WEEKLY WTF
05-27-24 Edition
What’s Happening
You that’s what!
Landed In Lima
Show up at a giant square building and drag some plastic wheeled rectangles down some zigzagging meat lines and sit in a shaky metal cylinder for 10hrs and next thing you know you’re lined up diagonally in motherfucking Lima, Peru! It’s shaping up to be a good ass time!
Lima, Peru~ Day 2
Day 2, Lima Peru. The best descriptor I have so far is “fuuuuuck”. Cobbled and bricked patchwork ribbons of road bleeding into modern but broken streets punching through a cityscape menagerie of shiny glass high rises who lean imperiously over cracked and dilapidated Spanish colonial abodes nearly drowned in flowering vines whose hollow windows gasp from curved faces of peeling paint. High rise apartments with rising spiderwebs of old earthquake scars meandering amongst windows adorned with mended socks and ghostly undergarment bits that blow about gently in the warm misty afternoons of this coastal city South of the equator. Tiny bodegas the size of closets crammed with plastic coated sweet treats juxtaposed with stark and modern cafes who rub elbows with ceviche joints and thumping neon bars all of which lie underneath impossibly tangled and branching power lines like black tendrils of sky mycelium. Cats, so many cats, curled up under blooming cacti, or any patch of grass or green, sleeping serenely next to the bustling flow of chaotic road rivers. And the mad darting of screaming motorcycle minnows and tiny dent scaled fish cars and greasy whale like buses who heed for no man or stop sign disturbing them not, for they give exactly zero feline fucks. Faces, so many faces in a city of 13 million souls. A tidal swirl of Spanish waves lapping above an Incan undertoe. Some with angular high cheeks shaded under tall hats, selling woven things sitting stoically along the streets like brightly adorned rocks within a purposeful current of bright eyed youthful faces strangely more smooth and pristine than any caucasian population whose crowds I’ve swam amongst. Today, day 2 and our final day in Lima, has already felt like a month. The best food of our lives have past our lips and have broken our brains with Amazonian flavors like colors never before beheld in these eternal 2 days. Tomorrow we fly to 11,000 feet to Cusco, the ancient heartbeat of the Inca, as we pulse through this tiny artery of South America with our syncopated travel companions for another, unimaginable, 13 days in Peru. Fuuuuck, how is this just day 2!? Here is a photo of wifey poo and I drinking pisco sours across from our friends and underneath a depiction of our future phantoms or perhaps past incarnations. A temporal tease of sorts. Buenas noches for now, Toodaloo.
Landed in Cusco
When you get to Cusco they immediately give you coca leaves to chew for altitude sickness. In addition, if you miss your cats or kids or whatevs, they give you a baby goat disguised as an Alpaca. (*tiny Peruvian lady not included)
Cusco
Landing in Cusco, after having spent a few culturally & culinary saturated days in the frenetic and writhing chaos of Lima, is like a long slow post coital exhale… immediately followed by a desperate whistling inhale because holy shit there is waaay less oxygen at 11,000 feet.
No amount of pics or vids or descriptions really convey a place. Not to mention one’s own personal brand of yeasty interpretations that gets kneaded into the fermenting mind dough within the bone oven and baked into our brain. But, fuck it, here’s a pic of the wifey poo & I in front of a big ass Spanish cathedral in Cusco which is apropos because it conveys the general feeling of being dwarfed by the immensity of it all. The Andes, the giant stonework of the Incas and the massive cathedrals built by the Spanish Conquistadors. Such a strange scale and comparison when you think about how the ancient soft & small people made of meat built such massive earthen monuments to whatever it was that they considered important at the time.
The sky is slightly darker up here. The sun is offensively bright. People move slower. Ancient looking faces with unknowable eyes walk about leisurely amongst throngs of huffing and hungry eyed tourists. You can walk through tight alleyways that were built by the Incan’s and trace your fingertips along the stonework where thousands of people since times of antiquity have done the same and along these same walls you have to occasionally plaster yourself to the impossible stonework when a car rapidly comes beeping down the ancient roads and hope that a rear view mirror doesn’t wack you in the balls. Some of the dark and distinctive faces twitch to life when you approach them, waving their laminated massage cards or jostling trinkets or drawings or any number of brightly woven bits and bobs.
Our two days in Cusco were a delightful blur and we are now nestled in the Andes a couple hours North of the city near the town of Huaran at Munay Songo, a retreat area or sanctuary, in what’s known as the sacred valley.
My room doesn’t have WiFi, but I’m not mad about it. I tried and failed to upload a video post but the WiFi that is here couldn’t handle it. Both the WiFi and the toilets here are not quite accustomed to the quantity I am attempting to push throughSo be it, sanctuary indeed.
There is a thing that happens when you post a lot of shit, a danger even. Your life becomes about posting shit and eventually degrades because whatever got you to the place you are is no longer what you’re doing. Posting shit should be about your life not be your life. It seems a subtle distinction but is in actuality a vast gulf. So, that being said, I’ll keep recording the shit we are up to, to later do something with, to share with you what it was like here for us, but intend to take full advantage of this sanctuary in the misty mountains. A retreat from the hum drums of day to day, a retreat from media in general but most importantly a retreat from the tensions of a busy mind.
Anywho that’s it for now. I’m gonna commence with this retreat bidness. Toodaloo!
