Notes from a Latter-Day Anglo Saxon

OK—the only good thing to come out of yesterday was the realization: I’m much better off than Queen Elizabeth of England.

The day started with an emergency breakfast, since Lord—the brother of Lady, who owns the café—was going to arrive with his 25-foot serpiente, since our kitchen sink, always temperamental, had had a complete breakdown, and was tremendously refusing to do what a sink should do: drain.

The plunger had been tried, boiling water had been tried, Draino had been tried, a huge Shop-Vac had alternately blown into and out of the respirator of the drain. And at last, and not without considerable sweat from Lord, the 25-foot was introduced. No luck.

OK—time to go to the hardware store, and buy a 50-foot snake. With even more difficulty, 30 feet of this snake—more like a boa, now that I think about it—was introduced, but the obstacle was impenetrable.

“I have no idea what the hell this is,” said Lord, looking at what was a thick, grey, slightly greasy paste, “but it’s definitely not food-related. Never seen anything like it…”

In the meantime, my sister-in-law had called and dropped the news: in a moment of supreme luck, my 25-year nephew had impressed some high-tech company that was now happily going to pay to build him a high-tech studio, and then pay him $50,000 a week to do whatever he does. Oh, and he only has to work one week a month.

So Lord had spent four hours sweating to ream out the drain, and I had spent a hundred bucks paying him, all the while sitting on the kitchen floor, in completely useless solidarity with Lord. And why? Because the chikungunya was particularly awful yesterday, my feet and ankles were especially affected, and I was utterly exhausted. Oh, and without a kitchen sink.

Time to confess: somebody needs to invent a new concept—self sorrow. Because self-pity is justifiably despised, but aren’t there times when truly, truly, you have a right to feel sorry for yourself? For over a month I’ve been in varying states of pain, I’ve been tired, I’ve not been able to exercise or play the cello, or even write. Oh, and did I mention that the disease also produces depression?

“It would probably do you good,” said my sister-in-law, when I confessed that I had this inexplicable desire to cry. But it wasn’t crying yesterday, but keening and wailing. The poet Gerard Manly Hopkins said it better:

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

And who was the sinner? Sorry, but it was my 25-year old nephew, who has had wonderful parents, excellent schools, and is now getting 50 grand a week once a month. If he bothers to do it for two years, he’ll be a millionaire.

I feel guilty about it now, but I didn’t then. I was raging at life, at the disease that had robbed me of my life, and the injustice of a young man who has had so much, and has been given so much. The Manley Hopkin’s poem ends, “Mine, O though lord of life, send my roots rain.” I was considerably less eloquent.

So what to do? Life teaches you—you wail, then you get up to do the rest of your day. First, of course, was to get to Ayurveda, down the street, since if my only hope from Western medicine is Tylenol and water? Screw that, I’m in the arms of the Hindis, or at least their traditional medicine. And the clerk, instantly, had the answer: colloidal silver and turmeric. Total cost: 47 dollars, which I would have paid for even one moment of relief.

 Wailing drains you of energy, nor could I be alone; I had to have people around me. So that meant the café, and YouTube, which is—at times—the only thing I can do. And what—for whatever reason—was YouTube suggesting I watch? The Royal Servants.

Was it ridiculous? Of course—but it was all I could manage. So now I can tell you that Prince Charles has a really bad temper; once dropped a silver stud down a sink in a house he was visiting. In a rage, he tore the sink out of the wall, retrieved the stud, and then decided to almost throttle the butler. Right—so think twice before you invite the guy to your house.

The other thing I learned? The queen and the royals are essentially at the mercy of their servants—who know how to do things they can’t do (such as put in their own studs….) And then consider the case of Princess Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, who, if he didn’t kiss, definitely told. So the royals are in a fishbowl, and any wailing they want to do? Sorry, guys—tough luck.

And the relationship of—at least—the queen to her servants? Well, apparently it’s utterly impersonal: there is a barrier, and it is never breached. On the day one of them left service—after many years—he tucked the queen and her husband into the car, spread the rug over their knees, and stood stiffly at attention. The queen gazed forward—knowing perfectly well that the servant was leaving service. Did she so much as glance at the man? According to the source—no.

And here it might be time to admit—I never read or watch anything about the royal family, since it seems to me disrespectful. Do I need to know that Princess Margaret, a chain-smoker, had to have someone around her always, holding the ashtray so she could flick away without looking? Isn’t it enough that these people are always having to smile, to wave their silly waves, to say the things that have to be said but that they may not possibly mean? Though I did enjoy the story about the Queen Mother’s reaction when a footman spilled piping hot gravy down the queens cleavage.

“I’m dreadfully sorry, your Majesty,” said the footman.

“The fault was all mine,” replied the queen, “I’m afraid I nudged your elbow.”

In fact, she had done no such thing.

Well, the colloidal silver and turmeric may be working, because today I’m better, feeling guilty about my pique at my nephew, and wondering if Prince Charles was truly such a jerk. Had I been fair? Would my father, striding through the celestial newsroom, approve?

Well, time to spend an hour with Charles, and check out his ambitious project in an impoverished area of Scotland. And since part of the project features Dumfries House, which besides being built in the 1750’s by Robert and Charles Adam, has all the original furniture by—among others—Chippendale. For a certain type of gay man, stuff like this is a variant of pornography…..

So I followed the Prince around, and no—I’m happy to say that he was on his best behavior. So I was explaining all this to Lady, and telling her how—at least I—thought the Prince was doing something a little more worthy than sitting aroun waiting for the old lady—I mean his mum—to die. Save a beautiful house, start a housing project, train people in traditional crafts, get ‘em working as guides and butlers and wedding planners—hey, not bad. Then I told her about the colloidal silver.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” she said, echoing what the good Taí had said, “since it will turn your skin blue.”

My skin blue?

So now I have a choice—walk around like an Anglo-Saxon with woad warpaint, or crawl around wincing in pain at any movement I make.

Well, at least I’m not depressed about it…..      

Rest, Tylenol and Handel

How bad is this thing, this virus-borne disease called chikungunya? I give you one example….

Stephanie is what the writer Malcolm Gladwell once called a weak connection—nor is there anything pejorative about that. It simply mean that we have—as we’ve so far discovered—three things in common: we both play the cello, she walks dogs and I love dogs, and we both hate Monsanto.

All of this mean that you really should say hello to Stephanie when you meet her on te street, so I did. We gave each other the standard Puerto Rican peck on the left cheek. And five minutes later? We were all but writing each other into our wills!

“It’s been seven weeks with this thing,” she said, which were the first clues. Because despite every web site that says, “most cases of the disease resolve within two to three days,” I’ve met only a few that have. Instead, this disease is carving out new territory: it is both acute and chronic.

“You know what the worst thing about this disease is,” I said. “It’s having to hear every healthy person tell you their home remedy to cure it.”

That’s when it clicked.

“Totally,” she said, “I had one friend tell me to take a red-hot pepper….”

“I can see so clearly where I would have put that pepper….”

“And you know, I went to this specialist speaking to a crowd out on the plaza a couple of days ago, and guess what he said? He urged people not to go to La Perla….”

“Why are people going to La Perla?” It’s our nearby slum, where you can get drugs slightly stronger than the Tylenol that the doctors are recommending.

“They go, buy some heroin—just enough to test positive—and then register to receive methadone, which is one of the strongest pain medications. Then, they get their doctor to prescribe steroids, so now, guess what? They’re telling people they’re perfectly fine, they feel great, and guess what? They’re out there fucking running! They still have the disease, they still have the virus, but they’re medicated up to their tits! And they’re out there fucking running!”

“I get that,” I told her, “since I went to my doctor and she suggested Tylenol. And I said sure, as well as we augment with a morphine drip….”

“And you know the other thing about the disease? Besides the joint pain, the fever, the cold sweats, it also gives you depression! Isn’t that great! And then you have your friends looking at you like you’re an alchie who refuses to go to AA, and they’re saying, ‘well, why haven’t you boiled a mango and added a little cinnamon?’ Well, I tell you why: the effort of bending over to dig out a pan, much less the pain involved in peeling a mango….”

I knew just what she meant.

“What I hate,” I told her, “is that the person who tells you about the mango and the cinnamon? The next day he tells you that the mango / cinnamon thing is completely worthless, and today what you have to do is get star anise and malagueta leaves (sorry—too tired to look that up) and infuse them in boiling water…”

“And you know what,” she interrupts, but that’s totally OK, because we both surfing the same wave, so who cares what surfboard we’re on? “They’re telling people NOT to go to the emergency room, since why bother? They might as well record a message, and play it over the PA system: “If you are experiencing severe joint pain, fevers of up to 105 degrees, inability to move, severe fatigue and crushing depression, get the hell out of here, go home, drink lots of water, and take Tylenol. And good luck, because you’re screwed.”

“First, of course, they’d charge the fifty dollar deductible….”

“Well, you have to admit, it would be more efficient,” I told her. “A friend went with his son to the ER, and it was filled with kids, all bent over, all walking around looking sort of like miniature Frankensteins, just after they had been zapped to life. Nine hours, he spent, just to be told….”

“And what is this shit about ‘drink lots of water?’ You know what? Any time a doctor has no goddamn clue what to say to a patient, he or she advises rest, Tylenol, and drink lots of water! Why? It’s a litany for them!”,

So today? The virus is doing a variant of the 19^th century grand tour, since it’s not just my wrists and fingers that hurt, but also my hips and ankles. I’m still fatigued, I’m still sweating, I want to be in bed but guess what? There’s a point when lying in bed hurts just as much as being up.

And this post ends with something far more efficacious than that trinity of water, rest, and Tylenol. Try a little catharsis, via Handel:

I will bemoan my fate

so cruel and brutal

as long as there is breath left in my body.

And when I am dead and become a ghost, I will haunt the tyrant night and day.

(English translation grabbed from this Kimmel Center website.)

 

   

Different, Yes, From You and Me

How screwed up is it? How far off balance have we gone? Well, consider what Lady, the owner of the café where I write, told me today.

“I’m so angry I could spit. I told him I had the money, and I told him it wasn’t a gift: it’s for all the stuff he’s done for us that we never paid him for, since he never charged us. So when his back window got smashed on his car—parked right outside of your house, by the way—he didn’t have the 200 bucks to get his car fixed. So what did he do? He pawned his computer, and now it’ll cost him $250 to get his computer back….”

This guy is a hard worker, an unfailingly cheerful worker, who’s somewhere in his mid-fifties. And he doesn’t have $200 to fix his car? He has no savings?

“Well, he’s not the only one,” said Lady, “there’s Julio, who lives day to day as well. And then, María…”

Names changed to protect the…impoverished.

Then it occurred to me. Just as New York had the “broken windows’ theory,” Puerto Rico has the broken tooth theory. For it’s hardly uncommon to see an attractive, well-dressed person driving a respectable car. But when he or she smiles? There are one or two gaps amid the teeth.

A dental implant costs about $2000, and no, not even the best plan covers it. And what is our personal savings rate? Well, in seventies years, it’s never been positive: in 2000, it was –3.2. And for the States? As of July 2014, it was 5.3. That’s still pretty bad, but at least it’s positive—however weakly.

What I didn’t know, until I began watching the YouTube clip below from the BBC, is that London has experienced its biggest increase in super wealth since the Industrial Revolution. The difference? As I understand it, the Industrial Revolution created new products and, especially, new ways of making old products. OK—so furniture for the first time was mass-produced. Not so good for Mr. Chippendale, but great for the farmers who became factory workers and who could, often, buy furniture at a reasonable price. In short, the Victorians had figured out a way to—sorry about this—make the pie bigger.

And now we have a new breed—not super but perhaps über-rich. And has all that lovely money trickled down to us? Well, in one of the luxury estates shown in the film, there are no less than five swimming pools, which has to argue that Mr. or Mrs. Gotrocks is paying a chunk of money for pool maintenance. But beyond the maids and domestic help and private pilots—is anybody else benefitting? A Carnegie or a Mellon created thousands of well paid jobs—are these new moguls doing the same?

Short answer—no. They are playing around with money, taking advantage of an interest rate held artificially low by the Federal Reserve Board, buying up distressed assets from the financial crisis of the last few years. Consider this, from The New York Times:

 The average home in Ferguson sold for $45,032 last year, up from a low of $28,499 in 2011, but still only about half the average price for a home when the market peaked in 2006, according to RealtyTrac, a company that monitors housing sales and foreclosures. Ferguson’s slow recovery has created an opening for dozens of investment firms, flush with cash, to descend, buy up homes and rent them to mostly low-income residents. The firms account for roughly a quarter of home purchases in Ferguson, according to RealtyTrac.   

Yes—this is Ferguson, Missouri, the site of the killing of Michael Brown. Certainly a crime, however it seems to have gone unpunished. But can anyone out there tell me why it’s OK to create a housing bubble, sell inflated mortgages to anyone with a pulse, crash the market, foreclose on a zillion people, and then buy all those foreclosed houses at rock-bottom rates and rent them to the people foreclosed on? Is it legal? Probably. Is it fair?

Well, well—that all started me off thinking: what are our favorites bastards—David and Charles Koch—up to now? And I could probably tell you, if the documentary, “Citizen Koch” that had been commissioned in part by PBS hadn’t been yanked by PBS. So I headed off to YouTube—always a fount of dubiously-copyrighted material—to see if I could see it there. Nope! So I invested the 4 dollars of so and rented it in a streaming version from Amazon. If you have four dollars, and can stand to cavort in bed with the enemy, it’s well worth it.

The real question is—why Wisconsin? Because Citizen Koch is less about the Koch brothers than it is about how Citizens United—which allows unlimited money from corporations to be reported anonymously to political campaigns—has completely altered the political landscape of Wisconsin. Which left me wondering—why? Why did the Koch brothers and their ilk single out Wisconsin? Weren’t there bigger fish to fry?

Run over to Wikipedia, and there you’ll find it: Koch has manufacturing in a score of states, operates Georgia-Pacific (which makes “Brawny” brand paper towels), has a cattle company, owns pipelines, fertilizers in the US, Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Venezuela. In short, Koch Industries operates in Wisconsin, but hardly to such an extent that it would invest the kind of money it has.  So what was the big deal?

I can only conclude one thing, which I cheerfully filch from Isthmus:

 I was aware of Wisconsin's frac sand mining boom. The number of permitted or operational mines and processing facilities rose from 10 in 2010 to 130 this year. Nearly 100 more mines and facilities are proposed or under development.

Later on in the article, you come to this:

On geological survey maps, the world's best frac sand stands out as a brown swipe down the western third of the state.

So why did the Koch’s invest so heavily in Wisconsin? Well, for all the paper products, cattle, commodities trading—what is Koch’s core business? My guess—since it started as a petroleum company—is that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. So what do we have?

A house built on sand.

Think it will stand?

   

Three Sisters

Feeling bored? Feeling insufficiently stressed? Need to have a minor mental breakdown? Then here’s the number for you: (787) 521-3434.

“I’m going to go off and bother Marc,” called Lady over her shoulder to Jorge, and it was a good thing she did. Because Marc had stopped being a writer, a cellist, or even a person: Marc was a broken gas main waiting to encounter a match.

Which was getting closer and closer as the mechanical voice assured me repetitively

and Spanishly—su llamada puede ser monitoriada por un supervisor para asegurar la calidad de servicio. Oh, and I can know tell you what to do in the event of (yes, I hate that “in the event of,” too, but that’s what they said: en el caso de un huracán) a hurricane: unplug all your appliances. Oh, and did you know that you’re not supposed to plug in wet or water-damaged appliances? Wow—the stuff you can learn, just by calling (787) 521-3434!

And they must have thought I was a real retard, because did they think I got it on the first several hundred repetitions? Of course not, so they shot for the thousands.

So Lady comes by, and says, “oh, I see you’re busy,” and I tell her, “no, though just now I’ve learned that my call will be answered in the order in which it was received! Wow—isn’t that nice? When you think of all the random events that happen in life—the good looks, the nasty temperaments, the trifles that are social status and race—isn’t it wonderful that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Company has decided to set an example for the universe to follow? Ah, justice! Fair play! A level playing field!”

Unwisely, Lady decides to sit down.

“I see you’re trying to call the power company….”

“No,” I tell her, “this is a physiological experiment in how high my blood pressure can get before I stroke out. I’ve decided to forego Rosetta Stone and practice my Spanish oral comprehension skills free via the government of Puerto Rico. Since my writer’s block has become both chronic and acute…”

Well, today it was the power company but yesterday? It started out with emergency calls to the sisters of Mr. Fernández from one of the sister’s husband who had learned from people high in government circles; these people—with their fingers on every governmental pulse, their stethoscopes auscultating every governmental breath—these people at the pinnacle of power had breathed to Mr. Fernández’s sister’s husband that water rationing was imminent: the announcement would come in an hour.

There is and isn’t a crisis, you see, though it is true that the water in the reservoirs has been dropping precipitously for the last six months. Puerto Rico, however, has decided to join the rest of the world and have a little drought: in fact, the whole Caribbean is droughting. So starting Monday, it’s going to be, as El Nuevo Día Put it: Un Día Si, Un Día No—I’ll insult no one by translating.

So yes, the water is running low, but 60% of the water that the water utility produces? It goes into the ground, not through the pipes. The system is so old, and so broken, that we are two or three times the industry standard for loss of water.

But is there time to contemplate such pedantic details? Of course not, since instantly the question became what to do about Mr. Fernández’s  parents—the one day yes they could manage, but the one day no? Not so easy. So we’re now in pollo decapitado phase, which means that two sisters have to go to Home Depot and scurry around, battling the armies that have gathered inexplicably in the water tank area—no surprise, because everybody, it seems, is powerfully connected to those who sit at the thrones of power—and the sisters can buy nothing, absolutely nothing, without the authority of the third sister, who is at home repining or reclining or both in bed with the monga, the dreaded Puerto Rican disease that descends when even one drop of water falls upon you.

So the solution, as anybody can see, was to take phone photos of various merchandise, slug off the advances of other shoppers who wanted to purchase, not photograph, the putative merchandise, and then wait for the text message of approval.

Why, you ask, Calm and Temperate Reader, do all that? Can’t we just buy a tank, and put it in the patio? No no, because this sister is doing everything for the parents—bringing them cremita with raisins at just the right time of the morning, checking in several times a day, shopping for them and cleaning their apartment. She’s a saint—a saint who will take one look at the water tank and—if unauthorized—find and invent every possible flaw with it. Oh, and will she bring it up? More often than the pope blesses the crowd in St. Peter’s Square…..

So it was a less-than-merry day at Home Depot, since the flash mob? It was invented, patented, and perfected in Puerto Rico, and all of the people still left on the island dropped everything they were doing and went—“one clear call for me,” as the poet sang—to Home Depot! Oh, and the three cell phones of the three sisters were ringing like mad, since there were constant updates on the situation coming in, plus the usual cell / text activity. So yesterday, at Home Depot, which never tends to be anything reminiscent of a day in the country? Well, if Dante were around, he’d have to do serious revision of The Inferno….

So at last the message is received—permission to buy the tank of photo 73. This is done by joining the line that has stretched through three municipalities and has merged with a sister store twenty miles away. See? Excellent choices in payment options! And then the sister are driving home—fortunately, the line turned out to be for the store in which they had started, and photographed—to Old San Juan, and are listening to the car radio, all the better to stay abreast, which is where you want to be in developing emergencies, and that’s when it’s announced, as the sisters drive in to Old San Juan…

…that the rationing will not affect Old San Juan!

Back at the ranch, or rather, the café, we’re having an emergency powwow, since it has dawned on all of us—damn, no wonder the power company thinks I’m such an idiot—that a major component of coffee is…

Right, but that’s not a problem, since Starbucks, which used to run the café, ripped out the cisterns when it decided to unStarbuck, and those cisterns? They’re over at the other store, though one of them may have a hole that could crap things up, since Lord—who is Lady’s brother and anybody can see the sense of that!—got it into his head to drill a hole in it. Sometimes guys get up in the morning and just gotta do things like that.

So we go off and take a look at the tanks—all except Sunshine, who actually knows what to look for and who will install them, if installable they be, but who declines to do so because why? He’s wearing a very nice shirt and very white pants, which he declines to sacrifice to the cause.

So he drifts off, since drifting off is in the air, here at the Poet’s Passage. Because while I am worrying about how to flush the toilets, Lady is kissing Gallego, and telling me that he is famous: everybody at the poetry open mic had been whispering to her, “hey, is that really Gallego? Wow, too cool!”

So Lady is now off talking to Sasha, also a famous poet, and not taking care of the fact that there is no bread, since no one has bothered to look at the bread inventory, which is now zero, absolute zero. And guess what? Bread is to sandwiches as water…

So Lady beckons to me and writes in blue ink on her hand: “IHANBD.” Not familiar with that acronym? Neither was I, but I can now tell you it means: “I’m having a nervous breakdown.

Therapy time, and I appoint Montalvo with the sacred task: don’t let anyone distract Lady. Who, it turns out, is functioning on three hours of sleep and no food. So she goes off to get some food, and comes back with a sandwich, made with the absolute last bread in the café.

“I feel kinda guilty,” she said.

“Eat,” I told her.

So I tell her—focus, concentrate, do what you absolutely need to do, and then go home and take a nap. I then go home to hear the Saga of Home Depot from one of the participating sisters. At the end of which, every auditor’s shoulders had fused anatomically with their ears…

Which may be why I was stressed today because the electricity in the apartment? It’s gotta be connected, since we may be having a tropical storm and a brother of the three sisters and Mr. Fernández will becoming with his young daughter—and how will that child fare in a beach condominium as she suffers through her first tropical torment?

So I have placed a note on the apartment building’s door for the power company to call me at my cell phone, and that hasn’t worked, so when they don’t call you, what do you do? Duh—call them.

“Of course they’re not going to answer, you have to find someone who knows someone in the agency, and then talk to him—after gently reminding him of whatever favor it was that your friend had done for him.” Says Lady.  “Oh, and you could also wander the streets of the old city, looking for the truck….”

And you thought those shoulders could go no higher?

And then she says, “I do have one piece of good news,” and goes on to say…

“…the cistern is now connected, and we’ll have enough water to flush the toilets and operate the kitchen. Oh, and we’ll make café col’ao, which is coffee expressed through an old sock, which everybody loves since it reminds them of abuelita so who needs espresso?”

I can’t believe it….

“Marc, do I drive you crazy?”

“How do you do it,” I asked her, “you kiss everyone and read their poetry and drift off to paint houses when there’s no bread, or order more bread when you should be painting houses, and yet everything falls into place!”

“You haven’t answered my question…”

“Of course you drive me crazy!”

She roars with laughter and tells me, “Yeah, I drive Nico (her husband) crazy, too….”

“What’s your secret?” I ask.  Nico comes by—the two embrace and share a long kiss. Love with Frenchmen!

Hmmm—could that be it? 

              

(Note--readers will be happy to learn that shortly after I wrote this post--a month ago--the storm came, dropped enough water to cause the reservoirs to open the flood gates, causing havoc for the communities below. So all is well!)