Managua

Managua is a filthy avenue of tree stumps, dirt clouds, and plastic trash.  The streets are the color of dusty feet in bright green shower flip flops.  Managua is the mammoth Sandinista billboards that rise from the ash and trash of the ground, and feature the smiling president waving to (seemingly) another billboard of the president smiling and waving.  (Daniel waving to himself.)  Managua is the huge roundabouts with abandoned parks in the middle featuring the skeleton of a christmas tree whose christmas lights continue to blink on the hottest of days of July. ("Here in Managua, it's Christmas year around," goes the saying.)  A city of cars, where the only people walking are the menacing and miserable faces of poverty; shoeless and shirtless, their dark skin glistening like a lake, selling small bags of water and candy.  The men, in camo pants or cargo shorts, intimidating and unapproachable, moving their shoulders purposefully as they walk like a puma pacing in its cage.  Managua is the suffocating heat, and the nauseous humidity of a packed school bus with all the windows closed.

Managua is also the air-conditioned malls, fast food chains, and five-star hotels, that people get to in their air-conditioned cars, after leaving their air-conditioned gated community mansions.  The people who live in these air-conditioned bubbles, traveling from one air-conditioned oasis to the next, sit at the American-style food courts and eat nutella flavored gelato ice-cream, they go to European-style discotecs, and Japanese-style karaokes, they watch the newest 3-D films at the mall cinema, and reflect on their lives in coffee shops.  These reflections are made in phony valley-girl accents, (movies having mislead them into believing the California valley-girl culture is the ultimate representation of modern-day "high society") which include English words and sayings like: "Oh my God!," "nice," "fancy," "cute," and "cherry." ("Cherry" being synonymous with "fancy.")

And so, these two Managuas co-exist, and are only forced to clash when those street kids jump on your new Lexus and start rubbing window-cleaner on the windshield as you yell and sign, "No!" But they don't seem to listen or understand you.

my post-modern summer job

“Just drive around and look busy,” were the instructions our crew would receive most mornings.

We worked for the local school district’s facilities and maintenance department as temporary summer employees; assigned to assist in those extra projects that could only be completed in the months when the schools were empty.  Re-waxing floors, cleanings desks and furniture, painting or repainting buildings and classrooms, emptying out gutters…general up-keep.  That summer I was assigned to the moving crew: furnishing new schools, refurnishing old schools, delivering new materials and removing old ones, moving teachers around, ect.

It was a job with work that ebbed and flowed.  Some weeks work orders were bountiful, other weeks we were lucky to get a single one.  It was during those dry spells that one put into practice the art of “looking busy.”  We would get into our moving vans and drive around aimlessly, burning through the district supplied gas.  

The three golden rules of “looking busy” were: don’t let anyone know that you aren’t busy; don’t hang around one spot for too long; and never ever leave the school district zone.

The Tower of Babel

I worked on the 358th floor, for an internet company that worked on improving translation software.  A colleague had invited me to lunch at a new Japanese restaurant on another floor, and I accepted.  It had been a long morning of deciphering computer code and Azerbaijani dialects.  The elevator had recently incorporated some new mechanism that allowed it to rise and fall at great speed, without making the passenger feel nausea.  In fact, I could not tell if we went up or down, I just recall it taking longer than usual.

The only thing I remember about the restaurant is that the waiter wasn’t Japanese, and that somehow detracted from the quality of the food.  My colleague talked to me in his quirky accent from who-knows-where, about how he felt he understood his dog better than his wife. (I forget whether he meant this literally.) Halfway through I asked to be excused and went to the bathroom; inside I took an aspirin and leaned over the sink for a few seconds.  I suddenly heard a distant rumbling from somewhere above or below me.  The next thing I knew the bathroom was rocking back and forth, throwing me around like a rag doll.  I hit my head against the sink counter, and that was that.

The orchestra all around us

The following was inspired by a story I heard on the radio many years ago:

All vibrations create sound, and every sound can be categorized--depending on its frequency--into musical notes.  Therefore, the vibrations created by the motor in your refrigerator create a buzzing sound, and that buzzing sound if listened to carefully is a musical note that can be found on a piano.  So, there is constantly a multitude of notes being played simultaneously all around you, and your ear subconsciously picks up all those sounds.  A chord is a combination of three or more different notes.  If I play three or more keys on a piano at the same time I create a chord.  Three different sustained sounds in the environment also produce a chord sound.  If you are in the kitchen, the refrigerator is plugged in, a fan is turned on, the microwave is heating something up, and the water is running, you will create a four note chord in your kitchen.

Why does this matter?  Because music can influence your moods, and, in particular, certain chords can elicit certain emotional responses.  A major chord is constructed by combining the first, third, and fifth notes of a major scale.  Lets say we are in the key of C; by combining the notes C, E, and G we create a C major chord.  Major chords tend to be satisfying chords; there is a sense of everything coming together, of happiness.  Many chord progressions end with a major chord, because of the kick of joy and relief it produces.  Minor chords (which are constructed with the same notes as a major chord, with the only difference that the third note in the scale is made flat) are melancholy.  Diminished chords (where you combine the first, third, and fifth notes but this time you flat the fifth note in the scale) are sinister.  Seventh chords (first, third, and fifth notes, plus the seventh note in the scale is included and made flat) are suspenseful.  And so on and so forth.

So, if the notes produced by the buzzing of your refrigerator, the humming of your microwave, the singing of your running water, and the droning of your fan create a major chord, this might make you subconsciously happy.  If they create a minor chord the sounds might make you subconsciously sad.  Or so, they say.  Who knows?  The important part, I think, is that people talk about wishing they had a musical score to their daily life, the reality is they already do.

Mexico Today

The photograph was splashed on the front page of the country’s national newspaper, a classic image of modern kidnappings: a wealthy businessman or politician, with downcast eyes still seemingly in shock and the face of resigned defeat, holding up the front page of yesterday’s edition of the national newspaper.  If one looked closely at the newspaper in the victim’s hands, one saw that the picture on the front page of yesterday’s newspaper was also that of a wealthy businessman or politician holding up the front page of the day before yesterday’s edition of that same national newspaper.  They were essentially the same picture, but with a different resigned face on the victim.  The picture on the front page of the day before yesterday’s paper was of a third victim, holding up a newspaper from three days ago.  The newspaper from three days ago had a man holding up the paper from four days ago.  And so on and so forth, so that by looking at today’s front page one was also looking at all the front pages in the country’s history, the same way you see your own image multiplied to infinity when you stand between two mirrors.