A dog. This beautiful brown lab, standing alert in a deserted gas station. She is holding an empty Coca-Cola bottle clamped in her jaws. It sticks straight out sideways from her mouth. Her searching eyes watch the other dogs, the passing traffic. Entirely earnest. Claiming that corner, that Coke bottle. Because she can. Like: This Is Mine Now.
Two twelve-or-so year-old kids, niños with backpacks on, in a foot race for the fun of it. In the middle of the street. Again, because they could.
Beautiful women. I try to act normal about it but they're everywhere.
Former world-number-one DJ Paul van Dyk is hosting a dance party here on the 13th of August. There are posters plastered all over the city, encircling every telephone pole and covering every graffiti-free wall. It is advertised as a 'black party', which, I assume, means all attendees are encouraged (required?) to wear black clothing. Mr van Dyk must have a lot of black lights. Anyway, I saw one poster (only one, out of thousands) that took the advertising intensity to a new level, openly proclaiming that "Once you go black, you'll never go back". And I understand the point they are driving at here, but where I'm from, that phrase suggests rather something else. Something else entirely.
Furthermore, having seen Paul van Dyk in Buenos Aires at the start of March, I here publicly attest to my continuing ability to 'go back' to the more interesting music to which I have become accustomed.
(There is a great one here. Now missing, mis-filed in my memory. Somewhere, some one remembers. I'll send an intern to go rummaging through the dusty filing cabinets in the basement of my brain. Funny how yesterdays files find their way into ancient drawers to co-mingle with age-old reportings.)
Large and small, all sizes; from dark to caramel, the odd vanilla or exotic strawberry, there is an embarrassing overabundance of beautiful women in this country.
I pass by the EcoPetrol sign up la Septima several times per week, sometimes twice a day. It has a big smiling, plastic green lizard sitting on top, with its tail stabbing through the O in Eco. No shit. "EcoPetrol" is an oxymoron so obvious, I can only hope and imagine that the Namer often reflects and laughs at the slyly self-depricating self-awareness of it, the blatant linguistic tricksterdom involved, the contradictions encoded to the degree that this idiocy passes for advertising, a sophisticated marketing scheme, somehow acceptable precisely because it is so damn bold, so bald.
Blockbuster video still exists. I've seen it; it's true.
Way out Calle 26, otherwise known as Avenida El Dorado, near Carrera 66, a man was sleeping on the sidewalk. His upturned head was tucked into the cement corner of a storefront, but his body was entirely exposed to the morning sun. It was almost 9 am. To be honest, this did not strike me as immediately unusual. The bus driver touched the brakes as we passed. I continued watching the window. Then I noticed an aberration in the sleeping mans jeans, just below his belt. Well, obviously, his half-erect penis was protruding, propped up through his unzipped fly. Of course it was; why wouldn't it be? I've since rationalized, accepting my suggestion that maybe it was a prank, a realistic fake. But wishful thinking rarely leads to stable logic, far from any form of truth.
Yup.
There will be more where these come from.
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