Adelante Santiago

          I cautiously write each page and make sure to print each one after I write it. I kind of want to throw them away and to be honest they didn’t really have much to do with one another. But I hold onto them like I was going to magically staple them together and Bam pull out the next Great American Novel. Well at this rate it’ll be the next Great Armenian Novel. Maybe, just maybe, if I was lucky I would be the next Oscar Wilde or something like that. I certainly felt I was making the picture of Dorian Gray and tricking him to sign his name in blood. My Dorian Gray is just called Salvador Allende instead.                                                                        

This was never meant to be great. In fact it’ll never be published or seen outside of a computer screen. It has no great sentimental value. It won’t make you cry. There is no great inner message that will drift in your mind years after you read it. It won’t fuck-you-in-the-face like Chuck Palanuik book. I’m not one for face fucking and underground fight clubs either. There’s nothing that is either gruesome or mildly horrifying like Stephen King. It won’t be long either because enough trees are killed printing War and Peace. At best I hope Ernest Hemmingway will throw me a wink from heaven while Brent Easton Ellis gives me a pat on the back from hell.

It’s cold and it’s rainy here in Santiago which is a mind fuck for the middle of June. The Spanish keyboard isn’t doing me much favors either, throwing in random accents and ene’s like it’s nobody’s business. I was going to rent a motorcycle and travel around the country Che Guevara style but I’d probably end up dead in a ditch with some guy named Roberto wearing my Brass Rat. I think I’ll settle for the bicycle I liberated just outside of my office. She’s a beaut standing proud at four feet tall, red steel with a rusted chain but fully pumped tires and I’ve christened her la ponderosa. I was going to go more classical but if I named her Bucephalus I’d probably spend wildly and amass huge foreign debt with an irresponsible domestic population(Aha! Take that fucking Greek Debt crisis). Now I just have to kick the perros callejeros that chase me whenever I ride and I’ll go far.                                                                        

They say ignorance is bliss. That mixed in with my gringo Spanish makes me a pretty happy kid when I’m in Santiago. I smile a ton more mostly because I don’t understand what people are saying so I just make up their jokes in my head. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid couldn’t have done it better when they robbed a Bolivian bank with their shitty Spanish. Mi espanol is making a comeback though. It’s like the comeback kid Bill Clinton dodging allegations like he was a dodge ball champion slipping through congress and into my brain so everyday words become more and more clear to me. I’m getting good enough that now Chileans mistake me for a light skinned Brazilian here for the skiing season instead of Gringo undercover CIA operative.

            With this I say enter the cold, enter the winter from the southern hemisphere, enter the Chilean student protests, enter the Latin American sense of urgency, enter five hundred pesos per dollar, enter pastel de chuglo, enter stray dogs, enter cute girls smoking cigarettes sitting on park benches eating empanadas, enter the Latin American mullet, enter la ponderosa, enter graffiti of Salvador Allende, enter regaton, enter drugas, enter three months without getting laid, enter three months of being a gringo, adelante Santiago, Chile.                                                                                   

And we start while I [exit stage left].