Millions of jobs lost across all sectors of the economy!!!
Trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars lost - evaporated! - or stolen - or devalued
freefalling!
with no end in sight
at least for several years!
I don't want to get into the specifics but the term hemmorhaging money paints the picture and psychically I felt like I was dying. Especially when I had these news items burned onto my retinas first thing in the morning before I even had time to eat a banana. A case of writers block developed as I focused all my writing energy into pitching myself to jobs that I never heard back from. I became a creative letter writer, and for the most part nothing worked from every angle.
Almost 40 days ago now things began to change with the season. Today is Good Friday, and I just realized the whole timing factor. It was at the end of Ash Wednesday that I quit smoking tobacco and boarded a plane bound for San Juan with my roommate after staying up all night. One of my best friends was getting married, and Ranee and I were meeting up with about six of our girlfriends down in the Caribbean to help properly usher in this fantastic new development in her life.
I packed a blunt as we packed our bags, intending to get the two of us healthily mind froze as we took a 3AM train to the airport but she rightly thought it would be a terribly dumb idea before checking into the airport, so I had to smoke the whole thing myself. I put my hood and sunglasses on and tried to be inconspicuous and when we made it through to our gate I passed out with my headphones on. The guy checking tickets called me out from my bleary looking eyes and told me to check out the dinosaurs in the airport. Leaving Chicago I was just completely numb, pale and zombied.
What can I say- it had been a long terrible winter.
After my time in Puerto Rico, standing up for one of my closest friends as a tribute to beautiful people to undying love, my outlook on life changed. I spent my first day there getting thrashed by the ocean. That island has some sick waves! Just standing up was hard - the water was so powerful and I was so small against it. Every time I stood up I got knocked on my ass. Two minutes after wading knee deep into the water I found myself face smashed against the sand, my sunglasses gone forever. Every time I get into the ocean she always takes something from me. Once it was my shorts, another time it was my shoes, two t-shirts a different time, my bracelets... I'm not counting though, because the ocean always gives me so much more back.
As I found myself getting thrashed by the sea in Condado, San Juan I was moved to tears with joy. What a strange situation for my life to have gotten into - there in the water I felt a familiar feeling of having been compelled to the shores of a beach, getting bathed in the salt water of the ocean sea. Water I could effortlessly float in with the sun melting onto my skin.
As a transplanted tropical person, being 100% islander biologically and born and raised in the most inland city you could get in N. American, it rouses the deepest primal instincts to be on the beach and in the water. My hair suddenly gets curly from being bone straight, my skin gets soft and loses the dry unbalanced texture it gets in the winter and springs to life like a fish changing colors in the humid air. I feel like my most natural self, and that the ocean likes for me to be playing in her and occasionally summons be through strange trips. It was not the first time I found myself deliriously frolicking in the water for hours, wondering how I even got there.
I had read a Kurt Vonnegut quote a few weeks before I got there: "Strange travel suggestions are like dancing lessons from God." I giggled over this as I floated on my back and felt the anxiety that had stopped my mental gears from turning float away like rust getting rinsed by a powerful solvent as the waves sent me tumbling and I had to keep getting back up.
We were staying at a resort that was also being visited by some famous NFL football players who were all set up in a huge posse at the side of the beach. They gawked at me diving headfirst into waves and letting them carry me super fast up the shore, as they tentatively toed the sand ankle deep, I observed from far away. They never got further in than that because the force of the water was banging.
The night before I left the island, I found myself strolling a street called the Paseo De La Princesas with my beautiful new friend Lana, as she explained the law of attraction to me. We laughed about how I had visioned some bogus things that wound up coming true prior to the trip, and I was convinced I should start thinking about the kinds of ways I use my mental energy. I was even more convinced when several people that were unconnected to each other also mentioned the same arcane principles in the course of the next few days - including a cop from Jersey who sat next to me on the airplane home. Spooky!
We walked along a wall that was built to protect the city of San Juan from the pirates and freebooters from marauding the town, because they were a major problem for the city. They must have raided it pretty hard, because that wall was solid and fitted with some serious looking cannons. You can tell how strong the offense must have been by the size of the defense. As a local pervert frustratedly escorted Lana and I through the city gates as an increasingly sullen tour guide as it became clear that we weren't going to take up his offer of letting us stay at his house, I breezed through the streets and felt the weight of the remnants of those times and wondered why I have always been drawn to the territory of these pirates - like the time I found myself swimming in the precariously jagged caves of the Baths in Virgin Gorda, where their single masted sloops hid as they scouted for booty. One day will it all make sense? I pictured Old San Juan lit by torchlights, shot at by cannons on square rigger ships, the gates finally bashed in by those relentless motherfuckers.
Isla de Encanta, indeed.
