Something Fresh
The fruit of Michigan's Music Scene
Cookbooklet included

A slew of Michigan musicians including Steppin' In It, Seth Bernard, Daisy May and Honest D and the Steel Reserve came up with 15 original songs accompanied by 15 original recipes to "raise awareness about community supported agriculture (CSA's), farmers markets, soil microbiology, small-scale independent businesses, adding value to local commodities, and eating with the seasons..." The album was a joint effort between Earthwork Music and the Traverse City non-profit organization SEEDS. I had the honor of doing some of the artwork for the album and playing on a handful of tunes.

Give a listen to Interlochen Public Radio interview with Seth and SEEDS woman Sarna Salzman.

Then go to the SEEDS website to purchase your own copy!

No Tenemos Agua En Managua, Nicaragua
Reason to Suspect Conspiracy?
Managua, Nicaragua

A friend of the people we're staying with in Managua just got back from the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela. She's full of information about the destructive effects free trade agreements (like CAFTA) and international development programs of the IMF, World Bank, and other institutions of of the Neo-Liberal establishment. Like in El Salvador, for example, villagers are taxed by number of children for collecting rain water. Government officials come by, count heads, and charge accordingly.

The rumor in Managua is that someone is sabotaging the water system so there's an excuse for it to be privatized. This is our third day without water.

Though we're not too often driven to "conspiracy theory," it wouldn't surprise us if someone were tampering with the water, especially given what the CIA did in the 1980s. Instead of Contras and Iran Contra, we have Bechtel and empire.

It's terrible to see developing societies charged outrageous prices for basic services (medical care, water, electricity, etc.) just so the ruling few can have bigger houses.

Check out the CIA Sabotage Manual for a view of what the US government promotes abroad. Here's another version.

Morning News Round-Up
Nicaragua Edition
From The Capital, Managua

US State Department Urges Compliance with US Trade Interests Fair and Open Elections link

"For Nicaragua to continue to progress, for Nicaragua to take advantage of the CAFTA [U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement], to take advantage of HIPC [Heavily Indebted Poor Countries] debt relief, for it to take advantage of the Millennium Challenge Account [U.S. foreign aid program], it needs new political leadership," Shannon said. "It can't rely on the leaders of the past."

To this end, the State Department official observed that the Nicaraguan people and civil society groups are working successfully to break the corrupt pact and open new political space for opposing views.

"In Nicaragua, groups like Moviemiento por Nicaragua and other civil society groups have been protesting against that pact, have been protesting against a political cabal that was attempting to limit and control Nicaragua's political future," Shannon said. "And they've been quite successful in this regard."

This sounds an awful lot like the election that got the Sandanistas out, where the US launched an ad blitz: "Vote against the socialists or we'll keep bombing you. The people voted in US interests and the new government forgave the US for mining its harbors, which, by the way, is still against the law (unless you're the US of A).

Nicaragua Seeking to End Transit Strike
link
Mayor proposes 5% fuel tax to subsidize transport workers. Your narrator seeks uncrowded bus.

Health Workers Join Strike
link
First the doctors, now health care workers. When a Nicaraguan doctor makes the equivalent of only US$60/month, who can blame them?

And who's the culprit? Our old friend the IMF:

Even though the doctors reduced their demand of a 70% salary increase by 50%, the conflict is still far from being resolved. The Minister of Health claims that the budget agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) does not allow for increases higher than 15%.

Nicaragua Bans Fresh Water Shark Fishing
link
Our taxi driver said the sharks can get up to two meters long.

Nicaragua banned freshwater fishing of bull sharks and sawfish on Tuesday because of alarming population declines, and said it wants neighboring Costa Rica to impose a similar prohibition.

Overfishing in the San Juan River that forms much of the border with Costa Rica has reduced the number of both marine animals to dangerously low levels, Nicaraguan agriculture officials said.

Maybe this change means we'll get to see them.

Nicaragua Latest Retirement Haven
link
Your narrator has seen no evidence of this, but that's because he's not in the colonial splendor of Granada. Gringos there have sent house prices skyrocketing. The article estimates there are around 2,000 Americans living here no tourist visas, still a far cry from neighboring Costa Rica.

Welcome to Nicaragua!
We'll Take Those Wallets For You
Managua

Robbery number three made me think of Chapter 9 of the Tao Te Ching:

Stretch a bow to the very full,
And you will wish you had stopped in time;
Temper a sword-edge to its very sharpest,
And you will find it soon grows dull.
When bronze and jade fill you hall
It can no longer be guarded.
Wealth and place breed insolence
That brings ruin in its train.
When your work is done, then withdraw!
Such is Heaven's* way.

*as opposed to the Way of man.

We were walking only three blocks from the Tica-Bus station on our way to the ATM. Three banditos, in broad daylight got:

--30 (Honduran) Lempiras (US$1.5)
--my 5 megapixel Panasonic Lumix FX8 ($350)
--All our bank cards (paid for with the high interest rates of credit card balance carriers)
--harmonica ($5)
--banjo slide (gift)

When we got back to the Tica-Bus station, we asked the attendant why he didn't warn us about the necessity of taking a taxi. "Yeah, maybe we should put up a sign about how dangerous this place is."

Funny that the robbery happened just as I was telling Susan, "Let's walk a little faster. I don't mind walking through this neighborhood during the day, but I want to get back to the station before dark."

We got help from a retired army dude who "would have helped [us], but there were three of them. You really shouldn't have been walking on this road. It's one of the worst in Managua."

We filed a report with the police, but it's unlikely they're going to do anything. They did not ask for a way to contact us. Because our friends of friends were not home when we arrived in the city, we almost gave up on them and planned on sleeping in the Tica-bus station with they very amiable guards. Juan, an off-duty attendants even bought us dinner. It's funny, as we were coming into town, Susan said, "I want to go to a nice Chinese restaurant and get tofu tonight." We hadn't had any since California. Without our requesting it, Juan brought us take-out. Nothing other than our palate's desire: tofu.

Anyone going to the Ticabus station in Managua should use a taxi. Or carry a machete.

Teaching the Noosphere:
My "Extreme Deprivacization" Blog and Google Desktop 3
on joshuawickerham.com

I'm going to download Google Desktop 3 on my laptop. The software is configured by default to upload personal data, such as email, internet history, and Office, PDF, and many other files to Google servers. You can then access your information on other computers.

Because of privacy concerns, the Electronic Frontier Foundation urges people not to use the new "Search Across Computers" feature:

"...it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password."

It is what it is.

By any other name, this technology is called Remote Access and it was proposed by showboating Oracle CEO Larry Ellison back in the exuberant Wired days of 1996. Funny how no one was fussy about privacy when the technology was just theoretical. That was back when Big Brother was all X-Files conspiracy theories instead of the very real, very well-publicized snooping of the Bush Crime Family.

I'm motivated by two factors:

1. greater-than-usual risk of laptop theft
2. Extreme Deprivacization

Just what am I talking about? Here are excerpts from my explanation of Extreme Deprivacization:

"Extreme Deprivacization...calls for the removal of all boundaries between public and private.

Some may call Extreme Deprivacization the logical extension of the feminist call to make the personal political. Others know that it is both voyeuristic and exhibitionist, that it encompasses both the height of drama and the most boring aspects of existence. Extreme Deprivacization is the logical extension of existing technology.

Extreme Deprivacization calls for video cameras everywhere, but puts no one in charge of monitoring them. It calls for nothing but the mandatory participation in increasingly omnipresent technology. It is about abandoning the self and jacking in.

We're talking about a world where we can see our president go to the bathroom and hear what he says at meetings, as long as every other world citizen does the same. This is a world in which I can watch myself watch myself on the internet. I can videotape my neighbor reading the newspaper, but only if he's allowed the same access to my world.

This is a world where we can see everyone else's formerly "secret" records because everybody is hacking. The future is a database that one wanders for pleasure. One literally loses oneself in such spaces.

The day we wake up and realize our medical records are public knowledge, our checkbooks are not secure, and our life is like an open book, our response should be clear: resist the illogic of individualism and split the data wide open. The Tech Leviathan of the integrated future can be a society of, by, and for the people. It can be a world of mind exposed. Once our organic and digital nervous systems expand to feel the pain and joy of the rest of the world's citizens, we will cease to live as individuals, and begin a new era."

Or, as Lorenzo Hagerty wrote:

"The Empire be damned! Let their secret police spy on us if they dare. We have nothing to hide. Let's stand up and be counted as an integral part of this great global brain that has already begun to take form on this beautiful little planet called Earth."(from Stand Up and Be Counted)

I think of Gandhi when I do this. As long as you're honest with everyone about everything, how can anyone use anything against you? Plus, I get at least some of my data backed up for free.

I'll let you know how things go. You can be sure to get updates on my Google Desktop 3 experiment on the Extreme Deprivacization blog.

Leaving Utila, A 7th Day With Adventists, And A
One-Man Sham Band in
San Pedro Sula, Honduras

[Editors' note: Due to not having a battery charger until we reach Venezuela, we're being more selective with the scenery we capture digitally. Harkens back to another era, no?]

The German with the "Mullets Rule" shirt asked us where we were going after we got off the ferry.

"First we go to the bus station. Then we ask people where they think we should go."

After another nap on the ferry, we decided we'd return to San Pedro Sula and take the long distance bus all the way to Managua, Nicaragua.

After a prolonged delay at a roadblock where plainclothes and camoflaged policemen checked IDs and then escorted some passengers off the bus, the man sitting in front of us called someone on his mobile phone, and began bitching about being bored and missing dinner. The conversation ended and he turned around in his seat, and said to Susan "I'm hungry" and turned around again.

Susan happened to have a pocketful of pistacchios she had stolen from her roommate in Utila. She felt justified in doing this because he kept her up snoring at night, and had a tendency to get drunk and hit on her when she was trying to sleep. Also, it was a very large bag of pistacchios.

She withdrew a handful of the delightful nuts and thrust it over the seat, hoping to appease the grumpy passenger in front of her. He munched them happily and accepted more. Shortly after, he began singing in a perfect falsetto. We struck up a conversation.

His name was Josue. (Joshua, like your narrator) He said he had a band and we should play with him if we were going to stay in San Pedro. Susan told him we were going to spend the night writing together in the bus station and leave on the 5 am bus. He said we should really stay and play with him. He sang a show tune and "Fly me to the Moon." The lyrics were a jumble, but he had a sonorous voice. We imagined that voice backed up by "two pianos, electric bass, acoustic guitar, a drum kit, bongoes, and congas" and decided to stay.

A 7th Day Adventist T-Shirt Maker

While Susan was talking to Josue , I was yacking with a different Josue. Josue #2 sat across the aisle. He was very friendly and knowledgable about the mountains and other manifestations of spirit.

Meanwhile, Josue#1 was making everyone laugh with his singing and his eight loaves of bread ("all for myself") and four mobile phones. Then he got off in the suburbs.

It's good that we made a new friend before attempting to sleep at the "bus station" in San Pedro. It was little more than a street. We could have slept in a hotel, but instead Josue #2 invited us to sleep on the floor of his "very small apartment."

Josue #2 hailed a taxi. We arrived on a dark street with lots of mud, music and dogs. His beautiful wife and daughter were waiting for us. The daughter was an honor student who asked us if "I love you" was correct English. Her mother made us an extraordinary heaping plate of half a dozen different kinds of fruit in perfect bite-sizes. We spent the night looking at Susan's sketchbook and their family photos, as Senayda played our wooden banjo.

The next morning, while they got ready for church, Susan and I went out looking for fresh flowers as a gift. All we found was a plush Valentine\'s Day heart that said "I Love You." Good enough. We had to get back because they were going to church. It was Saturday, after all.

The One Man Sham Band

Josue #1 said we'd see him if we went to the "Mercado Guamilito" at 1pm. There he was in the huge covered market wearing his shiny shirt and ironed black pants playing his keyboard to a row of 20 tortilla makers. Their tortilla dough went smack as he sang. They were his main audience. But because he didn't have a stage or a blank wall, most of his audience was beside and behind him. And though he appeared to be playing the keyboard along with the songs, it was clear that even that he was shammin' the whole place.

At his insistence, Susan played her fiddle to two songs: some Beegees tune and Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." In truth, Josue #1 was not a one-man band because he did have two backup singers. But functionally speaking, he was solo because the two teenage boys in matching shirts and pants were bored and looked like they wanted to go home. A young boy, perhaps Josue #1's son, kept pulling things out of his pockets. During one song, the boy answered Josue #1's mobile phone and handed it to him. Josue continued pounding piano keys in a mostly random fashion, leaning his conversation away from the mic. You should have seen the tortilla makers dance with the dustman!

Susan and I gave up on Josue #1. Forget about the other "gig" he has tonight. We snuck off when he wasn't looking to suckle horchatas from plastic bags.

One more thing...
before I leave this net cafe and
Utila, Bay Islands, Honduras

Here's my latest article for that's Shanghai, a feature story about Shanghai's gay scene.

To: the Sham Wife
Subject: Where ya at?
Utila, Honduras

Querida Susanita bonita linda,

Como estas? Donde estas?

I'm in Mermaid's internet bar. We should confer about plans to leave this island. We've already been here....two weeks? Island time is taking its hold. You're right that we must get on the road to Venezuela. First we should make sure we have a place to stay with those Greens in Managua. And that we time our visit to Adam's in Costa Rica so we catch him between classes. I hear from the lespanolas and others that Tica Bus is a pretty good way to travel from capital to capital in Central America. Perhaps we could book tickets? At least from Tegucigalpa to Managua. Or Managua to San Jose.

Today I went to a beach clean-up by the airport. I found 6 toothbrushes and over 200 hundred bottle caps. There was a hermit crab holding out in a clear water bottle topper until I scared him. We collected 60 bags of trash and 15 bags of recyclables for Utila's new recycling center. If only the island were off diesel. Maybe next time you come back there will be people selling solar/wind back to the grid.

Ok, I'm going to seek you out! wo de xiao gou!

Love,

Mr. Qiao

First
Grad School Acceptance Letter
AT UC San Diego

Just minutes from the Mexican border...is that where you'll find your narrator this fall? Perhaps, if he decides to go to UCSD School of International and Pacific Studies. Time'll tell. And so will A Backpack and a Keyboard. Stay tuned...

Depleted but Not Defeated,
Or, Robbery, More Robbery, and the Levity of Following the Dao to
Utila, Bay Islands, Honduras


It was raining hard when we sloshed into our cement box in Rio Dulce, Guatemala at 1am. The room was near the bus station too, if you can call the place on the main street under a shop front's tin roof where the bus opened its doors and threw out our backpacks a bus station. And what luck! The room was only $3!

I would have been content to laze around the rather touristy island of Flores for the evening, but we wanted to get to Rio Dulce so we could spend an entire day at the national park. (Advice for fellow travelers: if you're going to Tikal, you should stay at El Remate, a glorious pueblo on lake Peten Itza).


"Three dollars!" Susan shouted with glee as we stripped off our clothes and the bed sheets and settled into bags. One shouldn't sleep on the sheets in a $3 room unless you like catching crabs. I don't.

Never mind that the door didn't have a lock on it. The room was hardly big enough for another person to enter. Besides, my head was two inches from the door.


We woke in the morning to sun. Oddly enough, I couldn't find my secret pouch, a urine-scented money bag that I strap on between my pants and underwear. I must have tucked it somewhere. So we grabbed Susan's money bag, which was by her pillow.

I think I had enough pocket change to cover breakfast, but somewhere on the way home when we were buying fruit, Susan said, "Josh, we've been robbed."

"How do you know?"

"Because there's no money in my bag."

"Oh."

"But they left our passports, credit cards and ATM cards."

"That's good. Courteous thieves."

Susan's reaction was much less subdued.

I felt like a great karmic debt had been lifted, like the balance of our trip was restored. It's not that Susan and I cheated anyone out of the money for this trip. We just lucked out when we were born on top of the food chain. We made more doing an hour at any job we chose than people down here make in a week. Still, the money we lost could have paid for a week in a small socialist island, which is why we had it in the first place. I can only hope that the thief had as much trouble converting those pesos as Susan and I did.

Unfortunately, the "national park" on our map was less a national park and more a tourist park. We hired a taxi driver and he took us only across and under the Sweet River bridge.

"Where's the national park?" we asked.

"Uh...oh, the national park."

He took us away from the riverbank and directly under the bridge. The whole time a man was chasing us, telling us he could take us by boat to a "natural area."

Then the taxi driver said he could do it too, for 150 Quetzales.

"25," we countered.

"75"

"25"

"50"

"25"

"30"

"Ok, 30."

But we were disuaded because the man with the boat told us there were no government-run parks where we could just camp out in the woods and watch the birds. So phooey. We just got on the next bus out of there.

On to Honduras!

From there, we crossed the border into Honduras. "I'm glad that's over," I said to Susan, discussing the karmic implications of our financial loss.

"Yeah, me too," Susan nodded as the slobbering drunk behind us in the converted school bus opened the back door. We were in the second to last seat. I'm sure any American or Canadian who's ever ridden a school bus knows the buzzer that sounds whenver the back school bus door opens. You probably heard it whenever your childhood bus driver called for fire drills.

A moment after the man jumped, I looked over and behind at the conversion-installed luggage rack where I had set my dayback. Where was my bag? The one with 6 months of Chinese journaling. Where were All my travel notes? My Chinese-Spanish dictionary? My writing? My battery charger? My oncology field guides? My unsent postcards and letters?

With the drunk!

Gone!

It was worse than the money. And my own stupid fault. And not the first time.

Advice:

1) Don't put a small bag in an overhead compartment. (I knew better. This was the first time I'd done it. Somehow the kids manning (boying?) the door gave me a false sense of security).

2) If your cheap hotel room doesn't have a lock on it, for the love of Ralph put your backpack in front of it!

The good that came of this? My pack is lighter. I'm again unable to upload new photos, so I have to write more. I didn't freak out.

The bad? Let's not go there. You'll get plenty of that in Work in Progress.

Following the Tao to Scuba Diving.

So one good thing about riding the bus so much is that Susan and I have gotten lots of opportunity to talk to people. In Belize, a band of musicians climbed in the back door of the school bus and started playing drums and singing. And every time we mentioned scuba diving, people said, "go to Utila, Bay Islands, Honduras. It's the cheapest place in the world to scuba dive. And the reefs there are the second biggest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef."

And all this without a travel book! What a difference talking to people makes.

Again we got off the bus in the middle of the night, this time in La Ceiba. This time no rain. Susan made friendly with some French boys who had guitar cases. We stayed up all night playing music. I started keeping my journal in the Wake.

First we stayed at Alton's Dive Shop. We liked it there. They liked us there. They commissioned Susan to paint a mural. Then another woman asked her to paint a mural. Then the coffee shop owner asked her to do architectural drawings. That's where she drew the line...or didn't. Just to clarify: she didn't draw any lines.

Staying Longer. Just Where We Need to Be

This week I moved into cheaper digs. The woman keeps cats and a dog. This morning I woke to the sound of a cat bleating like a stuck pig. He had gotten into the poison one of the neighbors left out by the trash by the road. Sad. I'd never seen a poisoned cat--or any poisoned animal--before.

I haven't been diving. Depleted. Little interest. Much more interest in characters on the page.

We'll probably stay until the weekend and then take the ferry back to the mainland. On to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela. With bags held tight!

Breath, Compassion, and Loving-Kindness:
Meditation Questions Answered

Anonymous in Seattle writes,

"Hi. I know the narrator meditates. Narrator, have you meditated on an idea, such as compassion, before? Last Saturday at the Sakya Tibetan Buddhist temple a few blocks from my house, I listened to a lama speak for two hours on "The Relevance of Meditation." He mentioned ways of meditating on the virtues of compassion, then considering the negative aspects of samsara (grasping, desirous behavior). Or, narrator, do you stay with breathing focus only? -- Curious in Seattle"

For some reason, I can't post comments on this post, so I'll write a new entry that tries to answer these questions.

I think it's great that you went to hear the lama speak! We need teachers, even if we don't agree with what they have to say.

I began meditating when I moved to Ann Arbor, MIchigan during the summer of 2003. I lived in the basement of the converted church on Church Street, just blocks away from the Ann Arbor Zen Temple. It was here that I started my first practice, a combination of sitting and hatha yoga. (physical, movement yoga). It is also the simplest practice I've ever had. It has colored all the others.

For those of you who have never tried zen meditation, it at its most basic a focus on the breath and nothing more. Thoughts come and thoughts go. Eventually the thoughts arrive with less frequency. Then they cease altogether.

While in Thailand, I practiced vipassana meditation, which is also focusing on the breath, but with a slightly greater awareness of the body. I found this method quite expedient. Usually I would light a stick of incense and meditate until it was burned away. There are a number of other tricks I tried (such as counting breaths or numbers), but just breathing for a set amount of time was the most important in laying a foundation for what came next.

Variations

The Thai tradition has many other forms of meditation. There is meditation on death in which monks sit by a rotting corpse. There is meditation in which one focuses on the repulsiveness of the body by imagining different parts of the body (like bones, muscles, etc) or different stages of a rotting corpse. There is meditation on the undesirability of food, which I tried more often than the other kinds because of my gluttonous proclivities. All of these things limited my interest in sensual pleasure, but I felt like my desire for these things never really went away. I did not feel this was a very natural approach to dealing with the ego's desire to involve itself in samsara (delusion, the world as we see it). At my teacher's behest, I started doing meditations on loving-kindness (metta), which I need because of my tendency to be judgmental.

My teacher suggested I focus on loving-kindness right before going to bed. He said I should first imagine all the people I love and care deeply for. Then I should expand that to my wider circle of friends and family. Expand that to people you don't know very well. Expand to the people you don't like. Expand to the people you hate. Put them all in the light of love.

Current Meditation Routine

For the past year, my meditation has been more based on love than it was before. I practice a form of Raja (King) Yoga.

In this practice, I try to wake before dawn and sit for an hour. Instead of focusing on the breath, I focus on divine love (metta). Then, before dinner, I sit for half an hour, this time focusing on removing all impressions that have been made upon me during the day. I close the day with a short meditation right before bed.

If you want specifics on my practice, please email me. Since being on the road, I have not had the regularity that I used to have. I have been lazy too. I have been experimenting with more Tantric modes of existence (ie, instead of meditating my desires away, living them and feeling their effects on me). For this reason, I have not been as happy as I was before. I much prefer the ascetic. There really is no compare to being without desire and being filled with love.

I hope this is of some use, anonymous.