#110

Sheeeit. This blog has been a little dull lately! Let me tell you a story.

You deserve this.

*

My godfather's children were so close to me and my brothers when we were kids that they were our cousins. I mean, I made absolutely no distinction between them and my blood cousins, and I still do not. I could not. Spent more time with them than with blood last time I was in Venezuela. That's how tight that shit is.

Godfather was my dad's very best friend coming up, and is directly responsible for my being born: my father, being a vital, powerful, courageous, and high-minded man, was getting set to join the Venezuelan army when he was done with high school. My godfather snapped him right out of that crazy-assed nonsense and told him to go the fuck to college, where my father excelled, graduated with a degree in engineering, and launched himself onto a career path which would eventually place him to meet my mother through a friend who was dating my aunt.

At any rate, my parents were able to conceive me in no small part thanks to my godfather, and his kids and my brother and I were in a part of Caracas which was somewhat familiar to them, though not to me. They're eastside, we're northside. We went for a walk because they wanted to show me this cool-ass hill we could climb.

Now, I had heard them being told by their mom and the old lady we were visiting (their grandmother? Their great-aunt? I remember her face and smooth white hair and her thick droopy bare arms and that brown tint some people's glasses have, and her closet full of board games [we all broke our Jumanji cherry that evening, and I was openly disappointed that our lives were not uprooted and our psyches not destroyed by incredible supernatural misfortune]) that we were not to go to "that place", that it was dangerous, that it was dirty, that we could get hurt there and they were absolutely NOT to go there, point, paragraph, end of story.

Obviously not end of story because how could that be possible. 

This would wreck my street cred if I had ever bothered to hide it, but I like following the rules, generally speaking; it's in my instinctual makeup to avoid trouble and not start it or look for it. I'm not a cop or a snitch or a preacher, I do whatever the fuck I want* and I believe everyone can pretty much do the same, but I do grit my teeth and very plainly tell the idiots I let drag me into trouble that I wish we could do better with our lives by using but a modicum more of the good sense we were born with.

Not even better! Just, like, make them a little easier. Not even a ton.

Also I smoke drugs.* I've sadly had to break a few laws in order to do this, but then, so did the founding fathers as they chased the blue dream that became my awesome, free-ass life.**

So I did protest before we got to the hill, and was--as is always the case with people like me--loudly asked by all three cousins whether I was a pussy, a coward, a wuss, a loser, etc., and as always I clench my jaw and spell out that no I am none of those things and fine I will go and do the thing, it is just can we not think of a single other thing which will not most specifically make authority likely to become unpleasant?  

Approaching the hill suddenly around a corner as we did was such a vista I immediately understood, and when we reached the gate and opened it, began ascent without preamble.

Equator-blue sky at high noon is its own thing, its own whole world of sky. When you're a kid the sky is bigger and it is bluer and it is brighter, true, but this is a sky whose total blue crowns the universe, whose radiance wields a scepter wreathed in sunflame. Looking up from the bottom, swooping up and jutting into the blazing belly of that sky, that forty-seven degree hill of red soil and green tussock looked like the path to God's own embrace. It was titanic.

We had all climbed in silence, five of us, toiling up the hill, hunched over with the effort of coping with the grade and the looseness of the soil, using our hands as much as our feet on the steeper parts. It took us at least ten minutes and a good sweat to get even a third of the way up, and from the little plateau we beheld, from a good four hundred feet up, the little slice of city this height above street level revealed for us. It glittered, proud and ugly and cool and gross and gorgeous and incredible, that weird sprawling valley-mountain city of eternal spring (it's not, any more than it's the earthly cutting of Heaven's branch [for real they say that] but we say that, and it can be believed a surprising amount of the time--even now, I imagine). We ranged in age from four to eight, we stood as kids stand and looked as kids look from a high place on down, and I have never forgotten that view, that hill, that sky, that breeze cooling my sweat and filling my nostrils with the scent of the city and the mountains and the soil.

Then we were told, my brother and I, definitively, that the thing to do was race back down.

The exciting conclusion? My cousin fell and cut his hand wide open on a buried piece of broken glass, and his older sisters freaked out and argued and generally carried on (even bringing God into it as Catholic kids can be very wont to do) as we stumped back to the apartment building while I supported the injured. I'm not a big "I told you so" guy, I prefer to bite my tongue and deal with the problems of the Now, but I was sorely tried that day.

To my surprise, we weren't heavily disciplined, though it quickly became clear that this was because it was just their mom to deal with. Some yelling from her, hidden away from my brother and myself, some tears and tearful apologies. Then we were told to play quietly, and we played Jumanji, as I have mentioned, and we did so very very loudly.

*

Our dads would have fucking creamed us, yo. Not hitting us, mind you, neither of those dudes are big on that, but a pair of howling bellowers they are, really creative and professional, sergeant-major lever screaming, plus hardcore punishments and privations. My mom woulda smacked me upside the head or perhaps even taken her shoe off, after yelling so loud that it is actually quiet, a sort of wildcat's low, back-of-throat hiss-gargle.

Perhaps you have made your own mother or significant other this angry. I shall want a paragraph on the subject, to be handed in to me in the comments, due whenever, I don't really care and won't look.

*

Didn't slip on the ice yesterday! I felt better. Then I played a bunch of Super Nintendo games on a computer that fits in the palm of my hand*** and hooks up to a television that was simply unimaginable in the year the above story took place. Wild shit.


--JL

*within the bounds of subjective reason, duty, self-discipline, and social responsibility

**Hahaha I am so sorry to mention my smoking marijuana in the same breath as the accomplishments of the founders but it's still pretty funny to think they did what they did so Florida Man can just be himself in various ways while existing in the back of a rusted-out pickup truck or soon-to-be-almost-robbed liquor store, and Donald Trump can wear an open bathrobe and nothing else while he eats Mickey D's in the Lincoln Bedroom and fantasizes about like, actually impressing Vladimir Putin, but like he'll really be impressed and like him and everybody will say so. Freedom the true drug, people.

***Okay, I guess that's another illegal thing. I am sorry, Nintendo, I am sorry, FBI, I am sorry Jesus. But guys, I have given no other single company more of my leisure money than I have given Nintendo, and leisure has always been a pretty good chunk of my budget since you only get the one life and I would give it for Nintendo. The contradiction is something we will all have to live with together, as we happily play a healthy mixture of legal and illicit software.