note.

I zip-lined in the canopy of a cloud forest and sprawled out my hands like Superman. I was on the ledge of a soup bowl of an extinct volcano; to my right was Alexander’s belt framed by a double rainbow, to my left was sulphor fizzing into a fuzzy peach of a sun. I swam behind a waterfall in an alcove lined with flapping blue morphos, I drifted belly up, backside down and as buoyant as a lily pad. Then I slipped back into the water and had it haul up over my head like a black sweater. I asked a boy on the beach to cover me in sand, then a whole brigade started heaving piles of it onto my back so that by the end my chest chambers were collapsing and I was carved into a stegosaurus. In the Pacific Ocean I collected 26 sand dollars, which translates to over a thousand-quadrillion Canadian dollars (if the Nicaraguans only knew they might clamber out of the economic pits.) I gallivanted through a dump where the poorest people in the Western hemisphere live, in a human safari bus and refrained from the Nikon-circle jerk. I decided that was possibly the worst day to wear a baby rib fitted short-sleeved purple American Apparel t-shirt. I accidentally told my Spanish teacher that I ate pineapple and cat for breakfast, vehemently. I painted a mural in a primary school of a beach and palm trees with bopping leafy heads. I asked a local girl to splatter on a butterfly; it ended up looking like a raging, red, aquatic, inflated peanut. I wrote a list of all the possible ways I could possibly kill Jason Weiner, thereof including a special addition of “Will It Blend” on youtube. I colonized a sand slug empire. I listened to a man talk about the Moskuito (sp?) indigenous tribe on the Caribbean coast, and a university that offers med students classes in native healing elixirs and magical antidotes. My favorite painting was the bus window. I moonwalked through a Latin-American market, and watched as the clutter unfurled and folded over and the floating curtains breathed and barrels of beans scuttled behind desks and chairs and a menagerie of piñatas crowed and whooped and a walleyed cod was slapped onto a grill. I dared someone to snuff a coke line of candy powder. I was laughed at and photographed for propping-up my ass with my hind legs when I sleep. I fell off a hammock. I ambled by a tree that had more species of plant hanging off its arms and hemmed into its side and sewed along its seams and eddying inside its nooks and scurrying by its feet than the entirety of England. I had the heady waft of an orchid lick my nostrils, who blossomed only once in its life. I treated each moment as if it were dying. I had a whole cohort of the local Niquinohomo riff raff chant “pocito pene” to my arch nemesis. I asked my homestay mother to dance something of a stumbled Latin dance, whose name sounded like a tropical drink, though she giggled and simpered and elegantly declined as I tried to heave her out of her lawn chair. A local artisan told me to fuck off for having insulted his work. I saw sister horses who were gaunt like New York models. I came to terms with my bowels and recognized a woman’s ability to number two. I haggled a potato-sack-material bag down by over a whole 40 cordobas with a woman as hyper as a Ritalin-pumped fifteen-year-old. I woke up in the middle of the night to the flutter of large insect by my ear, which I figured to be a cockroach but ended up being a giant locust who I trapped beneath a ceramic bowl and found to be dead by morning. They’re supposed to be good luck though. I ate gallo pinto everyday, and plantain that had been stewed into potatoes, and the most extraordinary cheese ill ever eat, so much so it was almost paranormal. I had a crush on a fourteen-year-old named Paola who glittered more than a Mariah Carey music video. I laughed that my homestay had water every other day but managed to squirrel away enough for MTV and four different types of movie channels. I tiptoed into the hallow refuge of a woman’s collective, which polished pottery into wood. I was a dead dog being dragged by its paws off the roads, like a sack of meat. I held my breath when passing by, in our shanty and cramped bus, those crosses potted by the highway, white as a skull bone. I won the scavenger hunt in Esteli. I sipped on Victoria beer in a dim lit tavern with propaganda type portraits of Sandinistas stenciled onto the wall, not to mention a glaring sketch of Stalin. I skipped by a statue of a wartime hero wielding a Molotov cocktail and machete everyday. I bought 25 cigars for 10 bucks. The factory smelled like Organic Chemistry class, or hair dye, or nail polish, and the backrooms were reserved for stuffing white powder into small sacks. I concluded that I should go into ecology and double major in photography, despite my utter lack of credentials. I was that bundle of tattered tennis shoes strewn like a bushel of grapes on the telephone wire.