smack and slug juice

its 4:30 in the morning and eddie glasgow is telling us about the time he was holed up in a hotel room in india for 2 weeks chasing the dragon.

you take the tin foil. you sprinkle the sstuff on the tin foil. you cook the stuff. you suck in the fleeing smoke. you chase the dragon.

smoke heroin. smack, he calls it.

rounding out the circle are jenny adelaide, eddie and beck melbourne, daren south london and myself. the conversation takes a hard turn from hard drugs to world politics. i fear my worldly ignorance will be exposed. glasgow is in ireland, right?

as the roosters begin to call, the stories are making their way around the circle like pieces of challah at passover. eddie mistakes heroin for cocaine in cambodia. eddie and beck are in a disasterous car crash in bolivia. daren sees a pub patron´s cheek "glassed" off over a football argument in london. i am courted by a gay man in medellin. jenny likes to salsa.

if i had known anything about salento before my arrival and had made a list of things to do and see, it would look something like this,

hike through wax palm tree forest - check
visit hummingbird park - check
tour coffee plantations - check
get blitzkrieged off colombian beer and aguardiente - checkcheckcheckcheck

and so, with an extra day to kill in this sleepy town of 3,500, there is one thing left to do.

nothing.

and it is glorious.

the hostel i´m staying at is buried in the corner of town on the edge of nowhere. in the center of the crab grass ridden backyard there lies a treadless dunlop with my name on it. buena vista. between the bushes and beyond the stripped wood, tin roofed shack, the forest green tree lined mountains are peeking their heads. i reach out to touch them, but they are hundreds of miles away. and soon enough, the cool light breeze pushes everything to black and i am inside my mind.

i dream about speaking a dozen languages. about ¨making a difference in the world.¨ about making change. about changing nothing.

about running a dirty little bar. about owning a record store. about pickled herring and smoked salmon. about running away. about staying put. about why a british accent sounds so much cooler than mine.

i dream about what my father and my grandfathers dreamed about long ago. my thoughts float back home, wondering what everyone else is doing right now. what they are dreaming about.

what´s next? what do i want to happen next? where is the next escape? everybody has a hungry hear...shit.

i´ve been listening to too much bruce springsteen.

as i´m becoming comfortable with the notion that some dreams are to be snatched from above our heads and some are for safekeeping in a fantasy netherworld, the little shack comes back into focus. there is a slug on my shoe.

when i pack my things i see the little critter has left a trail of salento slime across my bag and half of my clothes. i pass on the laundry and gladly accept the parting gift.

no, mom, i did not chase the dragon.

and we DID sterolize the needles.

be good,
michael