New Blogs!!!!!!!!!!

Hello there,

I am starting up two new blogs!

The first is the exciting ajhaynes.net

I met AJ in Buenos Aires and we have decided to work together on his travel blog, him covering the glitz of LA and me exploring London, my home town. Check it out it should be fun!

The second is bookchurch.com

Bookchurch is my own baby and is basically about what the hell I am reading anyday of the week. Publishers are already sending me books and I am even trying to get a podcast interview underway.

There you go! Hope you like them.

The Week of the Chicken

I would like to use this post to say farewell to my least favourite house mate. Kevin the Chicken.

Two weeks ago I got home to find a large, self-assured chicken wandering around the kitchen of our shared house. This was weird but then my living arrangements are unusual to begin with. I rent a room in the headquarters of a women’s organisation called AMA. That stands for Association of Altiplano (highland) Women. Essentially then I live in a house run by Mayan Feminists, which is a contradiction in terms as Maya culture is very cuddly and all about an undying world spirit but it’s also sexist as hell. To have a daughter is seen as disappointing. 

So good for these women I say although goodness knows what they think of me, an enormous lard coloured foreigner meandering about the house they come to sew and work in everyday. The looks of alarm I get when emerging in my towel to go for my morning shower are deep and unfortunate.

But at least I don’t crow my head off at 4 in the morning. It turns out Kevin was a gift from the women of one community to AMA. Now I might have suggested a plasma screen but we got Kevin, who pock-pock-pocked his way round our house like he owned it for a week. To make matters worse Girlfriend took a strange fancy to Kevin and I would come home at night to find her talking to Kevin and even petting his comb. The little devil would close his little chickeny eyes and hold his head out, thoroughly enjoying attentions that should have been mine.

Well goodbye Kevin, you have now been taken away to be eaten. Good. That’s the last time I let a girlfriend of mine stroke a foreign cock. By way of tribute we offer the above video. That is GF saying ‘crow you fucker’ but she assures me this is not dirty talk. At the end he goes out doing what he did best. Making a big, chickeny noise.

Kevin-2007 2007 (last week)

Flumpy and Douchebag Return

Ok apologies my lovely public, I have been away. To be honest there are times you don’t want to write, it interferes with experience. Well that is the press release anyway, more likely I am just too lazy.

Much has happened. Hiking into the hills that surround this dusty town, afternoons learning Dreamweaver, a liquid ton of hot chocolate.

In my personal life I even decided my relationship needed pet names. After literally minutes of consideration I christened Girlfriend ‘Flumpy’. Which I thought was pretty funny. ‘Flumpy’ was less than pleased however and said that if I was going to call her that ‘stupid fucking name’ then I would be called ‘Douchebag’.

Project Flumpy has now been abandoned.

Larks aside the other thing I have been doing is trying to understand Xela. a place (much like a hissing Komodo) that takes time and patience to penetrate. After writing that brief article where I cautiously waved my pom poms for this place I kept talking to people (they certainly kept talking at me). I am still trying to understand the nature of volunteering and all the do gooding projects that infest this town.

What I found surprised me, although I should have been wiser. There is all the gossiping, bitching, disillusion and tribalism of any other human situation. In other words just because Xela is all about high flown ideals doesn’t mean the boggier parts of human behaviour don’t come with it.

There are people here CV building, there are the ‘Development Grumps’ who go wild at the mention of the term but are still involved in it then bitch about the people who don’t ‘understand’. There are people here who are sad because they feel their time here, trying to do something good, has been a failure. Furthermore they consider any attempt to ‘help’ misconceived to begin with and thus entirely doomed.

If you listen to some Xela is some sort of ethical Sodom and Gomorrah.

Personally I still think it is a great thing but as I say everyday you learn and the delusions are peeled away that little more. Motive and effectiveness, short term fixes for long term problems-those are the issues.

Almost insoluble too, at least up close.

Of course if you ask me, just for being here most of the gringos are leaving dollars and gaining knowledge, and that’s a good thing for both sides.

My Big, Ethical Article

Apologies to the three people who might want to read this crap.

However I have been pretty busy trying to set up my website and writing an article on Xela, where I am currently living. That’s in Guatemala. Yeah.

 Check out the link and as promised I will get some photos on here soon and generally go a bit more flashy and pro.

http://development-agencies.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_ethical_playpen

Awfully Good

As Girlfriend and I ate the chickpea burgers we had (shallowly) fried ourselves in the kitchen of the volunteer house we live in she looked up at me.

‘You know I bet we could use the same recipes with lentils.’

It was a moment of clarity. What a toolish demographic we have become. Let’s look at the evidence.

Girlfriend and I live in Guatemala, she works for an NGO saving the world I am writing a post modern novel.

Girlfriend and I read in bed, to save electricity we use our trekking headlamps, our variable beams shining currently on Philip Roth and Tolstoy.

Everyday GF and I buy fresh produce (mainly pulses) from smiley Guatemalan ladies. We do our best to eat vegan and organic.

Often GF and I have heated debates on the pitfalls of Development and the worth of life. After I might blog about it. In the fair trade Wi Fi cafe.

We are, in short, despicable. 

  

To My Loyal Public

Ok just a thank you to the legions (well twenty or so) of fanatical readers that have helped make the magic happen. Yes, yes I now have Adsense! Yes yes screw you ´Nick´!

I have beaten the odds!

Does it get better??

Yes. Having bought a host service and having brow beat anyone I know who can help I am setting up a literary website and this blog (oxymoronic as it is) will be going ´pro´.

I need a snappy www. name for my lit site! Any ideas? Let me know and if anyone would like to help me set up the page I will be most grateful.

I am proably going to a Guatemalan drag show on Saturday (no homophobe jokes please, no I am not going for my shift or to see my girlfriend) so I will write about that. Normal´ service, in other words,  shall be resumed.

Xela and the Earthquake

  

Do earthquakes count as weather?

Difficult to know really, weather being a sky-y, neck up sort of thing. Whatever the case I experienced my first quake yesterday.

Somehow or other I had managed to get into a big, fat argument with Girlfriend (as she will hence forth be known) on the nature of Development. Not for us the traditional arenas of ‘You were looking at her tits!´or something normal like that. O no no.

We have to have twisting, semantic duels that pull the rug out from under all meaning whilst we jab senselessly at each other´s sentences.  Girlfriend brings up all sorts of esoteric mathematical formulas (knowing I don´t understand them) whilst I carry out harrying raids on her logic (what do you mean by that term? Define it for me? )

Ooo ugly it was! Girlfriend had just deployed some nonsense about chaos theory and bell curves and was waiting for this argumentative doodlebug to land. I was sitting on the bed sulking hard over a bowl of pumpkin soup.

In the silence we noticed it. The room was gently swaying, rippling my soup in its bowl. To have the world move is a very odd experience. The ground is such a reliably dull object (still, painful when fallen on- that´s about it) to have that changed is bizarre.

It was as if the floor, with its trembling and rocking, suddenly wanted a say. What was its opinion on the the moral labyrinth that is Development? It didn´t say and soon the room stopped shaking, as if a huge worm had passed beneath us. 

Girlfriend and I looked at eachother. Had we just been warned by the earth itself to make peace?

´How does Chaos Theory illuminate our argument?´ I said like a giant, earthquake proof twit.

  

  

Farewell Golden Shower

Rarely is an experience both liberating and efficient. Still when I moved into my San Pedro hostel last week this rarest of combinations became possible, all thanks to the ‘genius’ of Guatemalan plumbing.

The owner showed me the room and as soon as she had closed the door (with a piping ‘Hasta lluego!’) I dumped my pack and sniffed around. Of course the easily impressed would have fawned over the view of Lago Atitlan. It was, after all, sundown and a thick beam of diamonds had been scattered on the lake’s choppy surface. Impossibly bright, this fat line of refraction skipped and pulsed as the sky rolled through a hundred lagerish tints. I watched the kaleidoscopic heavens for a while, noting that when the sun finally dipped behind the volcanoes a single cloud held that light. It was washed in luminous amber.

The real treat, however, was the toilet.

A concrete hole in the wall with a grubby curtain it took me half an hour to spot the quirk. Over, yes directly over, the bowl was the shower head.

Imagine the possibilities! Everything, all your morning functions satisfied at once. I dubbed it the ‘ Poo shower’ and am very sad to have left it behind.

Yesterday I got in to Xela, Guatemala’s second city and at first sight an odd town. There are no pavements for a start, only thin concrete runners at the side of the streets, and you can walk for blocks without seeing a gringo. This is a working Guatemalan town, unprettied and choked with diesel fumes. What makes it interesting (to me at least) is the fact my girlfriend lives here and that every gringo you do see is here to save the world.

The girlfriend is a long story (which she won’t let me tell) so let’s move onto the heroic gringos.

Xela is a volunteering hotspot and the place an increasing number of development agencies and NGOs have chosen to base themselves. People come here to put flesh on the liberal ideology. A constant flow of conscientious (guilty?) Westerners come to educate women, lend soft hands to farming communities, to establish worthy programs. As a man who obsessively thinks about the nature of good and right but has done precisely nothing about it I cannot wait to explore this place, this collecting pool for goodwill.

I hope I will learn something. In fact maybe I am secretly hoping to be changed by it.

Half my hostel are weapons experts

So let´s get this out there, I am far too old for hostels. I realised this last night when I heard an 18 year old English kid ask an Israeli girl who invented democracy.

´Ah. The Greeks I shink.´she said in the salty, Hebrew filtered English that sounds like car boots shutting. 

I virtually ran out of the common area at that point, the English kid had popped one too many disco biscuits and the meaning of life surely loomed in the conversational skies.

Run I thought. Run now. And I did, slamming the door of my room. Besides I had already squeezed all that was of interest from the Israeli girl. I just can´t help asking them about weaponry.

You see the Israelis are a numerous slice of the hostel population but something sets them a million miles apart from the rest of the labrador souled youngsters you meet there. Those bright t-shirted sorts are barely twenty- mere shiny, joyful, enviously undamaged pseudo toddlers. They are there to get drunk and extract the L plates from their underwear. 

Israelis, though, travel after being released from military service. I find that interesting enough but what I am really after is the guns. I am after all from a hopelessly gun poor island.

´So did you have a machine gun?´ I had asked earlier, knowing full well she did.

´Yesh. An M-16.´she said and looked bored.

´I kept it under my bed.´

OOoo. This was new. Aged 17 the most intersting thing I had under my bed was nail clippings and porn.

´Yesh. Me and my brother would take them apaard and clean them before going to sleep.´

´Ever have a bazooka?!´I pushed, hungry to raise the weaponry stakes! Adolescence in a war zone? Totally worth it for a bazooka.

´Actually I was in intelligensh.´

Was this a hint to me to stop asking such stupid questions? But I never found out,  she just walked off to go to her massage class.

Death by Window

Still bathed in fame, having underwhelmed at least 15 hippies at an open mic night in Antigua, I set out for Lake Atitlan in a smug mood. I sat at the back of the chicken bus and wondered when the emails from EMI A’n R would hit my inbox, looking forward to a serene couple of days in one the most beautiful places on earth.

However, life and in particular Guatemala is full of surprises. Halfway down the highway I looked up from my guidebook and looked at the truck up ahead. The driver gunned the engine and obviously decided to pass it.

‘Oooo.’ I thought  ’That’s going to be tight.’  and went back to plotting the ATMs in San Pedro.

Five seconds later we were nearly there when I looked up again. We were slugging by and all was well, that was until the truck pulled out of line. It’s dirty great nose swung out and clipped the corner (my corner!) of the chicken bus with a mighty thunk.

POP! My entire window shattered over me and the bus reeled crazily, skeening from the impact.

FUCK! I said very loudly in a less than Wildean moment and closed my eyes, the glittering isosceles tumbling over me.

When I opened my eyes (slowly, one might as well savour one’s life long disfigurement) I was confronted by the entire bus looking at me, every face an absolute picture, wondering if the back seat now contained a puddle of slice n’ dice gringo. Naturally enough, bits of glass falling out of my hair, I was curious too so I held my hands up and turned them around. Next I ran them over my face, and over the back of my scalp.

Nothing, not one cut. Phew.

The bus turned away, slightly disappointed, and started bazookering the driver with all sorts of Guat invective. I just sat there relieved not to look like I had just had a head rub from Freddy Kruger, and I thought with some aplomb, went back to reading.

Lago Atitlan, by the way, is really wonderful. The light, the setting is amazing. A blue bowl of green sided volcanoes dotted with boat reached villages.  Despite the window shower I am amazed so few Brits come to Guatemala, there is a gentle feel about the country, an easy going way in the air that is amazing considering civil war blazed here until a decade ago. And within ten seconds stepping off the launch into San Pedro I was offered shrooms, coke and all sorts more. Efficient dealing Hoxton could learn a thing or two from I say.

Next stop Xela where I will be setting up a proper website for this blog and for my articles. Thrilling I know but I am quite excited about it! Keep finding my my stuff on the web such as on http://www.highbeam.com/Search.aspx?q=author:[Patrick+Hussey] 

It’s not just searching you know, its research so if these people can make money from my writing, so can I.