to my husband,and when my daughter returned from class the
Crush was instantly solidified. Scrawny, small and weak-looking, the kitten took an instant liking to two females in my family:the black Cocker Spaniel bitch Pompey,and my kid. My daughter would name him Lautaro after the greatest military strategist of the Araucano-Mapuche nation of Chile. Her dog would become his surrogate mother, being able to nurse him even though she was a virgin. Constant sucking at her teat by little Lautaro managed to get her producing milk, The rich milk produced by his new mother allowed him to grow strong, sturdy and playful.He became a hunky cat with a glossy coat, and his enormous green eyes gave him a tiger.like look. Nobody would have believed him to have arrived so thin and emaciated. He became the constant companion of my daughter,waiting for her when she came home from the university. He was always there, supervising her while she did her homework. He even accepted her boyfriend with bonhomie, something my husband`s favourite cat-who had been born with my daughter acting as midwife-never did.
Lautaro never got sick, had a wonderful appetite and his looks got him admired by everyone who saw him. He grew up big,fat and sleek, completely devoted to his bitch mother. He nursed from her until the day he died,which was today. Our next-door neighbour called my husband over today in the morning. The cat had fallen into the traps of his two awful Pitbull terriers,and although Lautaro was in one piece with no holes poked into him,he had been badly smothered by them. The shamefaced dentist handed in the body to us and after identifying him, we gave him a decent burial, including the detail of crowning his grave with a broken indigenous pot(remember indigenous people used to bury their dead inside clay pots?) My daughter was shocked and sad. We all were. Lautaro wasn`t only our pet and master at he same time, but he taught us a very practical lesson by his special relationship with his mother the bitch.
He practiced tolerance and understanding to a point that only someone like Martin Luther King junior could have fully comprehended. We were all created equal for him, and as such, he dealt with us. He also taught us that it isn`t sharing the same bloodline what makes us family, but the understanding,love,caring and solidarity that binds beings. He never judged anyone,and was fair to all. Animals have such wisdom that if we imitated them a bit, we wouldn`t let ourselves be governed by base passions, idiotic prejudices and the eternal battle of the sexes, marriage wouldn`t have to be combat, working never a full invasion, simple life never an eternal struggle. I hope the lesson that this furry angel taught us in his brief passing through this world will not be forgotten, and we shall honor his dear memory by trying to improve ourselves as humans without having to step on other people`s heads to score futile points. Onto victory always, as Che Guevara said, my dearest Lautaro Toqui Lautaro!

The parting at dusk

2008-11-08T19:27:00.000-08:00

70 th entry for The Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates November 08:
1656 Sir Edmond Halley 1st to calculate comet's orbit (Halley's Comet),wore some of the funniest wigs in history
1883 Sir Arnold Bax London, Ireland, composer (Farewell My Youth, Cornish Rhapsody), how the English love to claim him
1900 Margaret Mitchell writer (Gone With the Wind), until she was gone under a taxi `s wheels who killed her
Events
1864 Abraham Lincoln elected to his 2nd term as President, this time he didn’t enter the White House through the backyard
1978 Carlos Fonseca Amador, founder of Frente Sandinista of Nicaragua ,is killed in Zinica, suspected someone from inside the organization got him removed from the way

THOSE TURNING POINTS IN LIFE

Usually we bang into a Wall of China somewhere along our path from birth to grave. At times we aren’t even aware of it happening, and we question ourselves why things are the way the turn out to be. Often, life,or nature, or kismet, has a way of showing us that we are in the way of something that has been fated for us. We take so many things for granted in life, and we want to dominate that beautiful but indomitable steed that is destiny, we want to feel masters of something. I started this book by a fortunate accident, in the most unusual of circumstances. I wanted something epistolary, perhaps because I have been shaped by different diaries of famous people. I also admire the French general Pierre Choderlos de Laclos `masterpiece The Dangerous Liaisons, written in a superb epistolary style and that is the reason why Laclos is considered the father of modern psychological novel. The day this scrapbook was begun, everything seemed to be as airborne as myself. I conjured angels even though I was aware I was using a lion figment of my cat imagination, and there goes my phrase again. I needed a muse, I had one on hand, what for who knows because many times we remember the work but not who was the one who begot it on us. Creation tends to be such a selfish act. But nobody wants to be called selfish so we invent or compose the most saccharine motivations in order for things to contain the necessary element of romance, we know it sells so well…. Writing is such a very selfish act of creation, we alone struggle at the keyboard, while those who don`t understand the demanding and spoiled devils that inhabit our imagination, ask themselves how callous or evil we can be. Dinners get cold, phones ring around us, letters go unanswered. The gravitational pull is there. We cannot escape, we are moons dancing around the Earth of our ideas, and it is very complicated to explain all the time. Can we fall one day into our own Earth, splat ,the moon falling on top of a continent. Have you ever dreamt of moons all floating around heaven, in different stages of their transformation? I often have that dream. Well we are all those moons, at our different stages in life. So the big thing about having a muse can be, to put it flatly, something very optional. More or less happens like the hen who can lay an egg cackling with satisfaction because the rooster humped her, but the hens at the farms where they produce eggs at industrial level, they can go without the gentleman cock. Bluntly, sorry, but some writers work like that. The angel is optional, like the nuts in the brownies that anyways taste delicious with or without them.
To tell the truth, I hate having to say that. But one thing brings another dancing in, and
Suddenly I join Hèctor Berlioz with his last but not first impression of Henrietta Smithson, the woman for whom he wrote the Symphonie Fantastique. What didn`t he do to conquer her? Brush a star with his fingertips, sigh like zephyr had gotten into his lungs? So I am left teetering over the edge, peeking into the abyss where I thought a crystal blue lake existed, only to find it is a huge gaping hole that yawns indifference shadows into my eyes. It had to happen, you may say. Buckets of ice cold water do fall from balconies. On our backs, which is the worse thing that can happen. We scream, drenched in our own waters of disappointment. Ha, told you so, whispers a small minion on that top corner of our eyelid, swinging contentedly with a seemingly innocuous smile on the small silver swing of our reactions. Again, I remember the phrase the Viscount Valmont tells his desperate and lovesick Madame de Volanges in Laclos` masterpiece. It is beyond my control. It is beyond my control. It always hurts to hear that. But it awakens us to our realities. Sometimes it is about time that we come out from our cotton candy cumulus clouds full of empty rain. The jolt is fantastic. The first question comes out, WHY? We feel frustrated, like when a glass blower in Murano sees the bottle he `s working on popping off.
So I will resort to using a piece of logic from one of my favourite authors and rulers: Suleyman the Magnificent, the best the Ottoman dynasty ever produced. The muse always acts like a nanny, loving mother or wet nurse. She guides the baby the author is with his first paces, step by step. She kisses the hurt knee ok, holds your hand, gives you a nudge. Follows you, smiles so dazzlingly sometimes you think you are falling in love. The spark may be there. But she knows sooner or later you have to try your own engine.
See if it works. So one day, with a wistful expression on her face, she lets you go on your own. She may even administer a well needed slap on the ass, or on the face. You may cry for a while, but suddenly you discover your own two feet and your own motor is the one who is running your steady step. Blessed laws by Newton, holy inertia. You have gone on your own, nobody will stop you now. The transition may be painful. Sooner or later you will express your thanks, maybe not now. So the muse sees her kid walking away slowly, may wave, shed a subrepticious tear. It is the turning point in your life, a road not taken in your works, and may Robert Frost forgive me for overusing the title of his best-know poem. The hinge of circumstances has opened.
You go your way. The rest comes by itself, although the first steps out of the fearful wheelchair are faltering.
It is hard to let go, hard to say onto victory always as Che Guevara said. But all greetings bring the farewells inside. They are pregnant with possibilities of parting. We may weep, when nobody sees us because we are so proud. We make futile promises.
We know we will not fulfil them, but they help to oil the knot of a final goodbye that we want to convert into a see you later.
The hardest thing to do in life is to give the last kiss, shake hands and turn around to face the horizon and start walking, alone. Believe me it is hard, heart wrenching. But still we do it. We subreptitiously let out a diamond tear when Jerry packs his stuff into a bandanna, pokes a stick into the satchel, hangs it over his shoulder and says goodbye to Tom. We would rather be dead than admit that farewells are full of thorns. So we don`t look back…until maybe we are at a safe distance, when the memories overtake us, we give a last glimpse like Lot`s wife and our yearning becomes a pillar of salt inside our heart. Hasta la vista baby, said jokingly beefcake Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator II. Now I understand, and I still don`t want to chuckle. Saying thank you is necessary, even if the torn heart still bleeds inside.

None but the Lonely Heart

2008-11-06T20:04:00.000-08:00

69th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates on November 06:
1558 Thomas Kyd English dramatist (Spanish Tragedy) , no kidding going on here1661 Charles II last Habsburg king of Spain (1665-1700),so deformed he couldn`t even have kids
1771 Alois Senefelder inventor (lithography)we owe him so much!
1814 Adolphe Sax Belgium, musician/inventor (saxophone) invented what people call the saxophone due to his instrument`s sensuous sound 1851 Charles H Dow co-founded Dow Jones/1st editor of Wall St Journal ,and since then his last name is synonymous to headaches1854 John Phillip Sousa Wash DC, march king (Stars & Stripes Forever,The March of all Animal Kingdom),the unique and melodious March King1860 Ignace Jan Paderewski Kurylowka Poland, composer/pianist/patriot,played like a politician, made politics like a prima donna pianist
Deaths which occurred on November 06:
1632 King Gustavus Aldophus of Sweden, dies in battle, left him there naked with his butt into the air,then his crybaby widow took his heart out and hung it over her bed
1893 Peter Ilitch Tchaikovsky of cholera,after having drunk a glass of unboiled water,greatest Russian composer,author of Swan Lake,The Nutcracker and his famous Diary in which he confessed his homosexuality,I adore him so much it almost hurts
1796 Empress Catherine II the Great of Russia dies while showering,hey she was hot but was not coupling with a horse as black male historian envy`s legend has it

Events
1813 Chilpancingo congress declares Mexico independent of Spain,wow finally1844 Spain grants Dominican Rep independence,was about time
1917 Bolshevik revolution begins with the capture of the Winter Palace,yessssss,got the gobbling family that ruined Russia,can`t imagine how they would later become saints of the Russian Orthodox Church

Peter
I wouldn`t have chosen to die of cholera. Too painful,rather messy. How can someone who set us to sing,even a baby like I was sang his music,die in such a tasteless fashion? I have so many questions to ask him,dearest reader of every single day that I breathe, and I wish someone would gurantee me that there is a hell or a heaven or half sewn together purgatory,somewhere that I can look into to find him there, with his blue eyes, his elegant polar bear beard, and question him what was his formula for producing such seamless, flawless and such tear- jerking music. One might ask me,ma`am, you do produce tear-jerkers in this same Colonel`s Scrapbook, or your story about My TellTale Heart, what do you want more salty tears for?
I have loved Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky since I was a baby, or maybe in my mother`s belly I was already his fan. Still in my crib,before I learned to walk,I chilled everyone when at 7 months old,I sang the introduction to The Nutcracker. Everyone listening could distinguish it was The Nutcracker. Nothing else.
From that moment on Peter and I became fast friends. When I had the great luck of being owned by the most beautiful cat ion the world, my pet Torta, it would have been a sin not to introduce her to such heavenly music. So when my mother really wanted to quiet both of us nasty little vase-breaking beasts, she would place a stack of records containing Peter`s music on the record player. That was the end of our insolence. We would sit down on the old Austrian sofa made of simple polished wicker, and drool. We both learned Peter`s music by heart, maybe because it was aimed exactly at the heart.
Then,it was inevitable that the grey-eyed, pudgy little me who got sent to study ballet with our premier danseur Heriberto Mercado, would fall in love more steadily with Peter. He is the man to listen to when you study classical ballet. Dressed in my pale pink tutu,hair rolled up in a bun trying to imitate Anna Pavlova(we have such gall, when we are young kids), Peter was my great companion at the barre, He would sweep me into the air,correct my port de bras.
At age five I was the White Cat from the Cat in Boots pas de deux in the Sleeping Beauty,and I tried to look graceful, but I really looked like a pregnant Siberian tigress. An effort was made because my mom paid juicy sums to see her cub in ballet tights,so I was re-cast as the Swan Queen in Swan Lake,and try as I might
to look like a swan I was really a dancing stuffed turkey. I knew I was never going to be Nicaragua`s competition for Tamara Karsavina,or Mathilde Kschessinskaya.
But I found a way to keep Peter with me all my life,and I became musically trained. The piano wasn’t Chopin or Liszt for me, it was Tchaikovsky.So many years of playing his music, and then the thunderclap fell.
I was a student at the French Conservatory when we had to read everything about Peter. Everything meant also his Diary. Unexpurgated version. My ears burned and I turned red .Why hadn`t anybody bothered to prepare me for this? I have nothing against gays, dearest reader. I respect their way of life, it is a question of taste, not a malady. Reading his diary left me drained. I cried when nobody saw me. I couldn’t reject Peter out of prejudice, by judging what he did without his pants on. I would have to hate Alexander the Great, Leonardo Da Vinci and Louis XIVth younger brother. No way. How scared could Petr have been in a double morality society? He called his homosexuality Sensation X. His brother Modeste was one of his guys. So afraid of losing his job, of being seen in public with his guy.
The same society that a century before had seen Catherine the Great romping around with the ancestor of composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov…who was envious of Peter`s enormous success. Slowly I assimilated Petr`s homosexuality. He had given me too many intense moments of joy with his music for me to ever discriminate against him.
I can`t stop believing Peter committed suicide. He had just premiered his last symphony,Pathetique, and he had lost his great patroness Nadezhdavon Meck,who was alike a mother, patroness, platonic lover and confidante all wrapped into one nice package. Drinking unboiled water while cholera swept across Russia in a big epidemic was the unwisest thing a person could do. I wouldn `t have chosen to do myself in like that, if I had ever thought about such nonsense as killing myself.
Peter has always been a sort of bearded guardian angel for me,if angels would really exist. It is funny that Russià s greatest genius should have died the way he did. In reality,he was always the embodiment of his own beautiful song None but the Lonely Heart. So that is why I shall always remember him with my heart in my hand set out towards him.

BUT THE SUNS BEEN QUITE KIND

2008-11-05T18:49:00.000-08:00

68th entry to the colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates November 05:
1849 Rui Benedetto Barbosa Brazil, statesman/jurist/essayist/civil liberties ,author of Pantanal,great novelist and environmentalist,said,”Man is the only creature on earth who eats when not hungry,drinks when not thirsty,that is why he is doomed”1885 Will Durant writer/historian (Story of Civilization) read his books,they are fun1887 Paul Wittgenstein Vienna Austria, left hand specialist pianist, he lost his right arm fighting in World War I,so Ravel wrote the Concerto for the Left Hand for him
1913 Vivien Leigh (Gone With Wind) unforgettable Scarlet OHara on the film Gone with the Wind,ended up cuckoo
1942 Art Garfunkel NYC, singer/actor (Sounds of Silence, Carnal Knowledge) better composer than actor1942 Elke Sommer Berlin Germany, actress (Oscar, 10 Little Indians),could never be as sexy as Brigitte Bardot
Deaths
1989 Vladimir Horowitz pianist, dies at 85,one of the greatest interpreters of Chopin`s music,a Jew,of course
Events
1872 Susan B Anthony fined $100 for trying to vote for Ulysses S Grant, she was one hell of a suffraggette 1875 Susan B Anthony arrested for attempting to vote, men could vote just because of their configuration,imagine

UNCHARTED TERRITORY

We all have a map of our chores, pains and duties we may neglect or comply with everyday. Things that hamper our liberty of movement. Obstacles,hindrances,the thorns of our own crown that we devise on our own or let our boss wield over our tired forehead. So there I was walking alone, in a flowered dress with which I look like a happy pregnant animal. In my bag,the placement tests for fifty soemthing cadets from a military academy, their immediate destiny in my iguana-fingered hands. I want under the shady road, my own road not taken but that somehow is entwined with your road, your path, parallel to mine,hoping we touch,right my reader. The sunshine has refused to follow the sun`s steps and it is 5 pm but the light still kisses my round cheek. I enter a pastry outlet at the end of the road that takes me usually to my job. My diabetic automatic pilot guides my hand so I unconsciously stay away from those tempting cream and fruit scones laden with powdered sugar, my eyes veer from that chocolate fudge cake that seems to yell at me in sensuous Edith Piaf voice,”Eat me.” So I end up sipping iced tea, with a cucumber sandwich on pumpernickel. My doctor would smile.
It`s funny,we women are almost never left alone to our own devices. Always, there will be a man to tell us what to do our to limit our civil liberties. Did youpunch your entry card dear? Did you report to husband that you will be late,give itinerary? Today I am alone, walking upon a shaded trail few people know.I choose what I will eat. How many times do I get my food chosen for? Starting by the house menu, do I really cook all those dips and vegetables I so love?
But I am not bitter.I eat slowly, and I make the shopping list for the supermarket. All the wants and whims of a household which by definition should be a home. Definitions are so messed up now. I walk, I stroll,I stride down the big boulevard that goes down to Plaza españa,where the supermarket is. Half a kilometre walk, no sweat. The late afternoon is evolving into a cool evening. Two of my friends pass by in their cars,stop,offer me a ride. Thanks but no thanks. I just want to walk. Only those of us who have been on a wheelchair know how delicious it is to walk again without walking aid or cane or braces. It is like nectar for the bones, soma for the feet. Diriangèn`s descendant walking without a care in her own fat and so many times broken body.
Hair blowing in the wind,satisfied only by the fact that she is alive. The feeling every beats must have at sunset, as if he or she has been just created, brand new.
Once in the supermarket,I am amazed at the gimmicks dirty capitalism will do to strip us of our money. Precooked potatoes in any capricious form, divorced from the nutritious value of that food Columbus took with him from our world. The vitamins are taken off,and perfumed garbage is given to us.No wonder that of 6 million Nicaraguans, 500 thousand of us are diabetics, some 750 thousands have high blood pressure and may I not believe the quantity that still are classified as dangerous cholesterolics. But if we look into their supermarket carts,we have the most logical of explanations.We dig iour own graves with our dentures or natural teeth, burrowing,gnawing into food insanity. We feel ashamed not to consume all those cold pies USA exports so that they will also give us all those diseases through our bad habits. If we don`t take something made in USA we feel poor,guilty,tacky. As if USA has ever had its own gastronomy.
But we think we have to buy the American lettuce,the arugula,because it is chic, when we produce better lettuce of that type in the mountains of our own Jinotega. How much forest has to be cleared for a lettuce patch?Are we killing our environment to stuff ourselves as pigs? Ruii B.barbosa`s words come to me again.
We prefer to pay for a lousy imported product even when ours is better. The curse of Malitzin,the Aztec beauty who preferred to be the mistress of Spaniard Hernàn Cortès and not the wife of an Aztec man. But my cart is brimming with national products.I will not buy Dos Pinos from Costa Rica, I refuse to feed those who want to snatch away MY San Juan River. When I go alone to the supermarket I can do this, but my daughter and husband have another way of seeing life. Each to his own folly. I am a very patriotic housewife, maybe that will be my downfall.
What a delight not to have someone along saying what to do next. I love being on my own,and I realize suddenly how seldom I am only with myself. Always watched, always at short length. Never too far from the camera. And now, as a common cilivian with no stars on my shoulders, I stroll through the aisles of this place wondering why we love to poison ourselves slowly through our treacherous taste buds. I feel like the cat who dreamt -while he was being spayed under anesthesia- that the moon is a ball of cheese where thousands of mice live, and he strolls taking a look around and wants to pick the best one to chase. Too bad the cat wakes up to find his nuts gone. I wake up just like the cat in the cheese moon full of mice, at the cashier when I realize all my money (my own nuts?)will be gone in a swish because now everything is so expensive. So when my daughter asks me how much something cost, I tell her not to be so mannerless as to curtail my appetite.
I walk out of the supermarket feeling fleeced but satisfied I had enough to cover the bill. Barely enough left for a luxury: taxi to go home. I climb in,knowing that a bus would have meant crushed eggs just ready to be fried into an omelette, spilled skim milk for my kid and broken spaghettis. Getting home 70 minutes afterwards, angry and all smashed up. I lean back on the soft seat of the brand new taxi. It smells clean. Sometimes you get into taxis and you get off smelling like anything, not all of it perfumed. Or the broken seat springs tear your clothes apart. The driver zooms silkily through the early evening traffic, barely missing a crowded bus, flying by a big Coca cola truck.
It is during rare moments like this outing I had today when I discover the true difference in meaning between solitude and loneliness.
No dictionary really can do that.
Solitude is voluntary,desire,wanted,chosen,longed for. You await it, you seek it. Like I did today after I talked to you,perhaps so I could be with you better. Solitude always has a voluntary shadow,one you carry,which you call. Loneliness is the lack of the desired person. It is bitter,gnawing like a furious rodent. It hurts and bleeds copiously ,like a hemophiliac patient after a fall. It strangles you.
Many an English teacher may say I have to be nuts to realize the difference between solitude and loneliness on a shopping spree. Definitions many times are uncharted territories, DMZs between both Koreas, twilight zones. No man`s land. Beyond delimited, clear borders Non demarcatory lines tend to confuse us, my dearest heart.
We feel out of step So our footfalls grow insecure.
But tonight the sun has been quite kind,as Elton John said in his hit Your Song, as I wrote this entry(not a song),and it is for people like you dearest reader and may Sir Elton John forgive me for using his lyrics, that keep this book turned on.

Reality versus tale

2008-10-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

October 29,th 67th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
births
1875 Marie queen consort of Ferdinand I of Romania (1914-27),what a raunchy lady she was with her Stirbo1882 Jean Giraudoux Bellac France, playwright (glantine, Provinciales) wonderful reads1884 Bela Lugosi horror actor (Dracula, Body Snatcher), looks like a friend >I had in Canada before the chap ate breakfast
1912 Salvador Cardenal, foremost Nicaraguan musicologist,my adored teacher
Deaths which occurred on October 29:
1618 Sir Walter Raleigh is executed in London, so being gallant never pays your way except to hell 1885 George B McClellan Union army general, dies at 58, a great military name 1901 Leon Czolcosz assassin of President McKinley, is executed on the electric chair,sure got fried while Edison watched 1911 Joseph Pulitzer American newspaperman, dies in Charleston, SC, he was the one to whom we owe the platform for the Statue of Liberty,monument which was initially disliked by the Americans and even called “The French Whore” when they got it as a gift from France
Birthdates October 30:
1735 John Adams Braintree, Mass (F) 2nd pres (1797-1801)was so patriotic,he even died on a 4th of July 1821 Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski Russian novelist & short-story writer, the advocate for the poor and miserable,epileptic,lieutenant and almost executed
1871 Paul Valery France, poet/essayist/critic (La Jeune)he is more famous for having Picasso steal off his wife Gala than for anything he wrote 1873 Francisco Madero Mexico, revolutionary, president (1911-13), knocked on wood for him1885 Ezra Pound Hailey, Idaho, poet (Cantos)a bit too bigoted for my taste
Events
1270 8th & last crusade is launched, last of follies in the name of a god nobody is 600 per went sure it exists
Birthdates on October 31:
1632 Jan Vermeer ,Dutch painter (Procuress, The Astronomer,Girl with the Pearl Earring) , poor guy,his marital life was a mess justover a lost pearl earring that reappeared on a painting1795 John Keats London, England, romantic poet (Ode to a Grecian Urn),he was only 25 when he kicked the bucket,TB took him
1887 Chiang Kai-shek Chekiang Province, China, pres of Nationalist China),this ugly and selfish guy had the temerity to offer General MacArthur unlimited power if both,after the Korean War,went to kick the shit out of Mao Tse Tung, no wonder old Comrade Mao would laugh at him until piss ran down his pants and his stomach hurt!
Deaths which occurred on October 31:1865 William Parson 3rd Earl of Rosse & maker of large telescopes, dies ,what would he have seen these days, Internet Sattelites?1918 Count Stephen Tisza Hungarian Prime Minister assassinated by soldiers, wow they always turn on you1926 Erich Weiss better known as magician Harry Houdini, dies in Detroit, only death could have caught him
1984 Indira Gandhi PM of India assassinated by 2 of her Sikh bodyguards while getting out of the car, and she nearly killed me because I cried a whole San Juan River over her and got very sick

THE REALITIES BEYOND HALLOWEEN

While all thos countries where there was Irish influence celebrate their Halloween, like USA, Canada,Australia and others, I wonder to myself if reality isn`t a perpetual spook show. Here in Nicaragua,we have always been considered a backyard for gringos,as we affectionately or pejoratively call Americans here. So our desperate merchants,eager to please and sell, decorate their windows with pumpkins, black cats,spiders,witches, jackò`lanterns and all the witchy memorabilia they can dish out. It is not our custom. No thanks. Halloween is Celtic,not even American, because USA a the melting pot it is, has no culture of their own but is a ragbag of all the inmigrants who came to seek for the American dream and got themselves a long-term nightmare. Halloween comes from the Druids,the original Irish before Saint Patrick had the hell of an idea of making them convert to Christianity. Hall of weens is the eve of dead souls,and witches were used as live telephones to bring down those spirits to chat with them for a while. More or less what we do in internet,only we do it with live people, right dearest of all readers? So the witches had a busy night on a night like tonight, god loaded with requests and coins. Good business. Like when I have several placement tests to make at different enterprises when bosses want to know if who they hired really has an inkling of what to do in English.
I don`t like Halloween,although I have used it as materials for my short stories. My dad used to say that as a kid I looked klike a jackò`lantern,big rabbit teeth and shining eyes, round faced little hellion. I have the ahuizotes or black spooks from Masaya, shadow black ghosts who come to grab you when dead points at you. Like in Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze when he was still delicious. They have glowing embers for eyes, they are like psychopomps to guide you to hell. Sounds romantic,for I wouldn`t like to go to hell alone and without my shadow. I have my high heeled floozie, a Spanish party girl in times of the province, not the republic, of Nicaragua. She wore high heels and danced a lot until the angry wife of her lover stabbed her in the belly,spilling her guts out in the middle of the dance floor. I also have the Witch Monkey Teodora, from Leòn-our second largest city in Nicaragua. Teodora was originally a very sexy married lady who loved to play around because her husband was boring,so every night she would wait until he slept, put a broom next to him to take her place, sing a demonic chant,go to the back yard,strip under a tamarind tree, then moan to herself so her human flesh slipped off her bones and then she became a black monkey.free to roam and pick up guys. One day,her husband didn’t quite take the spell well enough,and he woke at midnight seeking for his wife.He found a huge pan of meat lying in the yard,and believing it was the meat for a succulent dish to be prepared,he salted it and thus broke his wife`s pact with the devil.When Theo came back from her fun,she stepped into the pile of salted meat and reversed her incantation but the salt had broken the spell and she was left in the shape of a nice monkey which up till now roams the roofs of Leòn.Her husbnd was a bit sad at the beginning,but then he found himself another wife,a faithful one this time. I don`t need jackò`lanterns, lovely, I have the Wailer, who according to legend was a well born Spanish girl who fell in love with a married indigenous chieftain.After they had their fun,she became pregnant but her dad ordered her to get rid of the baby as not to shame the family`s good name(which obviously lay between her legs). The poor girl went to the Chiquito River and threw her baby there to drown, but then she regretted tat and jumped into the water.It was too late,the baby was downstream and she died too.Her wails for her baby are still heard on moonlit nights,the old Leonese townsfolk say. Who needs a sad bat when I have the Nahua cart,with squared wheels and death riding shotgun,driving ghost oxen, and all kinds of spooks laughing?This cart cannot turn at corners,and continues it lugubrious,straight and macabre trip down the city at midnight.
I will never cry for trick or treat. I have the long haired spook,our Cegua, a sexy woman who has long hair,dresses in black and chases men who are out philandering, having sex with them and then returning them to their wives completely stupid. More than they were originally,which is to say a lot. What about my lovely pair of hoofies,the black and the white?Since here we are as racists as in the Deep South of USA, the white hoofy protects those who work on the night shift,the secutrity guards,workers of the exploited free zone where those Koreans and Taiwanese come to bleed our workers dry without having to pay taxes. The hoofy looks like the Taco Bell dog(the one Adam Sandler ran over,what a sadistic sob), a Chihuahua like my dad`s Le Perro who died leving him with a bleedingheart for weeks on end. The white one is good. The black one chases all those who go to partouzes,orgies and burglaring sprees.
Halloween and fright.Reality more often creates worse stories than any a horror writer like E.A,Poe,Lovecraft,Iran Levin or even Stephen King,and not leaving myself behind,can create. It was on Halloween that my favourite stateswoman was killed,Indira Gandhi. I was capturing a pirate signal of CNN in 1984 when thwere appeared the news.First that she was shot. Then that she had died. Automatically, a pain on my chest settled in. My eyes started raining. Yes,dearest.raining. WEhere does the love go when someone you cherish dies? Because I loved her. I met her at a sales in a huge department store in Paris in the early 80s..I was with my uncle Silvio buying jeans,when he spotted her.A nice housewife with covered hair,perusing some silk stockings. Silvio shyly walked up to her,and after she told him he was one of the handsomest men she had ever met, she asked me to come forward.She at first thought I was Indian,too. Those 16 minutes in which I spoke to her, enjoying how she mentioned by adored bards Ruben Darìo and salomòn de la Selva,even reciting Selva`s The Bullet, are to live forever in me. Love at first sight,maybe not in sexual context, does exist and it happened to me with Indira. What a nightmare for me to imagine her dismay at seeing her bodyguard fire at her. My imagination has been a blessing many times,but in the case of Indira`s magnicide,it played awful tricks on me, almost leading me to hell fire. No wonder I caught the worst malaria possible,and ended up weighing 98 pounds by the end of November. That was spookiest and more scary than any Halloween nightmare anyone could imagine. Still to this day,I remember Indira and how she was killed. I hated the sight of George Bush sr,then vicepresident of USA,hypocritically saying how he regretted her passing. To close this with a note of fright, a huge black moth loomed over me and sent me screaming.Then we say fear is basic but not stifling, amd specially on a Halloween night.

just ask

2008-10-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

Entry ·66 for the Colonel`s Scrapbook

Born on October 25th

1825 Johann Strauss (the younger) composer (Waltz King), to whom the great Johannes Brahms wrote on a piece of music paper containing The Blue Danude, “unfortunately not by me”1838 Georges Bizet France, composer (Carmen), too bad he died opf chagrin after one of his masterpieces was severely criticized
1881 Pablo Picasso Spain, artist (3 Dancers, Guernica)greatest sexist of all, a ladykiller, egotistical, hard hearted manipulator, he may be the father of Cubism but he was a loathsome satyr
1967 Julia Roberts Smyma, Georgia, actress (Mystic Pizza, Pretty Woman)she is a great actress

Deaths which occurred on October 25:
1400 Geofrey Chaucer author, dies in London, what a real genius he was1892 Caroline Harrison Pres Benjamin Harrison's wife, dies at 60
1973 Abebe Bikila Ethiopian marathoner (Olympic -gold 1960, 64), dies at 46,he ran his marathon in the Tokyo Olympics only weeks after having an appendectomy

1415 Battle of Agincourt, Welsh longbow defeats the armored knight,this was during the Hundred Year War between England and France
1760 George III ascends the British throne, nicknamed Farmer George for his plans for the peasants,soon he went cuckoo, pissed in his nightshirt and ran screaming through Whitehall so he got crazy enough to lose the colonies in America
1764 John Adams marries Abigail Smith (marriage lasts 54 years) how could they put up with each other so long?

Birthdates which occurred on October 26:
1466 Desiderius Erasmus Holland, scholar/author (In Praise of Folly)a real egghead if there has been any 1685 Domenico Scarlatti Naples Italy, composer/harpsichordist ,part of the father and son team who made a delight of harpsichord music1759 Georges Danton France, leader during the French Revoluton who at the end didn`t like the monster he created and gave up hios head to the guillotine
1879 Leon Trotsky Russian revolutionary ,creator of the Red Army,too bad he died with an icepick into his brilliant brain
1917 Felix the Cat cartoon character, oh do we need laughter to heal our scratches the cat of life makes on us
1919 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Aryamehr Shah of Iran (1941-79), the Ayatollah`s least favourite guy
Deaths which occurred on October 26:
901 King Alfred the Great, dies, and we ask how great he really was?
On this day...
1825 Erie Canal between Hudson River & Lake Erie opened ,it was about time1863 Worldwide Red Cross organized in Geneva, did Dunant ever imagine how many people would use his dream to make money on their own for less noble purposes?
1916 Margaret Sanger arrested for obscenity (advocating birth control), this is the mother of the future Pill along with Dr.Gregory Pincus,thank you milady, a thousand thanks for liberating women from our sexual slavery.

THE MUSES

In ancient Greece, each type of art had its muse, flimsily dressed pretty chicks to inspire the poets and painters and musicians, Terpsichore for dance, Euterpe for music, Thalia for theatre, Clìo for history. All of us have muses, though we may not confess anything about their existence. Some of us had mechanized our writing to such a degree that we could fire all muses if we had a mind to do it, but to tell you the truth,discipline may get you to work, but only a spurt of magic milk from the Muses`teat can produce those seamless,wonderful sheets like Mozart`s symphonies or Dvorak`s Slavonic Dances. Whoever tells you than eating an egg like those white ones produced for supermarkets is the same as eating a real one made by the rooster on top of the hen is giving you a lot of codswallop. Muses are necessary,you should know better than to question about it.
Ok, but recently I have had so many questions about muses. Particularly about the ones used in my corel paint based collages. Who are they? Have I ever been in love with any of them, or had a fling? Is there any specific reason why they are there?
I know you want to ask questions, dearest reader, and you have the full right to do so. But somehow, you never do, you make no use of that right. Th question mark peeps over the rim of your glasses, riding low on the broken bridge of your nose that I have come to cherish so much. I will try to explain how things happen when I am going to create any of those collages.
Mostof them are created to illustrate my own short stories, because nobody like me, the author,can know what I mean through them. The picture must give a basic idea of the plot,setting or timeof my short story. Since many of them have a strong historical background, many times I have to draw out pictures or llustrations about the historical personalities in the grain of the story. For example, getting pictures of the Russian composer Modeste Mussorgsky was an ordeal,for there are few in existence.It seems the chap didn`t like to be photographed when he was weaving home, droving a herd of imaginary pigs due to his inebriation with good vodka. Nevertheless, I have always been in love with his music and his potential, and I wanted to write something soppy, so both The Letter from The Russian Heart and its illustration are hopelessly sugary,as befits to be created by a diabetic like me. Sometimes my own student`s pictures have been useful for me, and when I have needed real live models that I can pinch into posing,it has been a good experience. Jorge Luis Padilla`s halo on unruly hair decorated Encephalia, my gothic story about Ruben Darìo+`s brain being put into a kidnapped baby. My star student Yaderisrael became the nefarious and sadistic Serbian colonel in The Violoncello of Serbia, and the file pictures I have of Josip Broz Tito had the chance to leave the moldened bunker in which I had stored them.
To tell you the truth,many times I seek for ugly male models so they won`t upstage me in case I am combining my self with them on the collage. I used a spoiled brat named Paul from my profile in Hi5 and although in real life he could never pose in a Calvin Klein jeans for ads to make Bill Clinton jump out of his shoes, his ugliness was perfect for the creation I needed to push out of my brain. But even ugly men can turn fiendishly arrogant when used as models.Maybe it is too much attention for them. It can happen.I wll never forget the elegant and sexy Russian countess I met in France, who was my college classmates and once proposed to Ehab,a very ugly and skinny Moroccan, to come up and see her sometime,like Mae West used to croon so sexily. The Arab was so excited because he believed the countess was making a pass at him,so he arrived in Passy so perfumed that the Countess`dogs fainted and didn`t bite him. Once in the bedroom where she put him, he quickly obeyed when she asked him to strip naked for her. He believed he was going to have a wild porn show protagonized by himself and the countess, and his equipment was running rampant and randy when in burst the countess`three young kids. She told them,”Look at this poor man, if you don`t eat your meals soon you will look like him!” The three blond children just laughed and ran screaming, Ehab`s equipment just drooped and the countess gave him 500 dollars for posing. Then she called a taxi to get him out of her mansion. Model for one day,gigolo for nothing. Well, I don`t ask men to pose nude for me, of course, and some of the pictures in my gallery contain guys with whom I have barely crossed a word with, people with whom I would never build a life together, faces and torsos only valuable for their integration into the whole picture. Recently I used a very pale, fortysh white workingman for two pictures .I had met him on the internet and I knew from the first day I saw him he would become a model, because that was what I was looking for. I simply needed that type of fellow for the collage,and I sure got what I wished.Un -luckily I don`t have the time to chat with him assiduously,as he would wish,specially if I were willing to catwalk for him on webcam.
People tend to believe that anything a designer or author publishes must have a love affair or at least a one-night stand lurking in the background. I am very sorry to disappoint those sex.obsessed people who want to imagine me getting laid at the drop of a hat. Being a muse or model is no sure fire guarantee that I will be whisked away of¡n a white horse.
Now.some pictures have been worked by me in order to express those feelings I never let out in public. You know which ones they are,dearest reader. They were created in moment when I had no other choice but to work them out if I really wanted to be honest and sincere, private words said in public, like poet T.S Eliot once said in a poem to his wife. The pictures having such a muse will always elicit that phrase by Jean Alexander of Normandie about future generations asking the details of why and when and for whom his poems were written. He had his Henri. I have you. Are your questions answered? You never spoke them out loud,but I read them in your eyes.

The United Natterers

2008-10-24T21:52:00.000-07:00

65th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates for October 23:
1752 Nicolas Appert inventor (food canning, bouillon tablet) he eased things for us cooks1868 Rama V [Chulalongkorn], leader of Thailand (-1910),fredd the slaves and was an enlightened ruler, star pupil of Anna Leon Owens(The King and I)
1940 Edison do Nacimiento Arantes,Pelè ‚ Brazil, soccer player extraordinaire (NY Cosmos),the Black peral, Xuxa`s boyfriend
Events:

1679 Meal Tub Plot against James II of England, In England, nonexistent conspiracy to prevent the accession of the Duke of York, the future James II, invented by Thomas Dangerfield in 1679 during the attempts to pass the Exclusion Bills. Dangerfield was initially believed in the atmosphere of panic arising from the Popish Plot, but he was soon discredited and then claimed the plot was a false trail laid by Catholics to conceal a real conspiracy. The name came from the meal tub under which Dangerfield claimed to have found evidence of the plot, what a bit of codswallop!

1890 The opera "Prince Igor" by Aleksander Borodin is produced (St Petersburg), now the dances that come in it are very popular and Julio Iglesias even plagiarized one of them for his cheap croons
1942 During WW II, Britain launches major offensive at El Alamein, Egypt,this would make Bernard Law Montgomery, Monty, a military superstar after he beat Erwin Rommel
1958 Soviet novelist Boris Pasternak, wins Nobel Prize for Literature, but he wasn’t allowed to go and walk like a peacock for his award,poor chap

Birthdates which occurred on October 24:
1632 Antony van Leeuwenhoek Dutch, naturalist (Philosophical Transactions),what would he have seen under his microscope nowadays?, 1788 Sarah Josepha Hale author (Mary Had a Little Lamb) ,couldn`t she produce anything better?

1890 Chicago Mainbocher uniform designer (Red Cross, Girl Scouts, Waves),supposedly sooooooooo chic
Deaths which occurred on October 24:
1537 Jane Seymour 3rd wife of Henry VIII, dies after giving birth to her husband`s only legitimate male, but she never washed her off her birth blood and thus she rotted to death, sorry folks,crude details

1601 Tycho Brahe astronomer, dies in Prague at age 54 after being royally protected in the full sense of the word1957 Christian Dior French designer, dies at 52 in Italy, not very original but tres chic
1939 Nylon stockings go on sale for 1st time (Wilmington Delaware) ,another torture instrument for women,yuck1940 40 hour work week goes into effect (Fair Labor Standards of 1938)and curiously the one who promoted it was the fascist, anti-Semitic and hypocritical Henry Ford
1940 Japan eliminates US terms (strike, play ball) from baseball, great, I applaud, why barbarize such a nice language as Japanese.We in Nicaragua who have the honor of speaking Spanish-the most perfect language on earth. should do the same
1945 United Nations Charter becomes effective…what for? Only to consume lots of money and for the officials to believe they are kissing cousins of god?
1970 Salvador Allende Gossens elected president of Chile, little did he know what he would have to do three years later in La Moneda

THE SUPREME STUPIDITY OF DIPLOMACY

If I would have been an ambassadress, I would have gotten my country into uncountable wars. I always put my foot in my mouth., and say what is not expected for the occasion. So that is why what I will write about today will probably leave everything messed up and everyone gaping at me in horror or disgust. I believe the United Nations should be shut down. Better still, it should have never been created. Lapidary words, right? Let`s take it from the beginning, dearest of readers. For me diplomacy is just another way of dressing hypocrisy and trying to turn her into a lady. But how can I forgot my adored Korean student, Jung Yon An, who told me that in Korea, a lady who often proclaims to be a lady, is probably no lady at all? The Organization of the United Nations was tailored with the sad abortion of another organization, Like Woodrow Wilson `s pet project of the League of Nations, it was a stillborn baby. And there is only one sane thing to do with a corpse :bury it.
Ok, so World War I ended with the Treaty of Bersailless(the second one to be called so,because the first one was when the USA became independent,I don’t know why Americans love treaties called Versailles, maybe they want to be artificially elegant) and November 11th,the day the armistice was signed in 1918,became Veterans`Day. While in Paris, old Woodrow Woodpecker Wilson refused to heed what a patriot called Nguyen THrat Tat (Ho Chi Mihn) told him about self determination for people of Viet Nam, but since these people weren`t whites who cared about independence or if the Frenchies mistreated them? That was their lot for being slanted-eyed! Ok so the League of Nations was a dream,a nightmare in the wool, and out of that botched abortion in 1945 would spring the UN. Supposedly it was fashioned to stop all war conflicts before they were even thought up of. Wow,so preventive and wonderful.With godlike powers to stop everything,like Superman wearing his underwear on top of his tights. But Superman doesn’t fit into everybody`s imagination, nor does the UN as a peacemaker. Not even a cardiac patient`s pacemaker,because the world`s heart is already dead.
I remember while I was in elementary and even high school-and I went to an expensive private school -where you were brainwashed into thinking that the American Dream was not a nightmare, to think in English to oppress your people, and to eat apple pie-that UN Day was sacred, everyone had to genuflect and thank the White God for this blessing of an organization. The middle American loves pageants even though they are a festival of silliness, and we had to spend large sums of money getting silken costumes to act like the different pieces of this waste of time and money called the UN. Whoever didn`t participate in this dumb play was getting a flunking grade.
So many years of brainwashing didn`t convince me of the necessity of having the UN alive and well and living off people`s wallets in New York. When I was studying language translation in my college years,everyone would coo,”Oh sweetiepie, get a job in the UN as translatress and you will have achieved your dream.”Whoever said that was my dream? My nightmare probably. So when the Nicaraguan chancellor,Nora Astorga, a wonderful woman who has been the only worthy chancellor we have had in all our history after Maximo Jerez, proposed to me to go with her to the UN when she was sent as an ambassadress there, I declined. I wouldn`t hav been able to be in my best behaviour,saying sweet nothings,dancing cool adjectives,twisting my tongue to speak ribboned silliness and gibberish. It took a while for Nora to understand that it wasn`t anything against her,because she knew I worshipped her. She was over there when she discovered a lump in her breast. Soon she died of breast cancer,and I would dare to say that her job over there was the culprit for her untimely death. Being in the inner sacred sanctum of hypocrisy and uselessness is enough to neuter ovaries, peel off dicks and rot anyone.
Have the elegant blazered people of the United Nations really stopped any war? Have they fed all the hungry people? Have they prevented The Scream from getting stolen?
Did they stop the massacres at Kosovo and Afghanistan? Can they eliminate the carnage in Iraq? Thousands of dollars are spent every year to pay checks to these people who are so conceited they think they are the working testicle on god`s apparatus. With all those dollars, how many sacks of food and how many shelters could be bought? In 1945 on a day like today their charter was born. In the fifities we saw Ho Chi Mihn giving birth amid streams of innocent blood to what is today the thousand times glorious nation of Viet Nam. At the end of June 1950, 5 short years after the UN was delivered, the Korean war-never a forgotten war,sorry- exploded and forever split the Korean family in half, leaving so many people dead. Of course, it would be a while before the UN would look elsewhere while terrorism of state like the one practiced by Truman when he dropped the two fatsos on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 would happen. But it did happen again! Maybe not two big bombs, but the constant raiding and killing of the Persian Gulf War, or the bloody “cleanup” in Afghanistan after September 9-11 and afterwards the tragedy of Iraq. What did the Un do to stop the Vietnam War? What were they doing to each other while there was the Soccer War between Honduras and El Salvador in the 60s..?And all the conflicts in Africa? Lebanon? Kosovo? Come on people, sending a guy with a red hat(looking like a match and not like a vial of holy water) is not going to solve anything. Man will continue having wars and skirmishes and ambush as long as he shall live, so why waste money on people who believe themselves untouchable and above the rest of us humans?
One of the bosses I had, to be sure the best, had his wife working in the local UN building here in Managua. Stout,ugly,overbearing and very haughty,this bitch on wheels would terrorize all the workers under her husband`s orders with her airs of nobility in power, and ever since the officials of the UN all have the same stone face as Mrs,Nadine had. She had properly been hired for what she was, a mediocrity who pretended to be useful. Projects,projects and projects.Carried out they don`t work.
It is all done so pompously that nothing truthfully gets achieved. But all those who are involved in this sorry institution continue to be parasites, well –paid,aloof, almighty in their own idiocy, but there.And that money somehow comes out of our own pocket,from us,the “lesser beings” who have to be civilized,whitened and taught how to obey. This comment may sound so bitter to you,but the reality is exactly as it is,and it won`t get any better.
UN Day.No, I don`t celebrate this whitened day. Sorry,as I could never celebrate Columbus Day because I rue the day that stupid syphilis-infected and lice- ridden adventurer ever came to rip us off and kill our own civilization in order to impose the dogma of hypocrisy,which is what international diplomacy under the blue flag of the United Nations really is.

the roses from the thorns

2008-10-22T22:41:00.000-07:00

Entry 64 to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates for October 22:
1811 Franz Liszt Raiding, Hungary, romantic composer/virtuoso pianist , pioneer of the music idol figure and one of the most womanizing males of all history1845 Sarah Bernhardt France, Jewish diva and actress (Camille, Queen Elizabeth)
1919 Doris Lessing novelist (Golden Notebook), who worries so much over her cat
1943 Catherine Deneuve [Dorleac], Paris, actress (Repulsion, Hunger), a masterpiece made in Francem no wonder Marcello Mastroianni went nuts over her
events
1746 Princeton University (NJ) received its charter, so many centuries after the Sorbonne and Alcalà de Henares….
1962 JFK imposes naval blockade on Cuba, beginning missile crisis, so after he breakfasted with his own overbearing, he had to take Jackie with him to sheepishly lunch with shame with Fidel

NIGHTMARES

I couldn`t live without them,honestly. IN the real sense of the words I say, because many of them become short stories,and when published,they become money. Anyone would say it must be Chinese torture to have a two-session movie flick dripping blood while you are supposedly enjoying your sleep. Does my bed flood with so much blood from my nightmares? I always remember a quotation by D.H.Lawrence about a bird dying frosted but never feeling sorry for itself.Imaginary blood on real sheets? Come on,sounds so pathetic.It isn`t. I always remind myself of a quotation by English writer DH Lawrence in which he mentions that a wild bird gets frozen but never felt sorry for himself. The same thing has happened to me through so many accidents,fractures, losses and war traumas. How do I take this in stride?How could anything like this happen to anyone?
Things turn to be very simple in life,it is just a question of analyzing things clearly. From the moment I stepped into a military boot and off I went to Teotecacinte in 1983,on first mission,I was heading for trouble.I wan`t stopped by my father,who was a World War II veteran,with so many medlas that on November 11th,Veteran`s Day, he had so many medals on his chest that he looked like a walking Christmas Tree all decked out. Was he to stop me?Well, he certainly didn`t push me into a battlefield, but he did nothing to stop me and he kept the mother lioness of my mom at bay while this curious little cub went chaing bats instead of pinky butterflies. It was probably his fault,also.He never read Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood to me at night, in fact he said all those fairy tales were the disgrace of many young lady who dreamt later of Blue Princes in a world where even counts like him had to work to bring home the bacon. His bedtime stories were culled from his own vivid and agitated past, and he spoke freely and without bitterness about how he had been captured 3 days after he landed on D Day in his native Normandie while taking what he called a galactic shit in the middle of a trench. He would make me go to sleep by announcing that next on the real not fi channel of Bernard`s tricky mind,there was an even more surprising chapter lurking ahead. So as you see, I am not trying to blame anyone,truth is truth and that is it.
A bullet in 1984, while climbing onto a chopper after I had slung over my shoulder a fainted French cameraman who reeked like rotten onions and cheese, woke me up from the dream that it would never happen to me. I wasn`t superwoman in red cape, nor Wonder woman with her bullet proof bracelets and starred bloomer,so in love with her colonel Trejos, not even Fantomas the Elegant Threat with his cpe showing only mysterious slanted,Slavic eyes. How could anyone in his right mind want to shoot pretty little fat me? Ocelots and lynxes were already on the endangered list of species,and I looked like one. Even to the detail of the camouflage. But there I was, blood pulsating out my knee, the the flow staunched by a tourniquet made from a bandanna. There started the rosary of pearls praying for more pain. But I still didn`t jump when someone approached me from behind.
It wasn`t until after I broke my spine at La Penca,and carried next to me the corpse of the strangest yet gentlest young man in the world,Rubendarìo, who was only a few days away from concluding his military service,that the blood,instead of oozing out my skin,started to drip inwards. Not even my own pain with my broken spine made me weep like the death of green-eyed Rubendario. I felt destiny had played a bad joke on me. But still,I continued. Seeing dismembered bodies on the battlefield worsened the drip of blood drops from my heart that I didn`t know was there. When I saw a mother and cub sloth,lying dead and bloody in the midst of a battlefield near the woods,I knew I had downed the cup of poison that kismet serves punctually to all soldiers. I just sat and cried and didn`t care that big girls don`t cry but get even. If I had known who had killed that blessed furry angel and her cub I would have gleefully cut him into pieces with no remorse. Contrast? Men get into war knowing war is stupid. Animals have no wars because they are smarter than we are. Why should a sloth and her baby die just because the Sandinistas and the counterrevolutionaries decided to fight over the control of this poor wretched country. I ordered that the animal and her young be buried,and my soldiers just glanced at each other wondering if I had lost my mind. Every time I hear the song war is Stupid by Boy George I remember that sorry sight. At that moment I wished to believe in god so I could ask for a special pair of angel wings for the mother and kid I had helped bury. Up until now, I can`t see an animal suffer, I can`t bear watch a child in pain.But soldiers, yes,I hurt butnot as much.They got what they wanted,in a sense.
All those awful sights I can never erase from my mind were heaping up on a macabre pile, like the skulls left by Genghis Khan`s men after the razed cities under their trampling feet. The crowning point of this was when my parents died in a plane crash in Honduras in 1989 when they were fleeing from the confiscations and persecutions Daniel Ortega-still president in1989-was subjecting them to. Have you ever see n how people look after a plane crash? Don`t attempt seeing something like that before you sit down to dinner, dearest. That was the crowning jewel of it all.
I went into therapy with Douglas Guerrero, a very gentle psychiatrist I had met in the army. Owner of a drugstore also, he looked after me with loving care. Since I was not allowed to cry at home over my parents, I would do it at his clinic. Unfortunately, this guy who mended my psyche so well a far as he could, was bound to be killed and torn into bits later on by a stepdaughter he had raised and her lover. Douglas was the one who told me I would never rid myself of the nightmares,so I told him that if life gave me lemons I might as well make a good pitcher of lemonade. Which is the best I have done so far, I guess, knowing that I will have nightmares for as long as I live.
The forming of a nightmare comes automatically, whether I eat like two horses put together or I decide to skip dinner. There in full color,with credits at the end,musicalization by me of course,and special effects that Hollywood hasn`t even suspected could be made, comes the nightmare. I roll around, bite my spouse`s arm,drop the pillow to the floor, almost strangle myself with the blanket.I wake up scraming and I write it down while I drink a long cool glass of water. I discuss some tiny finishing touches with my cats. The fundoshi that Yukio MIshima was wearing under his uniform when he committed seppukku on November 25th 1971 shortly before noon in Tokyo gets mixed along with Jumbo`s death stricken by the locomotive, my broken and reconstructed wrists give their opinion and Ruben Darìo`s lost brain comes to the surface, I recall from somewhere sultan Bayezid Yildrim`s gray eyes and I stir them into the melting pot where I have the clothes hanger from my childhood fears, the cats that have been my confidantes and associates throw in their hairs and claws and I start the cooking on the computer. I give my heart to Mussorgsky`s shadow while I kiss the memory of the formidable woman chancellor Nora,who we had the privilege of having in Nicaragua until breast cancer whisked her away from us. I dig up my crush for Tito and Stefan Cel Mare to mix it with the gray skies of Paris that lie on the inside of my eyelids, and all the ghosts come marching in to the rhythm of a Dixie band or Astor Piazzola`s tangoes. The writing itself is not painful, unless the characters run rowdy and they force me to sit on my poor broken ass for hours non-stop,getting up only to pee or serve lunch as is my duty because one single steak is worth a thousand words in any good ignorant`s table of values. I laugh,I jump in my seat,I sweat profusely,and if I am menstruating inspiration comes faster along with the flow. Most of my short stories have been written while the menses stream out of me. Remarkable proof of women`s superiority, as my idol Mary Shelley knew. Once finished, I am satisfied like a new mother with her baby. I peruse it, I smell it,I love the way the printer moves. Lateron, sending the story away to be published gives me the sense of being a beauty parading herself on the best fashion show by Coco Chanel. The money?I need it,we all do.Writers also have bellies. But that is the least of all satisfactions. I am in love with what I write. My short stories are no less than O.Henry, Guy de Maupassant or Poe`s.
But they are a historian`s works, they were forged by a war veteran,who knows what nightmares can do to you when they come alive. Like my broken spine, or my bulleted knee, I have come to get an infatuation with my own nightmares. I hope after death,when my heart is thrown into the San Juan River, may it populate the rapids with ghosts and other spooks from my imagination, because there is no greater blessing than to be able to turn thorns into roses, without losing the original thorn.

not said in verse

2008-10-21T21:22:00.000-07:00

63rd entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred October 21:
1772 Samuel Taylor Coleridge England, poet (Rime of the Ancient Mariner), I learned it by heart and I have a candle in my heart for this man 1790 Alphonse-Marie Louis de Lamartine Macon France, writer (Ren‚),his Meditations inspired Franz Liszt for his tone poem Les Preludes 1833 Alfred Bernhard Nobel Stockholm, created dynamite & the awards that carry his name after he was announced as dead by mistake
12 Sir Georg Solti Budapest Hungary, conductor (Fidelio) great baton man1917 Dizzy Gillespie trumpeter, a creator of modern jazz,such an extraordinary guy
1921 Malcolm Arnold Northampton Engld, composer (Bridge over River Kwai),I learned to whistle with his theme tune for the fil Bridge over River Kwai

events
1520 Magellan entered the strait which bears his name, and did he ever have any inkling that his voyage would have no return for him because he would be eaten by the natives in Mactam? 1553 Volumes of the Talmud are burned,oh we have been so passionately loved us Jews!
1879 Thomas Edison perfects the carbonized cotton filament light bulb, it was his nth attempt, that guy had patience
1945 Women in France allowed to vote for 1st time, what had happened to the Libertè,Egalitè and Fraternitè of the French Revolution?

POETRY
Prince Korkut`s chants for the Mevlevi dervishes waft from the speakers of my PC, my shawl is wrapped around me and I sit down, now without uniform, boots off, in a flowered dress,to write to you. On a day like today one of my favourite bards,the Englishman Samuel Taylor Coleridge,was born. I fell in love with his Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner when I was a kid,but unlike most crushes, this was has lasted a lifetime. This has nothing to do with I miss you sweeties that ether of internet or old yellowed pages can hold. I have passionately loved my Samuel through all my life.I still recall his famous poem verse by verse. The fabulous and poisonous charm of poetry, although I have never been able to write a single line of it. Dearest reader of my heart, what wouldn`t I give in order for me to be able to lay at your feet a sonnet like the ones Petrarch or Shakespeare wrote, a madrigal that would put even Guillaume D `Aquitaine to shame, something to make Ruben Darìos bones-buried in the cathedral of Leòn-.shake with envy? But I have been denied that privilege,so you must try to be happy with the humble entries of this non fiction scrapbook I modestly offer at the altar of my inmense respect and tenderness for you. Poe could do it with his Raven, Jean Aleixandre of Normandie)my own ancestor) could sing to his adored Henri and tell him that his measurement of love was to love him beyond measure, and Miguel Hernàndez makes me cry with his Nanas de la Cebolla(Nursery of Onions), and I grow green with envy when I read Ya Habibi(the pen name for the formidable Sultan Sulyeman Kanuni of Turkey) when he mentions to his Roxelana that she is his gazelle. So please undertand me, poetry was the road I couldn`t take, and may Robert Frost forgive me for using the title of his most famous poem. It was the world I couldn`t create like James Weldon Johnson did when he said he was lonely and he would make himself a world, and I never learned to whistle softly, far and wee like e.e.cummings`little lame balloonman with the goat`s feet. That Rubèn Darìo, the Prince of Castilian letters, was born in my same country only makes me proud of him, but he left nothing for me to say in meter and rhyme. Did I make his website www.cablenet.com.ni/rubendario as a compensation because I cannot write poetry? What can I do besides love him without restriction and wish I had been single and young when he was in the same condition too? ? I still haven`t found my Clancy of the Overflow just like the Bnjo Paterson depicted him.
Don`t get me wrong. I can technically write poetry. I know the format by heart, and that I must give my thanks to my teacher James Martin. I know about how to measure the feet, that a sonnet has 14 verses as Lope de vega said when “a sonnet is what Violante sent me to do”, and I have sighed profoundly with Whitman`s Leaves of Grass, and in my high school years I astonished everyone by describing DNA in a series of perfectly rhymed quartets that I handed to my contrary biology teacher Mrs.Eberhardt, who never liked me because she was anti-Semitic. I pleased my teacher Pletzke who always asked us in the least gentle tones to shut the fuck up our battering,chattering and nattering traps and wrote a few sonnets. Technically perfect poetry.`Yuck,it tasted like wet cotton,sorry folks. Something must be missing in my hormones that I cannot produce poetry. I can quote it,recite it,memorize it.I memorized Beowulf,to give you and idea, and Chrètien de Troyes Romance of Tristan and Isolde on which the anti semitic and sexist Richard Wagner built his screaming opera that sounds like cats in heat mating on top of my roof at he sleepiest moment of the night. I memorized tons of poems by the Indian Rabindranath Tagore(Nobel Prize for Literature 1913), Lin Yu Tang from China,
T.S.Eliot(particularly his Hollow Men, and the whole book of Old Possum`s Book of Cats where it is stated that the naming of cats is a difficult matter), the love poems by Boris Pasternak for his mistress(somehow I feel his Dr.Zhivago is trash compared to his poems), and even those that the Zulu Unifier U Shaka Zulu wrote for his three red haired Abyssinian cat colonels. If I could write anything like what king Stefan Lazarevic penned down while he was depressed, I would be lucky. I am not the shadow of Veronica Franco, nor the wind that ruffled the feathers on his head of Tatanka Yotanka(Sitting Bull) of the Sioux. I have translated many poems into English, even my own compatriot Ruben Darìo`s which are so difficult to work on. But the ultimate joy, the final rapture of producing a poem of my own…has yet been denied.
I have used other people`s poetry in quotes for my stories, even some popular songs. Poetry has a bewitching charm for me that nothing except music can challenge. I will continue to read poetry until I die, and if you throw a book by Antonio Machado.Khalil Gibran or Vinicius de Moraes in my coffin when I expire, be sure I will be reading it before the worms eat my stormy looking eyes. Poetry still has the power to eliminate all my fracture pains,flushing away all the sediments of anger I may have kept from the day`s work. I grab a book by Salomòn de la Selva or Thibaud de Champagne-who was uselessly wooing the hard –hearted and domineering queen Blanche of France-and you are there, at the tip of my fingertips. Neruda or Alfonso Cortez, or his relative Silvio Alejandro Cortez whom I had the privilege to meet and make friends with, have the same effect. I am full of quotes from great poets,and I like them better than any politician. Someday it will be possible to recite a few to you- But the final rapture of giving birth to a full live poem is yet beyond me, and I must continue having the feeling of being a sterile woman who must admire the others`kids when I find a poem that expresses exactly what I wished to say, the shadow of the flame is there, and it is enough to spark a whole day.

The Rosenkavaliers`rules to good chat

2008-10-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

62d entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook

October 19th
Born
1899 Miguel Asturias Guatemala, poet/novelist/diplomat (Nobel 1967),so far the only Central American writer who has gotten the Nobel Award,even though some have even drafted letters to beg for that award
deaths
1983 Maurice Bishop prime minister of Grenada & others murdered in coup after the US 82d airborne division fell on the tiny Caribbean island, my eyes still tear when I remember him,.I met him when he came to Nicaragua

1812 Napoleon begins his retreat from Moscow, his ass halñf frozen, it would thaw in blood 3 years later when he was defeated at Waterloo
1818 US & Chicasaw Indians sign a treaty , and thus disaster settles in1845 Wagner's opera Tannhauser performed for 1st time , not his best by the way1849 Elizabeth Blackwell became 1st woman in US to receive medical degree,it was about time

ETIQUETTE IN THE CYBERBOUDOIR…DON’T TICKLE ME!

Globalization is here to stay, although it started a good thousand of years before, and conquerors like Alexander the Great had their own candle in this long funeral.The world has become a village that can be spanned by internet. Now it is perfectly safe to hear someone say he has a lover in Scandinavia when he dwells in the middle of Dark Africa, having his connection by laptop right under the largest tree in the jungle. We must better believe him,my dear.We are nobody to say that is a lie,because we surely know it isn’t,although sometimes I find that mos l anguages don`t have words to define these type of relationships. How valid are they,many may ask But the tears, pains,anger and laughter you can find in the fact that you are “dating” or “seeing” someone from across the world are not virtual. Sir,they are real. And so sometimes,when these relationships edge on the ridiculous part of life,the peals of laughter are real.
Let`s say I am a turquoise colored cat who just landed on earth,I am a citizen of Mars although the NASA will never credit me for being here and least of all existent.
Okay,this turquoise cat will go through the vocabulary used. All the aberrations committed against poor language.The gonnas,brbs and stuff.That is nothing, that can be forgiven. If I sit down to analyze a couple, one of them in Japan and the other one in Mali. The “cybersuitor” asked the lady being wooed to catwalk in front of the camera, which in itself is a lack of respect. He lays out all the instruments on the span covered by the camera, and starts making noises,hums,and all sorts of things. Meanwhile, the woman tries to see that nobody sees her,oh hour difference, because she is at work and he may be at home. Doesn`t dry humping seem so funny until you realize how pathetic it is? Like if you were doing push-ups and the human pillow beneath you suddenly upped and left? The French always have had a better way to put it,”tous les animaux sont tristes après l`amour”,all animals get sad after lovemaking. What are you going to grab when the legs get back in place, whatever has to be spilled was spilt, and the warmth goes out of your body…?The cam? The PC, come on people! This is the bestof cases, in which the fleeting satisfaction was perfect yet always ephimeral,
How many things can go wrong in a cyber-courtship?
The question has so many answers as stars the heavens possesses. How can anything be taken for granted? Excuses are abundant. How do you get someone to open his messenger if he simply doesn`t feel like it?After the tantrum, or the mean games, the manipulation, the blackmail, excuses come streaming down his beard or across her breasts. The net fell, my cat pissed on the webcam, no energy sorry, I was asleep, I forgot, whatever. The things people ask for in the chat! So far I have been wooed for an imaginary marriage, asked for non virtual money in a screaming,whining monster tone, demanded to send a laptop because I have more money than the person who asked, a crazy Sihk who had cut off his hair to be more American, asking me to come and have his baby and if the kid was a girl, to accept being packed back to Nicaragua, a lesbian who wanted me to lap dance for her, doing a s trip tease with my gala army general`s uniform. There are no limits to the things people can do,and although some may be endearing, like leaving the webcam open so you see the sleeping beauty of the Arab prince snoring and farting in his sleep, the farts looking like little bubbles in the ether of the webcam, sorry to be so graphic or even pornographic. I have also almost presenced a suicide with an old fashioned stylo, so dramatic I wanted to sing an aria from Puccini`s Madama Butterfly,but was too busy telling the fool to stop… and doing some screaming myself. Proposals for genetic experiments, pleas for money in exchange for rosy messages, an old fart asking for a belly dance on cam and if I did it he would give me the Sphynx as a gift, Sending it by DHL,straight to my bedside.
Are there policies or rules to follow? What is churlish,caddish,knavish and base, and what is gallant? The best of all cases I have heard about came from one of my sister`s friends, and it is the one of a big gorilla-looking monster who would command his “lover” from Dubai, grunting to her to never wear miniskirts, nor deal with men at her job,and threatening he would appear any day in her native city of Leòn, whisk her away and set her up in a triple locked apartment in Dubai, naked except for earrings and toe rings,waiting to satisfy him only. No marriage either because he had a wife in India, as if the poor lady would have ever wanted that. Should there be unwritten rules to outlaw some practices? How many have been astounded when a guy asks them to do unmentionable things like putting chicken bones into their ears or the whole hand where there is no business putting the hand into?
The messages outside the yahoo or hotmail are also worthy of a soap opera.Once Erica Jomg said that each country deserved its own circus, with Italy having the Catholic Church,Spain the bullfights. But all humanunkind loves to ridicule itself,so the whole world makes a bigger circus than the bloody one the Romans had,killing all those poor animals. The animals we kill in this circus of internet are the shadows of the ourselves we could have been. Sometimes the messages left on places like tagged,facebox,hi5 and fanbox are pathetic and reflect our human miseries in the most vivid way. “Don`t be a butterfly man, you are mine, I will be sad,” or ·the others are only that but you have shown me how much you love me” written by a poor Colombian woman with a cucumber nose and 70 kilos of overweight, and by the way in the poorest grammar I have ever seen in my 32 years of teaching English. Richard Strauss`Don Juan tone poem wafts out of the speakers of my PC as I write this,and the irony is too much to bear. How sick can we be to leave our droppings behind, like cows do as they walk towards their abattoir? No shame,no dignity,what does the ether of internet do to some people`s senses?
Sometimes I philosophize about the everyday craziness of the so called globalized world.How much seed and how many sighs are spent in front of a monitor?Or wasted?Could we have populated the earth again in seconds?Luckily, for those who do have cybersex sessions,they don`t leave anyone pregnant.
Erica Jong,not only for being Jewish and wiseass,happens to be one of my favourite writers. She builds real truths like the Taj Mahal. So when she says that those who watch porn deserve to be fucked with their eyes wide open and without joy, that applies to those for who the breakdown of their PC hurts more than the first bout of impotence or a lump in the so mauled upholstered breasts of a catwalk chick. How much meaning can there be in all those miss yous and love yous said after you have monkey-played with yourself in the saddest parody of love?All those crying scenes on cams,rolling around naked with the risk of catching a cold through your ass, come on, the other person will not even hear you sneeze or dry off your drippy reddened nose.
I know that for every thousand failure stories of meeting on the internet, there is a case or two of people who chatted,liked each other,met and married and now they have kids.
One in a zillion. Sorry to whet your appetites or wet your enthusiasm. Pragmatists like me will always catch my thumb under my chin and wonder how much chatouille,as the French say for bullshit,I am being fed. But we could be stoned in public as we placidly walk down the street, our heads not in the clouds but thinking of where the supper for tomorrow night will come from. Sometimes June 18th falls on you from the sky,like the alien ship we wish existed but probably doesn`t, and the spark is there,so much that you don`t need to turn your body into pretzel shape risking a fracture or getting caught by your boss, break wind like an old fan or debase yourself to the point that the selfsame person who asks for all those evidences of love ends up hating you for your unwise obedience. Words of love are too precious to be wasted on someone who won`t ever want to be in the same room as you are or throw his deck of cards on the same table with you to build a future together. If you ever have any doubt,ask yourself,would this chap or lady wish to hear Bartòk`s Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta with me while I lay in bed with the flu? If the answer is yes, then maybe you are one of those blessed ones for whom the onslaught of internet in a long ago globalized world can be the fair answer for your prayers.

inspiration and perspiration

2008-10-18T23:08:00.000-07:00

61st entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook

October18th

1925 Melina Mercouri Athens Greece, actress/politician (Never on a Sunday),even Camilo Sesto made her a song, wow
1939 Lee Harvey Oswald JFK assassin, born to be a scapegoat for the magnicide of John F.Kennedy
died
1931 Thomas Alva Edison inventor, dies in West Orange, NJ, at 84, the light bulbs were turned off for one minute in his honor, too bad he killed so many animals experimenting his direct current

THE PERCENTAGE OF GENIUS

When Edison said that genius is 10 percent inspiration and the rest of it perspiration,I think he told us a great truth, starting by his example. That phrase has inspired me all the time, whenever I felt more like doing anything except open a book. I sit down to write about a man whom I can never forgive for having killed so many animals while he was testing his direct current-a battle which his rival George Westinghouse won with his alternate current-and who was so callous to his first wife that on the wedding night he went into his lab and forgot his shaky bride was waiting for him in the nuptial chamber,crying,thinking he was slighting her. I don`t like him as a man. But the light bulb which warms me and allows me to be writing this for you came out of his head. No wonder when he died on a day like today, everyone turned off their lights for one minute to salute him.
Edison was a man who knew the value of knowledge. He knew because his mother had shown him the way when he was kicked out of school. His first teacher said he would never learn.Those are the historical mistakes that astound anyone. The dyslexic, “useless” kid grew up to be the greatest inventor that has ever exited. Sometimes kismet,or destiny,or karma or whatever you choose to call it, really laughs in our faces.
I will never understand the so permanently repeated excuse posed by most Nicaraguans and third world citizens:I cant. WE are unlucky,we are poor,we are weak…we have had bad times. The policy of the hammock,always being pushed because we never try to improve on our own. People are as stupid as their laziness wants them to be. As my associate in one of my webpages, Adolfo, says,”Constantly helping the weak will make him a cripple for he doesn’t learn.” Edison would have said the same thing.
Edison would have lost his patience here in my country. Three slaps, kicks or shoves have to be duly administered to people here, even to get a phone call back for something that you are paying for. In some companies, you get the impression that the customer is the beggar and his money is not worth anything, although their payroll comes from each customer they have. They do nothing to keep the customer happy,it is not worth the effort! Then when their sales digits go down, there comes the panic. There may have been inspiration at the moment the company was founded, but the continuity of everyday perspiration has been lost. Or it never was there.
In 1984, I had a chance to help organize a music festival here in Nicaragua. Nicaragua Musica 84. I was assigned to be the simultaneous interpreter for the French singer Maxime Le Forrestier. His visit here was a series of frustrations, one after the other.Lodged at a posh hotel,Hotel Camino Real, he couldn`t even get fresh towels from the administration,in his room. Perhaps the chambermaids believed the old wive`s tale that Frenchmen don`t bathe, and thought it was utterly unnecessary. Maxime spent his week and a half in Nicaragua complaining,sounding like the most cantankerous man in the world. 90 per cent of the time he was right, because he couldn’t get an international call, nor fresh vegetables, nor anything although he was paying for all that. Everything in Managua semed to be against his wishes,and he would just growl at me,”Nicaragua est un pays qui ne marche pas.” Nicaragua is a country that doesn`t work at all,doesn`t function. So one afternoon he sang the same tune again,but I had my period,I had had a big fight with my mother,and I was upset.So I finished his noise off by kicking him into the swimming pool, which fortunately was full of greenish water or I would have killed him if it had been empty. He ogled me furiously,coming out like a big skinny frog out of the murky water. He had been kicked for repeating a universal truth and that rankled. He knew most things went wrong because people didn`t put any effort into giving a good service. I knew it but was tired of hearing it rubbed into me. IN apologized quickly and he did the same, but both of us knew we were lying out of that polished hypocrisy called courtesy. We both knew that we were facing little perspiration in our people from Nicaragua, and it ashamed both of us.
Along life, the same attitude of laissez faire, of slumping and waiting for things to solve themselves on their own, has been met by me on different people and situations. When you tell me the same happens anywhere in the Third world, I know it is like an impending doom that has fallen on a good portion of humanunkind. For many people, finding a job is the worst punishment destiny can give them. They have barely signed the contract when they start making up excuses for not reporting themselves to work…the piddling salary, the hard conditions, the regulations. Everything is like a thorn on their side. Getting the job is the worst thing that has befalling them, like being raped by a horde of furious baboons in the middle of a duststorm. We often ask ourselves why we do the same thing over and over, like automatons. WE wonder why we don’t get lucky.I don`t believe in luck, like Edison didn`t either.You forge your own luck by hard work. Not praying because even if god did exist he may be in Chechenia and not listening to you, nor hoping because even though it is the last thing one loses, it doesn`t run far.But by rolling up your sleeves and getting down to business. But hard work is not everyone`s plate of cream. Pople prefer to believe in fairy tales,which only take the effort exerted by the shiny wand of a fairy, charmingly shaken with a lipstick smile over someone`s head, really.
In real life, things happen in the lab, or the office or the battlefield. And the one who had the best idea and got it working. He or she is the one who will reap the real rewards of the imaginary gold pot at the end of effort`s real rainbow.

when we mistake the peacock from the hen

2008-10-14T21:30:00.000-07:00

80th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Born on October 14:
Grover muppet (Sesame Street), for the delight of kids and grownups

1633 James II king of England (1685-88) ,since William III sounded him off as boing boing in the Battle of the Boyne, he had no more choice than to let his treacherous daughter take over the throne and go with his wife Mary of Modena to live as kept birds of Louis XIV1644 William Penn English Quaker & founder of Pennsylvania, what a way to shake off
1882 Eamon DeValera NY, Pres of Ireland (1937-48, 51-54, 57-59) , sorry,liked Michael Collins better than him1888 Katherine Mansfield New Zealand writer (Aloe, Garden Party)very entertaining
1890 Dwight D Eisenhower Denison, Tx (R) 34th Pres (1953-1961)poor guy,when he chose to have an Irish mistress, his boss Marshall told him he would personally make his life a living hell 1894 e. e. cummings Cambridge Mass, poet (Tulips & Chimneys),sure hit it right when he said a politician is an arse on which anybody but a man has sat on
Deaths which occurred on October 14:
1944 Erwin Rommel German Field Marshall (WW II-Africa), dies at 52 , poisoned by orders from Hitler, so payeth the devil to those who serveth him well1959 Errol Flynn actor, dies, top child molester and lover of Tyrone who had the Power to drive him crazy
1990 Leonard Bernstein composer (West Side Story), dies at 72,I still hum his Marìa without being aware of it,well, it figures, he had Jewish excellence
Events
1066 Battle of Hastings, in which William the Conqueror wins England, this wise bastard really knew how to earn himself the throne…left king Harold with an arrow through one eye on the sandy beach 1586 Mary Queen of Scots goes on trial for conspiracy against Elizabeth,what a plotting conniving wanton she was!
1980 Bob Marley's last concert,after that it was known that he had a brain tumour and would die the following year…thus we lost one opf the most talented guys of popular music
1964 Martin Luther King Jr wins Nobel Peace Prize,they already owed him that award when he got it

THE BATTLE THE SEXES

On a day like today,my great great ancestor William the Bastard or Willy the Conqueror,call him as you please, went from his French duchy of Normandie to defeat Harold II at Hastings, leaving the English king dead on the sandy beach with an arrow poked through one eye. With the Battle of Hasting, not only did England get herself the guy who would build the Tower of London and introduce aplle pie, but also the person who through his Norman invasion would unwittingly incorporate so many French words into the Anglosaxon jargon that until then was English. It was a Battle that on the long run improved the future for England,and its language. But some battles, like the one of the sexes, is something that never has as many losers as winners, the defeated and the victorious always end up mingling in the strangest ways possible. Today, something I presenced made me think of the thin Demilitarized zone that is the division between the sexes. What is feminine and what is masculine? Can someone in military boots and at the same time wearing breasts ever define that? I have been called a tomboy, even suspected of being a lesbian until I married at the very late age of 27 (at that cipher, women who remain unmarried in my country are viewed with suspicion), and my climbing upon the ladder of hierarchy has been hampered by the fact that I was unwilling to climb it on my back and with my legs splayed open. What is mannish,what is womanish? Is the difference exactly in why we sport a penis or if we wear makeup?
The scalpel goes deeply into the skin, which has by now undergone so much asepsia you could eat your meal right off the surface. First,a thin string of blood, then the yellowish fat underneath,then the ruby muscle,and flesh. The surgeon draws in his breath. After so many surgeries, what does he feel exactly? It is a human being in his hands, his chance to play god, and so many medics have the idea they are indeed some major or minor deity. Nothing is lost. Dearest reader, if you have a stomach that easily gets queasy, be aware I am going to describe to you a sex reassignment surgery performed in Nicaragua by a Nicaraguan surgeon, on a Nicaraguan male who slowly realized after 34 years of living in the wrong body that he had to do anything necessary to wear the skin and shape of the woman he had been since birth,by one of those ghastly mistakes that sometimes Mother Nature-turning into a stepmother-makes. Two British surgeons are there,watching. Do they believe it can`t be, that what they watch is impossible,a brown-skinned third-world-born surgeon is really doing this? It is not the first time I watch surgery being performed on someone. When one of my childhood chums,Mathilde, born her last son in 1986, I was still an imprudent and impudent maiden with a videocamera taping her labor in the wee hours of Mother`s Day,and I had the privilege of holding her son Sergio as he was taken out of her. Squeamish I am not, heart of my heart between the lines. I shalt not faint,and I didn`t.
Wow,playing god to reassign sex. Nothing is lost, I think as I take pictures. Not one ounce of the penis,which has been diminished by female hormones like estrogen for months before the surgery, is lost. From the dark skin of the scrotum the new vulva will be fashioned. This man will look like a real woman after a few months. A strong blood cataract comes out when the new vagina is being formed. For some time after this person will have to keep working with dilators so the pocket of flesh that is newly formed doesn`t collapse and scar, closing the entrance that is not crowned by the omnipotent uterus from which life springs. This new woman will never menstruate,and never have the joy of bringing forth a child. Medical science hasn`t been able to produce the spark which gives us the basic fire of life. In that, my heroine Mary Shelley was right when she wrote at age 19 on a single night her masterpiece Frankenstein. Men haven`t been able to do away with us for that purpose, which is why we women continue to reign although men have been dumb enough not to realize it.
A small wave of dizziness hits me. No I am not weak or afraid.I am having my blessed period,maximum of blessings that we women have apart from childbirth. The camera keeps on clicking as the translation into English automatically flows from my unlipsticked mouth. A damp spot grows on my back,pasting the light yellow and purple cotton dress to my clammy skin. I am glad it is not me on that operating table. How much blood and pain will this person have to shed in order to attain what she believes may be her dream,as long as it doesn`t turn into a nightmare. As a new woman, this person will learn to handle high stiletto heels, the snap of a bra( there already splendid cup c breasts on the chest, heaving softly in the ethereal rhythm given by the anesthesia),and the way skirts flow. Why do these transsexuals learn things that even natural women like myself don`t eventually do? I hate high heels, never wear a bra because there is no sound reason for it with my modest cup size, and I care know how I cross my legs because skirts are second nature to me. And all the legal hassle of redefining your birth certificate,changing your ID cell(a process which in Nicaragua may take ages due to the corruption, inefficiency and red tape in the Supreme Electoral Council), getting a new passport. This person will wear lipstick,and choose perfumes supposedly assigned to women(although I find Eau Sauvage and Burberry`s Weekend, both for men, more appealing than Jontue by Revlon or Shalimar by Guerlain). This person will stress that the cooking skills are necessary in a woman, and try to do the best possible task at daily chores. Feminine. Whoever invented that the woman has to always be salaaming to the man? I ask myself this question every Sunday while I cook a huge meal surrounded by my mostly male(although spayed)cat population.
Is this thing of defining what is good for a guy and what is stereotype for a girl what causes us to always be having hassles in our relationships between men and women?Does it have to be a rule that a baby boy must have blue and that a man in a pink shirt is suspected of being a sissy? How many homophobic words do we have coined in any language, just to punish those who have another taste? Bull dykes, lessies, Miss Tortilla, nacarados, queer, poofters, pèdes, cochones, patos, queers, queenies, ladybugs, maricones,all languages are full of sexist slurs. All flesh is warm and it all bleeds under the scalpel, I think while I sympathize with the person laid open on the surgeon`s table. Pain will be the same,whether he is satisfied with the results, or not. The largest sexual organ is the brain,and its basic composition,regardless of its weight(women have heavier encephalias,sorry guys),is basically the same. And don`t give me the bullshit of female and male soul, because in first place as atheists say we might not even have one for all we know and the grams lost at the moment of death may not be the soul departing with its luggage but the quantity of piss or shit we let out when everything is finally relaxed by the soothing hand of Lady Death.
The surgeon finishes refashioning the person`s genitals.Is our identity there? Is a lady`s honor, or her family`s pride,there in a thin membrane called the hymen?
I think of all the pain,discomfort,itching,stinging and numbness this person will feel .Going to the toilet will be an ordeal, walking around true Chinese torture. Will satisfaction be the pot of gold at the end of this person`s sex rainbow? Will this person also become sexist,discriminate against others or be discriminated against by being called a butch?
How much does the flesh have to endure in order to attain a femninine ideal?Will this person become a feminist?
Sex, my reader, was the real serpent in the paradise of Adam and Eve. If nature had created a third sex, would there be more or less strife in the Battle of the Sexes? How long shall this battle rage on, if we don`t put a stop to it by common sense, which is the least common of all senses?

getting our deserved education

2008-10-13T21:57:00.000-07:00

59th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
October 13th

Born:
1921 Yves Montand France, actor/singer (Z, Napoleon, Grand Prix),what did this guy with a cucumber nose have that he drove Marylin Monroe crazy after having managed to marry the incredible Simone Signoret?
1942 Paul Simon Newark NJ, singer/actor (Kodachrome, 1 Trick Pony), what a big noise his sounds of silence made!
Deaths which occurred on October 13:
54 Claudius Roman Emperor, dies, gaunt and ugly, he is the maximum authority as a historian on Etruscan period, too bad his fifth wife didn`t appreciate that 1601 Tycho Brahe greatest naked-eye observer, dies in Prague, having been royally patronized

1972 Uruguay to Chile plane crashes in Andes Mountain, (12/23 rescue), poor soccer players, never believed they would have to digest such a menu

WHEN EDUCATION FALLS IN THE HANDS OF BUCCANEERS

As if foreshadowing what I am going to write about, everything seemed against the fact that I needed to sit down at my PC and write about this. I had a difficult time getting home, where more often than not the climate is contrary to any radical yet truthful thing I would have to say, and there was even a physical barrier for me to jump over so I could get to my keyboard. A supposed antivirus that wasn`t worked momentarily banned me from sitting here to spew my words for today, and feeling like I am about to whelp a calf because I am on the first of “one of those days” that men so often use as an argument against us females, I honestly don`t know how much bile is pent up inside. I picture you sleeping placidly, your dark curls on the pillow I would have wished to share with you since I was a baby, unaware how much rage is pent up inside this me that you have learned to identify as your purple lion. As a teacher, I am in pain today. Why is it that education has been falling into the hands of pirates, mercenaries who deal with lack of quality, mediocrity and easy grading? Well, as long as the euros or dollars appear on hand as promptly as possible.
I have been a teacher for 32 years. I learned my trade when I wasn`t even a high school graduate, but I tried to teach my own mom and grandmom the best possible English at that age, and succeeded at it. After they both rained beltings on me when they made mistakes, because they-like Far Eastern teachers that haunt the memories of many Koreans-usually believed in physical punishment, only that it was the other way around. The student made the mistake and hit the tutor(me). After those two prize students, I felt I could put up with anyone or anything that was thrown by kismet my way.
What I never imagined was that problems don`t only come from students, but from the administration of an institute or academy that rules the teachers, and can withhold their salaries for any reason, including the pressure exerted to pass a flunking student just because daddy is a magistrate or the mom is the pet mistress of a rich politician(oops, unnecessary repetition, have you ever met a politician who is poor?) Education is never a method for getting rich fast,at least for the teacher. Sure, institutions promise you that in three months you will speak better English than all the poet laureates of England put together, but you and I know that is a fraud. The administrator of the institution buys a new car every year, but teachers never see the benefits of their job. In countries like Nicaragua, being a teacher is the kissing cousin of being a fakir, and all the pressures and tossing around that we get are the equivalents of the bed of nails on which to splat your hungry roaring stomach. Being a teacher is like getting a sure fire vaccine against serenity, a good salary and stability. In private schools you can be fired just because the spoiled brat doesn`t like the color of your hair, as happens in places like the school I went to for my elementary and high school. A kid learns to treat you like his housemaid as soon as he learns to spell his own name. Then, in the public school system, where you might desire being fired soon, the salary is so piddling you might consider it a bit below alms given to the beggar. If you belong to any political party other than the one in power, you may never get to see an eraser while that type of government is in power. So, whether it is the government that demands that its teachers be politically manipulated and manipulative at that, or the capital that backs up the institution that you work for, education is in the hands of condottieri(and I like that Italian name), buccaneers and pirates worse than the ones driven away from our San Juan River in 1762 by the brave mulatto Rafaela Herrera trying to preserve the interests of the Spanish king and not those of the future nation that Nicaragua would be.
When the gangrene begins by having someone as rector who has such a dirty past that he should feel ashamed of showing himself in public, or the dean is a woman who doesn`t even speak English and refuses to take advantage of an intensive course her boss will pay for her …and she drops this opportunity saying that on those days that the lessons are taught she must cook for her husband, how can this selfsame person even dare attempt something like checking on a syllabus which has to be written in English? How can a syllabus for another language to be taught be written in Spanish so the mediocrity in charge of the pensum can read it? Can anyone learn to swim without getting into the water? In Nicaragua many private universities have been opened in large garages, a few chairs added, and the teachers they hired are being paid a miserly sum with so much delay that sometimes the poor professor has to walk miles because he has no pennies for the bus fare because the salary never comes on time. How many of the degrees conferred by these so called garage universities can be useful when job-hunting? What knowledge exists there in the student`s brain to back up the piece of paper that credits him as a bachelor, master or doctor? Would I as an employer take this person who paid for an education he or she didn`t really receive because he was royally ripped off? Can you get a degree in Managua from a dubious university when you live in Serbia and don`t even speak Spanish?
Now you may ask me, okay, why does the government allow such fraudulent institutions to continue with open doors? It must really be a truly honest government, like the one Ataturk had when he put together the bits of the Ottoman empire to create Turkey as we know it today, it needs a precisely enlightened ruler like Kig Chulalongkorn of Siam to promote education. Most corrupt governments aren`t interested in the people`s furthering their knowledge. Having knowledge is having power in your hands,because an educated person knows his rights and protests when his rights are being neglected or abused. A reading person knows which law defens him in any case arising from injustice. Many countries forbid women to educate themselves because the rulers know that an educated woman will not let any jerk tell her to stay at home tending only to the kids, pregnant all the time, or “suggest” to a woman writer that it is best to write love stories in which she and the husband are the Romeos and Juliets. An educated person will not let anyone trample all over him or her. A well-read person can question his ruler as to where does all the money for taxes go, or why is he letting so many foreigners come to injure people in the name of foreign investment, as happens with the Taiwanese who kick our women in their sweatshops and go scot- free after all they do. A truly enlightened ruler,as was Emperor Joseph II of Habsburg in the Century of Enlightment, or Vespasian in the Roman Empire, who enjoyed bantering with professors and journalists, will always be open to criticism, knowing that the feedback he gets from his people is exactly what will make his procedures effective and his government to benefit all people. It was her fine education that led Eleanor of Arborea, giudicessa of the free Sardinia, to write down her Codi di Logu, a code of law that was way ahead of her medieval times. Had she been illiterate, we would not even be mentioning her with so much love and admiration because she would have gone down into the pages of history without a cry nor a bang nor a whimper,as said T. S. Eliot in his poem The Hollow Men.
While education stays in the hands of people more in love with the easy money a garage university can bring or a high school that is more of a prison or reformatory where kids do absolutely as they please and never get good grades, passing dirty notes to the English teacher asking her to let herself be seduced and be a collector`s item in the array of women the class playboy has bedded, we have no guarantee that society will have any kind of real progress nor development as such. While schools or language centers continue to be used to launder money coming from other less palatable sources, while educational authorities don`t set a great example so kids can take them as genuine role models, we will have no true learning going on. While so-called religiously overzealous people keep knowledge divorced from the people, brutally censoring the most unsavoury parts of history by using euphemisms or superstition, our children will continue ending up as titled ignoramuses.
It is up to us, the intellectuals of the world, and the people who want to leap out of ignorance, prudery and other evils that come from having pirates and thieves trying to merchandise so called education, it is up to us to denounce those mercenaries who prevent us from truly learning and being able to serve society, humanity and our nations as proper citizens of the world that we are. As the great historian and emperor Claudius said once,”You can change the past, but you, by doing this, will lose your origin and most probably your future.”

I refuse

2008-10-12T20:25:00.000-07:00

Entry 58 to the The Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on October 12:
1537 Edward VI king of England (1547-53) ,the only legitimate son poor gluttonous henry VIII could beget among his 6 wives, son of Jayne Seymour,who sacrificed her life for the king`s whims1798 Pedro I 1st emperor of Brazil (1822-31), king of Portugal, who gave his first wife Leopoldina such a hard life through his womanizing, becoming the objet d`amour of the troubled Ophenisia
1872 Ralph Vaughan Williams Down Amp England, composer (Hugh the Drover),England`s foremost composer,although I confess I like Purcell and Elgar better
1935 Luciano Pavarotti Modena Italy, operatic tenor (Yes, Giorgio), if he wasnt singing his mouth was always full
Deaths which occurred on October 12:
1694 Matsuo Basho greatest Japanese haiku poet, dies, one of the greatest Japan has ever produced
1870 Robert E Lee General of the Confederate Army, dies at 63, such a gentleman, too bad he fought on the wrong side1945 Jesse James Payne lynched in Madison County Florida, what a sad end to such an agitated life of pure mischief

1285 180 Jews refuse baptism in Munich Germany, they are set on fire.So foreshadowed history the coming of Hitler in the XXth century1492 Columbus arrives in the Bahamas; the real Columbus Day,for the woe of us Indians who had to be sacked,looted,raped,killed and worst of all,converted to a faith not ours and decimated by all the sicknesses this “disgraceful admiral” brought along

DAY OF OUR RACE (DEATH OF OUR RACE?)

Perhaps ignoring that there is the term coined as “white trash”, the dumpy yet pallid Spanish teacher who used to torture the students at a marginal high school I used to slave for, she was so excited from the month of September about celebrating “The Day of our Race”, as this date is so euphemistically called in my country as well as other Hispanic nations. Celebrate?No, my dear,deplore. Day of the Race? What race, the one the Spaniards came to kill? So many years,centuries after, I am still stewing with rage. My wrath has no bounds. I cannot celebrate the coming of a damned white man who brought disgrace to our Mayan, Aztec, Inca and other civilizations. With him camegonorrhea,syphyllis,measles,smallpox,piorrhea…the list is endless. Other worse maladies came to stay:pain,sword,gunpowder,slavery, the rape of our maidens who later refused to bear more babies so the Spanish wouldn`t have free slaves. They took our gold,silver,illusions,corn,tomatoes,potatoes,yams,cassava,cacao,avocadoes,beans,mangoes,
Pineapples, turkeys, macaws, mandioc,yucca and sour oranges. They deprived us of our self-determination, ruined our health and we got few good things in return,like the horse or the most perfect language in the world. Celebrate? That so-called teacher, and I don`t dare to call her a teacher because we teachers form, not distort, the minds of our students, has no idea in which yard the dog is barking. She thinks that just because she looks white she has to proclaim false values. As a descendant of the chieftain Diriangen, who preferred to jump from a cliff than submit to the Spaniards, I feel outraged.I feel ripped off.My fury has no end. I carry not one single drop of Spanish blood, blessed be kismet! I have dark skin and hair. While we continue having Nicaraguans who consider that any white has the right to come and bark orders at us, while we splay our thighs like cheap whores every time we are promised “foreign investment for the progress of poor little Nicaragua”, while whites continue to view us as their backyard brick shithouse, while we don`t raise the flag of our dignity as did our heroes Benjamìn Zeledòn, general Josè Dolores Estrada and the teacher Emmanuel Mongalo, we will continue to be the plenipotentiary ass kissers with a top star rating among third world countries.
I know what you will think: hey ,dear ,but you have a Turkish ancestress who made a cheese factory although she was an Ottoman, and your dad had red hair and blue green eyes, and in your family tree is a Portuguese love-mad king who exhumed his third wife to have his nobles swear fealty to her post mortem…what is all this foaming at the mouth and kicking up of your fractured feet supposed to be about? I agree with you, dearest reader, most necessary of people. But somehow, the raging patriotic blood of Diriangèn runs wilder through my veins, perhaps because I look most like him than any other descendants, or who knows why, but the patriot who lives in my left armpit foams and rages any time someone thinks his capital can buy a piece of our brown skin. I have been abused, and most curiously, not in France where I studied and where I was treated as an equal all the time. The worst discrimination came from other people who have as dark a skin and as tortuous a history as I do. I have been slapped on the face by the blackest oil of capital and left there,wet in the rain, wondering what the hell went wrong. I have taught at a posh school, the same where I graduated from, and been denied a fair salary reserved only to Americans, people who were not even high school graduates or were blacklisted in the USA, even though none of them held the degrees I have. There is a salary for Nicaraguans and one for Americans, at the American Nicaraguan School. Just the fact that we are nationals and not US citizens make us third class personnel for them.
In 1992 I was fired from the largest newspaper in Nicaragua, which proclaims to be The Diary of Nicaraguans although long time ago they forgot they are nationals and they make believe they live in Miami, simply because I refused to praise the coming of Columbus as the Holy Arrival of the Messiah to these places with the Spanish Conquest. It was the best thing that happened to me then. I had returned to my usual rebellious attitude, valuing my dark skin over the obscure interests of western capitalism and genuflection. I still continue believing we would not be a sorry place where to live if we still spoke nahuatl, had our pyramids and the most perfect solar calendar of history. It was our fateful doom that horny Isabel of Castille decided to favour her lice-infested Genoese adventurer and defying her useless husband Ferdinand, rewarded her lover with a series of journeys to fill the barren coffers of the finally united kingdom she had so unpleasantly created in her marriage bed.
She didn`t even pawn any jewels, what for? She had recently fleeced Muslims and Jews by kicking them out, confiscating their properties, or throwing them into the stake and torture chambers of her Top Inquisitor and Confessor Tomàs de Torquemada. So all that ratshit fed to children that pseudo teachers like the dumpy sexless gnome I had as a workmate at the rundown almost reformatory is just that, ignorants`codswallop. Gistory has a way of making things even her own way, and when Columbus died m the wronged husband that Ferdinand felt himself to be was too busy trying to father an heir-in times when the idea of Viagra was just a wet dream- on Germana de Foix after he drove his first consort Isabella to an early grave, and the debt for his deeds went unpaid to Columbus. So pays the devil to those who serve him well. No wonder our own Nicaraguan bard, Rubèn Darìo-himself more aboriginal than white like me-called him disgraceful admiral in one of his poems. He not only disgraced himself but also the thousands of souls that populated this paradise called America when he came on a day like today. History was so fair to him that we carry the name of Amerigo Vespuccio, another navigator and mapmaker, and not his name. Out of this continent we would have the bravest examples of indigenous leaders like Lautaro-who captured and killed the Spaniard Pedro de Valdivia, whose forearms were eaten without salt and barely roasted by Lautaro before finally slaying him. Today his war tactics are still perused by future commanders in the choicest military academies. No was always an answer to so much strife and abuse brought to us by the unbatheable Spaniards,as it is still a reply for all the globalization and neo colonialism so in fashion everywhere. I refuse to salaam to Americans as much as I refuse to do so to anyone who can think he can acquire me because he has petrodollars euros because the sovereignty that lives in my body and my mind belongs only to me.
I had nothing to celebrate today, much to deplore. The word conquest holds within its letters so much pain, domination and humiliation. They found our ancestors half naked and with the best calendar, so they destroyed their culture and dressed them up to their discomfort. It is much like what someone proposed to me, to be soft and yielding and never write these scathing remarks nor wear boots nor think for myself nor make such unromantic stories or corelpaint pictures…and I would be a kept woman standing barefoot and pregnant(at my 49 years of age, can you imagine such a ridiculous thing?) waiting for the men to eat and see if anything was left for me, wearing rings on my toes and no panties in case sir had a sudden lustful fit. That I denounce as colonization too. My body is not a territory to be ravaged. My mind is not an appendix on someone else`s map.That supposition of total devotion is also submission. A word that has no meaning in my personal dictionary of life.

on animals`day

2008-10-08T20:11:00.000-07:00

57th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on October 04:
1289 Louis X (the Stubborn) king of France (1314-16), was he really that rock-headed? 1626 Richard Cromwell second lord unprotector of England (1658-59),son of ugly Oliver.He declined the honor and had poverty-stricken Charles II imported back from exile to have him wear the crown of England
1071 bard,crusader and duke of Aquitaine Guillaume, cat lover and precious womanizer, France`s best troubadour. I would have never said no to him
1879 Benjamìn Zeledòn, patriotic Nicaraguan general who fought against gringo intervention, born in La Concordia
Deaths which occurred on October 04:
1904 Frederic Auguste Bertholdi French sculptor ("Statue of Liberty"), did he realize he was giving his masterpiece to the Americans,who were so stingy and piddling that they argued not having money for a pedestal where to put “the French whore” until Hungarian journalist Joseph Pulitzer made a campaign to raise funds?
1912 patriotic Nicaraguan general Benjamin Zeledòn gets killed by the traitors of the conservador party along with others who refused to accept gringos injuring our sovereignty and as a birthday present, his corpse gets tied to the tail of a horse and dragged through the village of Catarina

EVENTS
1883 Orient Express' 1st run, linking Turkey to Europe by rail, many rapes, murders and romances will decorate the history of this train
Today is Animal`s Day in honor of Catholic stigmatic saint Francis of Assisi, first ecologist and lover of creatures

^Twas the night before Animals`day and all through the house, all my pets were romping and and sounding like hell. Sorry to have paraphrased a Christmas carol, but I have never seen so much noise going on the night before my birthday. Yes,sir,I proudly was ushered into this world at 6 months and three weeks of pregnancy by my mom, who had seen fit to be a rowdy hoyden riding a steed far too insolent for her, and when she fell off the horse I was sent into this valley of tears before it was time. Into the incubator for one month, as ugly as a boiled spider and limp as old lettuce, I managed to survive somehow to be the round and sleek devil you now see in so many pictures. Rule of compensation, who knows?But I was born on Animals`Day and as soon as I was yanked out of my incubator, I had the honor of sharing my crib with beautiful,warm and hairy Morpheus, my First Cat, a black guy who ate like ten horses put together. I must have looked a sorry sight and thus he didn`t gobble me, but took me under his protection as my official hair blanket. There was the coup de foudre between animalia and I. A crush that has lasted all my life, the most passionate love affaire of my life, don`t get jealous,my dearest reader.
At this time of the day but in 1959 dark and lovely Juana was getting a forced pushed into her to unstick me. She was paying dearly for having fallen off a horse. My father was twisting his hands outside, wondering if he would be left without wife and kid. I know he first asked for her,my mom. Then he breathed a long noisy gasp of relief and three seconds later asked about the baby. The doctor just added that I was alive and that killing me would no service to anyone. He just rushed to barge into his wife`s hospital room, forgetting I was in an incubator looking like something the cat had dragged in from the rain.
Getting back to Morpheus, my official blanket, he was black and fat and Persian with Angora, and he adored me with a passion that only cats can feel. If I am an animal lover, I owe it to him. Morpheus left me when I was about 4 years old(when I was born the gentlecat was around ten years old, no young man himself, already in his dotage by human standards)but he left me his daughter Torta, who was originally named Eleanor of Aquitaine but ended up being called cake because she had the strangest russet color I have ever seen on any living thing. A color only the most delicious cakes have….and she proved to be the most delicious companion a girl could have. When my patriotic grandmother once read to us the sad story of our national hero Benjamìn Zeledòn, who was born and was killed on a day like today, we both lamented his passing away by huddling together in a curious heaving and sobbing ball of fur and fat, human and beast. When I started crying over Benjamin, she drew apart .Tears, water,whatever liquid, was hated by Torta. She only appreciated milk and beer, but for inner use. Never on her fur, please that was icky.
I breathe in deeply and think about Benjamin Zeledon. Small,dark,brown , brave…and so in love with our country. A true patriot, and like all patriots, had a sad end. Is patriotism a curse, my currant-eyed reader? I sometimes feel my intense addiction for my country to be something like a rope around my neck, but I am so obscenely happy my mom fell off a horse here and not in any other country of the world, no offense meant. Is it in the water we drink? No because everybody would be a patriot, and many Nicaraguans loathe their own country, sorry to mention it.
Sharing a birthdate with my favorite French troubadour Guillaume D `Aquitaine is an honor too. I fell in love with him and his work very early, around the age of ten when I didn`t even have the excuse of rampant hormones to justify my infatuation. A passionate cat lover, to the point that he took his Manx cat Gateau with him on crusade while he left his wife behind, his name is now on several animal rescue shelters throughout Europe. Chubby, green-eyed and charming, he must have had loads of women running after him. Too bad he lived back then, I wouldn`t have said no to him. Part of his charm, all of his lands and libido and a good portion of his talent were inherited by the formidable grandchild of his, queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, after whom I named my beloved cat Torta originally.
Getting to be 49 doesn `t worry me too much. I want to be like French wine-a repetition, excuse me, only French produce wine, the rest produce vinegars-getting better and better every year. But today I found a new silver hair above my forehead and for a moment I caught the shadow of a frown. My cat was watching me and he nodded his head. Was he confirming the fact that age comes to all of us, and he will suffer the same transformations? Does he have any idea what I felt? Probably. Animals are much wiser than us, take that for granted, so that is why they don `t fash themselves into crying over spilled milk. They just lap it up. My animals have taught me so many lessons with their simple way of doing things. My dog Pompey taught me a lesson about loving even kids that aren`t mine,when she adopted my daughter`s new gift-a small tabby whom we named Lautaro after the Araucan toqui who killed the Spanish conqueror who went to Chile- and being a certified virgin, she put the cat to suck on her teat and somehow has been nursing him as a good mom for 2 years. The wisdom of animals has been proven once and again, which is why medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas warns us that on Judgement `s Day, no matter how strong and arrogant we feel now, humans will be judged by the animals. How many of us can be acquitted? Spicy food for thought!
I have never been religious, you know that, but something in common do we have Saint Francis and I, and that is a taste for nature and the beautiful creatures it creates. After a hectic day in the classroom, how comfortable to nestle up with my cat Timur, who patiently waits for me at home, I understand what Winston Churchill, my favorite statesman, said about having a cat at home and it accounts for turning a hut into a palace. My hope is that someday all humans will be enlightened about the necessity of having a beast at home and not in order to gobble it or use it as a punching bag. If you are religious and you read your Genesis well, animals were created one day before we were, so as older siblings we owe them respect, love and caring the way many peoples around the world do to the eldest in the family. Leonardo da Vinci, who was good at almost anything and was even a vegetarian in order to avoid eating animals, would say that even the smallest feline was a masterpiece.
Emperor Akbar of the Mughal dynasty in India would say “let not my belly be the tomb of animals.” It is a great honor to share my birthdate with so many lovely creatures that nature made. I wouldn`t have understood it better any other way, as I am tremendously happy to share such a special date with my hero Benjamin Zeledon. The cake, the streamers, the noise and the cards are extra and I have never minded them. I go one more year into life, and if history is fair to me, I am strolling on to immortality. That is the utmost gift lif can give you.

as far as militaries go

2008-10-08T20:07:00.000-07:00

56th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on October 01:
1207 Henry III king of England (1216-72) , got lots of headaches from Simon de Monfort père and the barons1685 Charles VI Holy Roman emperor (1711-40),father of Empress Maria Theresa.patron of Antonio Vivaldi
1865 Paul Dukas Paris France, composer (The Sorcerer`s Apprentice),perfectionist,great teacher
881 William Edward Boeing founded aircraft co (Boeing), but lots of people have heard their planes go boing boing before a crash
1904 Vladimir Horowitz Kiev Ukraine, pianist, one of the best interpreters of Chopin
1924 Jimmy Earl Carter (D) 39th Pres (1977-1981), who allowed Somoza Debayle to be overthrown by the Sandinistas and then ate peanut butter to face the fact that he spoke loudly but carried a fly swatter(contrary to Teddy Roosevelt,who spokesoftly and shrilly but carried a big stick)
Events

1896 Sherlock Holmes adventure "The Veiled Lodger" takes place (BG) thanks Sir Arthur1898 Jews are expelled from Kiev, Russia, of course after the Tsar confiscated everything

The sword and the pen, not in the same hand

Someone was telling me today that the title of this book of entries based on history, real life and memories I harbor sounded like an oxymoron. A figure of speech that contained opposite concepts. Like sweet torture. No torture can be sweet. So no colonel can have a scrapbook, because it is generally held that militaries don`t own a literary brain. Of course,
Without forgetting exceptions like Feodor Dostoyevsy(sublime epileptic lieutenant from Russia)or the wonderful father of the modern psychological novel Frenchman Pierre Choderlos de Laclos ,whose masterwork The Dangerous Liaisons is a masterpiece, I tend to agree with the young Iranian scholar who pointed that out to me. It is well known that Einstein said that any man who could march like an automaton to the noise of a military march without questioning orders deserved his utmost derision. I tend to agree with him too,and not because we are both Jews(imagine we would have been expelled from Kiev on a day like today). Most militaries in fact don`t know how to dress when they strip off their uniform,which invariably smells bad whether the one who wore it was Serbian,Armenian, Nicaraguan or American, Plain clothes look like they are miswearing the soldier. Fortunately, having been a fashion model, that never happened to me. Last week when I went with my friend and student Jazmina to look for clothes at the “exclusive” department store reserved for militaries and those corrupt politicians who can buy a card to get merchandise at duty free prices, she noticed there were no choices for a chic woman to choose from. Being military usually implies a complete contempt for all that is beautiful, truthful, delicate and nice in life. I also tend to agree.
I know your question, the thick raised eyebrow above those magnificent currant eyes of yours. You are a military, you will remark, surprised to confirm that the best hurting chip comes from the selfsame tree. My becoming a military is one of those freak accidents that should not happen to anyone, almost like what Jewish Mexican paintress Frida Kahlo said about her two accidents being the bus crash in which she was skewered and her marriage to Diego Rivera. At least both accidents filled Frida`s life with color and creativity,and love in her own way. What did my accident with military life leave me? A confirmation that most militaries are as rude and stupid as we make them out to be? Militaries in totalitarian regimes are perhaps the worst of the lot. Picture yourself a naïve yet scholarly young woman, gold plated virgin with a fabulous genealogical tree, and the most rapacious yet clever army general, both meeting in a third world country where the guy with one eye gets to be king because the rest of the population is gopher-blind. When money can`t buy someone containing the bluest blood you can imagine , threats seem to work. Confiscation. Incarceration, Persecution. Ostracism. Boycott. All big words that should be as offensive as four letter words. Give her to me. Of course, we ask for what we lack. Or we snatch it away under threat.
I landed smack in the middle of that mud and blood puddle that was Nicaragua in 1983, with the beginnings of snarling enmity against the United States. It was the year Reagan denied that he was invading Grenada while the 82d Airborne Division was falling upon the island which still remembered the beautiful warm body of doomed Maurice Bishop. And there I was, single, with a PH D and three BA degrees, wonderfully complete in my academic formation but knowing zilch about practical life. Served on a golden platter, dusted with cement from the factory my dad ran as a benevolent manager, offered to Ares the god of war so I could be sacrificed at his altar while chanting in five languages, food for the bullet, ambrosia for the shrapnels, nectar with my lifeblood still thawing from so many years of living abroad, my spine the white spear consecrated in my bloodwine, and also the elongated host to be consumed by warmongers who deem themselves priests, my rib ready to be splintered by the arrogant butt of a Garand when I said NO to someone who offered to bed me, my wrists ready to be broken into tiny shards, my feet ready to be broken and snakebitten. Yes, it is a list. Worse than Schindler`s List, because at least that supreme womanizer from Germany had a list to save people, but my list contains all the pains I would meet face to face while role playing as a war correspondent-translator. Worse things could have happened to me, like getting knocked up on a tree trunk by the army general `s right hand(but he did much more than place his hand down there, hands don`t impregnate you) and then bearing a love child, like one correspondent did because she thought that having sex with a top officer would prevent her from getting shot in her meager blond ass.
Pain?Of course I became acquainted with pain. So much that no one can be surprised if I tell them that even when awarded a gold medal, the general`s clumsy hands pierced my left breast while insisting on condecorating me himself. I was in and out of the hospital so much that I should have moved my mailing address to that place. The doctors and nurses knew me by nickname by then .”Otra vez vos, aqui, Gata?” Once again here, Cat? They would have been surprised if in one year I wasn`t back on the stretcher, put on the slab, bathed in my own blood, pale and pitiful, eliciting compassion although never a mortal victim of self-compassion. Think about it, I could have even been maimed enough so that I might have not had any kids. I could have allowed the military to destroy what is most valuable in me or any woman, the utmost superiority of being able to bear children! Nothing is worth that. Mother sounds infinitely better than being called colonel. Or general or whatever. Sterility wears no stars,not at all, gentlest reader of my heart.
The truth is that this book of entries was named not for stars worn on shoulders, but for stars in my eyes when I write. It is my own kind of tribute to my favorite Spanish-language author,Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez, who wrote a book called The Colonel has nobody writing to him. It is a about an elderly male colonel who has given his best in a war-torn country, and then at the dusk of his life awaits every day for a pension to be allotted to him by mail from the government now in power. That colonel always awaits for that letter which will ease his hardships and save him from duress. The letter never comes. In my case, a pension from the army is not an answer to prayers I have never made. I serve not Ares, god of war. A cat may look at a king and feel the monarch is beneath him.I didn`t say that, just quoting my beloved T .S .Eliot, delighting in the fact that I can quote him and someone in olive drab can`t because you cannot quote what you haven`t read nor will ever read. Thus, this humble Jewish writer, veteran of so many fractures, who has stared at death in the eye and seen her smile back, can look down upon a simple colonel who doesn`t even have the size that is necessary to look at her in the eye. I dare any man in top uniform to show his badges, medals and stars and match them against my broken spine, my snake-bitten feet, my splintered rib and my reconstructed wrists. I, who can still look like a Mucha painting, with hat and flimsy dress without looking like a transvestite, challenge anyone to match my score. I lost blood, tears, bone and flesh. But never did I lose my humanity, nor the contents of my brain. So if a cat can look down upon a king, a mere premenopausic woman at the height of her intellectual powers can challenge any soldier of the desk, any officer of bureaucracy, any knave of the uniform, to grab a kendo sword or anything he may deem necessary, and match his ignorance to words, and his blind obedience to the liberty I have conquered for myself. Never hath the sword and the pen been in the same hand at the same time and functioning well,said poet and libertarian Jose Marti from Cuba. Boy, was he right! Because although I have worn the uniform, the camouflage has not worn me inside out and an outfit is just the skin that like any wise snake would do, can be immediately shed. The only true armory is worn inside your skull, and it is nothing more shining than the brain itself.