Gringo Manaba

My long history with insects has mostly been one of unrequited love. They always seemed to want to crawl all over me, but the feeling was not mutual. My earliest memory of insects was playing placidly in our leafy suburban backyard and suddenly being engulfed in a globular swarm of gnats. I couldn’t have been more than four or five. I remember staring fasinated at a conglomeration of hundreds of tiny living beings acting in concert.  I ad mired their ability to form a cloud and move it around, right up until they decided to move it around my curly-haired head. I opened my mouth to cry for Mommy and it was promptly invaded by six or seven of the suckers, and they didn’t taste good. So before I tell my tale of the tennis scorpion I wanted to make it clear that I am not 100% anti-insect. I have had many awesome interactions with beautiful ladybugs, butterflies, water-walkers and exquisite dragonflies like the one I shot (with a camera not an AK) in our rear patio.

But quite frankly, the majority of my insect memories rotate around cockroaches, spiders (serious aracnaphobia), bees and wasps, mosquitos with dengue fever, slugs, worms, bluebottle flies, fleas, ticks and my least favorite, the scorpions. Unfortunately, all of the above are found in our garden of eden on the Ecuadorian coast, so one must take precautions.  The following story of man versus mosquito was published on April 29 this year in my weekly column in Spanish in El Diario, the daily newspaper here in Manabi.

Man vs. Mosquito

In our lonely retreat, protecting my tiny family (my wife, myself and 2 cats) has become a long-term war against multiple invisible enemies. While we are holding our own against the killer virus, there is one battle I am consistently losing.  Man vs. Insect; specifically that most insignificant insect, the mosquito.

Because I consider myself a Buddhist, in philosophy if not in practice, I try to value and nurture all forms of life, but I have to admit – I hate mosquitos. I don’t understand why they exists apart from torturing humans and spreading disease. I had dengue fever twice, and have no desire to repeat the experience.

It should be no contest, the super developed brain of homo sapiens, on top of the planetary food chain, vs a tiny pest with a brain smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. But again and again, the tiny insect outsmarts the clumsy giant mammal.

They know how to hide under beds and in dark closets.  They can camouflage themselves behind hanging objects and in front of dark surfaces.  They infiltrate in the twilight and hide until we are sleeping or distracted. They are so sensitive to our nervous systems that by the time the human brain sends the slap message to the hand, they are long gone.

Preferring prevention to killing, we tried making our house anti-mosquito. We put nylon screens in all of the windows and sliding doors. Unfortunately the cats love to climb the screens, creating holes big enough for skinny mosquitos to penetrate. We removed all standing water, but were stymied by the “oxygenation pool”, alias mosquito nest, which the public water utility helpfully located directly below our patio.

So it comes down to hand to hand combat. Turns out, snatching mosquitos out of the air is  difficult unless one is a master of martial arts. Actually crushing one in a smear of blood is satisfying, but the process of hunting and slapping results in more bites than kills. So taking it to the next level, we introduced advanced human technology – an electrified tennis racket. Again, an occasional satisfying “BZZZZZP” but mostly wild swings and misses or times the tiny mosquito seems to fly right through the racket. At one point, convinced it was broken or discharged, I tested the wires and almost electrocuted myself.

So on to the big guns – chemical warfare. We bought an aersol bomb from a multinational conglomerate – experts in killing. The can was covered with warnings in to never use it in enclosed spaces, or near pets or small children, or get it in your eyes or food or lungs. I lay in bed, pretending to sleep, with the can of insecticide clutched in my hand, waiting. I saw it fly by and shot a good long spray in its direction. I heard it by my ear and sprayed it directly into my own face. By the time I stopped I had emptied half the can, had a headache, a cough and stinging eyes, but I was sure I had finally won. Then the mosquito flew slowly by, mocking me.

My new plan is to harness the power of nature.  According to Google, bats, birds and frogs all love to eat mosquitos. I wonder how the wife and cats would feel about a dozen pet frogs.

The current controversy over NSA oversight of, well, everything, seems a bit shortsighted. What worries me is not that the government is monitoring everything everyone is writing or saying electronically (still technologically impossible, given available resources) or that they are filtering everything looking for keywords or “patterns” (which they ARE doing), but rather that in the future, when every an individual or organization, say, animal rights activists or labor organizers or tax protesters, falls under government scrutiny, the NSA will have access to everything they have ever said or done on-line or over the cell networks. Talk about your Chilling Effect.

According to several of the world’s great religions, and backed by abundant empirical data, life as we know it consists largely of pain and suffering, salted with moments of enlightened inspiration and temporary alleviation of the burdens we all carry.

Consequently, most of life’s most essential activities, from art to athletics, from drug addiction to religion, can be seen as coping mechanisms designed to create mental and emotional bulwarks against the cold hostility and random cruelties of daily life. Having recently lost a close daily companion of 15 years has me thinking on the role of pets in our human lives as reflected in the life and times of one particular pet, the inestimable Chiqui Feldman.

Sometimes it seems like there is a chasm between “pet people” and those who feel the proper place for animals is back on the farm or out in the woods, but not in our homes. Any position can be taken to extremes and we’ve all seen stories of people much more invested emotionally and financially in their pets than in their human progeny, to the point of tailored clothes and spa visits.

But this is the exception, surely. Without anthropomorphizing our pets, and perhaps only so, we can still be amazed at the qualities of companionship offered by a committed non-human consciousness. A long-term relationship between a human and genetically modified companion species is complex and life-changing expedience. The thousands of hours spent together, often otherwise alone, leads to shared life experiences, including those signature signposts we share: infancy, learning and childhood,  parenthood, maturity and old age. 

For the past 15 years, my life has been entwined with the life of an inspired orange tabby cat named Chiqui. Last night at around 7:30 he passed on to a better place, and in the retrospective mourning that followed his departure, I realized that with my kids grown up and living on their own, aside from my wonderful wife,  I have spent more time with Chiqui than anyone else in the whole wide world.  Clearly, in terms of contributions to the quality of my life,  he comes in a clear second place, trailing Norma of course, but miles ahead of anyone else. Getting through thousands of hard nights and troublesome days, in sickness and under stress, in rich times and in poor, Chiqui improved my mood and lent  me strength by his mere presence. He can never be forgotten or replaced. But before eulogizing him, lets take a look back to the beginning.

Chiqui was a University cat from the get go. I first heard his “meow” in an office of the old Boston University Center for English Language and Orientation Programs, when it was located upstairs from a Radio Shack on Commonwealth Avenue.  I followed the sound and discovered a tiny ball of orange fur, so impossibly small it seemed doubtful it would survive more than a few hours without its mother or other serious support.  Where had he come from?

Turned out that Assistant Director Carol Allen had found him wandering in the breakdown lane of Interstate 95 that morning while stuck in a multi-mile traffic tie-up on her commute fromher Northern Massachusetts home to the office. She said she literally opened her car door and scooped him off the pavement, and that it was a miracle he hadn’t already been squashed by an inattentive commuter.

We later hypothesized that his mother must have given birth in some nearby woods but that he had wandered off from the litter while Mom was stuck with her humans or otherwise delayed, and that Carol had done the right thing since without her intervention he was clearly doomed. I immediately offered to take him  home. Carol said it seemed preordained and that was that.

We put him in an empty Hammermill  cardboard box with an old brown sweater bunched up in the bottom. The poor little feller was obviously terrified, disoriented and in acute need of his mother, who he would unfortunately never see again.  He was so small he fit easily in the palm of my hand, and he was obviously somewhere near the crucial age in which he could not survive without maternal care.  Survive he did, although it was touch and go for 10 days or so, and he was left with a lifelong fear of abandonment and a stubborn streak of distrust and paranoia.

The situation at home was fluid. At that time, the status of soulmate Norma Yvonne was unofficial fiancée. We were seeing how she fit into a new culture, country and language, living in the Northeast US with a single dad and his two teenage sons. It was a tough adjustment at first, and Norma was struggling with multiple physical and emotional issues.  Somehow, I thought having a pet cat would help.

Trouble was, Norma had never really liked animals in the house: she seemed firmly in the “animals are fine – where they belong, on the farm or in a zoo” camp. She seemed utterly unfamiliar with the minutiae of  pet care and behavior. That first day, shortly after being shown how the baby kitten liked being scratched behind the ears, she almost dropped him as she ran back into the bedroom, panicked, to report “I think the cat’s broken!  It’s making this really strange noise!” Chiqui was purring.

One of Chiqui’s greatest accomplishments, achieved on his first day of living with us, was starting the process of converting Norma into the Doctora Dolittle of Ecuador, helping animals in need from pigeons to penguins to opkapis. Animals in a dozen countries on three continents thank him.

Chiqui turned out to be a lover not a fighter; he showed neither interest nor aptitude for either fighting other cats or hunting other species.  He was athletic enough to get into and out of our second floor Harvard Square apartment by climbing up and down the outside of the balcony, but the only time we’ve known him to get in a fight with a neighborhood bully he came home with a hole in his neck which required surgery and 3 weeks in one of those no-scratch megaphone collars.  Despite the claims of the Animal Planet cable TV channel, which demonstrated in its World’s Deadliest Cats countdown that the deadliest feline of all, above the panther, lion and bengal tiger, was the common house cat, due to the staggering number of species they are know to hunt, Chiqui’s attitude towards hunting was akin to Muhammad Ali’s view of the Viet Cong –  as in “What did they ever do to me?”

He was a gentle soul, but very English in his emotional reserve and his stiff upper whiskers. Rather than crass displays of emotion Chiqui showed his displeasure through aloof disdain.  When we would return after abandoning him for varying lengths of time while off traveling, always with loving friends or foster parents, he would refuse to acknowledge our presence for several days, keeping his nose in the air as if we were beneath his notice. When we moved him from the refined grace of Harvard Square to the mean streets of Inman Square he burrowed into a packed suitcase in a back closet and wouldn’t come out for five full days.  We thought he had died.  He never warmed to that apartment and by the time the lease was up we all agreed with him and moved to Everett.

Although like his human partner he enjoyed relaxing with his herb of choice, catnip in this case, Chiqui was never much of one for games or toys. He was more of a serious reader: a reader of dust motes, bird calls, patterns of light as they moved across the floor. His speculations were not idle, for they allowed him to divine the optimal places to sit, the warmest corners for naps and the precise moment to move from window to chair to counter top. Always thinking, that Chiqui.

How I will miss the long afternoons reading in the sunlight together, the extended conversations about work, love and the great mystery of life, women.  Most of all I will miss our visits to the Kit Kat Club.  This ultra-exclusive, members-only club was located under the covers of our Queen-sized bed, meeting mostly during the long cold winter nights in New England. Membership was, of course, exclusively male; although we did take up several resolutions in later years to expand membership to include Chiqui’s putative sister Honey, they were never approved. Meetings usually consisted of reading of the minutes, ammendments to the bylaws, and endless elections for Club officials.  Chiqui was usually elected President and I had to content myself with being vice-president, except for a brief period following 9/11 when I was elected President-by-default because Chiqui preferred to be Master of Arms.

Finally, a confession. During Chiqui’s last days, as I tried to ease his discomfort and contemplate life without him, and wondered why his impending departure was affecting me so strongly, I realized that during over 50 years as a pet person who almost always had a dog or cat as a member of our household, I had never lived with a single pet as long as the 15 years I spent with Chiqui, cradle to grave. I had always been moving, traveling, transitioning between continents. My pets were always eventually given away to family members, adopted by housemates, lost inadvertently or died prematurely in tragic accidents or cruel crimes.  It was the first time I had to help a loved one die.

At its best, a pet can be so much more than a plaything or a mascot. They say we are born alone and die alone, but in between we can be kept company by comforting presences both human and non-human. Wise men and women have known since prehistoric times that humans can not only communicate with animal species, we have animal spirits inside us, coded into our DNA and our behavior through thousands of generations of interaction, cohabitation and making mutual cause with and against the vicissitudes of Fate. Getting in touch with one’s animal animus,  finding your animal totem, is a window into another kind of consciousness.  Like speaking a second language, it allows us to experience, understand and take advantage of completely different, in this case non-human points of view, or other ways of passing through life. The great secret of Pets is that although they require effort to maintain, that effort is always paid back in many multiples more.

I know Chiqui will always be a part of me, and that I must try to remember the lessons I learned from him over the years. While he was fading away, after he couldn’t stand up or move anymore, I would rub him and tell him stat soon he would be somewhere where he would be able to run and jump and climb like he could when he was young and free.  I am not sure I really believe this, mostly because I am not sure what I really believe about the afterlife.

On the days when I believe in reincarnation, I see Chiqui being reincarnated as a human being. I even know what he will look like, because unlike any other pet I ever had, I would see him frequently in my dreams, especially when we were separated, sometimes as a cat, but sometimes as a human being.  When he appears like that, he is a big, laughing, reddish-blond joker who teaches me not to take anything too seriously. Maybe, if Chiqui comes back as a human, I can come back as his pet next time.  That wouldn’t be too shabby, tabby.

But on the days I believe in a beneficent Almighty and an allegorical afterlife, which, God save me is most of the time, I like to think of the belief, held by several sects and major world religions dating back at least to the ancient Egyptians,  that upon passing into the great beyond we are met, not by Saint Peter and some pearly gates, not not the Archangel Gabriel and his celestial horn section, not by a personalized cadre of our previously departed nearest and dearest to help us across that final divide, but by an eager line of loving eyes and wagging tails, of every pet we’ve ever loved, and who loved us back, waiting patiently to paw and purr and playfully escort us into Paradise forever. I’ll see you on the other side, Chiqui.

BEIJING — In a bizarre move, China’s television censors have issued new guidelines that all but ban TV dramas featuring time travel.

In a statement (available here in Chinese) dated March 31, the State Administration for Radio, Film & Television said that TV dramas that involve characters traveling back in time “lack positive thoughts and meaning.” The guidelines discouraging this type of show said that some “casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.”

from the New York Times in April

How could we have missed this at the time? Oh, yeah, we were out of the loop in small-town Ecuador, the closest thing to time travel we have experienced yet. One can even choose which epoch to travel back to: The capital is part of the global elite circuit (according to Sunday’s New York Times there is a new hotel there charging $545 per night, well above the monthly per capita income for the country) but about 10 years behind cutting edge capitals like Tokyo or London, while small cities are quaintly 20 or 30 years behind (more family restaurants than chains and bootleg DVD’s on sale on every corner). Go into a small town crossroads on the coastal plain or up in the Andes, and you travel back about a hundred years, before highways, ATMs and the internet, while in the jungle and the higher, more isolated mountain valleys there are plenty of people living the way their ancestors did 3,000 years ago.

Anyway, any true scifi fan or reader knows that the way around the time travel ban is simple: alternate universes. Also referred to as the multiverse, meta-verse, alternate dimensions, etc. the basic idea is that at any instant infinite new universes are being spawned covering all of the possible combinations of quantum motion.  As Cosmologist Max Tegmark put it, “A generic prediction of chaotic inflation is an infinite ergodic universe, which, being infinite, must contain Hubble volumes realizing all initial conditions.” (Wikipedia) Under that bloviated blanket a content creator can take his characters anywhere or when and just call it an alternative quantum reality.

Unless some future Chinese time traveler has already voyaged back to now and fixed the problem without our knowing it.  Time will tell.

LONDON — The rioting and looting that convulsed poorer sections of London over the weekend spread Monday to at least eight new districts in the metropolitan area and broke out for the first time in Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, in what was developing into the worst outbreak of social unrest in Britain in 25 years.

Despite going its own way 234 years ago, in some ways the brash young outsized scion that is the United States continues to follow in the footsteps, down the same garden path, of its aging progenitor, the United Kingdom.

Specifically, since before the financial collapse of 2008, England has been dealing with the basic fiscal problem at the root of the current global convolutions – spending more than you’ve got coming in, followed by visits to some sort of street financing, payday loans, followed by organized thugs dedicated to illicit enrichment who take vows of silence and colorful names like The Cheese Man or Fannie Mae.

Even before the outbreak of violence, the police have been deeply demoralized by the government’s plan to cut about 9,000 of about 35,000 officers and by allegations that it badly mishandled protests against the government’s austerity program last winter and failed to properly investigate the phone-hacking scandal that has dominated the headlines here for much of the summer.

Britain was ahead of the curve in getting tough in government spending,slashing its budget in many of the areas about to be snipped across the Atlantic; education, social services, jobs programs, local government. Today, across this weary and worn world financial capital, the smoking ruins of working class neighborhoods stand in eloquent testimony to the effects of depriving angry adolescents of purchasing power now or even the hope of things getting better in the future. The police are being outmanned and outmanuevered, and if this thing continues to spread a military intervention may be inevitable.

Despite an additional build-up in the number of riot police officers, many of them rushed to London from areas around the country, gangs of hooded young people appeared to be outmaneuvering the police for the third successive night. Communicating via BlackBerry instant-message technology that the police have struggled to monitor, as well as by social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, they repeatedly signaled fresh target areas to those caught up in the mayhem.

They coupled their grasp of digital technology with the ability to race through London’s clogged traffic on bicycles and mopeds, creating what amounted to flying squads that switched from one scene to another in the London districts of Hackney, Lewisham, Clapham, Peckham, Croydon, Woolwich and Enfield, among others — and even, late on Monday night, at least minor outbreaks in the mainly upscale neighborhoods of Notting Hill and Camden.

Wild, out of control youths, with nothing to lose, running rampant through the streets of London. Not really protesting anything, just pissed off and full of hormones and in the grip of a desperate, liberating mania, a spasm of destruction and acquisition. They are not out to make a political point, or to confront the police in a macho mano-a-mano. The are into old-fashioned smash and grab, as much for the smash as for the grab, but the first shops looted were cell phone and electronic stores. Of course, eventually they took out whole blocks, stripping stores and torching the scene of the crimes.

Sitting in his swanky flat in Chelsea, the Dowbrigades briefly debates visiting the scenes of some of last night’s rioting. From curiosity, as a citizen journalist, for old times sakes. But we aren’t quite as spry as when we were on the other side of the barricades, and we promised the wife to try to snag half-priced tickets to Billy Elliot in Leichester Square after class. We only have another week before the U calls us back to Boston for the fall semester.

Will the rioting continue? Will this same miasma of want and need spread to the States, fueled as here by the stark contrast between the obscene opulence of store windows and almost everyone featured on TV and the grinding hopeless struggle of everyday life in immigrant and minority neighborhoods? Will the United States follow her emminent predecessor into eccentric and doddering decline as the ex-richest and most powerful Empire in the world? A once-was, last millenium museum of freaks and performers, isn’t-it-a-shame Celebrity Rebab candidate, a la ex-heavyweights Rome, Egypt and Greece, or Babylonia (aka Iraq)?

Hardly slept last night, watching shops and cars burn across London and financial markets fall across the globe. These are the news days we live for. Fiction can’t compete. Stay tuned……..

article extracts from the New York Times

RICHARD SENNETT and SASKIA SASSEN from the New York Times say it much better than I did:

 America is in many ways different from Britain, but the two countries today are alike in their extremes of inequality, and in the desire of many politicians to solve economic and social ills by reducing the power of the state.

The term repeated here over and over again is “mindless thuggery”. If that describes a potent mix of electronics envy, unemployment, lack of appearant exits and the sheer thrill of breaking glass, I guess it covers it. The true test will come the next time the police shoot an unarmed protester or passerby. Have we reached the point where any protest gathering will turn into a raging mob? And what’s up with the word “Yob”? Where did that come from?

article extracts from the New York Times