Star Wars: The Last Jihad

 

 

What is a story? What value do stories play in our culture? Do they contain any value? Are they simply the things we use to pass the time? A good book, a fine film, a tall tale before bed.

Or can stories be something greater than that? Are stories the DNA of our culture, the history of our people – both where we’re from and where we’re heading. “Our people” being whatever culture class you happen to belong to; race, religion, sexual preference, generation, geographic location, political affiliation, economic status, etc.

What happens when stories – fictitious fantasy tales – become something a little more real? What happens when the story begins writing the people and not the other way around?

A story writing people!? That’s insane!

I agree. But the world is filled with insane people with even more insane ideas. So even though it’s weird and wild, maybe it isn’t unbelievable.

If you’re anything like me, perhaps the story that was told to you sounds something like this…

“America is the best country on Earth and you should be honored to live here, Johnny. Brave and courageous people have sacrificed their lives so that you could be free. God, The God, The One-And-Only Jesus Christ made manifest, name above all names, is for the USA. We are cowboys and good guys and we’re rebels but we have the faith of Christ and He shall guide us to thwart Evil, in all of its heinous forms. Things that are evil include, but are not limited to: pedophiles, homosexuals and Mormons.”

That’s one version of the Midwest-Conservative-Christian story. Maybe you didn’t get that one. You might have gotten something else that sounded more like this…

“I pledge allegiance to the flag.”

That’s a powerful story told in one sentence. Only six words long. But the story it tells…

PLEDGE: a solemn promise or agreement.

ALLEGIANCE: loyalty or devotion to some person, group or cause.

FLAG: Symbol of person, group or cause.

My children are seven but, since they were five, the public school system has had them reciting this story to themselves. I go to their school functions and I listen to my children make a solemn promise to ally their loyalty to a government and country which they don’t understand.

A solemn promise to remain loyal. On repeat. Everyday. For a seven year old.

One more definition before we continue.

Mind control (also known as brainwashing, coercive persuasion, mind abuse, thought control, or thought reform) refers to a process in which a group or individual “systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s), often to the detriment of the person.

I guess we could further define “unethically manipulative” if we wanted to, but I’d define it as “having a child repeat something every day of his or her life in the hopes that they grow up willing to voluntarily murder another human being for you.”

Just my opinion.

 

So I have to wonder if that story begins to write the person. If that small sentence begins to write the story for my children instead of the other way around. Instead of my children witnessing the greatness of a fantastic culture and being swayed by it’s awesome power and empathy towards the hurting and hungry, which would then in turn cause authentic loyalty, we instead tell them a story over. And over. And over. And over. Until the story is true and there is no choice but to believe the lie.

And the story starts to write the person, making “truths” into “reality”.

If we tell ourselves everyday that we are stupid and ugly and unworthy of success and human kindness, we will see the world watching us and judging us as stupid and ugly and unworthy of success and human kindness.

Because we don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.

And the things we tell ourselves make us who we are.

I pledge allegiance to the flag.

Do you? Really?

 

This isn’t a post about the Pledge of Allegiance and how I think it’s brainwashing all of us. I do think that and I don’t recite it but that is neither here nor there. I do love America. But I also love Cuba and France and Iraq. Because I love Earth and people, not people defined by a piece of land they live on or a god they worship or who is putting their D* where.

*dick

This is a post about stories and the power they have over us.

Here’s another story. Maybe you’ve seen this one.

“The Empire is wreaking galactic havoc. The Dark Lord is taking control. Only one small group of Rebels can save us.” That’s a very old story. One that’s been told over and over and over as well. From the twelve disciples to Harry Potter to the founding of our very own country, The Rebel Rising Story has been told. And we love it.

But most recently it’s been portrayed in Star Wars: The Last Jedi a film in which, after two viewings I still have mixed feelings about it. But I say that in a good way. It was a film that made me step out of the theater and think for a bit. Ponder perplexing proposals.

Not only does the film ask us to redefine The Force, it also asks us to redefine how we perceive Good and Evil – the forces that pull us in our own lives. It’s been so easy for so long to point at something and say Black or White. Good or Evil. Harry Potter or Lord Voldemort. Christian or Other. American or Other. Rebel or Empire. Jedi or Sith. Yin or Yang. This or That.

But what happens when, through the usage of technology, the internet and social media, our world begins to shrink and people we thought we knew and understood as evil, suddenly begin to seem a little less strange? What happens when we uncover the gray area that surrounds all of us and see that we have more in common than we have apart? What happens when we stop looking at life as a Black-or-White-This-or-That switch and instead begin looking at it as a 4-Dimensional spectrum of rotating color. More a piece of art and less a technical analysis.

Suddenly, things look a little different.

What happens when the way we see the world doesn’t line up with the story we’ve been told?

What happens when I’ve pledged my allegiance to a country, flag, organization because they are the best the world has, both in power and morality, but then you learn that your heroes are flawed. What happens if you find out they’re not just flawed by amoral? What happens when you discover that the group you’ve pledged to – made that solemn vow since you were five – were not only amoral, but what happens when you decide that they don’t have your best interests at heart at all and that they are only manipulating you with lies to keep you as ignorant and passive as possible so that you continue to recite your story and pay your taxes and keep your head down and pull the trigger to kill The Enemy.

Here’s another story, this one is from The Last Jedi.

The film opens up and there’s this fantastic space battle happening. The Empire has cornered the Rebels and they’re getting ready to finally 86 them. But by God, there’s one last hope. There’s this Rebel-ship that is strapped with explosives. Some kind of cruiser hits the Rebel Ship and the soldier in charge of hitting The Big Red Button that drops these bombs onto the enemy ship, has been thrown to the ground and can’t get up. Maybe her back is broken. I don’t totally know. They don’t really get into that.

But what I do know is that she can still kick. Really hard. So she kicks this ladder. Over and over and over again. Because at the top of the ladder is The Big Red Button. And if she can get The Big Red Button, she can drop the bombs on the Empire ship and blow shit up. Another win for the good guys.

So she’s kicking this ladder and the music is building up, as it does. And she reaches up and she grabs this medallion around her neck. It looks like some kind of crescent with runic notations on it.

The Force. The symbol of The Force, their great religion. For which to fight. For which to die. For which to kill.

It’s her sign of hope. Her prayer. Her flag. Her cross. She holds her symbol and kicks one more time. The Big Red Button drops, she catches it and the bombs fall. Mission successful. The Empire takes a big hit.

Here’s another scene from the same movie. Towards the end the Rebels have gotten cornered in a kind of mine on a salt planet. The last of our heroes are tucked into this little bunker and right outside is Death.

But Rebels never say die.

Here come our rebels. They fly out of the mine in their shitty little cruisers flip-flopping all over the place. The floors are falling out. They’re wobbling about. These guys are really boot-strapping the war effort but this is it.

Main Character Finn, a storm trooper who deserted his post to join the Rebels finds himself hurtling towards some kind of Important Empire Vehicle that is resting on the ground. It’s a big machine that is blowing out heat and is going to kill everyone. Finn’s plan, albeit a last minute plan, is to save his team by flying his ship directly up the heat stream, into the engine turbine, effectively destroying The Important Empire Vehicle, killing himself and allowing The Rebels, the good guys, to live another day.

I have never experienced a theater of Americans emotionally cheering so hard for a suicide bomber.

But that’s the power of story.

That’s the power of narrative.

Story is a powerful tool that allows us to see the same thing from two different sides.

Here’s one more story…

“You are from a poor land but it’s because God favors the meek. Our people have been chosen by The Great One. All others only desire evil. Evil must be eradicated because it is against God, pure GOOD. Rebels, join me. Rebels, rise up. Rebels, come together. Rebels, come to fight. Rebels, here is a plan. Rebels, let us take these planes and Rebels, let us fly them into the World Trade Center in the United States, that land of The Empire. Guide us o’ Great Religion! Let us come out of our caves and cobble together whatever plan we can in order to make peace. In order to save the world. In order to bring peace… through destroying our enemies.”

I have to wonder how many times those men in those planes reached up to touch their symbol hanging from their neck to draw encouragement and bravery. I have to wonder how many times those men, as young men, were asked to recite a Pledge to their Higher Power.

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a lollipop?

How many repetitions does it take to get to the center of your brain? A prayer. A pledge. Once a day your entire childhood and developmental years should do the trick.

Do you know why Star Wars: The Last Jedi and 911 are not the same thing? Beyond, one is real and one is not? They’re not the same thing because of where we happen to be sitting when the event occurred. And our personal position in the process is what makes all the difference.

It is not good or evil.

It is good. To us.

And evil. To us.

And because we are thoughtless, tiny, self-centered, idiotic beasts, filled with self-importance, we often times can’t see that we cheer and recoil from the exact same things. Because, while we tell ourselves a story that we are smart and educated and self-aware and “woke”, we are truly nothing more than advanced mushrooms reacting to the simple emotional stimuli of our environment as pre-programmed into us by our culture.

Simple life forms who’s self-awareness only gives them the illusion of complexity.

“If they are not like us, we must devour them. Destroy them. Conform or you will be conquered.” This is the mantra of the Radical Islamist Terrorists that attacked America on 911.

And because of that, it was evil.

However, this was also the mantra of the Europeans when they arrived on the scene and found To-Be America crowded with Indians // Native Americans // Indigenous People.

This will never do. No shirts, no shoes, no civilization.

“Conform or you will be conquered.”

After all, if we’re to compare apples to apples, around 3000 people were killed on 911 but I have to wonder how many Indigenous People found themselves shot before having their infants get their brains bashed in by the boot-heels of hungry American settlers.

Die, savage.

Also, why don’t they just get over it? Why don’t the Indians just get over that genocide thing? Chin up, buckaroo! Why don’t the blacks just get over slavery? C’mon, chief! It was only human trafficking, rape and torture! Get over it already! Why ya gotta be such a cry-baby!

Shrugs. Why don’t we just get over 911?

Why don’t we just get over an absolutely horrendous human atrocity that was committed directly against our “group”, in which we / I / you felt the personal emotional attack of?

We don’t get over it because the story we tell ourselves regarding 911 is that there are good guys and there are bad guys and we for sure know the difference. We for sure know where everyone is standing and who is who because we have the script. We have the story.

But our sons and daughters!

But everyone’s sons and daughters.

As an outsider not from this Earth, I see it and say this is a true tragedy.

I’m just talking about the power of story. Just as an observation.

We’re interesting creatures, aren’t we? We love to define everything in our world. We love to say if something is good or evil and, by God, if something is evil, it cannot exist in our world. Our reality. Our version of reality.

Indigenous People on our land. Gay couples and wedding cakes. Black folk in our schools and a goddamn atheist living right down the street from me in my Christian nation! How is a person supposed to live in a world filled with so much diversity?

How is a person to function in a culture filled with so many people that are nothing like me?

How do we listen instead of judge? How do we remove judgement entirely and replace it with a calm sense of understanding? Jesus tried this and it got him hooked to a tree. Martin Luther King tried it and it got him the long goodnight.

We don’t want peace! We want blood! Because we are cavemen in suits and we are only feigning being civilized.

I believe we must ask ourselves if the stories we’ve been telling ourselves… are even true. Even the ones that seem the truest. Even the ones closest and most dearest to us.

My God, could it be that the very story I’m telling myself is as insane as the ones that everyone else is telling themselves? Could it be? Could it be that I am… wrong? That is a very uncomfortable feeling to face.

Being raised in a Christian home, I was raised to believe that my beliefs were authentic and real and everyone else had imposter relations with an improper God that was basically Satan masquerading himself.

But not my beliefs. Not my stories. Not our stories. Our stories were real. Everything else was a lie.

Our God was real. He was the only one that was real. All other religious experiences that any single person throughout history on the face of the Earth outside of my very specific belief system were merely… false. Lies. They were being misled by The Evil One.

Our country was the greatest. The biggest, baddest mother-fucker on the block and we’ll kick your ass if you fuck with us. We were also the kindest.

Wait just a minute! That doesn’t make sense. Are we kind and we take in the poor and feed the hungry or are we a bully who shows up to a knife fight?

I guess it just depends who’s telling you the story and where you happen to be sitting.

What stories have been told to you?

What stories are you telling yourself?

Maybe your story is that you aren’t good enough. That you aren’t talented enough. Smart enough. Savvy enough. Maybe the story you tell yourself is that you don’t deserve That Job. That Spouse. That Money. That Opportunity.

Maybe you tell yourself a personal story that puts you automatically in second place because you don’t think you have what it takes to be in first. Or maybe you’re like me and told yourself a story your entire life where you put yourself in last place over and over again, thinking that you didn’t deserve something, anything, because you weren’t good enough for it. Those things were for other people.

And if that’s the story you tell yourself, you’re probably right. In fact, you definitely are.

Because our stories craft our realities.

If we don’t write our own stories, if we don’t craft our own truths and our own realities, if we don’t tell ourselves who we are and decide for ourselves, then our stories – a random collection of gathered information passed down arbitrarily from one ape mouth to the next, completely unquestioned – write us.

Maybe you’ve allowed someone else in your life to write your story. Maybe it wasn’t Mother Culture for you. Maybe it was a close person or close people. Your family. Your parents. Your spouse. Your roommate. Perhaps you’ve given them the pen and allowed them to tell you that you don’t deserve something or are unworthy of something. Perhaps you keep reading the story they write for you. Those people are terrible authors. Throw away their book. Don’t ask for your pen back. Just take it back.

I wonder what happens if we all begin telling ourselves a new story. A story that doesn’t need a God or a Government to direct us. A story that says, “I am compassionate to all living things, including myself. When I make a mistake, I forgive myself and I try again. When another makes a mistake and harms me, I will forgive them and allow them to try again. But I also won’t put up with bullshit. Because life is too short to be crowded by ignorant assholes trying to ruin the show. I am going to do my best because that is all I have. I am going to believe in myself. I am going to give others, regardless of who or what they align with, nothing but understanding and sympathy because I don’t know what it’s like to be anyone except me. I acknowledge that my field of vision is very narrow. But I’m working on scoping it out.

I don’t know what it’s like to be gay or black or Mormon or female or a senior citizen or deaf or, gasp, Harvey Weinstein. I only know what it’s like to be me. That’s all I can really be certain of. And even that seems to be changing day to day.

I understand that conflict occurs. It’s inevitable because we tell ourselves a story that it is inevitable and so we live in a world wherein war is acceptable.

Rape: unacceptable.

Murder: unacceptable

Murder if the President asks you to: HONOR!

Sure, you have to be brainwashed first and give up your right to think but at the end you might just get the little purple heart on your shirt that makes you feel important. My kids get something similar when they do something kind in school. I’m not minimizing. I’m drawing parallels. Because it’s the same logic and neurologically it affects the human brain in the same way. Rewards. It’s the same reason we like getting comments and likes on our social media feeds.

They’re playing us. They’re using our emotions against us. Playing our biology against us. They know this.

God, it’s tragic. The value we place on such horrific acts. Quickly, reward the unquestioning soldier for he is a great tool to us! If we throw him some meat and praise him, he will most certainly do the violent act again!

I believe the quote is, “Forgive them, Father. For they know not what they do.”

Social media. A place to exchange ideas! I have never ever seen so many people talking to themselves before. It’s like a room full of schizophrenics. Everyone talking. Nobody listening.

We can be the Rebels. Being a rebel is cool. I get the appeal. But let’s be the Rebels in real life that stand apart from Herd Mentality.

Why do I believe… what I believe?

What story… is being told to me?

Serious question for the Star Wars junkies out there. Has anyone even bothered to ask what Snoke’s policies look like? Does anyone know what General Hux is trying to accomplish? Or do we judge them because they dress in black and look evil and speak in accents.

We can listen but do we hear?

The African American community screams, “We are being treated unfairly and shot dead in the streets!” and a crowd of decidedly un-black people shout back, “Shut the fuck up and sit down! Stop talking! Stop complaining! Don’t you know this is America! The greatest nation on Earth! Where opportunity is galore for anyone that tries to succeed!”

Never-mind the fantastic poverty rate.

Are we listening or are we hearing?

Can we hear someone of a different faith when we walk into the conversation believing them to be fundamentally wrong? Can we listen to a Republican or a Democrat or a Socialist if we already believe that we are right and they are wrong and we know and they do not? Can we hear someone of a different race or sexual preference if we think that all races and people experience the world exactly like we do, therefore, we are right.

If they only had my information! If they only saw things like I saw things! Then they’d know! If they could only be just like me, this would all be better.

How do we hear a different opinion if we are right.

And how smug do you think a person has to be in order to believe that they have figured out everything? To think that they were able to get an A+ on the Life Test wherein they pegged the correct God amongst thousands, the proper political party amongst several in their country, and also happened to be born in the greatest nation this planet has to offer.

I’ve heard a lot of stories.

And that last one is pretty unbelievable.

A person with nothing left to learn is a person who doesn’t realize how uneducated they are. And an uneducated person is the most dangerous thing of all.

Rebel against that. Rebel against ignorance. Rebel against your own ignorance by first understanding that it is camouflaged into your “truths”. Rebel by learning. Rebel by rising above The Empire and, instead of crushing our enemies beneath our boot-heels like Kylo Ren spraying Luke with the AT-AT blasters, we simply close our eyes and listen and understand that nothing is good nor bad.

Only we are, as viewers of the greatest play on Earth.

 

(The Father of) The Mother of Dragons

My friend Jack and I are standing in my front yard talking about The Big W’s – Weather, Work and Wives – when Quinn runs up and slams into my legs, a big smile painted across her face. I assume that she probably wants to tell me about a bug she saw, a rock she found or a bird she heard – these are the ecstatic ramblings of children long before the boring gray fuzz of adulthood has tainted their world view.

Jack bends at the waist and slaps his hands onto the tops of his knees and, in a sing-song voice says, “Why, hello there, princess!” Quinn looks up at him with a furrowed brow then looks over at me and I can hear her thoughts, Why is this guy talking to me like I’m a baby animal?

“How are you doing, Princess?”

“I’m, uh, fine?” and she says it like a question.

“You are beautiful, Princess! You are just beautiful, aren’t you?”

I cringe at the buttery compliments.

Quinn looks up at me. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Are, uh, princesses… uh, real?”

“Yes.”

“Like… on this planet?”

“Yes.”

“And they’re alive right now?”

“Yes.”

These are the three qualifiers Quinn uses in order to distinguish when and where a thing took place. She understands that things could have existed BEFORE now but exist no longer – like dinosaurs – or that things could exist outside of this country – like things in Africa – or that things could exist outside of this planet – like the sun and the moon. What she’s really asking is, “How accessible are these things to my reach?” How accessible are princesses to me? That’s the real question.

Can I be one?

Jack answers for me. “Of course they’re real! There’s one standing in front of me right now! A pretty princess! That’s you!” I cringe again. The last thing I want is my daughters to associate with characters who get trapped in towers, are afraid of spiders, and constantly require some form of assistance.

That is no one to make into a role model.

These ideas of “princess” are not inherent from birth. These ideas are fed into our daughters. We show them the pictures. We show them the movies. We glamourize the idea and the lifestyle. They are magical and beautiful and they don’t have bad hair and they never wet the bed and they don’t have to have jobs or work and everything is wonderful and their lives are perfect and how does it always end for a princess?

Happily Ever After.

And in all fairness, why would you not want that? I’m half tempted to throw a dress on myself and march around a castle while tethered to the sexual whims of some hunky prince in order to forego a few of the greater responsibilities of my standard adult life. Don’t judge.

We may not intentionally give our children this idea that they should actually dream to be a princess (I would never!). We may not intentionally feed this lie to them (They’re just movies!). We may not intentionally form them to believe this (Do you want to be a princess for your birthday?) but there are lessons in repetition and our culture helps shape that which we are.

It shapes girls through childhood with fun movies. It shapes ladies through their teen years, which we then couple with beauty magazines. It shapes women through adulthood, which we then couple with pornography. And they take all this baggage into the work force, which we then couple with an antiquated and slowly dying cultural idea that men work and women stay home and then we wonder why women make, across the board, slightly less in the workforce.

Perhaps we’ve spent decades telling girls that they deserve slightly less. Perhaps we’ve spent decades convincing ourselves that they deserve slightly less.

And maybe we all, on some level, believe it… even if we say we don’t. Perhaps there is a part of us all that still believes they are the fairer sex.

How do we know if we believe this? Well, if a man tells you that his wife works full time and he is a stay-at-home dad, what is your first, internal, gut, emotional reaction?

Your very first reaction is probably, like mine. “Wow, that is a-typical. I wonder what that’s like?”

I have full acceptance of it – no judgment – but there is this part of me that acknowledges that it is somehow out of the realm of what we typically understand to be true.

And herein lies the problem. Because we, as individuals or as an entire culture, can simultaneously acknowledge that it is okay and “progressive” for a woman to work and a man to stay home while also understanding that part of us finds it to be outside the norm.

And so if you also think it to be outside the norm, it is because you believe (or have been told to believe) that, like me, women have a specific place and men have a specific place. If your first thought is “That is unique,” then you too are trapped in this way of thinking even though you don’t think you’re trapped in a way of thinking.

Culture has also made you and I, as men, believe certain things without our knowing that we believe them.

Scary.

Perhaps we re-educate our daughters on what it means to be a woman. Perhaps we re-educate our girls on what it means to be a princess.

Perhaps we put Jack’s princess to rest.

Or better yet, perhaps we kill her completely. Perhaps we just let her starve to death in the tower as a lesson for not having the get-up-and-go to rescue herself. Rapunzel, you had hair. You could have crawled down yourself. Cinderella, you could have left. There was NOTHING tying you to that house. Those people hated you. Ariel, you doctored your birth form and gave up your entire world for a guy you just met simply on the hope of Happily Ever After.

These. Are. The. Lessons.

Settle for less.

Wait for help.

Change who you are.

And if you make twenty cents an hour less than men doing the same job, maybe that’s just your place. After all, that’s what we’ve taught you.

Perhaps feminism wouldn’t have to exist if we raised our daughters believing they were bad asses from the very beginning. Perhaps our daughters would never ask, “Am I good enough?” if we stopped telling them stories that highlight all the reasons why women aren’t good enough / pretty enough / strong enough.

Perhaps we start telling them stories about women that are leaders instead of women that wait for leaders.

Quinn looks up at me, a revelation dawning across her face, “Dad, am I a princess? Is this true?” Jack has planted the seed.

And now I must garden.

“Well, let’s see… do you have a crown?” “No.” “Do you have a scepter?” “No.” “Do you have a castle?” “Uh, no.” “Do you own any lands? Is your mother a queen? Do you have servants? Do you settle disputes amongst your countrymen?”

“Uh, no. I don’t do those things.”

“Then you probably aren’t a princess.”

Jack says, “Why would you tell her that?” and I say, “The same reason I tell her that she is not God nor an earthworm.”

“Dad? Is, uh, Cinderella a princess?”

“Yes, she is.”

And in that moment I see the light in her eye. I see the draw of The Princess. I see that my daughter wants it because, at her core, I think most little girls do. And that’s okay too. But how do we separate all the terrible trash from the good stuff? How do we tell them that it’s okay to be a princess and it’s okay to be pretty and it’s okay to dance and fall in love but… there is more. That is not all. The princess you know is an incomplete story. Because she is an incomplete character.

She is flat and brainless and you are not.

In her question I see an entire culture of beauty pressures and weight problems and negative encouragement and impossible goals and cosmetic surgery and feminism and macho bullshit swirling in a tornado, trying to rear its head, trying to sneak into Quinn’s ears and her head and her psyche, trying to poison the vision of who she is. Trying to mold her (and I mean “mold” both in the sense of “forming shape” and also as “an organism that slowly eats away and decays”).

Maybe that voice in our culture is impossible to stop. Maybe it’s a hopeless battle and all of the body image shit that bathes and berates our females is impossible to hide from.

But maybe not.

Maybe we just need to alter the messaging a bit.

I squat down onto one knee, proposing an idea.

“Quinn, you know what? Princesses are real. There are princesses on this planet right now. On this Earth. And you know who the best one is?”

“Uh, Cinderella?”

Me, “Nope.”

“GREAT GUESS, PRINCESS!” That’s Jack.

“The greatest princess of them all is a woman just like you named Daenerys Stormborn. And she is the Mother of Dragons.”

“DRAGONS!? SHE HAS DRAGONS!?”

“Oh, yes. Three of them.”

Jack, “I don’t think you can tell her that.”

Me, “You think I should stick to Cinderella and her transforming pumpkin-carriage as the barometer for reality?”

Jack shifts his eyes, “Uh, what?”

“THREE DRAGONS!?” that’s Quinn in full excitement.

“Yeah. And you know what else? She flies around on them.”

“WHAT!?”

“And they breathe fire.”

“WHAAAAAT!? FROM THEIR MOUTHS?!”

“Bingo.”

“Can I see a picture?!”

I pull out my phone and, thanks to Google and the wonderful CG team at HBO, I show her a picture of a very real looking Daenerys riding a very real looking dragon that is breathing very real looking fire.

“OH. MY. GOODNESS.”

“Can I tell you something else? She is a very. Powerful. Warrior. She is strong and she is brave and she stands up for people that are weak and she stands up for people that don’t have a voice. She is a hero. What do you think about that?”

“THAT IS REALLY KEWWWL!”

“Yes, it is. I agree. Now then, what do you think? Would you rather be Cinderella with her glass slippers going to the dance or Daenerys Stormborn with her dragons, breathing fire and battling the wicked?”

“I want to be Dan Harris!”

“I thought so. Remember, being pretty is nice. But being smart, brave and kind – being a leader – this is who you are. This is what’s really inside of you. Capiche?”

“Capiche!”

Quinn smiles and runs away. I stand up and smile at Jack, “Sugar and spice and everything nice only goes so far. Sometimes you’ve gotta pour a little whiskey in the soda if you want it to bite back.” Jack smiles in a way that makes me think he does not agree.

And that too is okay.

I acknowledge that someday Quinn will grow up and will most likely seek a spouse. And when she does, I want her to choose someone that she wants to be with. Someone that accentuates her happiness and helps to highlight her charm.

Our culture has a loud voice. And that voice tells us that spouses complete us. The voice tells us that our spouse is our other half.

But I say no.

I say we are complete people before we meet one another. A person does not complete another person. A person adds their brew to the mix. They bring their own ingredients and they help create a spicier dish but they do not complete the recipe.

Marriage does not complete you anymore than having children completes you anymore than having the proper job completes you anymore than having the right pair of pants completes you.

You are you.

You are you regardless of who you’re with.

Quinn doesn’t need someone to complete her. She can choose to be with someone because she loves being with them. Because their company is delightful. Because they find happiness in the other’s presence. Not because they will give her Happily Ever After.

Quinn comes running back, wrapping her arms around my leg.

“Daddy?”

I place my hand on her forehead. “Yes, Breaker of Chains?” Quinn squints at me. “Uh, those dragons… are they real?”

Ah, I knew that one was going to come around.

Sometimes, as a parent, it is our job to build up our children and raise them to be the best version of themselves that we believe they can be. Sometimes it’s our job to protect them from all the flying bullshit in the world – at least for as long as we can. Sometimes it’s our job to remind them to think for themselves and to question the status quo. Sometimes it’s our job to tell them the very hard truths of life.

And sometimes.

Sometimes.

It is our job to lie.

“Yes. The dragons are real. They are the last three in the world. And Daenerys has them and she flies around on them, fighting evil. And you, Quinn. You can fight evil as well.”

“I’M GOING TO!” and she turns and runs off into the yard, where I hear Rory and Bryce laughing.

Sometimes lying is good.

 

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Sex Brain

There was a point in time, not that long ago, when our ancestors stood on the same ground that we stand on today, and they looked towards the sky and they pointed and they said, “There is the sun. It circles around us.” Today we know this to not only be false, but to be foolish. Today we understand that the Earth along with all of her buddies circle around the sun in a great big dosey-doe.

The sun sits at the center of our universe and burns bright. The sun does not set. The sun does not rise. The Earth spins, both on its axis and rotation. The sun rising and setting is an illusion. This is not news to either you nor I. I am not breaking new ground here. We were all raised in a world where we understand this to be true. We are operating out of fact.

And yet, at one point, not long ago, the whole of our planetary culture would have told you differently and some of them might have even used the bible as a resource to back their argument since Ecclesiastes says The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.

The sun hurries through the sky.

No, it doesn’t.

Everyone would have stood against you, hand in hand, and told you how absolutely ludicrous you were for believing in what I am suggesting above. There was a planetary belief held by almost every inhabitant of Earth that the sun spun around us in orbit.

Don’t just brush over that. Think about it. We did not understand how our universe worked and then we made very basic assumptions about the principles of it. We jumped to conclusions based off of pre-conceived notions. Those notions were that god created us and so we were at the center of the universe and everything revolved around us because we were the most important things.

This, for a person of that culture, of that era, made sense. And in some regard, I can appreciate their logic. Airplanes, televisions and calculators were not invented yet, let alone to say anything of space travel, quantum physics and DNA.

That’s very heavy. Their worldview was crafted more by what they did NOT know than by what they did. In other words, they were not operating off of a provable scientific platform. They observed with their eyes and then made a call without further research.

You can take this back a little further to discuss how the Earth used to be flat. Human beings, not that much different from you and I, believed that the Earth was flat and that you could fall off into some kind of dark oblivion if you got too close to the edge. Again, these are people speaking from a place of the unknown. This wasn’t based on any kind of proof but was rather based upon a kind of UNproof. A table is flat. If you push a bowl to the edge of the table, it falls off. This makes sense. The Earth is a great big table.

You can appreciate their viewpoint. You can say to yourself, yeah, I can see how they thought that. I don’t agree with it because I am smarter than that, but I can see why they would believe this with their limited view of knowledge.

So then, let’s turn the camera around and point it back at ourselves. What is it that we see in our culture that future civilizations will raise an eyebrow at? What will future generations give us the sympathy sigh for? Ah, simple people of the twenty-first century.

Right now we believe that beyond our galaxy is just more galaxies and that space continues on forever and I guess this makes sense. But maybe not.

Right now we believe that time travel is a near impossibility and that it’s something out of science fiction movies. But maybe not.

Perhaps the next level of science we’ll push into is not the cosmos nor time hopping. Perhaps the next level of science we’ll push into is the human brain. There’s this gray mass living inside of our skulls and we don’t fully understand how it works.

I want to reiterate that last line. We do not fully understand how our own brain works.

That thing inside your head that secretes chemicals that makes you happy and that thing that holds all your memories and controls your breathing. We have no idea how it works. It may as well be alien technology.

Just like the Earth circling the sun. Just like people falling off the edge of the planet. We do not fully understand how it works.

And sometimes we jump to conclusions based upon what we believe to be true over what is yet to be proven to be true. Even today we are not so different than the people of hundreds and thousands of years ago. We still make the same, short-sighted mistakes.

What does it mean to be a homosexual? Do you know? If someone asked you to describe why an individual aligns themselves with homosexuality, would you be able to answer in a way wherein you would not sound like a “Flat Earth” person? Would you be able to answer at all? Could you speak with a sense of truth that is provable – like the Earth revolving around the sun – or would you speak with a sense of belief?

We look at the world around us and we see male and female. We see the majority of people on Earth operating in a very specific fashion. Male paired with female. But because a majority of people do a thing, does that make it so? Does that make it the only way to experience life? Because most people do something, does that mean that the minority are not only marginalized, but cut out completely?

Perhaps science will one day dissect the human brain and it will understand how it fully works. Perhaps one day we will understand the homosexual brain and the asexual brain and the transgender brain and the unisexual brain. But until then, how can we speak with knowledge on these things without understanding the truth of them?

How can we, as people, make judgment calls, moral or otherwise, on a people group that we do not understand? This is to say nothing of understanding them emotionally or having empathy for their pain in a world that tends to shun them, but to speak strictly of the neurological ramifications of what it means to have a brain.

We do not understand the human brain. To make definitive statements about a person’s genetic make-up without understanding their brain is like making definitive statements about someone on trial without listening to their court case.

At one point in my life, not that long ago, I was a staunch opponent of gay marriage, gay people and the lifestyle that they represented. It was a sin against God and it was damaging our traditional sense of marriage. In the simplest sense, these people were wrong. About everything. Gay people either made a choice (probably subconscious) or were raised to be gay by either a lack of a parental figure (probably a father) or some kind of molestation event.

Maybe you think this. There are, after all, a considerable group of people that do.

But what if… (ah, two of my favorite words) what if someday we do understand how the human brain fully works and functions? What if someday we do learn that gender binaries (strictly male / female), are not the absolute end of the line in regards to sexuality? What if science expands our minds and our culture and we understand that people are born with a very specific bend and to go against that is to go against all that is natural for them.

What if we learn that your belief does not matter because it is definitively wrong? Imagine the mobs that must have occurred when the philosophers said, “We are not the center of the universe. God did not put us in the middle. We are circling around the sun and the sun is not god. We are just drifting in space.” BOOM. Their faith has been not only questioned, but crushed. They could still believe in god but they had to go back to the drawing board to figure out what the new model looked like.

Whoa.

They had to re-define how they saw and experienced god.

God had to change.

That’s a scary thing.

It’s scary to question our belief of how god relates to us, especially when we think we are in proper standing with god. Justice and justification are very dangerous things when we wield them ourselves. When we believe that god is on our side and that we are doing his work, they can become lethal.

Let’s each of us remember that the KKK is a Christian organization.

Let’s each of us remember that the Westboro Baptist Church, those fine folks that picket at soldier’s funerals and hold up the God Hates Fags signs, are a Christian organization.

Let’s each of us remember that ISIS, who is beheading children and raping infants, are an organization dedicated to doing god’s work.

You are probably not like any of these things. These are big picture problems. And I’m not suggesting that Christianity or other religious groups are all like this. They aren’t. People of all faiths do absolutely amazing works of humanitarian service. But remember that each of us are capable of being blinded by our own passion for justice by the almighty hand of god. And what we think that god thinks is right, is not always so. And we must question our own motives. It is imperative.

It is easy for me, for you, for all of us, to point at a minority and say, “They aren’t doing it right.”

But it isn’t very easy to sit in the quiet – to intentionally, literally, go into a room by yourself in the absolute quiet – and to think about our own shortcomings. It is very difficult to pick apart ourselves and accept how fucked up we actually are as individuals.

I’ll end with this. God is a tool. Like a hammer. And that hammer can be used for good things and it can be used for bad things.

In 1994 a hammer was used to build an orphanage in Kampala, Uganda that has housed over 3,000 abandoned children that would otherwise be dead.

In 2002 a man bashed his wife’s skull in with a hammer after he caught her having sex with one of his friends.

And keep in mind that the Bible condones this behavior. It doesn’t call it out with a hammer but it condones stoning your wife to death if you catch her in the act of infidelity (Leviticus 20:10). And guys, that one goes for you too. If you’ve ever cheated on your wife, the old testament god calls for your blood. You can make the argument that Jesus came (new testament) and all of those laws are now moot but once they did matter. Once god told a group of people to bury a woman up to her neck and smash her face with rocks. Once that is how people viewed god. God was on their side and their acts were just.

We can say “That doesn’t count anymore.” But it did. To someone who was placed in a pit and buried, screaming for help, screaming out to god to help, screaming at her husband to please forgive her before he splattered her brains all over the ground, it did matter. Because it happened a long time ago, does not negate its reality.

Even the holocaust is in the past.

But that shit matters.

Remember that our perception of god has changed more than once in the course of human history. Remember that the way you view god today is not the way people will view god in a thousand years. Remember that the way people viewed god in the past is not the way you do today. Remember that everything, including the unchanging god, does change. Or at the very least, our perception of god changes.

Remember that you are broken as well. And remember that you’ve done things that might require you to someday be buried up to your neck and have your face smashed in by rocks.

God is a hammer. Be sure you’re using it properly.

I hope your take away is this.

Our world changes (science, technology, war, peace, providential boundaries). Our moral code changes (as an adult I drink alcohol but don’t eat meat, the opposite of my childhood). Even our moral code in accordance to god changes (where it was once acceptable to kill someone for adultery, today we think it barbaric). Our science has changed. Our perception of the universe has changed. And even if you believe that god does not change, our perception of god does. And it is our perception that we act upon. It is our perception of god that gives ISIS their justification. It is our perception of god that gives us our bearing for right and wrong.

Everything changes. It is unstoppable.

And so let’s remember that human sexuality will also change. It will change. Or at least our perception of it will change. The reality is that it was probably always here, muffled and quiet and now we’re finally speaking about it. And the only thing that is in our control is how we handle it – how we perceive it. The LGBT community is a hurting and broken one.

I won’t touch on the current transgender bathroom topic because I believe it is one of simple logistics. There is a solution that will be enacted and then it will be over. This is not about the bathroom topic. This is about the heart in which we approach it. Our world is about the heart in which we approach it. God is about the heart in which we approach it.

This is our opportunity, as human beings, to pick up the hammer and repair or destroy.

How we use it is up to each of us.

 

The Quenching Waters of Shame

 

Let me tell you about one of the most shameful moments I have ever experienced. Let me tell you about the awful time I wanted to disappear into nothingness because I was so humiliated by my thoughtless actions. Sometimes Truth is a venom and when it works its way into our hearts it hurts fiercely but it also helps if you let it. It can burn away all the fat of reality until we experience only the kernel of humanity that is left.

Let’s begin…

The heat in Africa is like someone holding a blow dryer in your face on a July day. It’s like eating mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs in a Jacuzzi. It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire.

 

When you get a bottle of water, you don’t sip it. You slam it. You slam it if it’s cold and freezes your throat. You slam it if it’s room temperature and feels like spit. There is no casual thirst here.

 

And now, standing in the dirt, covered by the shade of our van and wiping sweat from my face, I see Ryan, a Ugandan who’s tagging along with us, kill an entire bottle in no time flat. He wipes his mouth and says, “I know dis guy named Geronimo – he’s a big guy. Will take a whole bottle and just drop it right down his throat into his big belly.”

 

I lift the piss-warm water to my lips as my mind wanders back to America where a faucet gives me ice-cold water and I don’t have to worry about microbes giving me diarrhea and headaches. I say, “How fast you think you can slam that bottle?” Ryan shrugs and I pull the stopwatch up on my phone.

 

“GO.” Ryan kicks his head back and goes bottoms up. The clear liquid birdie-drops past his teeth and he doesn’t spill a drop. “Eight point five seconds. That’s insane.”

He grabs a second bottle from our stash in the van and hands it to me. “Ready, Johnny?” I nod and watch his thumb hit the timer. I flip the bottle up, trying to imitate his method, but instead water jets up my nose and covers my shirt. I cough and water sprays out of my mouth. Ryan starts to laugh as I go into a choking fit. “Haha! Twelve seconds, Johnny! I win!”

 

“No! I can do better! I can do –”

 

But my thought is cut short and the contest is forgotten forever as I realize where I’m standing, as I realize where I am and what I’m doing. “Maybe . . . we shouldn’t . . . do this . . .”

 

Staring at us is a small group of Ugandan children, twelve in all. Some of them are barefoot. Some of them wear shoes that are tied to their feet. One kid has a hole in his pants so big I can see his penis hanging out. Their shirts are either too big or too small for their bodies. Their skin is as dark as a plum and the dirt they are caked in is like a powder. One child has a herniated belly button the size of a kiwi. Their white eyes look at me. Look into me.

 

I’m not just in Uganda. I’m in the slums. I’m down here shooting promotional videos for an organization that houses abandoned babies, an organization that takes infants who have been left for dead inside of dumpsters and places them with new mothers. I’m down here representing them. And I’m down here representing America. And I’m down here representing humanity. And I’m supposed to be helping. I’m supposed to be in the dirt with these kids, giving them the tiniest shred of hope in their day. Earlier I was doing close-up magic—making a small coin disappear—and teaching them secret handshakes and they were chasing me around and hugging me and laughing and shouting, “Mzungu! Mzungu!”— an African term that means white traveler—and a humbling happiness came over me wherein I knew I could not help them all and I knew I could only help in this moment.

I look at their houses and I see mud walls with tin roofs. I see a canal, an undeveloped sewage system, that is one foot wide filled with human waste running in front of their homes. I see someone from my team open up a bag of suckers and I hear 30 children scream with so much glee that at first I think someone is being murdered. The children run around waving their candy in the air and laughing. I watch a two-year-old drop his sucker in some kind of dark brown mud. I watch him pick it up, wipe it on his shirt, and stick it back in his mouth.

 

I watch the mothers look at me and I know what they are thinking. They know where I come from. They know what I have. They know what they never will. Their mats in the dirt are as good as it gets and are as good as it ever will get. There is a quiet hopelessness that my presence rubs their noses in.

 

A drunken man wanders down the street and begins shouting at us in Lugandan, the local language. I ask Ryan what he’s saying. “He doesn’t want us here. He thinks you’re going to take his picture and make money from it and he will get nothing.”

 

“Can you tell him that we’re going to take the images to raise money for the babies?”

 

Ryan says, “He doesn’t care. Those babies are not in this village. Uganda is a big place. We might help someone but we won’t help him.”

 

We can’t help everyone.

The man disappears and comes back holding an iron rod. He cranks the volume on his voice and begins waving it around. The man gets up in the face of a local girl and begins pointing at each of us wildly. Ryan translates for me, “Why are you helping them? They are white, and they don’t care about you! When they are done they will leave and forget about you and you will still be here, poor and broke!”

 

It’s easy to paint this man as the bad guy, but the truth is that he’s spent his entire life being treated like an animal as we all come from our homes and take pictures of him in his natural habitat. He feels exploited.

 

When he’s spoken his mind, he stumbles away.

 

In a place like this – where you have so much more than everyone else, where you’re the richest guy in the room and everyone knows it—it’s easy to start thinking of yourself as some kind of gracious Mother Teresa type. It’s easy to start believing that you’re sacrificing yourself for The Children. Vanity moves in fast.

 

“I’ve come from America to save you! Do not fear, simple African people, for I have brought you the best thing I can: myself!”

I reach out and I take a child’s hand and I look into her eyes while I wonder how filthy those fingers are. How much human excrement is on them? I say, “How are you? What is your name?” while I scan her for any cuts that could infect me with HIV.

 

I’m down in it. For tonight only. And I am helping. But not this kid. Some kid somewhere will feel the effects of this video we’re making. It will raise awareness and it will raise money and that money will help some kid. But not this one. Not any of these. And the guy with the pipe is right. When I’m done here I am going to go back to America and you will still be here. And you will still be poor and broke.

 

But I won’t forget you. He’s wrong about that.

The sun is dropping down, and this close to the equator it only takes 15 minutes to go dark. The kids chase after us, laughing and dancing, smiling and shouting, “Mzungu! Mzungu!” as we walk to our van.

 

We get to the lot and I’m sweating. Ryan slides open the door and grabs a bottle of water, “I know dis guy named Geronimo—” And that’s how it all plays out.

 

How quickly we forget ourselves.

 

And now here I am, my eyes connecting with each one of the twelve kids. I think I know who they are and what they are. I believe that I am deep enough to understand the sorrows of their culture. And with clean water rushing down my chin and into the dirt, pooling in the dust at my feet, I realize that I am filled with more shit than the ditches in front of their homes.

 

I feel my heart break. Not for them. But for myself. I am baptized in shame. I swing my pack off and reach inside. Please, please let there be more. Please. My hand wraps around warm plastic and I pull out a bottle of water. I push through the crowd to the tallest child and say, “Are you the oldest?” and he nods. I hand him the bottle of water and I point to the crowd. “Share.”

 

Half the kids get a sip as it’s passed carefully between them, and then it’s gone and is discarded on the ground before they all look back at me. Nobody is multiplying fish and loaves here.

 

Our driver hollers. “Suns down. We gotta go.” And he means it. This is no place for a mzungu at night. I jump into the backseat and the kids all press their hands to the glass. “Mzungu! Please!” They babble in their native tongue, shouting pleas at me.

 

I can’t help you.

The engine fires up and the van shifts into drive. “Mzungu! Mzungu!” I press my hand against the glass and we start to move. I thrust my fist into my pocket. Where is it? Where is it? Hurry up! Hurry up, you fucking idiot! You fucking selfish idiot! The pocket is empty. I go for the other one—just a bunch of wrappers and lint. Where is it!? Where did I put it? There! My hand wraps around a single coin worth 100 shillings or about 3 U.S. pennies – the one I was making vanish with my close-up magic.

 

I swing open the door and reach out to the smallest kid, front and center. “Here! Here!” He holds out his hand and I drop the coin into his palm. His eyes turn into saucers. “Thank you, mzungu!” They all see the coin and they look at me and they start shouting, “Mzungu! Shilling! Mzungu!” They reach out for me, 12 dirty hands asking for my help, as the van speeds up.

 

I do them the courtesy of looking them all in the eyes as I slam the door in their faces.

 

I’m sorry. I can’t save you.

 

HOOTCH

 

It was supposed to be over one hundred degrees when we arrived in Gulu, a small village in Northern Uganda but, as the locals say, “God has blessed us and brought the rain.” I’m standing on the lip of our cruiser, a ten-person bus that I’ve taken to calling The Iron Donkey, and looking down the street towards Gulu’s own miniature version of The Sunset Strip. The entire length of the block is made up of shanties and lean-tos. Instead of doors, there are curtains. Instead of cement blocks, mud and corrugated steel. Instead of shingles, tin. If the big bad wolf comes around, he’s going to blow this entire place down.

 

Men and women sit under eaves, trying to escape the light drizzle while they wait for locals to buy their merchandise – sweet bananas, passion fruit, yams, mangoes, live chickens, dead chickens, chicken pieces and fry bread. All prices are open to negotiation.

 

Looking down the street I see dark faces and dirty people, individuals that my mind immediately associates with unsavory characters. I brush the thought away, remembering that I’m seeing them through a perspective that has been spoon fed to me through media and pop-culture for over thirty years. This looks like a slum to me, by my western standards, but to them, to everyone here, to these people, this is not a slum. This is everyday. This is what they were born into. This is what their parents were born into. This is the absolute unfaltering reality of their world.

Ten years ago the LRA was here recruiting children into the Lord’s Resistance Army and forcing them to kill their parents. They’d give a ten year old a gun and tell him to kill mom and dad. The soldiers would come in and cut off noses, lips and ears of children just so that, when they looked in the mirror, they’d remember their leader, Joseph Kony. This street was once ravaged by rape and violence so recently that George W. was still in office when it was happening. Most of the locals are now just happy that those days are over and they can now sell their wares in peace. They can feed their family without fear of a lunatic kicking in their door and making them choose which of their sons would be sacrificed to the LRA.

 

That 20-something guy with the mangoes spread out on the blanket across the street? That’s the world he grew up in while I was kicking back Bud Lights in college, cruising around on my Honda motorcycle in Colorado. I tell people I’ve never won the lottery but I gotta tell you, being born in America ain’t a bad runner up.

From my vantage point atop The Iron Donkey I can see behind these shanties to the village beyond. This street might be where these people work but where they live is tucked away and kept safe from prying eyes. Over the tops of the tin roofs, I can see a collection of huts – true huts whose walls are made from mud and whose roofs are made from thatch. I try to decide if these people live beyond poverty or outside of it completely. It’s easy to call them poor but perhaps their lives are just simpler than ours, unbound by complications like rent control, electric bills and social media.

A voice floats through the air and lands in the crook of my ear, “What are you thinking, Johnny?” I turn around. Noah, our Ugandan guide, is looking at me and smiling. I look back at the tiny strip and point to a bright red shack with people sitting out front. “What is that?” He answers, “A pub. You call it a bahrrr.”

 

I picture a bar as I know it – dimly lit, some tables, chairs. There is a bar up front, proper. A mirror, some bottles. Beer on tap, people sitting with their backs to the front door. Pool tables, darts, etc. But this red place – none of that is inside. It’s too small, too contained. I look at the people and judge them by their specific demographic. They’re not drinking Jameson. Hell, they’re not even drinking Black Velvet or Wild Turkey or the soup de jour, Bud Light – and not just because this is an impoverished community but because most places in Uganda don’t carry those brands. So what’s inside? My imagination tries to picture what this place looks like and my curiosity is peaked. Is there even electricity? Is there a refrigerator?

There are certain places on Earth that I assume I’ll never set foot simply because I would be unwelcomed. You know the vibe – certain places in Detroit, those nasty neighborhoods in New York you’ve seen in the movies, Skid Row at night. We try to make a peaceful world but there are places where a certain type of person just doesn’t belong because it’s private. It belongs to a culture and by stepping foot inside; you are invading it, exploiting it, making a carnival ride out of their personal world.

 

I also assume that this red bar across the street or the huts behind them are one of those places. That is some raw humanity that my cowboy boots and sunglasses would never be allowed in.

 

Still, it doesn’t hurt to wonder. I ask, “What do they serve?” and Noah looks down the street and seems to judge it. “Would you like to go inside?”

 

There is a part of me, inside my head, that shouts, No! Stay here! Stay here where it is safe! Stay here where your group is! Stay here where the bus is! That is the village. Those are the real people of Uganda. Those are the locals. You will not be welcomed. Remember when you got mugged in Nicaragua while heading towards a local bar?

 

But then the other half of me screams, Go! Quick! Go where there is danger! Go where no one else has! Run from the comforts you know! That is the village. Those are the real people of Uganda. Those are the locals. They may embrace you. And you helped rescue a lady during that mugging. If you weren’t there, who knows what could have happened to her.

 

Ah, back and forth. Back and forth.

 

I jump down from the lip and say, “Noah. I would love that. Is it safe?” He shrugs and begins walking, stepping in front of a car that comes to a screeching halt. I jog to keep up.

Across the street my boot hits mud. Deep mud. Sticky mud. Heavy mud that clings like little fingers that seem to say Now that you’re here, you’ll never leave. I look up and see a sea of white eyes lacking any casual sideways glances. They are staring, no two ways about it. And whether I am welcome or not, I can’t yet tell. I nod at them, give the cowboy quick-chin-down and nobody responds. I try the more street version with the quick-chin-up but still nothing. It’s very possible that people don’t do that here and have no idea what it means. They might think that my head nod is just a nervous twitch. Or they might think that I’m throwing attitude. This is how new cultures are – things you think are simple and straight forward sometimes get totally lost. I walk around a boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) with its wheels ripped off, leaking oil into the rain, none of it mixing together. The mechanic sits on a bucket with a rusty tool in his hand. I lift up my arm and hold out all five fingers in a stiff wave. He stares at me, blinks, and then lifts up his hand in acknowledgment. No smile.

 

I tap my left and right pocket. Phone and wallet still there. Check and check.

 

I lift my hand to another person and they immediately respond, meeting my action with the mirrored version. Noah hangs a right and cuts across the street again, putting us kitty-corner from our bus and about a city block away. “Noah, I’m catching a lot of eyeballs here. Are you sure we’re cool?”

 

“We’re fine. Mzungus just don’t come down here.”

 

“Why? Why not?”

 

“They come to Africa but they want the safe and beautiful version from National Geographic. They want to keep their shoes dry and their hands clean. They’ll help as long as it doesn’t put them in an uncomfortable place.”

 

“And where are we going?”

 

“We’re going somewhere uncomfortable. When people look at you, you won’t be able to just drive by and take a picture. You’ll have to look back at them.”

We approach a blue building and walk past a man sitting out front. Noah says something to him in Lugandan and the guy responds. Noah jumps up the single step and pushes the curtain aside that acts as a door and I lose him to the darkness within. I lift my hand to the man and he ignores me. Standing out here alone makes me feel exposed and vulnerable, like a snail in an atrium without its shell. I step up onto the concrete “porch” and push past the curtain, trying to look casual and confident, trying to look like I fit in, a white guy wearing a white shirt with a white hood and white sunglasses. Didn’t plan that one out. May as well drape Old Glory over my shoulders and sing the national anthem while I’m at it.

 

Inside the shack, the rain is considerably louder, slapping against the tin roof, and the light is almost non-existent. It slips under the sheet that covers the door and illuminates a bit of the floor. Inside, two young girls stand in haunting silence. There are no chairs or benches in the room. Noah says something to them in Lugandan and they mumble something in response. He says something again and the older of the two, maybe 13, shakes her head and points.

 

Noah pushes back past the sheet and steps out into the rain. He strolls past several structures made of rotting wood and tarps. Four doors down we come to the small cell with red walls that I’d spotted across the street. Sitting out front are a number of men, six on each side, lining the benches that lead to the entrance. “Mzungu! Ahh! Haha! Mzuuuungu!” (an African term for white traveler). Their eyes are bloodshot and their limbs are loose. They comfortably lean against one another, all of them drunk. We’ve reached The Pub.

Noah and I push through another sheer sheet and into a dark red room, eight feet across and eight feet wide. Parting the room in half is a counter. Behind the counter is a heavy woman whose eyes are barely visible above the tall ledge. Noah stands on his tip-toes and says something to her. He points to me. Her eyes shift in my direction but show no emotion. She says something and, in English, Noah says, “How much?” She quotes a number and he pulls out a bill, handing it across the counter. Pudgy fingers reach out and gobble up yellow money. I hear a shuffling, a clinking, a pouring, and then over the counter comes a dirty cup about the size of two shot-glasses filled with a clear liquid. She hands it to Noah, who hands it to me. I’m suddenly reminded of the scene from The Goonies where Mouth orders water in the Fratelli’s restaurant before discovering Sloth.

 

It’s now that I notice another woman standing next to me with a wrap around her waist and a sleeping newborn swaddled into the backside. She smiles at me and I smile back, happy to see a friendly face. I smell the drink, breathing deeply. There is a hint of fruit and a punch of alcohol that burns my nose. “What is it?”

Noah says, “Tonto. It’s made from sweet bananas – the little yellow ones.” It’s whiskey. Or moonshine. Or hootch. It’s made here. I take a little sip and the lady with the baby smiles. I smack my lips together and say, “It’s sweet. It’s like whiskey.” Noah smiles and signals me to shoot it. “Fast.” I pull in a breath and, on my empty stomach, begin to tilt the cup back. It takes me three drinks to finish it off. I pinch my eyes and pucker my mouth. I say, “Tastes a little fruity. It’s quite good,” and when I hand the cup back to the woman behind the counter, I see a small smile in her eyes. Is it pride? She takes the cup and places it back on the shelf behind her without washing it.

 

Noah says something to the lady with the baby and she nods twice before turning and leaving. Noah follows after her while I bring up the rear. The gray daylight cuts at my eyes and I squint, walking back out into the rain. The drink has gone straight to my head and I can already feel it loosening me up. The men outside again shout, “Yeah! Mzungu! Haha! Woo!” and I smile back and hold out my fist to one of them, not caring how it looks. Not caring about the social implications of lifting my fist or what that might mean here. The man stares at it, confused. Noah keeps walking. I don’t move. I just stare at him and wait for it to click. The drunk man laughs and lifts his fist in return.

 

Bump it.

 

I laugh and the rest of the men in the row immediately lift their fists as I walk past them. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. Laughter chases behind me as I disappear back into the rain.

The lady with the baby walks past six doors before taking a sharp left down a narrow corridor. I’m being led back into the quiet places. This is not the place that you see from the car. This is the internal. This is the inner circle. This is their community. Their private life. There is a sense of both fear and honor that mix around in my gut. The thought crosses my mind that it may have been years since a white man has visited. The thought crosses my mind that I could be making history.

 

I step out of the corridor and into a village where Africans in dusty clothes slowly walk back and forth. All eyes are on me, front and center. I lift my hand and say, “Hello. Hello,” being sure to hit each syllable hard. I feel like a visitor from outer space. I mean you no harm. Scattered abruptly around and seemingly without reason are huts. The huts. Real huts. That’s all I can think. These are huts. These are real huts. These are real huts that real people live in. I’ve seen them in movies and books but these are real. The real thing. This is what pre-civilization looked like. This is pre-brick and pre-commerce. I am in an African village. These are huts made of mud and thatch. People live here. This is raw humanity. This is pure. This is honest.

 

I want to pull out my phone and begin snapping photos. Look at me, Facebook! Look where I am! I’m at a hut village! But the idea immediately revolts me. A few yards ahead I see a small circle of people, eight in total. They sit in chairs around a small pot. Coming out of the pot are long straws that the people all suck on – it looks like some kind of water bong but there is no smoke coming from their mouths.

Noah says, “Do you want to try?” and I say, “What is it? What are they doing?” and he says, “It’s alcohol. It is called Ajono.” We approach the circle and the people all look at me, each of them appearing more haggard than the last. Teeth are missing. Eyes are sunken. Clothes are torn and dirty. Hands are caked in age and filth. I look to my right and see another circle made of younger men, all of them sending me The Eyeball.

 

“Do you want to try it?” Noah asks again. I look down into the blue and yellow striped pot, the size of a basketball, and see a mixture that looks like water and sand and glue. It looks like chewed up sawdust mixed with spit. It looks like ground up peanuts and warm milk. An older woman stands up, pulls her straw out of her mouth and hands it to me.

This is where the rubber meets the road. This is their culture. These are the hidden things that no one ever knows. You will not find this on a tour bus or a guided walk through a museum. This is a special moment. This is their community extending an olive branch to me. Welcome. This is they giving me a gift. The woman, mid-sixties, taps my shoulder and signals me to sit in her chair, a wooden contraption that’s low to the ground and, after I sit in it, I learn, exceptionally comfortable.

 

An old man across from me holds his straw in his hands and stares at me. Man, what have you seen? What things have you seen? Were you here when the LRA stormed in? What are those scars from? How long have you been here? What do you know?

 

I say, “Hello,” but he doesn’t respond. I look around the circle and see them all staring at me, waiting. Not pressuring me. Just waiting. Observing. Watching me take part in their tradition. There is something nearly spiritual about this. We are cultures combining, an unexpected exercise for both of us.

 

As with most of the monumentally memorable moments in my life, I never thought they would happen when I opened my eyes that morning. There is power in running towards fear. After all, can a true adventure be planned? Aren’t they, by their very nature, an exploration of the unknown?

 

I look back at the pot and the smell hits me. Rotten bread and moisture. I lift the straw to my mouth and think, Can I get Hep A from this? Hep B? I got my vaccines… Can you contract AIDS from backwash? I’m fairly certain that’s not possible. I pinch the straw between my lips and pull, pull, pull. The length of the straw is about three feet but the thick liquid comes up faster than I anticipate. It’s hot, like green tea that is just cool enough to drink without pausing. It doesn’t burn but it warms me. The taste is just bearable enough to take on, just awful enough to put my mind elsewhere while I swallow.

 

Sometimes taste is deceiving – sparkling water, curry and dark chocolate – sometimes you need a second taste to really appreciate whether you like it or not. I pull again and realize that this is not one of those things. This stuff just tastes like soggy bread with yeast. It is apparent that it will never grow on me.

 

I hear a laugh and when I look up, both circles, young and old, are watching me. A woman lets out a long cackle, which acts as a wick to the fireworks. The rest of the old people begin to laugh. They each pull their straws back into their mouths and begin to sip. Noah says, almost as a command, “Take more.”

 

I put the straw back in my mouth and pull deeply. Three, four, five, six drinks. The effect of the first shot is massaging my brain and I can feel this sludge caking my stomach like glue. The young guys begin to shout and I look over. A tall guy that would fit perfectly in the NBA yells something at me. I turn to Noah. “What is he saying?” Noah listens. “I don’t know. He’s speaking Acholi.” The NBA-guy yells something again and the woman with the baby says something to Noah, who translates to English, “He wants you to drink with him.” I say, “Should I?” and Noah tilts his head ever so slightly left to right.

 

No.

 

I don’t know why and later on I forget to ask. I stand up and admire the toothless smiles that shine up at me from these ancient villagers that have seen more tragedy than anyone on my block back home probably ever will. I stick out my fist to the oldest man and hold it. His smile grows ever wider as he pulls the straw from his mouth and bumps my fist. All the way around the circle I connect with each of them. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for this. Thank you.”

I know, even as it’s happening, that this moment is unique and will play back through my mind for the rest of my life. I know that it will be rare to ever meet someone with a similar story who I can compare notes with. I understand how valuable this is. This experience is irreplaceable and will probably never repeat itself.

 

I turn to the eldest man, the leader, and I say to him, “May I take a photo? May I take a picture?” Noah translates and then the lady with the baby translates again and the man’s eyes shine. He nods his head yes vigorously. I pull out my iPhone, worth more money than they make in three months, and snap a photo of the brew.

 

I repeat, “Thank you. Thank you for this,” as Noah speaks over me, translating. An older woman gently claps her hands together. The NBA-guy yells again and then hoots. The mood is so good. So light. So pure. So human. There is so much awesome connectivity happening that I try to take it one step further. I don’t want it to end. I’m in The Current of All Good Things and I want to watch it all play out. My luck is ripe. I pull in a breath and look at the group of elders. And then I ask, “May I see the inside of a hut? May I look inside?”

 

Noah looks at me and then looks at the woman with the baby. The woman with the baby says something to an older woman. The older woman smiles and jumps up from out of her chair with more grace than I would anticipate possible. She says something that I don’t understand but waves her hand through the air in a follow me gesture. She leads us to her hut, signals one more time, and walks inside.

 

I watch the lady with the baby disappear. And then I watch Noah disappear. I turn my head back to the circles and the old man waves at me. I look back at the hut and realize that this woman is bringing me, accepting me, into the deepest part of her life. This is the deepest privacy this woman has. These huts are only ten feet across and everything she owns in the world exists inside.

 

The only place this woman has with more privacy is her heart.

 

I touch the soft fabric hanging in front of the door and push into the darkness and once again, out of the rain that is now turning my clothes damp. The humidity hits me first. It’s very warm – at least 10 degrees hotter in here than it is outside. It’s also dark. It’s very dark. The rain falls silent. The drape falls and the four of us stand in silence. Noah, the old woman and the lady with the baby all stare at me. To my immediate left is a small bench. At the back of the hut a small curtain hangs, blocking something. To my right another small curtain hangs, blocking something else. There must only be a foot or two maximum between the other side of the curtain and the wall. What are they hiding?

 

I look up and touch the ceiling. I want to say something profound, something that shows how thankful I am to be brought here, to be shown this, to have this shared with me, a stranger who is opposite in every way. The old woman says something, pointing to each area – the bench, the first curtain, the second curtain. The woman with the baby translates for Noah. Noah translates for me. He says, “This is her living room (the bench), this is her bedroom (first curtain), and this is her kitchen (second curtain).”

 

The only decorations are four pictures of Jesus hanging on the wall in the living room.

 

I don’t know how to feel. Sympathy? Pity? Envy? I reach out my hand and take hers. Her skin is paper-thin and she feels like an autumn leaf. Our hands are so different. Young, old. Black, white. She’s spent year doing heavy work and I’ve spent my time sitting at a desk and writing. Our fingernails tell the story of our lives. I stare into her eyes and say, “Your home is beautiful. Thank you for sharing this with me. I will never forget this moment.”

 

Noah translates to the lady with the baby, who translates to the old woman. She gives me a tender smile and speaks a simple sentence. The lady with the baby translates back. Noah smiles and says to me, “You are not like the other mzungus.”

 

I smile.

 

Outside, the same rain that falls on Los Angeles, falls on everyone.

SYRIAN REFUGEES DO NOT DESERVE OUR HELP.

I was standing in an arcade last night, sirens and flashing lights drowning my senses. A friend of mine had just jumped into this Star Wars immersive pod and I decided to check out Facebook while I waited for him to emerge victorious after destroying the Death Star. Upon opening my feed, I saw this photo re-posted a number of times by various people. Clearly it was striking a chord in the populous. A real hot-button meme if ever there was one.

We’re all constantly badgered by one another’s political opinions and we all live on opposing sides of the fence. We all believe something different and we all constantly have to hear about it from the Too Conservative or the Overly Liberal. We all have That Mom, That Son, That Uncle, That Cousin, That Friend From High School that we want to shake because they are so frustratingly stupid. People can complain up and down about how tired they are of their feed being filled with opinions that are in contradiction to their own but it’s like… I don’t know. Facebook is a social media platform where everyone gets to stand on a soapbox and type in exactly what they’re feeling. That’s what it is. That’s what this place is. I thought everyone understood that. Like, “I gave this guy an opportunity to talk and he told me his opinion. I was so disgusted by his audacity.” So it’s always so strange to me when people say, “I’m tired of hearing other people’s opinions. I want to discuss things as long as you’re a carbon copy of me.” Diversity is what makes our culture rich and it’s what expands our world view. We as a people have to understand that even the people that believe something on the very opposite end of the spectrum believe it because, for some inner-logical reason, it makes perfect sense to them. They are not just hate-mongers. There is a decisive purpose to their decisions. It doesn’t mean that they are wrong. It means we don’t understand them. It is a personal failure of ours to not see the point of view of another. And understanding that, I believe, is the first step to finding common ground. We need to understand where each side is coming from. Listen, Donald Trump is not filled with hate. He is filled with fear. And I don’t need Yoda to tell me how that turns out… but just in case you do…

We all have something to learn from one another and I believe it’s a very dangerous practice to start blocking out the variety of life. I understand that certain people were raised in a very different culture, in a very different city, in a very different family, with very different opinions than the ones I’ve been brought up in. It makes sense that we all view the same object from different perspectives. That is what life is.

But last night I saw this image on Facebook and it struck me quite hard. Really made me question everything I thought I believed about myself.

I just stared at it and it all suddenly clicked into place for me. I finally got it. I finally understood the deep, unsettling kernel of truth at the very center of this current historical dilemma.

The Syrian refugees do not deserve our help.

And it is my basic right as an American Christian to deny that help.

It’s OKAY to tell people that they’re going to die at the hands of savages. We don’t need to feel guilt over that.

I understand that ISIS is doing bad things over there but that’s what those people do. Their entire culture breeds hatred and animosity and it makes sense that hatred and animosity rises up out of that. I understand that ISIS is pure evil. I mean they are really the closest thing to absolute pure darkness that I can imagine. If an army of demons were to crawl out of Hell and begin attacking the Earth, I would imagine the headlines and acts of atrocity would look the same. The inhuman brutality of what they are doing is reprehensible. And we can all agree on this, right? No one is questioning who the bad guy is.

We can all look at the group of men that rape children and lock people in cages and cover them in gasoline and light them on fire and cut the throats of men and women while they videotape it to share with their friends and the public. We all know those are the bad guys. The guys that are stomping in the skulls of infants and cutting off their heads and taking photos for their social media feed. We can all look at those guys and go, “That is so fucking evil I feel like “evil” is too kind of a word for it.” No discrepancies. It is the one thing we can all get on the same side about. Great. That’s progress! We’re all coming together on something and let’s not take that lightly. Dude, Christians, atheists, gay people, straight people, let’s all high five. We are on the exact same page!

Now, there is currently a group of people in this world that are just wreaking absolute havoc on another group of people. They are not bullying them. They are not ruling them with some kind of tyrannical fist. They are capturing them like prey. They are torturing them. And they are killing them. And they are doing this on a massive scale. It’s like real life Hostel. I can only assume that there are no words, phrases, images or otherwise that could possibly allow you and I to know the concentrated fear that has been placed on these individuals. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to watch a large group of masked men break into my house, strip my children naked, sexually assault them in front of me and then murder them. If someone cut off Rory’s head in front of me, I feel like I would just lose my mind. Like, legitimately my brain would slip into a place where there would be no coming back from. Something inside of me would just break and I wouldn’t be a person anymore. If someone raped Bryce in front of me, I would just… it’s as though my consciousness would simply shut off.

Now, these victims. These people that these acts are being done to. It is my understanding that they feel as though their home life has apparently gotten so bad that they want to run to The United States of America for help. They’re so broken and afraid that they are taking makeshift boats blindly across a sea. They would rather slowly starve to death in the middle of a body of water before hunkering down and seeing this problem through. I guess that, to me, it just doesn’t sound very patriotic. On their part, I mean. These people were born in Syria – they knew what they were getting into. And now they act surprised when this kind of thing happens. And then they try to come over to our country and pollute us with it. Y’know, America has done a really impressive job of being the greatest nation on Earth and we didn’t get here by helping out every asshole running from their problems.

America has it’s short comings, I get it. We’re not perfect. We have a homeless veteran situation. We have an orphan situation. We apparently are going through some kind of gun phase right now that I’m hoping we either grow out of or grow into. We. Have. Problems. There are so many bad things happening over here that we should focus on, we don’t have any room to help these other people – very specifically this group of people – because of… well, what they are.

And when I say that, I mean that they are probably Muslims.

This is a safe spot and if I can’t say it here, I can’t say it anywhere. America is for Christians. That’s what we’re ultimately saying, right? America was built by Christians, for Christians and there is no room for Muslims. Their faith is kind of like Christianity – I’ve read that they actually stem from kind of the same belief system although I’ve never dug deep enough into it to give you the details – but it’s different enough to make them bad people. I’m not sure where the disconnect is but the Muslim faith teaches hatred and violence. Here is a brief list of famous Muslims I’ve compiled to show you what I mean…

ICE CUBE: This is not a joke. He converted to Muslimism in the 90s. He raps about killing police officers.

SNOOP DOGG: See ICE CUBE.

MIKE TYSON: Rapist. Has tattoo on face.

ELLEN BURSTYN: This woman looks gentle but you can see in her eyes that she contains a sparkle of hatred. She was in Requiem for a Dream. This movie has lots to do with evil. She was not in The Notebook – that’s Gena Rowlands and as far as I can tell, Gena is not a muslim.

MUHAMMED ALI: This black man made a living out of punching people. He also changed his name and that is suspicious.

CAT STEVENS: Another black man. I’m seeing a re-curring theme here.

Sorry for being long-winded and really driving the point home but I want to make sure I’m heard properly. Some people deserve our help. Some people deserve our attention. Those people are people who were born in our country. If you were not born in our country and you need to get out of a situation where you’re being hunted by demons, this is not the place you should come to. Our shores are filled with enough people begging us to save their lives. We don’t need anymore. Your children are going to have to just get raped. I’m sorry. That sounds a little vicious but it’s the unfortunate truth. You might be a Christian and you might be married and God might even have his gentle hand on your marriage but if ISIS is going to cut off the head of your wife, that’s just the way of it. You are a Syrian and that is your biggest crime.

You, as a human, do not deserve my sympathy. And you as a Syrian do not deserve my American soil. And you as a Muslim sure as fuck don’t deserve my Christian kindness. Sorry, brah. Better luck next time. I’m looking out for numero uno and I’m okay with your family getting the sharp end of the Tragic Stick if it means mine gets to eat at Chuck-E-Cheese without fear of being blown up by one of your brothers in God.

Let’s just call a spade a spade. We are afraid of all the Muslims coming over here and killing us. And if a couple thousand local yokels from The Middle East have to die so that we stay safe, that’s the ticket. I hope I’m not coming across as selfish or prudish. Because I have my own problems. I get it. Life is tough sometimes. Next week I’ve got to figure out how to get the drain from my shower re-plumbed to my rain barrel so that I can water my lawn with grey water. We had a consultation done and they quoted us 10k. That’s crazy. I simply don’t have that kind of money.

First World Problems

Sometimes too many words are just too many words so I’m going to keep this one short.

While visiting Nicaragua I heard a man say, “If you can fix it with money, it’s not really a problem… if you can’t fix it with money, then it’s a problem.”

Really simple words that have stuck with me for the last six months and have given me a simple clarity to most of my everyday issues.  I hope you can take a moment to meditate on that phrase and then go have a GREAT WEEK!  See you next Monday!

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/101108613″>First World Problems</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user3183899″>John Brookbank</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

When Wives Go Wild

There’s this old episode of The Twilight Zone where these two neighbors are super chummy with each other at a dinner party.  One guy says to the other that he just had a bomb shelter put in and the neighbor chuckles to himself and pokes fun at the homeowner; says he’s far too over prepared.  The gag in the episode, of course, is that the warning sirens come on moments later and suddenly the neighbor wants into the bomb shelter.  Sadly, there isn’t nearly enough food for both families so the guy that owns the place locks his guest out.  Well, the neighbor, not accepting death so nobly, decides that if he can’t be saved, no one will.  The man turns into an animal and just begins ravaging this door.  He’s going at it with an axe, he’s screaming, he’s losing his mind, his eyes wide in terror and rage.

This is no longer a friendly neighbor.  This is primal man.  Borderline animal.

The episode ends when the door is finally kicked in and the two men are about to kill each other when the sirens go off and the, “This is only a warning” recording comes on.

Awkward. Situation. For. Sure.

The men revert back to their civilized states, nod to one another and then sort of shift slowly towards the door as standard life has been restored.  BUT… it raises the question, what sort of animals are we?  What sort of beasts are lurking just under the surface?  Just behind the veil of security, the illusion of law, the commitment of marriage?

What I mean is this…

My wife left tonight.  Not left me, thank goodness, but left to head out with The Ladies.  She and three friends have gone to watch a Roller Derby Tournament.  Yes, you read that correctly.  That’s what type of woman I’m married to.  In her free time she goes to watch other women get beat up.  She’s like Patricia Bateman but in a good way.

So I’m dealing with one of these circumstances where I’m on solo dad duty and everything moves sort of slowly but we get it done and we cycle the kids through the dishwasher and into the pajama machine and then tuck them away in the sock drawer and everyone is happy but then… the house is quiet… and there are no adults… and so I look around and try to decide what to do…

What to do…

And the very first thing that comes to my mind, THE VERY FIRST THING, is to make myself a bean burrito at 9pm.  NINE PEE-EM!  I suddenly have a flashback of myself standing in a dimly lit dorm room ten years ago chasing a six pack and three unfiltered cigarettes down my throat with a can of cold refried beans; a diet my dog wouldn’t even touch…. if my dog were alive… which she isn’t… please see last blog…

Now, contrary to popular belief, I AM 30-something and so I actually DO try to watch what I eat from time to time and especially when I eat it.  Gone are the days of chowing down on Taco Bell at midnight.  I’m an adult.  I’m married.  I have responsibilities… and so I pick up my phone and I text The Guys.  I text the two gentlemen whose wives are currently out with my wife watching women shove elbows into each other’s guts and faces like a modern day Coliseum on skates.  I hear Shang Tsung shout, “FINISH HIM!” and then some roller derby enthusiast rips off her skate and crushes her opponents skull with it.  Blood spatters all over the ground and the audience golf claps gently.

The first guy, we’ll call him Mickey, says, “I’m drinking.  I’m drunk.  I’m drinking drunk.  I’ve had five drinks.  I’m alone.  I’m drinking alone… and bisquits and gravy sounds amazing.  AMAZING.  I wish I had bisquits and gravy.  I only have two week old lasagna.”

I say, “Don’t do it, Mickey.  It’s too late and it’s too old.  Just stay away.”  He says, “I’ll be fine.  I’ll microwave it.  Heat kills bacteria,” and I say, “I’m not sure… if… that’s… trooooo…”

ABOVE: This is what all microwaves look like in my imagination.  Just total last resort.

In another text thread I hit up the other guy.  We’ll call him Andre (just because I don’t know any Andre’s and so never get to tell stories about them).  I say, “Whatchyoo up to tonight?” and he says, “I just finished eating a Kung Pao 3 Musketeer,” and I say, “Is that one thing or two?  Is that like… an American-Asian candy bar?” and he says, “It’s just one thing.  It’s Kung Pao with chicken, beef and shrimp,” and I find that I’m thinking about that bean burrito again.  I’ve got some salsa in the fridge.  I’ve got some sour cream I bought for some kind of potato the other day… do we have tortillas?  Screw it… I’d eat it on bread if necessary… even just mixing it all up like a stew doesn’t sound terrible…

Andre says, “This is what happens when girls aren’t around… just regret…”

I text him back and I say, “We’re never truly men.  We hit college and that’s full maturity for us – for every man.  Everything beyond college is just a mask.  Some guys are better at wearing it but it’s all just a chore to be civilized.  As soon as our wives leave, we immediately revert (just like the guy from The Twilight Zone).  It’s just masturbation and sadness and nachos, in that specific order.

He laughs but, as I’m opening up a can of refried beans at 11pm I catch myself in the mirror and I realize that if I ever lose my wife, I am totally and completely doomed.

ABOVE: If she leaves me, everything in my life will immediately go wrong.  I am certain of this.

***   ***   ***   ***   ***

To my wife, who I know will read this because you read all of the garbage I write, good or bad; thank you for making sure I’m not a slovenly maniac with an axe trying to chop down my neighbor’s door.  Thank you for making sure I don’t subsist on refried beans and Telemundo alone.

Please, please, please, go crush skulls.  Please, please, please, go absolutely wild.  Please, please, please, always come back to me.

ABOVE: If this town isn’t big enough for the both of us, I don’t wanna live here.

Lost in Nicaragua… sort of…

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is the second part in a series I’m writing based off of my wife’s and my recent adventures in Nicaragua.  It is unnecessary to read the previous segment in order to read this one since, outside of geographic location, all events are, for the most part, unrelated.

For context to some of my following inner monologues and emotions, just know that we were involved first-hand in a mugging during our initial evening in Nicaragua and it has thrown a bit of a dark flurry over our journey, leaving us suspicious of everyone.

***   ***   ***   ***   ***

My wife and I are standing in the lobby of the Hotel Naranja, the place we’d bunked the night previous.  We were just checking out and getting ready to – thankfully – leave the dangerous and violent city of Managua behind for higher grounds on Isla de Ometepe or The Island of Ometepe; a textbook paradise located just 90 minutes by ferry off the shores of Nicaragua.

The woman behind the desk hangs up the phone and says, “I’ve just called you a taxi.  He’ll pick you up out front and drop you off at the bus station.  Take the Rivas Express.  Rivas is a port city.  The ferry from Rivas will take you to the island.”  I nod and she says, “Rivas Express,” and I nod again and she says, “EXPRESS.”

The taxi driver arrives in an unmarked minivan and pushes both my wife and I into the backseat where the cushions are ripped and springs and yellow stuffing are jutting out at odd and painful angles.  The man speaks nada English and drives like a Latino Jeff Gordon.  He blazes through the city, swerving, honking, skirting around bicyclists and pedestrians.  He cuts corner and takes shortcuts, driving with the finesse of a paramedic.

The city flies past us in a frenetic buzz, the buildings and homes broken, vandalized and decimated.

ABOVE: A completely operational business.

The taxi driver turns into a buzzing market place and stomps on his brakes in the middle of the street, slams his car into PARK and exits the vehicle as a group of strange men (also in unmarked clothes) begin to descend upon us.  Jade squeezes my hand and says, “What’s happening?  What’s happening?”  I square myself off against my wife, blocking her from our assailants as they slide open the door and tell us to exit the vehicle into a crescent they’re forming with their bodies.

Jade echoes herself, “What’s happening?” and I, powerless against them, slowly exit the minivan, preparing myself for the worst and snapping my pack to me so it can’t be stolen.  Jade hesitantly exits, staying near to me while the men begin to bump into us and shout words I can’t understand.  Noises come from every direction.  People are everywhere.  Buses and cars fly by.  Information and stimuli are pouring in from every angle and I’m trying to look for knives and thieves.  My personal bubble is being infiltrated and molested by a variety of strangers and I don’t know how to answer any of them.

A large school looking bus pulls up next to us and I suddenly hear a word that makes sense to me.  One of the large men shouts, “RIVAS!  RIVAS!” and points to the bus.  I say, “Rivas?” and he says, “Si!  Si!”  I push through the men towards the bus and onto the steps leading inside.  My wife shouts, “Johnny!” and I turn around, anticipating her to be following me but instead seeing her through the bus window, still standing on the concrete, surrounded by strangers.  I shout, “Come.  ON.” and wave my arm through the air.

She says, “Are you sure this is the right bus?” and I say, “Rivas?  Rivas?” and the group of men, whose roles in this I still don’t understand, all nod and say, “Rivas!  Si!  Rivas!”  I wave my hand through the air again and say, “JADE.  Come on!”  The bus driver and all of its patrons stare at me as I hold up the show; the bus not being at a stop but at an actual stop SIGN, just getting ready to pull into traffic when I hijacked it.

ABOVE: ALTO / STOP

Jade says, “Is this the Express?” and one of the men shakes his head and says, “No,” and Jade says, “It’s not the Express!” and I say, “It’s Rivas!  We have to get on!  Come on!” and Jade, finally bending under the pressure, gets on the bus and we both take a seat together halfway down the aisle as the bus turns into oncoming traffic, swerves, and picks up speed.

I turn to Jade and say, “That was intense,” and she says, “Yeah.  Who were those guys?” and I shrug.  The bus stops and some people get on.  Others get off.  The city passes and then falls away.  The bus stops.  People get on.  People get off.  The country engulfs us; acres and acres and acres and acres of wild life as far as the eye can see.  Everything is overgrown and lush and green.  The bus stops and people get off and people get on.

Jade says, “How far to Rivas?” and I say, “I don’t know.”  I nudge the woman in front of me and say, “How far to Rivas?” and she says, “Rivas?” and I say, “Yes.  Uh, si,” and she says, “Si,” and points forward.  I have no way to communicate the simplest thoughts to anyone and this is both frustrating, exhilarating, challenging and also a bit scary.

ABOVE: JB & JB ridin’ dirty on the bus to Rivas… like, literally filthy.  Everything is sweaty and caked in dust.

I reach into my bag and pull out our Nicaraguan Traveler’s Guide and flip to the translator in the back which gives you general phrases like, “What time is it?” and “That is too expensive,” and, “How far to…”

I nudge the woman again and say, “Cuanto kilometers… Rivas?” which I assume translates roughly to, “What is the quantity of kilometers to Rivas?”  The woman blurts out a few words and my wife and I turn back to our book, trying to figure out what noventa means.  We cross reference every ten digits until we come to ninety and sigh with relief.

We’re definitely on the right bus and we’re definitely heading the right direction.  90 kilometers.  The woman tells us two hours.  The bus stops, people get off, people get on.  To our left, a bus filled with white people passes us.  Jade says, “I think that’s the Express to Rivas.”  Our bus stops again.  More people get on.  More people get off.  The Express Bus never stops.  The Express Bus disappears into the distance.  The Express Bus is gone.

A woman selling snacks from a basket gets on and begins to walk up and down the aisle, chanting her inventory at all the passengers.  The woman in front of  us purchases some candy for a handful of shiny coins.  The merchant gets off at the next stop and more food distributors get on.  They sell bread, drinks and snacks.  People come and go.  The bus never breaks forty miles per hour.  I turn to Jade and say, “Do you think that Express bus just goes from the station in Managua to Rivas?” and she nods and I say, “This bus is way better,” and she nods again.

ABOVE: Sack o’ Fanta… that I bet the regular ol’ Express Bus didn’t get to try out!

The woman in front of us turns around and offers us some candy.  She holds it out in the palm of her hand and says, “Esposa?” and I take the candy and say, “Que?” and she repeats herself.  She holds up her hand and points to her ring finger.  “Esposa,” and I say, “Oh!  Spouse.  Wife.  Husband.  Yes!” and I lift my hand and show her my pure gold wedding ring but quickly drop my hand, afraid somebody will try to steal it from me (both my ring as well as my finger).

The woman says, “Ninos?” and Jade says, “Tre.  Uno nino.  Dose nina.” or,”Three.  One boy.  Two girls.”  This is how total immersion into a foreign language works; you take the little you know and you begin to incorporate.  Over the next week we’ll add a few words to our vocabulary every day until we’re able to function as tourists on a relatively socially acceptable basis.

The bus stops and the driver shouts, “Rivas!  Rivas!” and I say, “Rivas!  Let’s go!” and The Candy Woman says, “No!” and we sit down.  The man repeats it and I realize he’d said, “Arriba!“, which I believe means “Hurry up.”

The bus enters another city and Jade says, “Is this Rivas?” and I say, “I have no idea.”  I look for signage but can’t find any and, the boards I do find, I can’t seem to read.  At one point I see the word Rivas with an arrow but no numbers or mileage / kilometers next to it.  It’s at this point that the thought crosses my mind that we could actually miss Rivas.  We could actually slide right through it, right past it.  We could end up in an even more foreign land and have no idea how to contact anyone.  The internet doesn’t work on our phones so we couldn’t YELP a taxi cab.  We could enter a business and hope to translate “lost” and “taxi” and “help” and… the sun crosses it’s peak point in the sky and I imagine being stuck in a small village at night…

I ask the woman in front of us where she’s heading and she says, “Costa Rica,” and I nod and say, “If we hit Costa Rica, we’ve gone too far.”  Jade exhales and takes a picture of something with her phone.

ABOVE: Our Bus Buddies.

Every ten minutes, every fifteen minutes, the bus stops and passengers are traded.  I say to Jade, “What are these places?  Where are they going?” and she says, “I don’t know.”  I look at the bus stops and they’re nothing more than benches in the middle of nowhere.  A random hut or trailer stands all alone in the distance, completely disconnected to any sort of civilization for miles and miles and miles around.  Getting off at one of these places was completely out of the question.

If we passed Rivas, we’d be onto the next city… whatever it was.

I imagine where The Rivas Express could be right now.  I imagine all those tourists hopping on a ferry and laughing and smiling.  I wonder if this is how the entire trip will play out; us trying to do something and failing miserably; us trying to do The Tourist Thing and instead doing The Nicaraguan Thing; us trying to dip our toes in the pool and instead falling in completely.

I honestly can’t say it’s a terrible way to experience a new culture but there is a fear involved in it that coincides with the excitement.  This is more than hitchhiking to Denver.  This is more than going for a stroll through Strange New York.  This is more than taking a road trip detour through Salt Lake City.

This is complete isolation from your culture, from a way of life, from standard and safety.

When we typically travel we like to Give In To The Process and let happen what may; let the journey bring things to us and carry us through and allow it to live on its own, to be alive but this process and this journey was completely different.  This wasn’t Giving In to the art of acupuncture and letting the weirdness wash over you; this was someone asking to do acupuncture with machetes.  It was the complete unknown with no guidelines, roads or basis of comparison.  We had no contact to any one to ask for advice and the contacts we had, we couldn’t speak frankly to.

I turn my head and look out the window, watching more countryside roll by; more broken homes, houses and yards, wondering how much further.  How much further?  How much is ninety kilometers?  How much is one kilometer?  A half mile?  Two-thirds of a mile?  Everything is foreign.  Even distance is strange.  I can’t even get a grasp on time.

We wait, completely at the whim of Fate and Travel and Journey.

Suddenly, The Candy Woman turns around and, choking on her excitement for us, says, “Rivas!” just moments before the bus driver shouts it.  We stand up and I say, “Gracias!  Gracias!” and walk off the bus, having no idea how to get a taxi, how to call one, how to get to the ferry from the bus station, how far it is, how expensive it is, how, exactly, the translation from U.S. dollars to Nicarguan cordobas works.  Everything is Grey Zone.  Everything is Unknown.  And I’m jumping off the bus directly into it.

I step down into the dirt and a heavy set man in a red polo approaches me and says, “Ferry?  Ometepe?” and I say, “Si,” and he says, “Taxi,” and points to himself.  I say, “Si.  Cuanto costa?” and he says, “Ocho,” and I say, “U.S.?” and he says, “Si,” and I say to Jade, “Eight bucks to the ferry?” and she says, “Sure.”

We hop in and he blasts Hispanic techno music while driving with his knees and texting on his old-fashioned-Motorola-Razor-looking phone… and I’m positive he’s texting his Boss, telling him he’s got two Gringos in the backseat that are prime meat for the Sex Shop.  I’m sure he’s thinking to himself, “Score!  The first one has beautiful features, soft hands and a delicate voice… and his wife ain’t bad neither!”

He sways into on-coming traffic, over corrects and begins to veer towards the sidewalks, corrects again, evens out, puts down the phone and turns up the music.  He turns onto narrow streets populated by abandoned homes, dark garages and people that look like they’re capable of bad things.  I mindlessly reach for my right pocket where I always keep my pocket knife before finding it gone, realizing too late that I’d left it at home to avoid the TSA from confiscating it from me.

ABOVE: The airport exiting Nicaragua works on the honor system.  “Dear Passenger, please deposit any prohibited items into case.”  No further inspection required.

The man turns down the music, turns to me and asks something in elongated Spanish.  I say, “Hahah, poco espaniol,” or “Hahah, small Spanish.”  I hold up my forefinger a half inch from my thumb, indicating just how poco.  The man laughs and says, “Ah… Ometepe, si?” and I say, “Si,” and he says, “Cuanto dias?” and there’s that cuanto word again!  I know this one!  I learned it on the bus!  He’s asking how many, how many, how many something.  Dias.  I know that.  It’s familiar.  What is it?  Buenos dias.  Good Day.  Day.  DAY.  Cuanto Dias.  Quantity of days.  He’s asking how long I’m staying.  I cracked the code!  And that’s how it feels every time you figure out what someone has said to you – it feels like you’ve just decrypted a super secret real life code and the message is out and it’s yours.

I, counting silently in my head while staring at my fingers say, “Cinco?” and he says, “Cinco, si, si,” and then we drive in silence until he stops at a tall fence blocking a huge body of water.  In the distance I see the two volcanoes that make up Ometepe.  They are majestic and…. other adjectives will just poison them.  They are truly majestic.  I nudge Jade and say, “Loooooook…”

ABOVE: Ometepe from the ferry.  On the left is Volcan Concepcion and on the right is Volcan Maderas.  The second is dead, the first just sleeping.

I pay the taxi driver ocho dollars and he gives me his name and phone number so I can call him in cinco dias.  (See, you’re picking it up too!  It’s fun, right?!)

Jade and I walk through the gate, find a poco restaurante and purchase lunch; a single plate of over easy eggs, rice and black beans that we share and jointly chase down with two beers; a Victoria and a Tona, the two major beer brands of Nicaragua.  We don’t know it, but this is what most of our meals will consist of.

The rice and beans are unlike any I’ve ever had.  While I find most rice and beans to be completely bland and underwhelming, this combo was delicious and we would intentionally go out of our way to find some.  I suppose that when it’s your major crop and food source, you find ways to make it more palatable.

Next to the restaurant is a dirt… road?  Path?  Trail?  Running along… houses?  A school?  Businesses?  Everything is very vague and nebulous; unlabeled but obviously operational.  Buildings.  People.  I’m not sure what they’re doing.  Stray dogs run rampant along with herds of cows and several chickens.  Everything passes right by us, at our table, careless to our presence.

Everything is so different here, even the animals are strange.

We pay our tab; an unheard of three U.S. dollars for both of the beers and lunch and make our way to the ferry; a beat up sea coaster that’s made this journey innumerable times.  We find seats on the very top and gaze down on the land as we slowly pull away from the mainland, pushing out into the body of water, feeling the gentle rocking pushing from beneath us and the vicious sun beating down on us from above.

We move on and on but Ometepe seems to become no closer.  Jade falls asleep.  I fall asleep.  I wake up.  Jade wakes up.  We take pictures.  We see birds.  A woman sitting next to us drops her digital camera in the water.  Her boyfriends laughs at her.  A bird sits on the rail of our boat, allowing himself to be tugged to the island as well.  Maybe he knows there is better fish over there.

We both fall back to sleep and when we wake up, we are in spitting distance… and everything is amazing and stunning and beautiful and unlike everything we’ve seen so far; it is a land all its own, completely separate in every way from both Managua and Rivas.  It is stunning.

The steel plank drops.  The engine is killed.  The boat is tied off.

We have arrived safely at Ometepe.

***   ***   ***   ***   ***

Next week our adventure continues.  We still have a gypsy circus, The Beach at the End of the World and a man named Urine to discuss.

ABOVE: First photo taken at the port of Ometepe.

 

“How I Was Nearly Beaten, Mugged and Kidnapped in Nicaragua” … OR … “How I Spent My Wife’s 30th Birthday”

For the longest time I’ve had this ridiculous hero fantasy wherein I find myself in a hostile situation with various other civilians – the two most used locations in my brain are a gas station robbery and an airplane during a terrorist take-over.  I hear stories about these things happening all the time; I read the news articles, I’ve seen the YouTube clips uploaded from security cameras, I’ve watched the Caught on Tape! TV specials.  Everything is calm and then, just like that, you’ve got a gun in your face, piss in your pants and the register is hanging open.

I always hoped that if I were to find myself in a real life crime-drama scenario that I would be the guy who Did the Right Thing.  I tell myself that I would act honorably and valiantly but there’s a little voice in the back of my head that says, “When sword meets steel, you will fold.  You will hide behind a rack of candy bars and sports car magazines and you will squat down and shiver and pray and wait for it to be over.”

I tell that voice that it’s wrong.  That I’m made of better material but… until it happens… you never know what you’ll do.

Two and a half weeks ago while visiting a foreign country, I finally got to see if The Voice was right…

***   ***   ***   ***

For my wife’s 30th birthday we wanted to do something exotic… something extravagant… something adventurous.  We talked about Red Lobster but said, “NO!  Bigger.”  We talked about skydiving but said, “NO!  Bigger.”  We talked about having a Latin American themed birthday party complete with pinata that looked like Jade but we said, “NO!  Bigger…. but let’s save that idea for 31…”

BELOW: A photo journalistic approach to some of the awesome things we thought about doing for Jade’s birthday…

Petting a camel.

Having a staring contest with a seal.

Going camping.

Wearing masks.

Breaking things.

Around this time we serendipitously ran into a couple at an ice skating arena one night who told us they’d just returned from honeymooning in Nicaragua.  “Nicaragua?” I say, “Isn’t that a war-torn, poverty stricken, wasteland?”  The husband shrugs and the wife says, “Yes and no.”  They pull out their iPhones and show us pictures of an exotic paradise, photos of extravagant beaches, videos of adventurous hikes, swims and ferry rides.

We were sold.

“The only thing you gotta remember,” they say together ominously, “Is that everyone there is really poor and they’ll steal things from you… not because they’re violent but because it’s a course of survival…”

Two weeks later we’d purchased our tickets and two weeks later again we found ourselves airborne, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, heading for a land who’s foreign tongue we did not speak.  I felt like Indiana Jones and my wife was that short Asian kid that follows him around, always helping him out of trouble.

Neither of us had experienced international travel before besides the one time my wife visited the Bahamas and the single time I was in southern Texas so neither of us really knew what to expect.  Everything was new and revelatory; virgin territory.

On the plane I sit next to a Jehova Witness who just retired two days ago.  To celebrate she was moving to Nicaragua for three months.  Thinking about her I realize that she’s still there now (at the time of this writing) and it makes me jealous.

The captain buzzes over the intercom and tells us we’ll be landing in twenty minutes.  Jade and I push up the window, expecting to see Strange and Foreign Nicaragua, a land covered in jungles and vines and explorers carrying machetes but instead we only see a phosphorescent orange glow emanating from the city; a color that screams the word “HEAT!”  Traffic slowly crawls below us, cars and trucks and motorcycles.  From above it looks like LA at night… or Miami at night… or New York at night….

ABOVE: Nicaragua by day, which is more what I was anticipating when I opened the window.

The plane lands, everyone stands up, Jade and I grab the only thing we’ve packed – a backpack per each of us – and exit the plane.  It’s then, as I step into the terminal, that it all hits me very hard.  I am in a foreign land.  I don’t know anyone and, most noticeably, I can’t read any of the signs.  Letters that I have been familiar with my entire life strategically reorganize themselves to stand out like strangers on boards that might as well have been blank.

ABOVE: Bookstore in the airport.

The airport is quiet.  There are few people and no security.

Outside we find a man that the hotel has sent.  He holds a sign with our name on it and, as we approach, he introduces himself as, “Mumble-Mumble, I speak very fast Spanish.”  I place my hand against my chest, feeling like Tarzan, and say, “Johnny,” and he says, “Yonni,” and I nod.  My wife says, “Jade,” and he, like everyone that’s ever met her, says, “Jane.”  It’s good to know that the mistake transcends language and culture, making us feel right at home.

He takes us to an unmarked car and opens the doors for us.  PS, we’d read stories about taxi drivers picking travelers up, driving them into dark alleys and mugging them so i was ready for his attack… if it were ever to come to that…

The man, Mumble-Mumble, drives us through a large city called Managua and it’s unlike any I’d ever seen.  Homes and businesses in various states of disrepair are found on every corner.  Domiciles that most would find uninhabitable are everywhere; we see toddlers walking in ruins, families eating in filth, couples enjoying the night air, surrounded by debris; corrugated steel, cracked wood and rubble.

We pass a street corner where a small gang of eight year old kids are washing windshields for money.  On the same corner are women covered in short dresses, long hair and thin sheets of sweat, selling themselves on a humid night.

ABOVE: This picture was not taken at night… but all the pictures that were taken at night were dark… so you get some day time photos.

ABOVE: For the low, low price of just 85 cordobas, you too could enjoy the processed goodness of a quesoburguesa doble!

Jade and I begin trying to converse with our driver.  The three of us speak slowly, trying to find familiar words and phrases; shaping things with our hands.  He tells us he has diez hermanos or ten brothers.  He tells us that the children working the streets are the children of drug addicts who can’t take care of them.  He tells us that Marc Anthony is playing a show in town tonight.  He tells us we should go.  He says, “Trabajo!  Trabajo!” and snaps his fingers and dances but I don’t know what it means.

He turns off the main road onto a dark street and the solitude of our situation creeps under my skin.  We pass abandoned garages and dark homes and broken windows; patched up fences and homes with no doors.  A group of six motorcycles blow past us, their engines tearing through the silence of the night and the driver tells us there will be a motorcycle convention in the center of town tomorrow but all I hear is “There are motorcycle gangs everywhere.  Watch out!”

ABOVE: The outside of our room at Hospedaje Naranja.

He takes us to Hospedaje Naranja (Hotel Orange), where we’re staying the night, and walks us to the front door, who’s gate is locked from the inside.  A woman cautiously peeks around the corner before recognizing her friend, smiling and pulling the dead bolt.  Jade and I step inside and the woman quickly latches the door behind us with a nervous giggle.

She speaks fluent English, checks us in and asks if we’re hungry.  She suggests three restaurants and, little do I know, but this is the first of several choices that will ultimately lead me to an undesirable end.  We choose the closest; a Peruvian place three doors down the street and our fate is sealed.  The woman says, “Very close.  Very safe.”

We put our bags in our room and walk the half a block to the restaurant.  It’s now 9:30pm and dark.  Every car I hear approaching is a kidnapper, a thug, a villain ready to Do Crimes.  We enter the restaurant and order our food in the best Spanish we can muster.  Jade orders wine and I get a shot or trajo of whiskey.  We order a pasta plate and share it.

The woman who owns the restaurant approaches our table and asks where we’re staying, asks what our plans are, asks how the food is.  She sits down at the table and tells us that her tablet (knock-off iPad) is broken and it’s erased all of her family photos.  She says something about batteries and RAM and wireless signals.  She asks if we’d like her to pull some herbs from her garden to make us a fresh and delicious tea but we decline.  Jade, because she’s genuinely not interested, me because I’m afraid she’s going to slip me some kind of date rape toxin that will render me useless before I wake up handcuffed to a bed with a man named Tony rubbing his dirties all over me.

The woman sighs, disheartened, and then we take another turn closer to the pit.

I say, “Is there a bar around here?”  The woman looks at me quizzically and says, “Bahr?” and I say, “Yeah, uh… drinks?  Beer.  Cerveza?” and she says, “Bahrr?  AH!  Pub!?” and I say, “Yes!  Si!  Si!  Pub!” and she tells us that there’s one on this very block.  She draws an invisible map on the table and says, “Go right and right and right.  Not far at all.”

The night is young and, maybe it’s my one shot of whiskey or the fact that I’m realizing that my fear of all Nicaraguans has been unfounded and that everyone truly is kind and gentle but the pub sounds like a good idea.  The taxi driver was friendly and helpful.  The woman in the lobby was generous and wonderful.  The restaurant owner and our waiter were both smiling and genuine people.

“This is Nicaragua,” I think.  This is how life should be.  I’m projecting my anti-trusting violent mindset onto these people.  I’ve watched too many movies.  Seen too much TV.  People are people and people are kind.

The woman says, “I will take you there,” and we say, “Okay,” and she grabs her coat and then we’re in the dark street and then we’re walking towards her SUV and then Jade is saying, “Wait, what is happening?  I thought she was walking us?” and then I say, “Yeah, but she’s driving us.  It’s okay.  She’s nice,” and then the woman is on the other side of her car and Jade and I are standing in the dead street with both doors open and Jade is whisper-shouting, “We don’t know her.  She could take us to some factory and sell us into sex slavery and men will stick it to your maize-hole,” which of course is a Spanish joke if you can translate it and I say, “Don’t worry.  Everyone is so nice!  She’s just going to give us a little ride!” and Jade says, “I don’t want to.  I don’t want to go,” and, looking back… I’m really amazed at how stupid and careless I was about to be, crawling into a car with a stranger.

Luckily, we never saw how that story ended because, like all good stories, the unexpected occurred.

Suddenly, the woman, out of my line of sight on the driver’s side of the car, screams.  SCREAMS.  She hasn’t stubbed her toe or slipped or broken her ankle.  This scream tells you immediately that something nasty is happening.  Again.  SCREAMING.  In my mind, I remember it all in English, but I have no idea if that’s true or not.  It seems like she would have shouted in her native tongue but all I can recall is, “Stop!  Stop!  Stop!  No!  Stop!”

Jade says, “What-” and I begin to hesitantly walk towards the back of the car… and then from out of the darkness a man appears, slightly heavy set, Latino fella.  Late 20s.  The image is blurry and I’m having a hard time processing what is happening; everything has gone from calm and unsure to chaotic and unsure in literally seconds.  I see the man and I see the woman and they are struggling.  The woman is hanging onto something – her purse – and the man is pushing her away from it, trying to break free.  She’s struggling like it’s her newborn child he’s trying to pull away and, finally, he succeeds.  He grabs her dress by the shoulder and violently throws her to the ground.

The entire exchange happens in one or two seconds; I walked around the back of the van and then saw a man overpower a woman and throw her to the ground.  It was very fast.  Everything else moves at an incredible rate… everything else moves faster than I can process; faster than I can make decisions or weigh pros and cons.  It all just…. happens.

But this is my moment.  The one I’ve been waiting for my whole life.

And when it is upon me, I don’t think, “Here is my moment,” and The Voice never speaks up.  There is no internal dialogue of whether I will act or not.  Whatever is inside… just exists.

The man turns and begins to run and I immediately break into a sprint after him, my Dad sneakers slapping the hot concrete like pistons.  And then there is suddenly a motorcycle with a second man in the street, waiting, but I don’t slow down.  I don’t know where it came from or when it arrived or if it was there when we exited the restaurant but I am certain that my runner is heading straight for his getaway driver.

ABOVE: This was not the robber… believe it or not, we did not pull out our cameras during this ordeal.  This is just a random man on a bike.  Although, the bike looks similar and the man looks similar…. so…. maybe…….

I’m out of shape but The Thief is even thicker in the center than myself so I’m able to close the gap between us just before he reaches the bike.  He pauses momentarily to skip and hop into the air; the plan to land on the back of the bike and his friend to, of course, escape into the darkness with their loot but…

…I don’t know where the truth is in this following section and I don’t know where my wishful thinking is – everything is a gray blur – but I’ll give it to you how I remember it and how I hope it happened.

The Man slows down to leapfrog onto the back of his accomplice’s bike and, as he does so, glances over his shoulder.  This is the first time, I believe, he realizes that he is being pursued… and it shocks and surprises him and causes him to stumble, foiling what would otherwise have been a practiced and flawless landing on the bike.  In the background, echoing, I can hear someone screaming.  Maybe it’s the woman from the restaurant, maybe it’s my wife, maybe it’s both.

The man stumbles and, instead of hopping smoothly onto the bike, lifts his foot up and catches it awkwardly after seeing me.  He lifts his foot again and lands half sideways on the seat, hop-hopping to keep his balance, the back of his left knee draped over the seat prematurely, the driver now struggling to hold things upright.  I catch up to him and, as I’m running, begin to pull my fist back.  I’ve never hit anyone in my life and it’s about to happen.  We are on an impact trajectory, folks.

The Man holds out his left hand, trying to block me and, with his other hand, pulls back his fist and begins to say, “No!No!No!No!” and then this is the first time that everything slows down.  Finally, the fast forward is done and a clarity rolls through my brain.

I see two men standing in front of me that are clearly capable of very dark things.  I see two women standing behind me, the latter of the two pressing 50.  I see myself stopping these two men and then me standing in a street with both of them coming towards me.  I don’t know if they have knives or guns.  I don’t know anything.  I don’t know anyone.  I’m in Nicaragua.

And then I see my children, in my head, clearly.

ABOVE: The two things that I love most; my children and my hammock……… Oh, and Jade is nice too.

And then I realize that whatever is in that woman’s purse is not worth losing what I have at home.  I don’t care if she has a hundred thousand dollars in there and three gold bouillons and the Busch’s Baked Beans family recipe.  I suddenly realize that that purse is going to go away… and I am completely okay with that.

I pull my punch and take a step back.  The guy sees me hesitate and hops the rest of the way onto the bike.  I assume that our exchange, his entire pause, was roughly seven seconds.  Just enough…

The bike revs and the two men wobble and then take off into the darkness just as a third man appears over my shoulder; this one running directly towards the motorcycle.  Like the others, he too came out of nowhere and it only takes me a moment to realize that it’s the waiter from the restaurant.  He shouts and the bike revs and takes off but he doesn’t stop.  He cranks his arms and chases the bike for a solid 20 feet.  His arms outstretch… the bike picks up speed… he’s closing the gap… as the bike finds its balance… and then just before the bike is out of his grasp, he wraps his fingers into the shirt of The Thief and throws him to the ground, pulling the entire bike sliding onto the concrete with a bang and a hissssss.

Looking back, I wonder if the two criminals were thinking the same thing I’ve been thinking, which is…. seven seconds.  If we’d only had seven more seconds… if that stupid American hadn’t…

In those seven seconds they would have been able to ride free and clear.  As is, they did not.

Two, three, four, six, nine, twelve men suddenly come running from behind me; various restaurant workers who heard the ruckus.  The driver stands up, pulls his bike up, hops on and takes off, leaving his partner in crime lying in the street, alone, as the twelve men encircle him before dragging this would be felon to the curb and begin beating him mercilessly.

Jade and I slowly step backwards, towards the other side of the street and disappear into the shadows, retreating back to the confines of our hotel.  For the remainder of the night we lie in bed and slowly flip through 93 channels of Spanish television, hoping to learn a few phrases for the coming week but the only word I’m able to pick out is ayuda.

Help.

At midnight I shut the light off and try to go to sleep but merely stare at the ceiling for what feels like hours.  My heart rate has long since returned to normal but I still feel as though adrenaline and fear are pounding through my veins and my brains.  I hear a noise outside and go to the window.  Nothing.  I crawl back into bed and hear a scamper from the room next door.  I listen and wait.  Nothing.  I get up and use the bathroom, make sure the window is locked and secure.  I double check the lock on the door and then peer out from behind the curtains slowly.  I hear a motorcycle approaching and wonder if it’s the same man, coming back to the neighborhood to pick up his limping and beaten friend.

I crawl back into bed, under the cold sheets and wonder what it’s like to live in a world where this occurrence does not throw you into a state of panic and fear and unease.  I think about the men that came running from the restaurants and realize that this wasn’t the first time this had happened.  This wasn’t An Event.  This was A Lifestyle.

This was Managua.