My Texan Girl

She sang sweetly in the cold rain. She came outside in the cold and smoked by the fire. She was there to love me in the night. She ground coffee in the morning and brought me to the kitchen and massaged my head. I left her that morning and never saw her again. She was a young woman from Texas and her man had died in war.

From the snow

This is a good etiology, the surplus. It gives a man power and levels those who have the funny numbers in the bank accounts and feel special. There is much wild here, much beautiful, much distracting. It would be fine for a man who is riding, he stops a few days, and then continues on. But in my contemplation to live here, already this commerce takes away too much of my energy. Looking for a t-shirt yesterday, any cheap cotton t-shirt, I wasted too much time. I want back the life of my being on the road. It was good and severe in Argentina and I told myself I would never go back to the cold. But last night I had no energy to see the city. I know too much now--the result of a party, even with the beautiful women of the city, would be weakness and weariness in the motning. And the only way of living possible to hit the clubs and get the women is a life of surplus pursuit, because Rio, and perhaps Brasil, is controlled by the successful pursuit of surplus.

I thought I could rent an apartment and practice the language but once I take the bike away the whole journey has lost its meaning. I can't do it. Those italics just appeared out of nowhere and I can't see the screen on the sun but they are good and fitting italics.

All of a man's senses are destroyed by the surplus. He becomes like the three ovejas on the boat at Villa O' Higgins, terrified to move and playing dead after the ties to their legs were cut. I have nothing to unleash.

One could say that there is something wrong with such a man who can't adopt. Perhaps the Brazilian men would criticize me. Yet they also would not be the ones who kayak, run, cycle, and climb across the world. This is the activity that makes me happy.

What a thing, a man who wants to rest but is only happy when he is on his bicycle. It is better than a drunk who must have his beer. It is better than the cocainista who must have his blow. It is better than the man of surplus who must have his surplus.

The question we must ask the bicycle man is: Oh man of the bicycle, tell us of your way of being. And he says: don't confuse me with the Buddha or the sitting, for I am nothing. I am the dogs who run with me. I am the polenta at night which doesn't warm my spirit but warms the spirit of my journey.

And so the man of the bicycle rarely has anything to say. He listens to many stories yet he rarely says anything. Rarely do the westerners have a heart for his stories. He must go to where there is cold and wind and open pampas if he wants to speak to a man. And sadly he realizes there is no way to use any of his life of surplus to be happy every again. He cannot purchase a bus ticket to Patagonia as he must arrive to the holy land by foot or by bicycle or by horse. And so Fabian, his friend in cold snowy pampas, is very far away. Perhaps it was a mistake to fly to Rio but I didn't have it in me to ride up Ruta 3, Christ, in the cold I had defeated. I think of the men who go on a second tour in war.

Brasil was a challenge against the matrix as its toxic waves washed up against the shores of a happy, tropic people. How the Brazilian people smile, eat, and make babies as the large matrices shamelessly kill them and exchange their lives for the life of surplus in the cities.

How much of the surplus is the of the people and the richness of the foods and the ice slush in the cold beers and the music and dance of the city? Aren't these just the same things the people would do outside of the surplus of the city and in the abundant surplus of the jungle? This is the great paradox of Brasil and perhaps of the jungle.

There will be a time for me to sit and it is not now.