8-Bit Victory, the Babylon System, and What Is Best In Life

What is cowardice but a lot self-imposed garbage? I'm sick of living my life this way. Victory will come by way of saying 'Fuck you!' to as many people as necessary, and in spectacular fashion. I have a giant middle finger for anyone who doubts me, misrepresents the value I create, fails to see the merit of my vision, or who discounts my God-given abilities. The only constraint on my success as a human being is that which I impose upon myself. I will burn your mother-fucking house down. I will watch your corrupt castle crumble into dust from Minimum Safe Distance.

Castlevania ©1986 Konami Holdings Corp.

     There will be no mercy. None. I'm beyond sick of this abominable routine of whoring myself to the Human Resource pimps who narrowly view my worth in terms of prior  experiences in proper self-humiliation; my value to the human race has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with my ability and willingness to marginally enrich a scrum of directors huddled around a conference table, or their invisible share-holder bosses. I will no longer tolerate the acrimony of being 'managed' by some room-temperature IQ ignoramus, bereft of creativity, living a thoroughly unexamined life as a pathetic mechanism of corporate profitability - someone promoted through the ranks not for their capacity for original thought, but for their ambition to demonstrate obedience and conformity, or worse, for being skilled in the sanctioned brutality of others. These are the real deplorables - the exhausted, fleshy human refuse conditioned from birth to tacitly accept Slavery 2.0 - the free-range kind, as they desperately cling to the false assumptions they hold regarding the true terms of their carefully managed 'freedom'. Bill Hicks pretty much nailed it when he asked us how free we really are when ANY iteration of human action requires dollars in one's pocket or bank account. Fucking losers think they live in a free society; they think they actually have a stake in it. 

      "Babylon System is the vampire, falling empire; Sucking the children day by day, sucking the blood of the sufferers; Building church and university, deceiving the people continually, graduating thieves and murderers." -Bob Marley, 'Babylon System'

     I'll say it again: Go fuck yourself! I don't believe in your institutions. Someone should slice their way through your successive levels of zombies and demons, the little self-important imps who paw meekly for your anemic praise, and who stab viciously from their niches at any outlier they encounter; someone needs to slay you, the demon boss, through your hideous eye. 

Demon Sword ©1990 Taito America Corp.

      
     You are only as you were designed to be - a bringer of bedlam. You must be slain with absolute prejudice. There is no justification for mercy. To turn away from your system and your creatures is the only sane option, but your influence begins at birth and continues to the end of delayed childhood (also known as graduation from High School) and beyond, indoctrinating the soul to stifle itself. The only freedom is to do the insane, the self-indulgent, the ill-advised, the foolhardy, the idealistic. 

     At what point did pursuing a dream become relegated to idle fantasy?  It's hardly self-indulgent to have a burning desire to connect with fellow humans at a level above crude social or economic discourse. There are higher forms of achievable intimacy and understanding- to paint a masterpiece that pulls the onlooker out of their void and into a state of contemplation, and thus, potential spiritual growth; there is merit to composing music that makes the soul ache, which inspires joy, and ignites the desire to make a difference, that realigns one's chemicals and obliterates depression; there is value in the creation of stories, of writing narratives that serve as analogs for everyday struggles - there is merit in the modern iteration of the timeless parable of Good vs. Evil. These creative endeavors are what propulse the human race away from its self-imposed limitations.

Bionic Commando © 1987 Capcom Co. Ltd.

     Acknowledging the conditions of one's slavery is the first step to self-liberation, as the Babylon System is based upon 'voluntary compliance' - and that particular doublespeak can merit its own stand-alone treatise. I acknowledge that I am a slave. Only another slave suffering from Stockholm Syndrome would accuse me of 'white privilege' for making such a claim about the spiritual conditions that afflict everybody, as though acknowledging the very palpable reality of extreme poverty and human misery as planned mechanisms somehow spits on the legitimate, horrid history of antebellum chattel slavery. Post-Reconstruction, the slave masters on both sides of Mason/Dixon still held to the premise that their supremacy must be measured in terms of disposable human lives. They got wise, and got to work through their 'philanthropy'. Thus, the concept of 'human resources' was born of the super-oligarchs' desire to cultivate their break-away civilization built on exploitation; their thirst for expendable human chattel to fuel their corpulent greed never abated. They revised and expanded the scope of existing American Indian Reservation policy. The 40-hour work week evolved; the one-income, nuclear family became an economic impossibility; the public school system metastasized and assumed parenting responsibilities; central banking quietly subverted the free economy; psychological conditions were invented so as to classify nearly everybody as mentally defective; modern marvels of pharmaceutical realignment therapy helped tamp down on the inevitable social costs of this new, high tech bondage; prison for profit became a legal form of both population control, and cultural genocide; Panem et Circensus was refashioned for the modern era via television, and now, the internet.

     Over the course of a century, slavery was systematically mutated into a psycho-economic process - one which oversaw the breeding and indoctrination of an obedient, cowardly, compliant workforce. That's where we are today. Again, ask yourself how fucking free you are without dollars in your pocket or a government approved bank account. Ask how fucking free you are without your social security number, or your public school credentials. Ask how fucking free you are when your official identity is distilled down to a credit score, and you're saddled with debt you were never meant to be able to repay. As the late Russell Means was known to say, 'Welcome to the Reservation!" I say nuke the site from orbit. Blow the whole thing to pieces, make your swift escape, and never look back. Ever.

     And so I ask, 'What is best in life?' The answer is to do what is necessary to not be someone's slave, to go to whatever extreme lengths are required to safeguard one's personal, spiritual and economic freedom; to use the system as minimally as possible, and then only for the express purpose of subverting it.

'Conan, what is best in life?'
'Crush enemies, see them driven before you,
and to hear the lamentations of their women.'
'That is good.'

©1982 20th Century Fox

 

 

     I've been beating my brains out since last July trying to break into the Austin job market, consuming countless hours and my intellectual energy, and I've failed miserably; I've received over a hundred and thirty rejections, and I'm just exhausted. I can't take being told by so many people in no uncertain terms that I'm not worth dog shit to their corporate masters. One more job rejection, and I'm jettisoning myself from the 'good ol' U.S. of A.' I'm selling off what little property I have left, and I'm heading back to the frontier of the American Dream in Costa Rica where my life was reclaimed; where I will film my first, and possibly only music video. I'm an artist. There is no excuse to abandon what I love, to forsake what God put me on this earth to do, in order to be afforded the illusion of security and comfort. There is no excuse for withholding my true gifts from humanity. If I fail, I'll just be back where I am at this moment. But I might succeed. There's no excuse, other than choosing to continue to be a coward and a slave.

Two New Technology Jobs to Watch

      With history unfolding faster than we can scroll or swipe, there is a critical need to properly nest social media posts, tweets, and comment threads as they become the historical record. Given the sheer vastness of the growing trove of insights, there is a critical role to play in better understanding and interpreting the social trends that affect commerce and culture in the present, and into the future.

Enter the Social Media Historian/Forensic Analyst

      Opportunities can be lost in the flood. Social Media Historians [SMH] would be tasked with capturing and organizing a live feed using software tools that keep track of names, organizations, and keywords, and which make analytics more relevant through intuitive analysis. This is the human intelligence [HUMINT] component of social media management. It requires someone (or an effective team) to be passively engaged in channeling a company’s social media streams (withholding interaction with customers, or followers.) As organizations grow, or as entrepreneurs build a following with their innovation and relevance, they would gain a competitive advantage with SMH, who get to hack away at the missing information problem confronted by their employers as they transact regular business.

      The task of social media historical analysis develops into a competitive tech job using evolving tools such as Gnip. SMH will actively manage growing, searchable databases for their respective employers, highlighting notable comments and trends, putting them into the broader context of what’s happening in the social media space; preparing regular overviews of public responses to marketing initiatives, or to help ‘take the temperature’ of the public, or customer base, at the time an idea is first developed, and periodically during its life cycle. 

    Social Media Historians have the fascinating and important job of using a social media archive to put into context changes in public perception over time, and of making analytics more relevant to their respective companies. 


      In an interview by Jason Steinhauer published by the Library of Congress, Kluge Fellow and Information Scientist Katrin Weller discusses the role of the Social Media Historian as an industry leader on the frontier where analytics, forensics and academia intersect: 

'[S]ocial media are already being used as a new type of data source by contemporary scholars in various disciplines: political science, sociology, linguistics, communication science, geography, physics, computer science and many more. It is logical to assume that future historians will also look at these sources. ' 

      With a solid framework for protecting individual privacy in place, the SMH will have the skills to retrace conversations, or establish timelines for activities that weren't historically significant at the time they occurred, but would have an impact decades, maybe even centuries later. 

      I would add to the mix a crowd-sourced public intelligence capability- a potentially valuable law enforcement tool. In the minutes and hours following the Boston Marathon bombing, thousands of people sleuthed around social media, gathering crowd shots, adding to (and in some ways convoluting) the official narrative of events, as they occurred.

      Take the famous photos of the guys in tan khakis, wearing backpacks, one with a Craft International cover - the men were soon identified not as potential hostile actors, but as members of the Massachusetts National Guard's Civil Support Team.

      This was a detail that investigators at the time did not value, but the question in the public's mind demanded an answer. There was a tremendous amount of noise, and I can understand how it might make the jobs of forensic analysts more difficult in the short run. No doubt, there are, and will always be those within government who will discard this public output as superfluous, even distracting.



      I think certain people in the forensics community who are a part of the government’s law enforcement and national security infrastructure might feel threatened by something they cannot control. But the effects of democratization on criminal investigation brought to bear by the power of social media should be embraced by government at all scales, for it should not be considered competition, but rather, a concurrent, redundant public service provided by the people en masse.

      Such a public record keeps government honest about their own forensic practices, as it serves as a repository for highly granular intelligence material that is totally transparent, and allows for the public to answer its own questions, and eventually to come to its own conclusions about critical events, like mass shootings, or terrorist attacks. Imagine if the internet had been just five years more advanced on September 11th, 2001. The SMH, working privately, or for a 501(c)(3), would be adept in the emerging field of Social Media Forensics, and would carry out this role.

The Software Archaeologist Evolves/Data Preservation Services

      With the critical mass of commercially available computing software, the last quarter century was built upon a rapidly evolving structure of technology that cast away tremendously useful tools for managing information as newer, more efficient processes emerged. Old hardware was upgraded to the limits of design, then replaced. But much of the software that made that hardware useful was discontinued, their developers no longer offering updates. How many businesses out there, or governments, which haven't made data management a fiscal priority, or which have made critical errors that delay or prevent an overhaul, find themselves with rapidly deteriorating systems, while still managing tremendously valuable data?

      This problem was recently related to me by a colleague who is an associate conductor in a Southern California public school. He shared with me the extreme vulnerability of his music program's data security, due to just such a problem. All of the school's orchestral scores, reference material, exercises, are still being accessed and updated with ClarisWorks 4.0 on a single computer running a nearly obsolete operating system. Years of information are in danger of being lost. This is an example of the effects of the first digital dark age: thousands and thousands of terabytes of information poised to fall beyond reach for lack of a functional platform to access it.

 Google's Vint Cerf puts the problem in the proper perspective:

   "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?"

      To the extent that it is feasible, maintaining a library of functional hardware diminishes the need for software reengineering. Such a collection could serve as a vital commercial resource for companies and individuals. A counterpart of the Aviation Archaeologist in preserving 20th century industrial lore, the Commercial Software Archaeologist is a specialist who works at depths shallower than the deeper digs of early software archaeologists, most of whom curate hardware for purely historical purposes. Such a facility exists in the form of The Computer History Museum, an outpost of the Boston Museum of Science, located in Mountain View, CA. But the knowledge and capability for commercial digital data management requires greater breadth, and less depth as their museum counterparts, as we are only concerned with curating a library of obsolete commercial systems - not merely the historically significant prototype machines. The challenges of building that hardware library are immense, but such a collection need not necessarily be centrally located.

      A collaborative effort could be commercialized by way of a membership-based association of curators [a potential member might only have one very specific artifact in his or her personal collection] who would, for a fee, provide some of the very specific data conversion services needed by so many people and institutions.

Rolled into the standard fee, a subsidy for the costs of digital storage media could be offered to individual customers by the entity, either corporate, or non-profit, thanks to its collective buying power.

      The entrepreneurial success here lies in lowering the opportunity cost of digital preservation and systems transition services for businesses, and any other owner of intellectual property [virtually everyone] who is in need of reestablishing more permanent accessibility to their data. By making it cheaper, and less time intensive, the first providers to offer these 'boutique' services stand to earn the maximum in economic profits. As this service market becomes more monopolistically competitive, top providers will have an evolving portfolio, as data preservation projects on the older systems near completion. Shallower layers of computing technology artifacts will then require the same attention.

      It is unclear whether the future market for these services will grow or shrink, since some new hardware is hitting the market which is not designed to be upgradable, even though, at the same time,  it becomes more durable, and more scalable. An example of this is the 2016 Macbook Pro redesign. With components that are glued in place as opposed to affixed with screws, Apple's overhaul seems to be driven by aesthetics, and the result has 'sacrificed customizability, repairability, and upgradeability,' according to tech writer Jason Koebler. Despite the uncertainty of the volume of future digital preservation work, and the scope of the hardware library that such work will require, there is currently nowhere near the supply of data preservation services to meet demand. The time to get on board with this business model is now.

      With the rise of the network economy of personal computing came an explosion in new programs which served commercial aims. To the extent that a hardware solution to data management doesn't suffice, new solutions are in development for curating the software landscape of the founding age of personal computing. One such tool on the horizon is called the 'digital vellum' which 'involves taking a snapshot of all the ways that a digital file can be opened, and storing it alongside the document itself,' writes The Independent's Andrew Griffin. The most well cultivated effort thus far is the  Olive project, spearheaded by Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor M. Satyanarayanan. The Olive project objective is to 'freeze and precisely reproduce the execution state that produced this dynamic content,' according to Satya's broad description of his team's preservation efforts. Olive, and other digital vellum tools will be at the disposal of Commercial Software Archaeologists, whose data preservation services help keep the early digital fires burning.

#socialmediaanalytics #socialmediahistorian #socialmediaforensics #HUMINT #publicintelligence #softwarearchaeologist #commercialsoftware #datapreservationservices #digitaldarkage

Notes from the Author:

      Some content was taken from the public domain, and in need of proper attribution. Please contact me if you wish to receive it. 

      I would appreciate comments and criticism, as this is an early draft of this article, and I plan for an eventual revision.

The American Dream, Craft Beer, and Rumors of Eco-Terrorism

It was tremendously good for the soul to find myself back in Puerto Viejo, after two years. I was witness to strange omens, and uncommonly fortunate in the acquaintances I made this go-round. Having been won over by the convenience of airbnb, and captivated by the outright bizarre randomness which typically embodies an airbnb residency, I had booked the weekend at Kaya's Place, on the periphery of town, with no particular expectation, save that I would likely see something I hadn't seen before.

Being that I venture to Costa Rica in search of... opportunity?... and no longer merely as a dollar-hemorrhaging tourist, it has become particularly interesting to me when I meet other estadounidenses who seek personal renewal; those few of us willing to undergo a reboot of the 'American Dream' on singular terms, devoid of the taint of propaganda. And so it was that I met J.T., ex-pat of 11 years, from Vermont, and the affable proprietor of Kaya's Place.

J.T. has been brewing since he was 14-years-old. Initial tutelage in the craft of beer-making began by virtue of his older friends, who themselves had begun their own fermentation experiments. Though not old enough to drink, J.T. was old enough to buy ingredients. And certainly, the social capital that arrived at the rampant whispering amongst his peers, 'Hey! J.T.'s got his own beer!', must have paid awesome dividends for the New England teenager. The hobby became the passion. Fast forward to 2004: Scion of an enterprising family, poised to eventually inherit their company, and no doubt, millions of dollars, J.T. walked away from it all (save for his marriage, which, even after a heroic effort on her part, she unfortunately walked away from him.)

~ There's something about hitting thirty which, I think for men in particular, prompts a sober reassessment of life choices ~

[ My own honest appraisal of the ground upon which I stood at thirty led me to essentially walk away from a 50% ownership stake in a digital recording studio in San Diego; it led me to East Texas - the historical incubator of my matrilineal ancestors - where I went back to college,  and subsequently found a much more hospitable economic landscape, not to mention the fresh start which would become exponentially harder to initiate the longer I waited, the older I became. ]

J.T.'s 'career path', if you will (or perhaps it is more accurate to call it a profile in self-preservation), brought him to the warm embrace of the Caribbean. To have lived the life laid at his feet, to have fulfilled those basest of expectations, this no doubt would have been easier, as it would be for anyone. Is it a condition of being 'well-adjusted' to constantly feel like you want to leap out of your own skin for lack of any meaningful reminder that you're actually alive? As I interviewed him, and as J.T. plied me with his concoctions, we both more or less arrived at the consensus that 'The American Dream', as sold to us through endless imagery, through the insipid assurances of everyone from high school guidance counselors to Presidents, has nothing to do whatsoever with actually being happy, and everything to do with the compulsion to consume: our time, and all of its tangible derivatives.

If I may be unequivocal, the 'American Dream' is simply the pursuit of passion, and the journey to wherever it takes you in life - something Americans used to be heroic at. Some of us still are. "Passion is everything," J.T. agreed with me.

J.T. followed his passion for beer making to one of the loveliest places on Earth. And so it was that I discovered the varieties which Bribri Springs Brewery has to offer: a selection of artesanales full of creativity, each one more different from the next. (Disclaimer: though I love beer, I am not a beer critic.) At first glance, they all appeared as one might expect beer to look like. Of particular note was (I believe) the third variety which I tried. Called Hibiscus Mango Basi, this was no beer at all - derived from sugar cane, it is the undistilled precursor to rum. It sits at about 12% alcohol content, if memory serves. It was a unique pleasure, and I'm curious to try other varieties of Basi, now that I know what to ask for. The most experimental of the five would have to be the Sundown Brown, which contains maple notes, as well as a not-even-subtle bacon motif. (Yes, bacon.) As revolting as other food amalgams have been, such as bacon-flavored ice cream, or soda, Sundown was surprisingly good - I can definitely envision this being a seasonal delight around Thanksgiving time.

Certainly the most relevant of the five samples would be the chocolate porter, or Big Choco, as it's formally known. This is significant for the simple fact that the chocolate is local, bought from the Bribri, the indigenous people who inhabit the Limón province. The cacao farmers, as J.T. related to me, suffered a terrible blight beginning in the late 1970's due to an invasive fungus, Moniliophthora roreri, which destroyed about 80% of Costa Rica's output of cacao beans. The official narrative is that this amargo misterio was something entirely random, a misfortune that was the inevitable result of nature, and of commercial farming. But the Bribri tell a much darker story. The eyewitnesses paint a picture of airplanes dumping bags of the fungus onto the cacao fields from above - deliberate acts of eco-terrorism carried out by contractors on the payroll of U.S. multinationals, with the goal of forcing the farmers to burn their fields and transition to banana plantation. Nowhere in the Costa Rican National Library, nor in any of the news archives, is there even a hint of this. Nor was John Perkins, author of the indispensable Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and expert on corporate-sponsored terrorism, able to confirm this bit of history when I asked him via email. 

After an afternoon of digging, and hitting mostly dead ends, I did however find this one article, which reported on the legal action against Standard Fruit for dumping - and this is ironic - fungicide into the ecosystem. Whether or not this same multinational is definitively responsible for the cacao plague is beyond the scope of this posting. I am inclined to believe that there is truth to the allegations, as there is scientific evidence that suggests that the particular strain of M. roreri which destroyed Costa Rica's cacao industry is genetically identical to varieties found in Ecuador; that the presence north of Panama is not the result of natural selection. Whether there is also truth in the notion that modern commercial farming played an innocent part in the devastation, we may never know.

My next visit to Costa Rica will definitely include another trip to the Limón region, as this allegation is truly alarming to me, and deserving of more investigation. I'm very grateful to J.T. for telling the story of the Bribri, and for making such a noble effort to bring not only understanding, but healing between two disparate worlds - the indigenous, and the European - bundled together paradoxically within a distinct identity; a people who share a regional history that is tragic, at times brutal, but also triumphant: Costa Rica, and that which her people have built in a half-millenium of coexistence, has become the jewel of Central America.

~"I'm telling the history through the beers I brew." - J.T. Ficociello ~

2025 UPDATE: JT and I have reconnected after more than a decade and are collaborating on a real estate project. For more information, please visit www.tejanosproperties.com 

Gringo-proofing ATVs, La Virgen del Carmen, and the Monkey Mafia

There is plenty to do for the adventuresome tourist here in Sámara.  I've personally undertaken a couple such adventures in the two weeks I've been here thus far. The aforementioned queasy dolphin tour would have been even better had it not been for [the violent urge to vomit] the rough surf - we were supposed to go snorkeling in addition to testing our hand-eye coordination by snapping pictures of the porpoises. Yesterday I also enjoyed a sweltering 7k run east to Playa Carrillo with a buddy. One can explore Cantarana (Singing Frog) on horseback, as the gorgeous German girls did, with the mares' gamboling colts following close behind; one can take surfing lessons (a notion which appeals more and more the deeper Sámara draws me in); and there are also ATVs for rent - I've seen mostly French and German gentlemen partake in their use, though they are available to everyone.

No translation needed

What I find amusing is the proprietor's need to warn a certain demographic about the potentiality for lethal injury. The presence of this cynical but accurate appraisal of the judgement of certain tourists on the entire fleet of ATVs was more than worthy of a photo. I imagine the owner of this business may well have at least one entrant for consideration of a Darwin Award. I should go interview him/her.

Last Sunday, I attended my first baptism in a long while, that of the granddaughter of my host-mother. With the exception of my cousin's recent baptism, I'd not attended a full Catholic ritual since I'd lived in Portola Valley. La Virgen del Carmen gets her name from Mt. Carmel in Israel, also known as Hakkarmel in Hebrew, which translates to 'Place of the Garden.' [1]

The Altar of La Virgen de Carmen in La Iglesia de Sámara 

It is not lost on me that She is an invocation of the Virgin Mary; being literally named in association with the sowing/reaping of sustenance seems to be in keeping with Catholic dogma. La Virgen del Carmen also happens to be the matron for at least a half-dozen military organizations in Central and South America. Our guide on the recent dolphin tour mentioned that July 16th is Dia del Carmen in Costa Rica, in which captains coordinate a procession of their boats in Her honor along the Sámara coast.

At first I thought that the Monkey Mafia was a motorcycle club, but as it turns out, it's a surf organization based in Nicoya, with local branches in several of the outlying beach towns. They have a robust merchandizing operation, and are associated with what appears to be a much larger company offering surf tours, called Howling Monkey Adventures. 

I think their logo is pretty damned awesome, and I'm halfway tempted to buy a tee-shirt. However, having lived in La Jolla, California, as a teenager, I know first-hand about the territorial [read: terrorist] nature of some such organizations. I fortunately never had to deal personally with the likes of either the Windansea Surf Rats, or the douchebags of 2008, The Bird Rock Bandits. (What's funny is I recall members of the former used to carve the shorthand 'WSR' all over the walls and furniture of La Jolla High School, and the ignoramuses in the Administration assumed it meant 'White Supremacy Rules.') 

Unlike their Mexican cousins, who suffer from a well documented, centuries-long rape complex (See: Samuel Ramos, Octavio Paz, others), violence is not in the nature of Costa Ricans, at least not that I've been able to determine. I do have reason to believe that the Monkey Mafia are per se territorial, based on at least one photo posted to their Facebook page, but still, out of respect, as much as I really like their logo, I don't want to haphazardly buy their swag like a stupid fanboy, only to be rebuked for not being a surfer. (Fanboy doesn't translate into Spanish, that I know of.) Still, there's plenty of time for me to take that bull by the horns. I'll consult the oracle - his name is Spartácus, and he's the only septuagenarian I know who can pound out a hundred consecutive push-ups. (More on him later.)

Source: [1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgen_del_Carmen

Avoiding Simian Bombardment, or My First Week in Sámara

Indeed, being aware of the trees is more of a necessity in Costa Rica, and for reasons more critical than whether or not they will provide ample shade for your car. (There aren’t that many of those here, and no parking lots - just the occasional unpaved bit to the side of a building.) The importance of three-dimensional awareness comes into play in this country, as humans can easily be put in a hospital by falling coconuts, or they can be informed in no uncertain terms of the opinions of their less-evolved cousins. The local monkeys have also apparently inspired a motorcycle club. 

Pandemonium

It was a treat being present for the zenith of Costa Rica’s performance in the 2014 World Cup, as it was also their best performance in the history of the sport: The Ticos embarrassed some very big names, and surprised many by inspiring the question, “Where’s Costa Rica?” Immediately following the difficult victory over Greece, Sámara erupted into a joyous romp. Flags adorned the hoods of the few vehicles that are here, and kids stacked themselves like cordwood into pickup trucks, all a-shout as they sped about the outskirts of town; the thoroughfare was occluded with the delerious celebrants of their nation’s rite of passage into soccer respectability. Unfortunately, the June 29th game was the high water mark for Costa Rica this go-round. Still, they have much to be proud of, and hopefully this summer’s success will see the current team stay together. I also hope it attracts the importation of both capital and talent into the Costa Rican soccer machine. The Chinese should invest in a couple stadiums. The U.S. sure as hell won’t.

Should I go to the beach? Oh wait... 

Yeah, I’m having a terrible time. Intercultura, my language school, is situated literally right on the beach. I walk through the front gate and I’m literally working sand into the nooks of my Chacos. I’m getting an interesting tan on my feet, sort of a cross-section basket-weave pattern, and I’m hearing ghastly things about something called Chikungunya. I’ll eventually need to blow the equivalent of a week’s lunch money to keep the repellent in stock. That’s a slam dunk business here for Ticos: selling sunscreen and mosquito spray - a testament to the general lack of preparedness of silly Americans. I'm all for exploiting consumer surplus. More on that topic later.

Habla más despacio por favor!

It’s not the Spanish, it’s the general disregard for pronunciation, and the tendency to take shortcuts that really throws me for a loop. My host mother, God bless her, is about sixty, and has purple hair. (I’m going to my first baptism this Sunday, that of her brand new Granddaughter.) ‘Mamá,’ as I call her, is an amazing cook, and speaks Spanish in a torrent of syllables, most of which fly right by me. I can catch the occasional prepositional phrase, vocabulary here and there - but I figure I’ll need to just listen better. Unless paid to do so, no Tico living in this country will speak Spanish slow enough, or with sufficient care, for Gringos learning the language to really be able to stay afloat. (This is not a complaint, just the way it is; and contrary to what it sometimes means in Mexico, ‘Gringo’ is never meant as an insult in Costa Rica.) Ticos of course will repeat themselves if you ask them nicely. I also learned from the customs agent that ‘Que?’ is not an appropriate way of asking someone to repeat something. For what it’s worth, I’m doing a lot better than I did last summer, and for the first time, I’m speaking Spanish more than I’m speaking English. My instructors kick ass, and I might actually have a shot at becoming more international by the end of this trip. ‘Sangre de Cristo!’, as my host mother says.

Note: If you bring Dramamine on a trip, be sure to fucking use it. The dolphins are great, but not at the expense of lunch, or pride.