May 8. Waiting for our boat.

After only a few hours sleep we walk to the Club Nautico and say YES to Fabian and the Panama boattrip. And that was it. The next days we will spend waiting for the boat to leave. And I will write.

Consider this: THE KEYS.
"How did you get in?"
-"I still have the keys."
"You should have left them."
-"I'm sorry, okay. S-o-r-r-y."
"I can hear you. Just give them to me now."
-"Suspicious as always. I could have known. I should have come to get my stuff while you're working."
"You diabolical serpent."
-"Pardon?"
"I mean, ah, you know what I mean. Can you give me the keys now?"
-"No. I'm not ready. I will get my stuff first."
"What stuff?"
-"My cd's and the salad bowl."
"Salad bowl was a present of my uncle."
-"He gave it to me, so it belongs to me and me and me."
"Okay. You can have it. And keep the keys too. I don't care about what you do."
-"You run away again, can't you see that. You always run away."
"I can see it, but I no longer care. Do whatever you like."
-"You make me very, very sick."
He shrugs.
"Maybe you should visit a doctor then."
-"Fuck you. I'm out of here."
She throws the keys at him and rans away. He shouts at her.
"Don't you want the cd's?"
-"No! they're contaminated."
"What do you mean?"
-"Everything you touch gets bad."
"You're hysterical. You should see a doctor."
-"Yes, I AM hysterical. And you know why? Because you touched me."
She rans out of the house. He shrugs again and plays one of her cd's that is actually quite nice. He begins to swing a little bit to the music. It's some old jazz record. If love were like an old jazz record, we see him thinking, this world would be a paradise. Another woman gets in and starts talking to him.
"Tom, how are you doing?"
-"What?"
"How are you.. can you lower the volume a little?"
-"What?"
She sighs and walks to the stereo set to lower the volume.
-"What do you want?"
"I want to talk to you about us. How serious are we?"
-"Why now?"
"Well I... technical reasons."
-"Technical?"
"Tomorrow I should start taking the pill again."
-"And?"
"If we're serious I thought I will not take it. I am thirty-two you know."
He knew. Thirty-two, almost the autumn of her reproductive life. He had thought about having a child with her, but just not now. His wife had just left him. We can see him calculating.
-"And thirty-four? My sister was thirty-four" he says.
"I am not your sister. Women of my age are running a risk. Just tell me are we serious?"
He shrugs.
-"Okay, we're serious" he says absent-mindedly.
"You make me very, very sick."
-"You don't believe me?"
"No of course I don't believe you."
-"Look at the table. You see the keys? They are yours. What do you say? Do you believe me now?"
"O Tom, that was not necessary. And I thought you had not yet made up your mind. I'm sorry, stupid little me. I love you."
She walks to Tom and gives him a kiss on his mouth. They hug and she sighs.
"I am so happy we finally found each other."
-"Will you be careful with the keys?"
"Of course. You can trust me."
-"I trust you, sweetheart."
He stands up to get a bottle of wine. He comes back with two glasses and a bottle.
-"Should I change the music?"
"No, I like it. It's jazz, isn't it?"
He sighs.
-"Do you think our love is like this music?"
"What do you mean?"
-"Swinging, dynamic, smooth, without stress."
"That depends."
-"On what?"
"On our understanding of each other."
-"You mean thiry-two?"
"Do you want a child with me?"
-"It's too early sweetheart. How am I supposed to make that kind of decision. My wife just left."
"She was here?"
-"She came to return the keys."
"O. So that's why they feel warm. They are still warm of her hands."
-"Does it bother you?"
"I don't know. Did she want a child with you?"
-"After the death of Tom we never spoke about having another child."
"But did she want Tom with you?"
-"Yes, very much. Tom has made us very happy the last three years."
"How happy?"
-"I don't want to talk about now, please. Let's go to bed."
She plays with the keys in her hands.
"Can I visit Tom's grave?"
He sighs.
-"Yes, but leave the keys on the table. I will change the lock.
"Why?"
-"Because I say so!" he yells.
She looks at him and thinks for a few seconds. Then she says.
"Who will get Tom's keys?"
He looks at her with tears in his eyes. She sweeps the tears out of his eyes and whispers in his ear.
"Thirty-three."
Then they go to bed.

Kamiel's Daily Karma Rule: "Synthesis of opposite fears".
If you are afraid of something, try to generate fear of the opposite as well. Try to imagine why the exact opposite is fearsome as well. The synthesis of these two fears, if properly generated, will heave you up a higher level of Being (taste of apricots).

April 9. More nonsense.

Working on fear. My traveling is a kind of therapy program, but it's not only for me individually. I want to use my person as an example, make a little sacrifice to psychological science. When you die, you can fill out a form (that is, before you die of course) declaring that Science can use your body for research. A dead body however, is not of much use to psychological science. They need living souls to test their hypotheses.
Wait a minute, maybe I won't be of much value for that science. I don't care. How do I work on fear? It's not easy. The causes often are very ancient and difficult to remove. Sometimes it's better to try and cure the symptom. I imagine all the people / that I feel afraid of. The whole bunch! All together! Dream about them, screwdrive my head in a soft pillow and dream more about them. I accept the irrationality of the fears. I make some abstractions, you might make other ones. There are father-figures and woman-figures I am afraid of. They say things to me in those dreams and I shiver. I guess it has to do something with the order of power. My hypothesis is that these fears are determining a lot of what I do. All I do are eventually symptoms of fear. Did I order an icecream recently? Didn't you see how I looked to the ground? Didn't you notice how I stuttered and trembled and wanted to get the coins out of my pocket really quick and didn't stand upright and sweated and ground my teeth? (feel free to apply this to yourself I am writing this for you). So the whole posture (or the whole pose) is one big demonstration of deep subliminal fears. And that's some insight. Now I can go and fight the symptoms. Step one: quantification. Keeping track of it like a bookkeeper. Step two: massive attack. I want to burn the fear out of her cave, smoke her out of her hole, clusterbomb her beyond recognition. But the fear is hiding too deep, so I go at the main symptom: the gibber. Behead the gibber! Shatter the True Being in order to be able to P L A Y it. You were curious about my Theory of Pure Being? That was my Theory of Pure Being.

I write all day in the canteen above a supermarket because I can pay there with my credit card. Without that card I would have been like a bump. I would have been someone who lives in ways I cannot even imagine. For a few dollars I buy a good lunch and coca cola and work diligently on my computer. The night before had not been very inspiring, but I've learned from it. I had run into two German girls in their early twenties that study international management in Montevideo. They were camping in the national parks of Paraguay. I envy them for what they already know about the world in their early twenties. I showed them the bar Britannica and was glad they really liked it. Maren and Annika liked Weizenbier and coke so that's what I got them. We danced later, and I saw the guys I shared the room in my pension with. They had a good time I saw; the Swiss macho had just kissed another girl and made the girl he fucked the other day painfully jealous. The strong blond German waited for the girl he met the other night in order to fuck her later in a love motel. We were dancing under the Paraguayan night sky to music of Bon Jovi, U2, Guns 'n Roses on the terrace of this only bar in the center of Asuncion. The sky was dark, the basedrum resonated. Vincent, the big black guy from Nigeria could dance really well. People took a lot of pictures. I flirted with a beautiful girl, whose pretty face I saw only against the wild shimmering light of the stroboscope. She told me she was a surrealist painter and twenty-seven. I told her I am a surrealist writer and then we danced and kissed with our eyes open and I said "you know that surrealists kiss with their eyes open?" in the stroboscopic light with the big moon in the background it was a brief share of infinity; she gave me her card her name is Guadeloupe and she said she is a serious person. That means she won't jump into the bed with someone just like that. She went home early. The longing for nearness, the nearness of You who don't exist (please, don't exist...), the nearness of lips that talk and talk and talk so near they cannot talk any more.

I will take a bus straight to Santa Cruz, Bolivia tonight, skipping the rest of Paraguay because I feel like moving on. Got really lucky with the ticket: I had exactly enough Guaranis (Paraguayan money) to pay for my trip to Santa Cruz.