postliminary posts of the diary of k whomever 2017 @annie6pm - Tumblr Blog

san marcos is described to us as a place where most of ‘what’s happening’ happens on a personal level, on the inside. there are adages about lady lake remembering, about the jungle humbling. Rich spiritual tourists come to take indian head massage classes and yoga mastery courses. I want to take a workshop, says E_, so we go to a life drawing class early the next morning. Oh! the woman says, a life drawing class. Where’d you see that flier? It’s rainy season and there hasn’t been a class for a few weeks. Sure, okay, she says, I can do a life drawing class. We move all of the furniture around, which is low to the ground anyway and made from bamboo and woven palm fronds and weighs nothing. B_ and k_ come. she gets naked and puts on a hide & fur robe. when she kneels with us to cut squares of parchment paper with a knife and to show us where to put the shoulders in relation to the hips her robe slips open. We draw in a row, the four of us, facing her, supine on cloth and more furs. the music is great. the two dogs come and lick her nipple and press against her stomach like the mother wolf of rome. she is beautiful and she wears chunky necklaces and she’s got a beautiful tuft of pubic hair. she smokes rolled cigarettes in doors, locals walk in and out, the dogs nap or bark.

On a bus to Atitlan we sit with k_ and (N)B_, incredibly pretty senegalese italian german brothers raised in Frankfurt by their mama. We’d been asked where in Atitlan do you want to go? we didn’t have any idea. k_ hasn’t read bell hooks but doesn’t capitalize his name.

every house: temple, empire, school joseph joubert 1800

we leave C_ and go in the car of a friend of jorge’s (whose 18 bunk hostel we’ve been staying in—Wicho’s and Charlie’s, named after his parents) to an abandoned pool outside of antigua everyone has an after-hours rave at on saturdays, although development in the surrounding lots makes each rave the last rave. The driver is maniac. the rave is boring but there’s public gay affection! It’s been so long. Also this is my first rave. -kyla age 8

We go to the bar again and E_ is in rare form. This means sleeves pulled low across her shoulders and she’s biting her lip. We both feel I think so dangerous and beautiful that we meet C_’s last efforts to sleep together (to ‘go listen to the old guatemalan folk rebellion songs’) like hahaha C_. Guatemalan men here, he says, have a tradition called La Cantina where if one man goes through a breakup he calls all of his friends to meet him at the bar. they come no matter what, and then men all listen to classic spanish romance songs and cry together.

from sara sutterlin’s I Wanted to Be the Knife: ‘All I hear straight women say is I love MY vampire, mine is Fine.

C_ is half guatemalan (mother, a woman who both runs the local discovery channel and works as a mayan shaman) and half german (father, reactionary, reproductive). he tells us the next day in the bar we’re in there will be a man who performs very good americana covers like what, we ask like bruce springsteen’s i’m on fire, he says, very much the song me and E_’ve shared with each other. We pull up chairs. the next day we go over to his place outside of antigua. there’s a wedding going on in the main square. C_ wears an unbuttoned checkered shirt tucked into blue jeans and sings along to cowboy songs. He’s a filmmaker, he shows me a small press run of a book of his poetry, something about pulvo, he takes us out into the garden to cut herbs for a tea. in effect we sit in the candlelight and talk like three people on a date with each other. we drink mayan cacao hot chocolate and guatemalan mezcal. we dance. C_ tells us our nawales and we read about them from a book. All nights turn to talk about love.

P_ is C_’s ex who lives two blocks away and exists only as I’ve been told about her, which is like this: Years ago C_ saw her driving a ’79 truck down the road of Antigua. She was a skinny strong thing. He asked a friend about it. ‘that’s probably P_’ said the friend. Two years later he sees her a few doors down from his house. ‘I dreamed about you two years ago’, he tells her. They date and are in love and then don’t date. She is building a house on land she bought herself, from trees she felled herself then milled on her own. She is bisexual, says C_, and today she is probably digging her well.

the next days in Antigua involved good coffee both grown and processed in the local fincas and brewed by my new best friend I_ who’d complimented the hairs on the mole on my cheek almost beside himself with their beauty! and the delicacy of my arm tattoo and the celestial green/blue of E_’s eyes, all calmly and without advance, all in spanish i could respond to, all over cordites or cubanitos (es como yo, pero un café, I_ says). we walked 4 kilometers to ‘earth lodge’, a treehouse restaurant/hotel/avocado farm across a mountain in el hato. Laura, who we meet up there, is from ireland. she’s lazy in her dislike of homestays “I just like hostel people” flippant. She tells us we have to be more careful, girls, so-and-so had gotten stabbed, or robbed, a bus got held up and one girl was too slow to get out her money she got both stabbed and then robbed, when ‘semana santa was happening there were loads of idiots and the language school kids all were safe but now there aren’t any tourists around, girls’. There is a tourist for about every 4 locals in downtown Antigua. “OK,” we say, “we’ll be more careful.”

when we go out dancing it’s free 1/2 bachata 1/2 salsa and lasts 3 hours long

E_ and I leave at 5:30 in the morning and get on a bus we didn’t know existed for less than we should have paid. In the border town there’s a jail and a wide mouthed river. men follow us in packs, some with 3 inch stacks of Quetzals to exchange, some to reach for our backs and offer rough, violent and ambiguous help. There are shet police who don’t move from the side of their truck, even when we come out from the border offices and our bus is gone and the foulish complicated men wrap us up in themselves. The bus stops on the side of the road and an employee who’d heard we wanted to go to antigua before guatemala city (where the bus was heading) says we can get a ride direct in the pick up truck of an off duty company bus driver. We did. He pointed out crops of both banana and plantain, sugarcane, cacao, the emergent volcanoes that we slip between to get to the city center. The streets of antigua are cobblestone. The city fell in a 1773 earthquake. Fog comes in. We get beds in an 18 bed hostel and blink at the gaudy Israelis and Australians sitting in the outdoor common space. we buy pineapple off the back of a fruit stand truck and hitchhike up to the cross at the top of the mountain overlooking antigua. here we talk and feel great about the decision to have left Tapachula.

the crew spend two nights together in the failed beach town Playa Linda. At night we watch VH1 classics music videos and mix jimador with grapefruit juice and seltzer and massage kale with lime juice and salt. Days we spend prepping the boat on the hard. We drain the freshwater tanks, properly store the sails, put biocide in the jerry cans, top off the tank, give away our old gasoline, run the anchor rode out and wash it with freshwater, scrub the bilges, air the ‘freezer’, lubricate the terminals/connections for the batteries, create a trickle charge for the solar panel, run the outboard motor empty, and so on. The second night is a full moon in scorpio. At midnight we walk out to the sad beach—too much sand before you reach the water, drag so strong you can barely do anything with the water once you reach it. This proves nice, all the sand, because there is lightning that hits over and over until the shoreline. One month of no rain, but when rainy season comes it comes deftly and there is some rain every day. We say ‘it’s turtles all the way down’. We each take some chain from a pendant that had been on the boat when it was first bought by R_, the eyes of Buddha, decoration or iconography I can’t read. We pull it, the chain breaks and it’s my length that still has the pendant on it so i walk into the ocean and the storm lights the shore—there’s the other three looking at you and you can see yourself in the water up to your high shins and you really think ‘this is it’ or something like that. You think about staying in the water but come back and everybody hugs and drinks jimador and comes up with the most frightening ways the pendant could return to us ‘on top of the pillow on the bed’ ‘ever profile picture on tinder’ ‘the face of the moon, right now. no…now.’

B_ stays in san cristobal. after we part is when i do the real ugly work of imprinting a fling with depth and reason and residue. show me a kiss i have not dated!

and the crew goes to el chiflón—a bus to cometan early in the morning, a combí to the entrance and a motorbike further in. A_’s foulest moods rear: here she’s edge, terse, easy to blame, silent in rage. we take big steps around her.

I’ve been in Mexico for nearly two months…true? I can understand most things, still can’t speak, can navigate markets, tallers, hardware stores, paleta vendors, stray dogs, Q&As with strangers, A_’s anger, S_’s aloofness, E_’s proudness and disappointments. My hair is nearly all gone. I wear baggy black clothing or barely anything at all.

For Greg to get his beads, he says, he befriended the village chief, traded goods, and fixed the integral system for the town’s water supply. They talk about how around the coral islands in the Louisades you can tell who a helmsman is because his feet will be deformed from working the tiller with his toes. We track a hurricane starting in the Papaguyos. when it rains it’s the first rain we’ve seen in weeks and we stare at it dumbfounded. I step into it but don’t know what to do next.

Jim says the s-drive ‘wasn’t a fix worth hauling the boat out for’, that we should continue on to Ecuador and do the work there. They watch the boat get hauled out and run over the teeth of the fins of the prop with their fingers and they say ‘this is no good’ and then they leave with their weather window through Tehauntepec.

In islam they’ve got a saying that if you want to make god laugh you should tell him your plans.

they're salty, really really salty. they can't believe we're all polywogs, having never crossed the equator under sail. They can't believe we're concerned about hurricane season. Jim's got on a necklace of handmade beads that signifies he had done a lot for a small village in Papa New Guinea.

at the marina a luxary catamaran arrives a little before sunset and turns in place on its axis to come into the slip. B_ and E_ and i go to join them for beers, which we drink with ice out of red plastic cups. it's a french boat from 2016 named after the lunar landing: 5 berths with 5 separate heads, central controls, light dimmers. the toilets are all on a fresh water system. two engines, a mainsail that catches in an underside sail cover 15 feet up the mast and flakes itself. jim, gregg, and dominique are chartering it to california for the owner. who is the owner? 'a rich man'. would we know him? 'yes'

we'd cooked a dinner of beets and kale after not eating vegetables for days. inspired by B_ (vegan) we'd begun pleading with places: 'don't you have vegetables back there? anything?'

in San Cristobal we learn a who's who of the small mountain town. in a backroom caberet we drink pox (pronounced 'poe-shh') & mezcal & someone S_ knows who'd gotten his pack stolen on the bus on the way over plays accordion in one corner & macha plays trumpet in the other and the drummer and guitar player choose the songs & pato yells CUMBIA, fuckers, cumbia! and i dance terribly, cumbia, with a local and i swallow the worm at the bottom of the mezcal.

San Cristobal is a mountain town turned hippie mountain town largely from EZLN tourism. Women sell hand crocheted Minions dolls next to hand crocheted balaclava zapatistas. We eat at vegetarian places advertised as vegan places. We ride horses to the indian town of Chamula, S_ wanting a horse old and calm, a horse, as he says, "I can text on". S_’s horse trots at odd times until he leans over her neck and pets her for a good 30 minutes. my horse kicks at the horses that threaten to pass him. B_ and I have sex in a way we'd prepared for in dirty talk and demonstrations during the thunderstorm. the sex is complicated but i give myself to him simply.

it's kink that is that like, the fabled end-of-the-world of hetero sex. where one looks out on the ocean and says "there is nothing more hetero beyond this; this is the end of the world." which also allows me to tell him i'd masturbated next to him about our future sex, in itself a little island out past the end of the world.

Did you ever get your shoes shined? Yeah, once how'd it feel like, nothing

We secretly leave for San Cristobal late on an overnight bus and show up with goosebumps on our arms. It feels so good to be cold! all our warm clothes are up a ladder on the boat, which we hauled out onto the hard in the boatyard.

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postliminary posts of the diary of k whomever 2017