Tag Archives: Ecuador
Lost in Quito
Got lost in the Centro Historico – the Old Town – riding past crumbly colored houses stacked on hillsides, smushed breathlessly with a million other Quitenos on the bus. Accepting that I had no idea where I was, I tried to get off, but the doors shut sooner than I could finish climbing my way through the forest of thick sweaty limbs tangled together in the limbo between stops, reaching for steel poles and gasping for air. I got out at the next stop and walked who-knows-where – along a busy road strangling a vacant mountain – no people around except for in cars. Reminded me of long stretches of roads all over the U.S. with sidewalks unwalked on for ages – 15 miles to the next stoplight, islands of forest breaking up the homes from the roads – except that walking along the road in Quito I saw some abandoned building in the valley to my right; nothing really keeping me from the fall. About three walls survived whatever destroyed everything else – reddish, sandy pillars cascading in linear ruins overgrown with a wild green, hugged by a frothy river. The road curved to a bus stop and I waited there in the sun. Tons of buses passed by, men swinging by their open doors shouting destinations like superfast spoken word poems –Chillogallo Quitumbe Eugenio Espejo La Mayorista El Trebol todo el Colon; they stop and start with the coming and going of clients leaving great black clouds and whirlwinds of dust in their wake, all of Quito a terminal, the following stops all foreign; titles of books not yet read.
Words Are Like Icebergs
This town is called La Libertad or ‘Freedom’, where my grandmother was born.
Word of the week is Blue.
I’m ’bout to start a Zine page where you could see the progress of the Everywhere All The Time project in a more accessible way. But for now, pre-order and get *free shipping* ’cause as of January I will be selling those fuckers for $10, since they cost a lot to make and ship from Ecuador, and I’m making zero profit ’cause it’s what I love to do! Like every other zinester and artist.
“Words in other languages are like icebergs: The basic meaning is visible above the surface, but we can only guess at the shape of the vast chambers of meaning below. And every language has particularly hard-to-translate terms, such as the Portuguese saudade, meaning “the feeling of missing someone or something that is gone,” or the Japanese ichigo-ichie, meaning “the practice of treasuring each moment and trying to make it perfect.” Linguists refer to the distance between these words and their rough translations as a lacuna, which comes from the Latin word for “pool” or “lake.” There’s a space we need to swim across to reach the other side.”
The Real El Dorado
Making of a Zine
Organized chaos?
Everywhere All The Time #1 is a radical travel zine featuring tons of color photos, sketches and writings from all ova the place, wrapped in a vellum cover and completely typewritten on my Remington Streamliner. Click on the ‘read the zine’ button to pre-order for $5 now and get free shipping; remember I’m sending this shit from Ecuador!
More on what the heck ‘radical travel’ is…to come!
Bus Terminal Freestyle
Full Moon
In the time it takes to blink, your whole life can change.
Well, mine has, in a very beautiful way. My life is full of unplanned, random, magical changes. Sometimes not so good, but I’ve become a professional at keeping my heart open and my mind open and not worrying too much and working very, very hard. So when I blinked and saw my life had changed, not even how or why or any of that stuff, just saw it, I was watching the sphere of the full moon rise above one of the highest Volcanoes in the world, Cotopaxi. I became emotional.
I’ve been asked to work at an incredible place, a once in an lifetime opportunity. So, what do ya think I said? IncaHacienda.com