Lion

Lion is passed out in my yard again. His crinkled form lies sprawled across the concrete retaining wall, his eyes shielded by an ancient straw hat that seems to have taken on an organic quality, harboring life forms unknown to modern biology. Taking a seat on my porch I pretend to read a book, but my eyes frequently drift over to the old man, making sure the buzzards don’t pay the him a premature visit. It’s doubtful that John Crow would show much interest in old Lion anyway. Not even the mosquitoes pay him any mind.

The pride assembles

I take a moment and amble over to him, just to make sure he’s still breathing. His distinctive sweet-and-sour aroma of cannabis resin and sun-seared sweat is not quite repulsive, but not a smell one would typically associate with a healthy organism. I search for the telltale bottle and find it shoved into his right pocket. He keeps his rum close… in the way a cop would carefully position a trusted sidearm.

No one in town knows how old he is or where he came from. One is led to believe that he simply grew up from the fiery soil like the knarled mango trees guarding the main road. For most, he is just another permanent fixture of daily life. There’s the mountain… the gully… the river… the sun… and Lion. Much like the sun, folks measure time according to his movements.

“Lion go up a bush?”

“Lion pass yet?”

“Lion down a yard?”

Day after day, the cycle never varies. Lion rises, Lion sets, and somehow Lion rises the next day.

Occasionally our orbits cross. After the customary offering of a cigarette, Lion will sit and impart to me the wisdom of the heavens. His teaching will become increasingly disjointed, eventually degenerating into a rambling diatribe of miserable oaths and curses. Sometimes he’ll cry, lamenting this and that, then hit me with a radiant smile as he fires into a new topic and the chemicals swirling through the ether of his mind drive him to break into some forgotten song.

“Respect” is a frequent topic of these cathartic conversations. He mutters his grievances against the world between cutlass chops to an unlucky coconut. He’ll recall chilling moments from his early life that did wonders to warp his worldview. After cursing my people in every way imaginable, he’ll lavish praise on me for being “a good one” and flashes into a rage if I attempt to take the humble path. ‘Tek it when it come. You nah cyan steal respect, Bwai. You must grow an reap.’

Somewhere in the solar system Mars aligns with Europa in Gemini’s third phase and Lion suddenly awakes. I have a Matterhorn ready. He accepts my offering and we walk down the dusty road to his little house, speaking of bissey and pepper and war and God as the planets spin around us. The sun hangs over Mount Recovery and seems to pause, waiting until Lion has stumbled through his front door before it slips away. Hopefully, they’ll both be around tomorrow. It’s all about respect.

The Lion's Den

Adventure: Apiculture!

The first sting is undoubtedly the worst; a screaming fire spreading under your skin, multiplied immediately as the dying bee releases pheromones signaling her comrades to join in the instinctual suicide that has protected countless hives for millions of years. Two more infernos begin blazing across your bare hand and you are gripped by the natural urge to freak out and exercise the vilest vocabulary at your disposal. You want to run, to scratch, to pull the pulsating stingers from your flesh and curse yourself for being so brutally stupid as to voluntarily inflict this pain upon yourself simply because you wanted to learn about beekeeping.

But that’s not an option.

You realize you’re holding a beehive, and dropping it so close to a bustling high school is not the best way to build effective relationships. Besides, you’ve got to think of your colleague who is holding the other side of the humming white box, also with his bare hands, since gloves are known to spread diseases. Right now the bees are spreading histamines through your fingers, so you delicately set the box down and calmly push out the stingers as your hand takes on the warm color and puffs up to the size of a ripe Ayers mango.

Say Bees!

This was my introduction to apiculture, the rearing of bees and harvesting of honey. Getting stung is mandatory, since it builds up your resistance to the venom. Mr. P, my agency’s chief apiculturist for St. Catherine, hardly registers the stings anymore. He is focused on the terrible condition of the hive, neglected by the school’s administration for a range of reasons. Many boxes lay vacant and rotting while duck ants, hive beetles, snails and other destructive pests plague those few with functioning colonies. Mr. P balked at the neglect, showing me the honeycombs hanging haphazardly in a box without the necessary removable frames and taking pictures of what he called, “A perfect example of how a hive should not look.”

“What a waste,” he mutters, looking out from behind the meshed veil protecting his face and neck. We cleaned it best we could and moved on to search for more survivors. The task of resurrecting this place was too big for one day, and we had a couple thousand more clients to visit. One of them gave me a farewell kiss on the back of my neck after I had removed the veil. It had followed me to the parking lot.

“You’ll see some healthy hives soon.” Mr. P says as we drive through the citrus groves of Orangefield. “Bee dem lively! You’ll see the difference.” I could hardly wait.

Despite the throbbing pain in my left hand, I still held a very high opinion of apiculture as being one of the most lucrative agricultural enterprises available. Honey goes for $2500J a gallon, and with the bees doing most of the work, all the successful apiculturist needs is to keep the hives clean and reap the sweet rewards. My guys and the Ministry of Agriculture recognize the tremendous potential and make it a major part of their program for small farmers.

Paydirt

You just have to get stung.

Mr. P could care less about the stings as he opens the gleaming white box before him to reveal a vibrant, buzzing colony working amid rows of honeycombed wire frames. These frames come out like a filing cabinet. You then slip them into a hand-cranked centrifuge, which spins out the honey and leaves the empty comb that is reinserted and reused by the bees. It’s a surprisingly efficient process. The tricky part is keeping the bees calm as you disassemble their world.

We stand in an orange grove in front of a table stacked with hives, and the bees here are noticeably feistier than those at the high school. Scout units buzz and bump against my veil while others brush my fingers and spelunk through my pockets. I hold the bizarre smoke contraption that looks like something out of the Inquisition and shoot puffs of burning newspaper and orange peel between the frames, keeping the bees blissfully disoriented. Understandably, the trees around the hives are heavy with fruit, while most of the others are picked clean. Pinnuck called it “Natural Security.”

Poorly-kept hive. Note the wacky honeycomb formations on the lid.

It’s a fascinating experience to peer into a living colony and see the myriad tasks implemented with a programmed perfection that would make the Swiss jealous. Worker bees arrive laden with pollen, which is then removed by their fellows and packed into storage cells. Other workers are busy moving eggs about and tending to the larvae. The massive queen crawls slowly through the honeycomb hideout, attended by a retinue of workers and near-useless drones. Still more workers just sit and fan their wings, providing natural air-conditioning. I was envious of such organization.

By the fourth box I had worked up the courage to handle the frames myself, and was doing a good job until the bees decided they’d had enough and the painful burning flowed up through my previously untouched right hand. Still, I did not drop the frame, but bit my tongue and set it down gently before wandering away a little bit and suffering in silence. On the plus side, the next few stings hardly registered, because both hands were now swollen abominations of their former selves and it was as if I were wearing gloves.

“Pain is just the feeling of weakness leaving the body,” Jokes my colleague as we trudge back through the grove and settle under a tangerine tree. I nod in agreement and we wait for the attack bees that have followed us to lose interest and return home. It is true that apiculture is painful and slightly weird, but there’s money to be made here and an opportunity waiting for those who can step above their fears. We wait till the last fanatical bee gives up and then remove our gear and head back to the car.

He hands me a sticky bottle full of indisputably fresh honey at the end of the day. Apiculture is a tough sell, but it’s a fair one. Discipline and self-control bring sweet returns. Like life, you take the pain, and you come back for more.

You just can’t be afraid to get stung.

I wrote that a while ago, just wanted to publish it here. I’ll date it later.

The Old Man

The event was a perilous culmination of chaos and chance, besieged on all sides by various catastrophes and stalked by a malevolent shadow of dread… but it never quite caught us. Somehow, we pulled the thing off, despite the forces of Man and Nature levied against our cause. Defying all odds, its organizers, guests, and audience deemed it a resounding success which lasted deep into the balmy evening. It managed to spawn a lifeforce of its own to pull it through the tempest, a serendipitous core of unabashed humility and genuine love that could only be the work of The Old Man.

He was one of many who rose from the mists of the fallen Empire to grab the weathered reigns of his bastard society and pull it out of the cradle, hurling it spitting and screaming into the Wilsonian gathering of modern nations. He’s a product of that strange quirk of humanity that drives races to mingle in even the most hostile circumstances, where slaves and servants, overseers and oligarchs, combine in some twisted social Stockholm Syndrome that breeds as much festering resentment as it does national pride and social unity. His family tree is more like a rainforest, and only a select few academic institutions and government agencies possess the technology needed to sort out his bloodline, which is, by my opinion, nonlinear in nature.

Long ago, our hero realized that education, hard work, and Byzantine rural politics could elevate him to a greater order. Armed with ruthless determination and haunted by the specters of his broken parents, who worked like dogs for men who were little better than dogs themselves, the Young Man built his business and assumed a position of political leadership in his fiefdom. Now came the favors, the requests, the deals and the unspoken obligations, the vast web of friendly words and vicious emotions that dribble down into the red soil, culminating in the magnificent cesspool of local politics.

Unlike many of his peers, who went on to seek higher offices to plunder, he returned to his family. Taking a mid-level government job, he started church youth groups and a town council. Now almost into his seventh decade, he dreams of change. Latching on to the modern concepts of sustainability and environmentalism, he draws parallels with the frugality and responsible industry of his parents. The fierce criticism he so lovingly cultivates for the government is only offset by an almost ecstatic hatred of laziness, an evil he never tires of pointing out in all its insidious manifestations.

His energy is legendary, as each of his 17 children, and his wife, can attest. I feel ashamed when he praises my work ethic, which often falls victim to his slothful arch-nemesis. Still, just being around the guy makes you feel happy and alive. His personality is composed of so much condensed righteousness that it boasts its own gravitational pull, and I was sucked into its orbit during a particularly dark time in my travels. I’ve committed my sword to his crusade.

So, after the myriad f**k-ups, the lapses in judgment, and the many failures of planning; after the worried looks and exasperated murmurs of his lieutenants, after every twist that fate could summon, and after Poseidon’s magnificent downpour left most everything wet and miserable, the Old Man stood at the podium beaming, gazed over the shifting crowd, and thanked his god for such a wonderful day.

Protected: The password is “digicel”

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

The Visionary

I find it hard to believe that Nature produced this man.

There’s nothing natural about him.

He’s one of those souls that bubbles up from the cosmic cauldron of Creation every eon or so, a being that defies its environment to the point where it seems he was forged not of this Earth, but somewhere in the Great Beyond by God and his minions to march into Babylon from the bush and usher in a divine skullf**king of the establishment and its excesses.

The man defies all Western logic and his words would leave all but the wisest Zenmasters scratching their heads at the nebula of contradictions that loosely hold together his existence. Without them, the profound singularity of the Truth he brings would tear the fabric of space time, rendering Reality as we know it to a faint mist of gamma particles and tears flashing in some event horizon around a massive black hole that was once the epicenter of our solar system. He must be Tathagata, or a Prophet of the Ragnarok, because there are no alternative explanations for him, regardless of what school of logic you adhere to.

He certainly doesn’t belong to this time, or any other. Quoting Bob Marley, the Bible, and George Bush Sr. in a single sentence, he treks through the bush spreading the Gospel of anti-corporate environmentalism through nutraceutical agriculture and community-based agroprocessing/ ecotourism ventures focusing on natural medicines while extolling the virtues of herbal research and youth intervention for the continued protection and low-impact development of the Rio Pedro Watershed. He is the Prophet. The Scourge of Babylon.

He can’t sit still. His eyes flash wildly when he speaks. He mumbles and sings to himself during meetings and bursts into polemic orations during presentations. He swears the cures for Alzheimer’s, Autism, Hypertension, AIDS, MS, Cancer, Hair Loss, Influenza, Malaria, Herpes, Gingivitis, Leukemia, Downs Syndrome, and Diabetes are all growing in the hills of St. Catherine, but the insidious pharmaceutical conglomerates and bauxite miners are covering it all up. He has devoted his life and his sanity to uplifting the community, bringing forth utopian unity, but he trusts no one and treats his plans like some kind of backwoods Manhattan Project.

His personality is a glorious Mobius strip of contradiction. He rants about the idleness of his countrymen while laying back and rolling his 4th spliff of the morning. Over cups of white rum he boasts of how he gave up drinking, but not for “medicinal” purposes. He’s a development worker’s nightmare: Stubborn, strong, and way too smart, he isn’t interested in anything that deviates from his dreams, especially if it means sharing them with members of the community; nest of rabid vipers that they are, or at least that’s what he perceives them to be.

He knows all the tricks. Compromise is just another word for Slavery. We shall fight on alone, never ceasing!… unless it rains… then we’ll take the month off.

And yet, I admired him, as Sancho Panza admired Don Quixote. The senseless futility of his methods and the vaulted Valhalla of his visions makes me wish he gets what he’s searching for. I know it’s the wrong place to be, but his madness is so inspiring that I find myself giving serious thought as to where the International Medicinal Plant Research Center will be located and how many Cray supercomputers will be needed to run the gene sequencer.

Stashed beneath the layers of madness, and beyond the web of paranoia lies some great Truth that cannot be conveyed through mere words or even actions, but solely through the energies of a well-tuned mind. He’s a wily old goat, and he knows nothing but the dream and the fight.

A stroll through eternity

Rode back from Constant Spring on Billy’s bus today. Of the two times I have legitimately feared for my life here, both instances occurred on Billy’s taxi. It’s strangely comforting to know that if I die, it’s most likely going to be gazing through the side window as we take a skidding turn into an oncoming sand truck or gloriously careen off the side of Allman Pass. I only hope they can separate enough of our remains, so at least the majority of my genetic material is buried in my casket, and not along with whats left of Billy in his.

Billy drives a nondescript mid-90′s Chevy van, which would be ideally suited for service in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Just pack it with ammonium nitrate and a few jugs of diesel and take her for a spin into the local UN compound. Or, if you’re Billy, pack it with 20 helpless souls and take off at top speed through the hills

The interior has been stripped down so the maximum value of flesh can be uncomfortably wedged into its threadbare seats. I rode with my ear set against one of the massive speakers hung at the corners. For some reason, I’ve never heard them actually play music. Instead, they emit a high-pitched electric whine, the frequency of which correlates with the van’s acceleration.

Everyone rides in grim silence. A few mutter soft epithets torn away by the screaming wind. I think I’ve heard a prayer or two, not just the ubiquitous “Oh Jesus”. Closing your eyes and treating Billy’s taxi like a sensory deprivation chamber is one of the more spiritual highs I’ve reached lately. Just shift your trust to whatever deity or enlightened principle you prefer and let the screeching tires and rocking chassis transport you home. Whether it’s your earthly home or your home in an etherial sense is largely up to the weather, road conditions, and Billy’s sobriety.

After thumbing my nose at fate, I loitered for a while in the square and had a beer at the pub. Or bar. They call it both. British and American words are interchanged often, depending on what country the speaker has emigrated to or from recently. Most of the country is on a long-term stopover between the two. I’ve met folks who’ve seen more of my country than I have. It’s not uncommon for a fellow to have lived in my state, and know my city or suburb intimately.

Walking back along the main road to my house, I regurgitate smiles for anyone who cares to notice me anymore. I’ve long-since passed the phase of being a local spectacle. A quick stop to the shop for toilet paper and gossip and I’m back on my front porch before sundown. That affords me a few precious moments to break open a frozen box juice and snipe hellos and good evenings at unsuspecting passersby. Athena is happy to see me, because she’s equated me with food and attention. Good cat.

The sun sets on another day. Regardless of what I did or did not accomplish, I can’t help but smile at the colors the atmosphere still manages to summon for the grand finale, another composition to file in a lost gallery of countless masterpieces.