Zen and the Art of Scuba Maintenance:

I met the richest man on the island last week, a billionaire with a two or greater in front of the nine zeros. I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a billionaire before, how would you know if you did? Well, millionaires tend to make scenes, it would seem sensical that billionaires would make a scene several fold. Last week I was sitting at the end of a picnic table looking yonder towards the sunset when an old man in a dirty ripped tee shirt walks up and sits down. He doesn’t say much, I can’t recall if he even said anything at all. He simply pulls some palm leaves out of his shorts pocket and weaves an elegant crane of fresh fronds. He leaves it on the table. Stands up and walks away.

A billionaire.

Had two great dives today, the cowfish lost its spot at the top of “my favorite fish list”, taking its spot, the sail-finned blenny. A tiny blenny who hides in finger size holes in small stones. You can pick up a few of these stones and place them face to face and the blennies will proceed to  yell at each other from their doorways like two neighbors arguing over a property line. They will eventually grow violent and kill one another or force the other to relocate.

After the dives I took an equipment maintenance course. I learned all about dismantling and reassembling the entire system. The valves, high pressure hose, primary and secondary regulator, learned the cleaning procedure for the metals, filters and o-rings. I feel a much greater connection to the system, once you are aware of them, you can imagine and sense the parts when you’re using them. You can feel them as if you are inside of the machine. I would love to be able to work more with this stuff. All I need is the esoteric tool kit.

With this addition to my credentials I will soon be able to get a job anywhere in this world (where there is water). 

Sustainable Agriculture:

I was egregiously mistaken when I said the other night that everyone in a hundred souls on this island is a celebrity. The truth is everyone on this island is so profound, paint nor pen may depict it.

I was warmed up by a goodbye drink with the Slovakians when I met a farmer. One of three or four on the island. I confessed my devotion to permaculture and he proceeded to pull out of his pocket a a beautiful cacao pod and the largest lime ever produced. Had this been India I might have prostrated myself at his feet and begged me to show me “the way”. I have been weak, I have been lame. I have sought pleasure in the stead of work. I will soon visit his farm and hopefully return to the path.

Prices (converted to USD):

A sweet pink grapefruit will cost .20

An avocado .50

A baleada or a fresh made greasy pastelito (the equivalent of fast food) between .50 and $1.50

A beer at a bar $1.50

A case of beer, from Archie, coming to .85 a beer.

A bottle of nice Nicaraguan rum, 750ml $7.

A coconut, $1, or free depending on your machete skills.

A movie, $2 and varying levels of sweat.

A book from the “library” $5, or trade.

A tank top and 4 shots of Giffitti, $10

A boat to Roatan $50

My  giant delicious homemade conglomeration, which can last a grown man five nights (A full pot of beans, rice, carrots, peppers, onions, tomatoes, three heads of garlic and vast amounts of curry.  $1.75

The 17^th

My hair is getting pretty dreadful. I called my accountant, Jose Greengold, he told me my dreadlock s were indeed tax deductible. It’s a product of the rainy season, the never ending days when it was too cold to bathe, but your hair is still wet, and salty, interweaving and locking, matting like an unshaved poodle. It is okay though, if my hair wills it, it will be so.

Laissez-faire hair-care.

Went to what was described to me as an “afro beat Garifuna show”. It was at the Red Light, on the side of Airport Road, a one and 5/8^th lane chunky road that connects Sandy Bay to the North Side, the equivalent of Interstate 405. Half of Campanada showed up, various motorized vehicles lined the side of the road a half mile in each direction. I packed in with 5 other people into the most vile of transports, the infernal tuk tuk, I pretended I was a dog and spent the ride with more than half my body outside, dodging trucks and large women. The whole mess turned out to be a karaoke fest, with swarms of people getting high off of the disco and strobe lights and warm beer.

Clean living here, I’ve eaten over 200 avocados, used no soap, cleaned my clothes only in the ocean. I wake up at 6:30am every day as opposed to my previous rising hour of 1pm and I’m on a diet where I only eat things that have bugs in it. They are my food tasters, Hitler had Margot Woelk, I have indeterminate beetles.

Buy the Beetles, Get the Bugs

The 13^th

Crack is wack. I’m sick of all of my things disappearing sequentially. Some nimble toed “rock star” made himself welcome into my bedroom whilst I in my blissful ignorance was cooking up some rice and beans in the kitchen. He helped himself to my cellular phone, which of course served only as an alarm clock these days. Two days later he must have admired my bathing suit, for that too is inexcusably absent. So it looks as if I will be reliant on ill informed roosters, whom cookadoodledoo to no regard for Greenwich Mean Time, to wake me up so that I may dive naked.

Speaking of crime, here are two laws that grant you great freedom. You are allowed to steal whatever you please. Unless there are three or more people who saw you commit the thievery. The second liberty you are given is, you may kill anyone you please. But, only as long as you are over the age of sixty. Both of these legislations are actual laws you may and must abide by. Laws that are written on the most legal of documents. This is why you can see your bike ridden all over town and not be able to do anything about it because the guy has many large associates and speaks like a pirate.

This island is very much how I imagine Hollywood is. You are walking down the street and within a few short minutes you see three celebrities. You are star struck every half a mile here because every, one in a hundred people here are a celebrity.  Not a single person outside the perimeter of this island may know them, but you know them, and you know that every single other living person who has been on the island for over a week knows them as well. In fact, they are greater than celebrities, they’re folk heros, and you can appreciate them all the more, because they have actually done something real and of value.

I was at a bar listening to some comedic guitar when Gunter sat down at the table. I hadn’t had the chance to meet him yet, but within a few minutes he made me quite aware that I had been drinking the wrong beer this whole time, and directed me to where to find, real, German, beer.

He mentioned how the sewage flows right into the sea (actually, Tranquilla bar used to flow directly to the sea, with their toilet on the top deck that you could look down into and see sea), the sewer system gets piped through the open drainage gutters and out into the bay. That is apparently why there is such high rates of staff staph infections. When the instructors preform their “confined water tests”, they are in the shallows, also known as the natural waste management facility.

I cleaned a dirty bottom today, the barnacles only bit back a bit. I was given 500 Lempira. I intend to set out to prove one can live a week here on said 500L.

Embrace the Buddhist way

And all will be okay

No more beer

Or 500 won’t last you a week here.

The 8^th

Todays dives were by far the most fun. The first one, we took the offshore passage to the north side to do some whale shark hunting, all of us sitting on top of the wheelhouse staring at the horizon. Nothing. At the Pinnacle the lot of us looked down upon the shear wall into the abyss. We floated down like skydivers in slow motion. At the bottom there was a swim through cave, when I went in I got some narcosis, the perfect amount. I came out the other side laughing and clapping like a drooling sea monkey. I took some skin off my knuckles going through the cloudy darkness and the only thought I had was “woah, I hope there’s a scientific reason my blood is green”.

The best thing to do underwater is laugh, this is so because you start to wonder if the laughing is making any noise and if it does, does anyone hear you, and if they do, do they know it’s laughing, or is the laughing only happening in your head and you are perpetrating an imaginary act in your head to correspond to what you believe should be happening. And all these thoughts just make you laugh more.

In any case I could’t stop laughing. We came upon a Nurse shark on the second dive. You had to sneak into a crevice to see it and you passed a small moray on the way out. “Yikes” I thought as my face swung by. But then out of nowhere a monstrous moray comes swimming from out of nowhere. It goes into the sharks den and slams right into it. It comes out all riled up and starts going for everyones fins and trying to munch on the camera lens. After some action it would swim away and they’d be feeding he shark a lionfish they had speared when all of a sudden the moray is back for blood, swimming through your legs, all the while making the “num num num” face. I depleted a good quarter of tank in laughter.

The following link goes to the video. Courtesy of Shaun.

Nurse Shark v. Moray

Slightly Continued

What I mean to say is, there is it is all take, but no give. Everything in this comfortable air conditioned life is made to order, fast food, no effort, no problem.  Your house is the way you want it, your food is the way you want it. You get it where ever you want, when you want it, in what ever quantity you want it. But no one ever bothers to see where the sausage is made.

No give. Just take.

Everyone knows the best way to flavor food is hunger. People need to get hungry for their lives. I know my beans always taste better when I have been sitting on the floor like a Jain monk, around a pot of beans I have just filled with water and spent the good time picking out the beetles clinging to the legumic life rafts.

One Month Anniversary:

The lodge is getting packed and I’m realizing how privileged I am to speak the most important language on earth. The Ruski can convey his thoughts on Gandhi with perfect grammar, the Italian can tell me how his foot ails, the French Canadian can share my pleasure at leaving the northern cold, the Slovaks can tell me what it’s like to sleep under the Eiffel Tower and the Germans can ask me what time tomorrows boat leaves. Cheers to English imperialism.

I am slowly coming down with a classic case of Island Fever. The seas are closing in, and Pumpkin Hill looks shorter every day. The dive sites are most familiar and all the parrot fish look the same.

I want to be in Munchen for Oktoberfest, see the serenity in east Asia, be in Brazil the most interesting country in the world, then head south for Argentinan Patagonia. I want to be in Tennesee for Bonnaroo and in the Green Triangle to suffer the monotony of trimming season.

I don’t want to stay here, but I don’t want to go home either.  Walking home in New York, looking at the sad disgusting faces of the drivers of the new SUVS, whilst creating bubbling noise about their daily digestion of superficial culture on their shining white phones that can do so much it is almost considered magic, or god. Coming home from jobs where they produce nothing that they themselves or their consumers can tangibly see, working eight hours in hopes that someday soon they will receive the privilege of working twelve. That is why the human condition is so weak. We work all day, for people we don’t like, generating plastic and plastic related “things” that serve a purpose that bears no true emotional relationship to our lives. Our souls are half full, there can be no true joy until real work has been done, our food is half rich and our fun is half hearted. It’s like were playing a viciously competitive game of monopoly, where all you want to do is beat your best friends and make them cry like little girls.

There are moments when I am blown back, astonished that there are not only few, but many, seemingly even most people who disregard compassion, instead choosing hatred, violence and pain. Do they not see that compassion is peace and peace is love, the purest most righteous and desirable thing that has ever been known.

The 6^th

Went to the American bar to watch the football game. It was the United States verse Honduras qualifying game for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the first of two for Honduras in the North American, Caribbean, Central American bracket. When the U.S scored the first point the Hondurans, enraged, drew knives and machetes, someone ran out and came back with a can of gas, threatening to burn the bar to the dirt. I snuck out the back to use the restroom. I returned four hours later, or however long a football game takes, and found Honduras beat the United States 2 to 1. Jubilation was in the air.

It has been a month since I have seen or heard any news, other than that of the Coconut Radio. Whenever I have the opportunity to take a peek my chest fills with electric dread and I must turn away in haste. The farthest I got was glancing up to the right hand corner of the yahoo news, you know, where they post the most searched and usually wind up cutting it off. It said “Cats kill millions”. I instantly slammed the computer shut and sprinted of the sea.

I hope to return home to hear some sort of shocking news, something like, “Governor Chris Christi agrees to bathe in the Mississippi River, raising the water level enabling continued shipping commerce.”

Industry & Trade

I spoke the other day of the millionaires of Pigeon Cay. At the time I thought it quite literally to be a fishermans tale. But I talked to someone today who caught a “White Nose Fish” and soon following this catch he went out and bought himself a nice new house.

There is a sleek 1200 horse power speed boat that was left as a gift for the coast guard.  Simply found, empty, floating off shore.

The aeronautical cowboys used to visit the power plant to cut the power to the whole island for those clandestine arrivals and departures, not that it was necessary after midnight, electricity was turned off on the island at that time anyway. They would bring a string of lights to the municipal airport for the very late night arrivals.

Every day the black helicopters chop over my head. Americans. So you can stop wondering why the drug war has a price tag of $20,000,000,000 a year.

The dive boat captains refuse to go to the north side in the afternoon, so as not to risk seeing anything they are not supposed to. See no evil, speak no evil.

I myself, walking along the trash strewn north side beach, more vibrant than the visible spectrum of light from all the lovely plastic fragments, found a quadruple sealed bag. Rectangular in shape, yellow rubber covered by blue plastic covered by pink plastic wrapped in duct tape. Sliced straight down the center, empty. Some one had a really good time…. Or someone had a really terrible time. 

“Super Bowl Sunday”

The dive shop called in sick today, the lot of us snuck off to Water Cay. The Salva Vida did not have her engines at 100% so we took two dorys. I along with 23 others were on Hermans boat, it looked as if we were taking the nighttime cruise from Cuba to Florida.

We passed Pigeon Cay. Some say that this small sleepy Cay of old fishermen, living in old shacks and houses packed so tightly together has more millionaires per capita than anywhere else on this blue and green earth. This being attributed to their luck in fishing for square grouper.

We arrived on Water Cay and promptly set up camp. Drinks were concocted and food ingested. The slack line was set up for all those who enjoy frustration. Soon the tropical rain arrived, while some took shelter around the coconut bark fueled fire, tropically shivering, Herr Osterich was enjoying his first game of baseball. All the way up until when the wet grip of a small bat turned it into a throat seeking missile. I turned as Osterich fell to the ground unconscious. This allowed for some practical EFR training. After a good amount of fumbling he was strapped down to a boogie board with weight belts and shivering he was sent sailing for the main(is)land.

Afterwards we set about wandering the island, playing with fire, trying to break language barriers and breaking open shells to get out what I truly hope were almonds.

I went to sleep that night as mentally fresh as one can be, laying alone on a table on the end of the dive shops dock looking at the stars, imaging what they must look like beyond the peaks of the Gracias a Dios, where no human lumens penetrate.

I thought about the college I would have been otherwise enveloped in at that moment. I thought about the professors and students who thought they really knew something. It wasn’t how to save lives or grow food or create machinery or even make contributions to any type of math or science. Still their egos grew fat off of mass delusion and towered over the studious innocents. I wrote this for them.

Being smart is realizing you know nothing.

Being intelligent is using the nothing you know to do something.

Being an intellectual is saying everything without knowing or doing anything.

1^st

I spent the morning creating irregularly shaped tortillas. They tasted warm and delicious but I’m not sure if it was worth all the dough all over the walls and floor and my clothes.

Took money out from the bank to pay for the diving. On the way back I took a detour since I was borrowing a nice bike and found myself in a traffic jam. Motorcycles and mopeds were stuck behind a mess of black cows. The running of the Utilian Bulls. Just off the boat, there were over twenty squeezed tightly heading up the small road. I first passed a lazy one off to the side taking a nap, in the process of being agitated by some village girls. When the opportunity arose the herd took it, running up the steps trying to get into the grocery stores and china shops as the owners tried to slam their doors on their faces. The cowboys in the lead pointed for the cows which way they would like them to turn at a fork, they responded more to the yelling and big wooden sticks the young cowboys in the back and flanks held high.

Both literally and figuratively, my life is a room filled with piles of open books, lying face down, pages of varying unbalance. Resting on the bed, floor, table and on top of each other is a Twain and a Phalanuk, Steppenwolf, Farenheit 451, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and a Kerouac I’ve been reading for two years. Not to mention another whole pile of dive text books.

Walking down main, late at night, suddenly my foot kicked a weighty asymmetrical object that went flying, I knew from some sort of combination of senses, including sixth and seventh ones, it was not something I have ever kicked before. Looking down I saw the largest crab I had ever seen. Coloured as the armies desert fatigues, he looked up at me and said in a melancholy voice, “what’d you do that for jerk”.

The 30^th

I used up a quarter of a tank chasing down a mammoth, six foot Southern Ray. The instructors apron strings have been severed, so I have begun to float solo. My fancy watch informed me I went into decompression at 136 feet and then, simply assuming I was dead, failed to give me any further advice. I hope and believe this was because I went free diving wearing it an hour before and lacking a free diving setting the computer  thought me mad.

I found the skipper whom I was seeking, he is sailing for Belize on Saturday. I assumed he was looking for a crew, but rather he was seeking passengers for $450 US a head. He had his own vessel sitting in Roatan and was borrowing his friends sloop to raise funds for engine repair. Never the less he was most interesting. A young, good looking German who two days ago, being a stranger, I wagered for a bottle of rum that he was not gay. My victory was ensured as he told me of his Kava drinking days in Vanautu. Jealous of the native girls attraction to him, a black magician cursed him and his boat, so as he sailed away he found himself perpetually just a few meters out of the winds reach. In a personal doldrum he motored for the breeze but every time he approached the wind, as it had been doing for days, simply stepped out of reach.

I told him $100 and I’ll cook, we will see in two days.

Post Script: Man cannot survive on Krazy Glue alone. I was prematurely appreciative about the glues repair job on my sandal. But through some battlefield tech testing I discovered World War Two parachute cord mixed with the sticky creates a sort of high powered fiberglass that has held for five action packed days.

The 28^th

I think we can call the cycle officially gone. They call this paying the “island tax”. If that is so, it’s tax season. Night one my bike and my cheese.  Night two, Jermaines fancy shirt. Night three my diving brief case, empty and moldy. Word is some crackheads moved into the neighborhood, and you know how they get. Someone suggested I go tell the policia, but I don’t see how successful that would be in a country where they recruit only Guatemalans into the military because they can’t trust the Hondurans.

But as always, all energy eventually equalizes, this time almost immediately. I found a Patagonia jacket in the bay, smelling of the lowest of tides and zippers rusted still. Still, I am proud to wear a product of Yvon Chouinard whom I have a new found respect for in his loving protect of Patagonia the land.

On a clear day you can look South and see not the coast, due to the earths curvature, but the grand mountain range on the mainland. A majestic range, running from east to west as far as my eyes could see. The tallest in the country at 9000 feet, they call it the Gracias Adios, which I only desperately hope is true.

Post Script: The range is actually called Gracious a Dios. As Columbus sailed out of storms reeking of fatality the mountain came into view, and the Spaniards naturally thanked God.