letting go

i have the most damning evidence of all time that i am, in fact, che guavara's horrible sunburt-nose american cousin. and ellen is, also in fact, molly ringwald's other sister (you remember that movie with giovanni rabisi and juliette lewis? yeah, that kind of other sister.)

first my damnation. the day deb, cholly and i were in pisco--was it?--trekking around with our homemade taxi driver-tour guide yuri (strange to have a russian name-sounding peruvian taxi driver-tour guide, but)... he was devilish with the comebacks, fast with the zoomzoom, and expert at dragging us to places where we'd have fun dancing, hiking and stretching the limits with the locals and our (ahem...not mine) spanish. so. the damnation. we were on the coast of pisco--i think--considering a tour of galapagos, which we never did take. instead we ended up hanging out with a sea lion who's number was up (he'd beached himself after losing the battle for his harem to a young virile pup). he was waiting to die, his throaty mournful yawps grusome. then yuri said, "that's the way. the way it must be." and it was so...correct. yuri. a man not bigger than a boy by our standards. small round glasses. he would have been a good doctor but his father died and the family needed money. driving a taxi is a good living, and sharing knowledge is like sharing loaves and fish--the supply seems magically to replenish itself, to grow in fact.

we climbed inside the "cathedral," an underground/in-sea grotto and stood. and just felt. old as earth itself.

we wandered into one of the most fabulous refuges for flamingos and more wild things than exists near-anywhere else on the planet. nevermind the galapagos, the whole region is crazyraging full of living beasts.

interruption: do you feel the creeping sensation that we're in a race to figure out some ways to appreciate the variety and the plenty that this planet keeps trying to show us before a very small and powerfully determined faction succeeds in destroying or maltreating or dishonoring or wasting it right out of existence? end of interruption.

i'd never seen so much pink in one place. neither on the nude beach of nice nor in the underwear shops of florence. not in parisian art houses or amsterdam's smut houses. not even, i daresay, at a muszynski family picnic (and that, my friend, is a lot of pink skin). hundred and hundreds of birds, perched somehow solidly on one...leg. leg? leg.

and then. the photo.

i don't know where deb or cholly were. deb may have been getting notes from locals about her very new home in the old old culture. and cholly...cholly was probably pumping yuri for info about his region's slang so he could bring it home to his detroit spanish-learning students.

so there i was. alone. standing on a gravelly beige beach between spring chill and summer sweat, with gusts of wind that lift hair off your head and stand it on end, i snapped the last of the roll. of myself planted firmly on crusty beach with broiling salt water at my back. strange thing is when i snapped the pic i remember looking across piles of miles of brown-to-red desert expanse. i didn't get it then. and when i look at the pic now, i still don't. it's as hard to recognize the me on the photo paper as it was to assimilate the dessert-meets-beach scene. one thing's certain, though: my hair gave the whole damn display a standing o, in awe i suppose. marvellously bizarre.

and ellen's debautched identity? marvellously bizarre as well. no idea where this snap was taken. a skiing village somewhere. my guess: colorado. she's stalking toward the camera, skiis in right hand, poles in left, silky rope-heavy hair swinging a bit (pushy wind) barely off her face left left. and her face is squinched, hearing her head's awful whispers. things like: only kurdled milk for dinner, skunk died in your car, gangreen in the leg, insomnia for the r e s t o f y o u r l i f e . . .

she made me promise i'd give her my che photo after i blogged about them both. "even trade," she said, bulls-eye eyes. so i've blogged it.

time to let go.