hello

I am in an internet café in guarayos, bolivia at the moment. for about two weeks now i´ve been taking care of an obese ocelot named Lazy Cat. We burn lard every morning on a jungle trail. EXCEPT, it´s not so sweet now because the other day she shat out 3 intestinal parasites! I do not want these in mah belly. So I´m not giving her so much love! 😦 All day I am bored out of my mind without a cat to play with, and there are too many mosquitos to ever be sitting still, so I can´t read or write. Usually I go exploring the jungle, trying to climb trees only to discover many varieties of stinging ants. I like chopping lots of things with my machete, singing Beatles songs to my cat, trying to sing the guitar solos. I pass hours and hours following huge lines of thousands of marching ants, trying to figure out what they are doing. I think they just march because they don´t know what else to do!

Yesterday I had a good day, 8 hours straight of bordome yielded one long, brilliant green poisonous snake, and an ant war. (giant black one with huge-ass pincers versus quick stinging red ant, it was a draw). Another let-down (or not?!!) is that there is a huge wild male jaguar roaming around camp. For three days in a row now I´ve heard him grunting (it’s this sort of deep, infrasonic, mighty, guttural noise) about 50 yards away from me, somewhere in the forest. Too bad they have perfect camouflage and are quiet as hell when they stalk things! otherwise I would have more peace of mind while I am off exploring the jungle. So basically I just stay in one place, near my cat´s cage, because my soft human flesh is surely delicious.

Also- a giant fire ant was latched on to my cat´s leash, so i chopped its stinging body off from its head so that it wouldn´t get us: the body stayed alive for 2 hours, stinging MADLY away at the air, the ground, anything really. In a social experiment of sorts I put the headless body in the middle of the marching line of ants to see how they would react. Some tried to eat it, others tried to help it, but in the end they just altered their path slightly so they could avoid this unpleasant distraction to their hard work. How telling!

AND! the birds! I love them! there are a ton of parrots on camp. They are so intelligent. I sing to them every morning and they are such a good audience. They all gather in one corner right next to me and start dancing, which means the move their little feathery bodies up and down to the beat of the song. It´s really cute. The macaws are the biggest fans of singing. They´re so smart! Whenever I am walking towards them, I can hear them practicing language together- Hola! What´s up! Hello! Cool! Yo! Nooken in the Cooken! (sex in the kitchen in Dutch) and then when they realize that I´m passing, they stop talking and start screeching inarticulately. It´s so hilarious! this happens without fail every day. They speak with each other perfectly in various languages, and then when there are people in sight, they feign stupidity. I think they are secretly plotting a total human takeover.

PS: sorry about the lack of photos, I promise I will put them on the internet somehow, even though I am returning home very soon. I just can´t find a good way to do it, and I´m never on the internet!

Çómíng home June 10th

-Have had only one shower a week since March 12th

-I need to get to Barranquilla, Colombia by the end of may, but flights from Lima to Colombia are all several hundred dollars. I may have to travel by bus for one week without stopping, which will SUCK big time!

LOVE TO ALL

bye