Guatemalan Equivalents

The other day when I was walking to school I saw a man who looked exactly as Dee Snyder would if he were guatemalan and not wearing those sunglasses he always wears. Perhaps this guy was Lionel Ritchie and Dee Snyder{s love child. He was wearing pinkish jeans and had really awful bangs. Close your eyes and try to Imagine it. Last night when I was walking home I heard singing on my street so I went over to where it was coming from and was treated to the Guatemalan equivalent of Boys II Men. Though the American version is far superior these guys were really giving it the ol' colegio try despite the fact that there was one or two guys who couldn't sing on pitch which made their singing a little cacophanous, but still enjoyable from a curious gringo{s perspective. They even had the Guatemalan equivalent of the guy in B2M with the cane and the really deep voice. Every friday there{s a graduation dinner for the students who are leaving the school and last night it was a potluck type dinner. I made chow Mein with eggs, onion, and carrot and it was the jam, especially with ketchup. The ketchup here is far superiour to the american version. Anyhow, at every friday night graduation dinner there{s this dude, Cazarelli who is Xela's answer to Elvis. He{s got the look down and his name sounds like Fonzarelli which is 5 or 6 bonus points for him. He plays his guitar though an amp that also has his mic, and some beats he has playing on his boombox (also sent through the amp). His songs are all played to unchanging drum machine beats that you{d find on the demo setting on any of the basic drum machines. he favors what I assume is the samba beat. I think he plays around town or something and is known outside of the school. The first time I met him, during a lesson he shook my hand 3 times really casually as if it were a meet and greet or something. 3X I cannot explain. During the dinner I experienced my first Earthquake. It was minor, and I didn't even notice it until someone said something and then I was all 'oh, everything is moving is a slow rolling motion!' It was as if the Earth was gettin' some. GO Earth!

My Padre bought a rooster the other day and put it up on the roof with a string tied from its leg to something else and the first night I woke up to that fucker cock-a-doodle-doing at 3.30 am. I don't think |I need to tell you that the sun doesn't rise until a lot later here. It wasn't that it began its stupid antics at 330, rather it's that between 330 and 715 when I get up that fucker CADD'd 25 times and it's not pretty. It's finishes its call with a horrible sound that sounds like a sick dinosaur. I think that's the only sound it can make. It continued to CADD all day, without a rest and to make matters worse there are other roosters in the neighborhood and I think they egg each other on in their tied-to-the-roof-gonna-be-slaughtered-next-week misery. I asked my Madre if and when they're gonna kill it and eat it and she only said "later." That gives me little hope. I do have ear plugs, but I can't hear my alarm if they're in and I don't want to be late for class or anything. I'm thinking about being the executioner just so that we can all get on with our lives/deaths. I have a sharp knife! I have to believe that it's keeping everyone else up at night because I don't think they have earplugz.

There's this strange phenomenon around here where guys will put strips of super dark tinting across the top and bottom of their windshield and the edges are usually silver or something and opaque. Why anyone would limit their field of view like that is beyond me especially since the lighting at night is garbage and the driving matches it.

There's this Tienda right by my casa where the proprietor has a hole in his throat and I never noticed it until the other day. I knew his voice was real fucked up, but I never looked at his neck closely enough. Throat holes don't sit well with me.

The other day I was walking to buy some tasty bread and there was this really nice motorcycle parked on the street and it had a swastika decal, black on gray, 3" on either side of the gas tank. Later I saw the dude who owned it and he was some weiner who looked like he was going to a club, not a Nazzy. Go figure,. Maybe he was real PoMo and a diamond of sass in the ruff of pragmatism that is Guatemala.

This morning we went on a trip to an old Guerilla camp out in the Campo and Amaro, our resident X Guerilla told us a bunch of stuff about his days. It was great fun!

Put those in your American equivalent of a guatemalan skull bong and smoke 'em.


I forgot to include a few things in the last MM.
1. Before each graduation dinner, which usually includes all the students and a bunch of teachers we sing songs led by a few musically inclined instructors while Cazarelli plays the bass lines on his guitar which are usually a lot louder than the classical guitar and shakers played by the staff. One of the songs is about how ¨I am a communist for life, I will die a communist, my hands are my rifle.¨ I´m not sure if it´s sung tongue in cheek or if they´re seriously communists for life until death. There are lots of Che Guevara pictures and posters in the school so it´s possible, but I don´t feel like I´m learning Spanish from a bunch of commies. Note that in Guatemala Che Guevara is not the Cli che that he or his image is in the US. The song´s a good one, regardless of it´s message- It could be about WWE and the new line of Dodge trucks and I´d still sing its catchy melody.
2. There´s a really big problem with alcoholism in Guatemala and especially in mi Barrio. There aren´t any bars, rather there are Cantinas which sell booze at a low low price that the borrachos can afford. The one cantina I pass regulary is like all the other tiendas with old timey bank bars seperating the customers from the clerk. One night I passed the cantina and there were 5 or so dudes hanging out in there and the booze vendor was chilling with his customers on the opposite side of the bars. It´s weird that the relationship between dealer and user is defined/mediated by steel bars, rather than a bar ...Everyday, without fail there are several borrachos passed out on the sidewalk from the early hours of the morning until afternoon. They usually lie on their backs with their heads against a building and their knees bent over the high curb. There´s a bum couple who I´ve seen embracing while sleeping and I have seen two dudes doing the same. It´s also not uncommon to see people stumbling around and today one dude approached me and I said¨como estas?¨ and he said ¨muy mal, tengo goma.¨ which means, very bad, I have a hangover and I assumed that he was going to ask me for money so I told him good luck with his hangover and walked away. Giving money to people here is a lot different than in the US because here I am a citizen of a country that has so badly fucked over the poor of Guatemala. That´s not to say that the US hasn´t fucked over its own poor, but there ain´t been no civil wars in the US in recent years due to American-style meddling. Therefore I feel hungry Guatemalteco X is more deserving of my relatively powerful currency than hungry American X. Also there really aren´t any heroin addicts here so the money´s more likely to go to food than drugs, unless it´s a borracho and I don´t give em monedas anyway.
3. In my barrio which is pretty working class with cinderblock buildings (I guess almost every building here is cinderblock) , stray dogs with sagging teats and crippled back legs, and the aforementioned borrachos there is a strip of houses that were recently built behind 10ft walls with razorwire on top and big metal gates with a door in the middle. Every once in a while one of the gates is open and there they are, 4 or 5 brightly painted townhomes with shiny cars in the driveways and little strips of thick green grass. It´s like these people saw a commercial for suburban living in the US and said, ¨I want that!¨ and made themselves a little slice of heaven walled in, in a working class Quetzalteco neighborhood. Also, when I was on the bus to Xela from Guatemala city we passed tons of unbelievably poor campesinos by the roadside which was littered with a landfill´s worth of trash. On the roadside there also were billboards featuring European models with cell phones, washer and dryers, televisions and other such stuff that a Campesino has no use for (clean water?¿?). Guatemalans, who are mostly indigenous have images of sexy Europeans thrust upon them unmercifally (sort of like in the US!!!). Their politicians are of European descent too. bummer. A size 11 or 12 shoe in Xela is a rarity.
4. The Guerilla stories included how they would eat twice a day, oatmeal for breakfast and rice and beans without seasoning for dinner, if they were lucky. They´d carry 100 lb packs and live a really crappy life for years at a time and fight the army a few times a week on average. Put that in your Skullbong with a Che sticker on it and smoke it.