Back in business after 8 years. More to come.

El Comentario de un Argentino

(Comentario Escrito por un Argentino)

Se ha dicho que vivimos en el país más antiyanqui del mundo, junto con España y Francia. Por lo tanto, debe de haber muchos lectores de estas líneas que, por alguna razón, odian a los Estados Unidos. A todos ellos querría hacer llegar (con el mayor respeto) un pensamiento que considero atendible. El mundo entero, mucho antes de la globalización, se ha convertido en una prolongación del american way of life.
El lector antiyanqui que me está leyendo a la luz de una lamparita creada por Mr. Thomas Alva Edison en 1876, viste un jean patentado por Mr. Levi Strauss en 1873. Yo ya no escribo en las máquinas de Mr.
Burns (1826) o Mr. Cristopher Sholes (1867) ni en las legendarias Underwood de Chicago, sino en una computadora diseñada por el joven Bill Gates.

Hoy es domingo, de modo que no sonó el despertador creado por Mr. Levi Hutchins en 1787. Pero sí funciona a toda máquina el láser inventado por Charles Townes y Arthur Schawlow (1960) y hoy tan útil en la cirugía, la odontología, la música, el cine, la guerra, etcétera. Sigo escribiendo, mientras no nos interrumpa el teléfono (Mr. Graham Bell, 1876) y no me llamen de la radio, que fue creada por Mr. Lee de Forest en 1906.

Más tarde, perezosamente, haremos inflar las llantas (Mr. John Dunlop, 1888), aunque los neumáticos (Mr. Thompson, 1845) están hechos de caucho vulcanizado (Mr. Goodyear, 1839), pero no sin antes chequear los mensajes del teléfono celular, que funciona gracias a los transistores creados por Mr. Bardeen, Mr. Brattain y Mr. Shockley en 1948. No hay apuro: ya no estamos en los tiempos en que Mr. Isaac Singer inventó la máquina de coser (1851), de modo que bien podemos tomarnos un vino blanco frío, que sacaremos del refrigerador (Mr.
Jacob Perkins, 1834).

Gracias a Dios, disfrutamos de un producto tan gratificante como nuestro querido diario, compuesto con la máquina de hacer papel que inventó Mr. Dickinson en 1809, mediante las rotativas creadas por Mr.
Hoe en 1846.

Más tarde podemos bajar a la calle por el ascensor que creó Mr. Otis en 1853. ¡Si va a salir, no olvide afeitarse con el artilugio diseñado por Mr. Gillette! ¿El pasto está bien cortado gracias a la máquina que pergeñó Mr. Hills en 1868? En un mediodía de sol primaveral, uno ya sueña con enero: el día en que el avión (Mr. Wright, 1903) nos lleve a Punta del Este o a Pinamar.

Las autopistas, los edificios de propiedad horizontal, las casas con pileta, la radio, la televisión, el rock, que lejos de ser "nacional" forma parte del folklore norteamericano, como la batería y la guitarra eléctrica, las grandes tiendas, el cine. Todos los sueños, todas las realidades, todos los placeres, todos los dolores del mundo moderno, son una emanación de lo yanqui. Hasta el izquierdismo moderno fue creado por los americanos, a partir de C. Wright Mills y su concepto The New Left.

Para los franceses, EE.UU. es la potencia que les arrebató la primacía de Occidente, en estrecha alianza con un viejo enemigo de los galos: Gran Bretaña. Para los españoles, es la nación que vino a despojarlos de sus últimos bastiones americanos: Cuba y Puerto Rico . Pero, al mismo tiempo, los europeos suelen agradecer que los yanquis les sacaron de encima dos amenazas tenebrosas: Stalin y Hitler.

¿Y en la Argentina ? La historia indica que Kissinger se mostraba complacido con Videla, pero el Movimiento de los Derechos Humanos fue creación de Jimmy Carter y Patricia Derian, enemigos jurados de la dictadura.
Cuando nuestros hijos dejan el país para buscar un futuro mejor, los impulsamos hacia Nueva York, Chicago, Los Angeles . De hecho, son varias veces 100,000 los argentinos que viven en Yanquilandia. ¿Para qué fingir que nos gusta Castro cuando no depositaríamos un centavo en el Banco de Cuba?

Nota con algunas cositas de más: Los odiados gringos están a la delantera en todos los avances y modernizaciones del Mundo. La gran mayoría de los Premio Nobel, en ciencias, y de los inventos e innovaciones que se realizan en el mundo salen de cerebros e instituciones yanquis. También promueven los mejores espectáculos y crean los estilos de la moda. Han inventado el Iphone, el Ipod, y un montón de artilugios de todo tipo, y comercializado en grande el internet. Ahí tienen a google y a facebook.

Como si fuera poco, inventan los medicamentos y tecnologías más avanzados y hacen las películas que más le gusta a sus amigos y enemigos. Fueron los primeros en llegar a la luna, y llevan la delantera en los estudios espaciales. La TV norteamericana, CNN, es la más vista en el planeta. Los mejores armamentos los fabrican ellos, pero estos inventos son deplorables. Al comunismo lo vencieron sin disparar un tiro y al nazismo a puro cañón.

Tampoco nadie les gana en cuestiones de derechos humanos, libertad y justicia penal, pero nadie los copia. Ah, nadie emigra a Argentina , y comparativamente, pocos emigran a España y Francia en comparación con los millones que se van a vivir ilegales a yanquilandia. Hasta no son tan racistas como decían, pues a pesar de que allí la raza negra es minoritaria, tienen un presidente negro.

Casi todo lo que usted usa, come o viste tiene algo que proviene de una inventiva yanki, aunque ahora lo fabriquen en China . Y para rabia y sicosis de los antiyankis y a pesar de que padecen una crisis, que la padece casi todo el mundo, las estadísticas recientes (2009) muestran que gringolandia sigue siendo el país más poderoso del mundo, dejando muy atrás a sus competidores, Alemania, China y Japón.

Está claro, mientras hay gente por ahí que los odia y envidia, los yankis te dan la mano, así son ellos.
Pase este escrito y agregue su comentario... Gracias.

COMENTARIO EXTRA:
Los ecuatorianos, que huyen de Correa, no viajan a Cuba, los de Venezuela, los de Nicaragua, los de Bolivia y los cubanos que huyen de Cuba no lanzan sus balsas improvisadas hacia Argentina o a ningún otro país, sino a USA. Los mejicanos (y otros latinos, que desgraciadamente muchos mueren en el intento), no cruzan las fronteras hacia el Sur, sino hacia USA . Los emigrantes de Europa no fueron hacia Francia, Inglaterra, o España, sino hacia USA :

"One Nation Under God."

The Natural Born Citizen Rule

I am an American citizen from birth. I grew up in foreign countries and did not live in the United States for an extended time until I attended college. After college I lived and worked overseas for most of my career. When I turned thirty five I was eligible to become the next President of the United States of America. Many of my childhood friends enjoyed similar lives, growing up as American citizens in foreign countries before attending college in the U.S. and pursuing careers overseas. Unlike me, many of them cannot aspire to be the next President. I can, because I was born in a hospital in Glendale, California. They cannot because they were born in a hospital in Caracas, Venezuela. 

Section 1 of Article Two of the United States Constitution states:

“No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

The Article is outdated and should be amended. In fact, I will argue that it is precisely these foreign born and raised Americans that we should strive more and more to put into political office, including the highest of them all. 

The Constitution was written and adopted during a different time. The U.S. was seeking independence from England. It made perfect sense back then to exclude foreign born Americans, especially those born and raised in England, from leadership roles in the fledgeling government. At the time there were many natural born citizens opposed to independence from England. Article Two simplified things. With it, the founding fathers could at least eliminate one group of potential political threats to the fragile government, and focus on the internal threat. Simple as that. It served its purpose at the time.

I lived a grand total of five weeks in the U.S. after I was born before my parents returned with me to Latin America, where my father spent most of his career working for American oil companies. I joined up with a lot of other new born American babies, only they were born in foreign countries. Their parents worked for American oil companies too. I am pretty sure that I had not, in the those five weeks, been brain-washed by the democratic American political system any more than my foreign born friends had been by the Latin American right wing dictatorial political systems of the time. We were babies, and our parents were all born in the U.S. and they were Democrats and Republicans and they voted and we all vacationed at Disneyland each summer.

Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot be President of the United States of America. Neither could ex-Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Henry Kissinger, although - strange at it may seem - he was actually the fourth in the line of succession to the Presidency behind the President, Vice-President and Speaker of the House. The list includes other prominent American citizens: Albert Einstein, founding father Alexander Hamilton, comedian and USO legend Bob Hope, Alexander Graham Bell and naval hero John Paul Jones, to name a few. They could never be President, even if they had been so inclined. For them, Article Two makes sense, sort of, especially for the ones who spent their formative years as citizens of foreign countries. 

Take Schwarzenegger. He was born and raised in Austria in 1947, a few years after Word War II. His father had fought in the German army and was a Nazi and a member of the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary organization that was crucial to Hitler’s rise to power. So I suppose it could be that his son secretly embraced his father’s ideology. It could be that Arnold has had a plan all along and it is nefarious. You never know. Maybe he hates Jews. He is a Catholic. When he moved to the U.S., at the age of twenty one, he could barely speak English. The rest is history: the body building, the movie career and his governorship of California. But he will never be the President of the United States and, in a way, Article Two makes a little sense in his case. Just a little. 

But it does not make sense for the American kids I grew up with in South America, the ones who just happened to be born there. For the record, we were called Third Culture Kids, or TCK’s. David Pollock, Coauthor of Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, provides the following definition:

“A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parent’s culture. The TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership of any. Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.”

We should not exclude these people from the Presidency. On the contrary, we should open the door for them. The world has changed and so has America. Immigration, especially to the U.S. and Western Europe, has drastically changed our cultural and demographic landscape. Data from the 2000 U.S. Census on Ancestry is telling. People claiming ancestry from our original sources of immigrants during the Revolution - when the Constitution was written - has dropped dramatically from 1990 to 2000: 24.9% for English, 27.1% for Dutch, 21.2% for Irish, 26.1% for German, and 19.5% for French. We are all aware of the increase of immigration from Latin America, and the numbers bear it out. Truly eye-popping, however, is the increase of Americans claiming ancestry from less traditional, less ‘Christian’ places and cultures: 381.3% for Africans, 171.7% from Asian-Indian, 153.3% for Pakistanis, 92.1% for Vietnamese, 50.9% for Chinese and 43.6% for Iranians. Most of these people - these Americans - are here to stay, and they will remain different from ‘us’ for  a while. It takes time to adapt - them to us and us to them. You want to know who can knock on their doors and immediately get to know them better, and vice-versa? Want to know who gets what they’re feeling, knows what they face and what to say to them? Third Culture Kids, at least the adult versions of those TCK’s.

President Obama is an example of a TCK, except he was born in the U.S. He spent five years attending elementary school in Jakarta, Indonesia and, though that was the extent of his formative experience outside the U.S., he grew up in multi-cultural Hawaii, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Wichita, Kansas. It is not the classic TCK stereotype, but his time in Indonesia, from age six to ten, was smack in the middle of his formative years. He returned to Hawaii where he completed high school, later saying "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear." His formative life experience in Indonesia probably had something to do with it too. 

Good thing Obama was born in Hawaii. If he had been born in his father’s homeland of Kenya, or even his step-father’s homeland of Indonesia - even if he only remained there for five weeks before returning home to U.S. soil - he could not have been elected President of the United States of America.

TCK’s bring a lot to table, especially to the political one. They are much more accepting of other cultures because they actually lived them. TCK’s are likely to speak two or more languages. They are four times more likely to obtain an undergraduate degree, and eight times more likely than non-TCK’s to obtain a graduate degree. Even so, it is not the classroom education that separates them from the rest. It is the real life education - the real ‘been there, done that’ kind.

My argument, so far, has focused on removing a single clause from Article Two of the Constitution. To do this, the text should be changed from “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution...” to something more like “All persons born as citizens of the United States...”. But wouldn’t it be a shame to open up the Constitution and not take a whack at one or two other things? Maybe I’m getting off track a bit, but having established that the cultural and, therefore, religious landscape has changed so dramatically, maybe we should go ahead make one other little change - just to keep up with the times. I mean, as long as we’ve cut through the patient’s skin and we’re looking at the guts, let’s do a little preventive surgery, before things get a little more out of hand. There it is - that organ could use some fixing - the one that tries to maintain the separation of church and state. The First Amendment to the Constitution states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...”

The idea here is to allow and respect all religions - all of them - and give no preference to any particular one. The founding fathers and almost all citizens of the new United States back in the late 1700’s were Christians, so they weren’t exactly contemplating the incredible religious mix we have nowadays. The idea was simply to keep (Christian) church matters separate from strictly political ones - the ones in the Constitution. It was done with the best intentions, just like the natural born rule in Article Two and, just like that one, it is no longer fit for purpose, but for a different reason. If the natural born rule is too specific and wrong to exclude foreign born Americans, the Constitution’s text on the separation of church and state is not specific enough.

If were are going to exclude certain groups of people from becoming President, shouldn’t it be religious leaders? Keep pastors, priests, rabbis, mullahs and other religious leaders from aspiring to lead the secular political machine of the United States. That certainly makes more sense than excluding foreign born Americans from that aspiration, doesn’t it? Religion will always motivate and deeply divide voters, but let them elect candidates that best reflect the moral and religious values they prefer, without putting Reverend Smith or Rabbi Goldberg in office. Which brings us back to the TCK’s, including those born overseas.

Like the overall cultural mix in the U.S., the TCK demographic has also changed dramatically.  Before World War II, 66% of TCK’s came from missionary families. Things have changed. Now only 17% of TCK’s are born into missionary families. The balance is 30% military, 23% government, 16% business and 14% ‘other’. It is a healthy mix, if a little heavy on the military side, but not surprising given the current state of affairs in the Middle East. More than half of TCK parents proudly work for or actively defend their country. Is it fair or right to exclude these children from leading that same country simply because Sergeant Jones’s son was born in a military hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany, or Ambassador Davis’s daughter was born in Lagos, Nigeria. 

To me, the answer is no. It is not fair - or prudent - to keep foreign born Americans from aspiring to be the next President of the United States. Americans are the greatest mix of races and cultures the world has ever witnessed. We are the cultural melting pot. Does it makes sense to exclude the most culturally diverse group of Americans from leading the most culturally diverse country in the world? Again, no. Article Two, Section 1 of the United States Constitution should be amended to include people born overseas to American parents - they should be able to lead this country. Instead, if we’re going to exclude anyone, make it American religious leaders, whether natural or foreign born. Two birds with one stone.

Back in Business

Well, I planted the metaphorical grape seeds. I wrote the books. I sold one of them. I have others out there looking for homes. I scratched the itch that I'd had all these years. Time to let those seeds mature. Let's see what kind of wine they yield.

Now it's time to get on with my business career. The reality is that it takes a long while for these things to mature...the writing things, I mean. Too long. The savings are dwindling, so I'm going back to the real world. I'm not sad. I'm just being realistic. Fact is, I've missed the travel that working in the energy business afforded me. I miss living overseas especially. It's about time to scratch the new itch.

I won't stop writing, but I won't be doing it 8 to 5. I'll do it after I come home at night, or on the weekends, or on holidays. But, for the time being, the only writing I'll be doing is polishing up the resume and typing up emails to prospective employers. At least I should be a lot better a that sort of writing than I was a few years ago.

It's been fun.

Friending TCK's

I have friended people on Facebook that I haven't seen or heard from in over thirty years. Some of them last heard from me forty-five years ago. These are friends that grew up with me in the middle of Venezuela in the Sixties, and others from Ecuador in the early and mid Seventies. I now spend more time interacting with them than I do with all the friends I met since then. It could be just because they were there during my formative years and friends from those years are indelible to everyone, but I think there's more to it in the case of TCK's.

We share a common bond and it transcends differences. Differing political and religious views take a back seat to that bond of growing up as foreigners in foreign lands. We reminisce about the experience and most of us keep up on the goings-on in those places. Many return to visit and some never leave those places.

And it's even more than that. I know what I'm getting when I friend a TCK. They are less bigoted and prejudiced, on the whole, than the rest of the population. It's a fact. And they tend to be more educated - four times more likely than the average person to receive undergraduate and graduate degrees - and it's not because they're smarter or richer. It's because their eyes have been opened to a whole new world of possibilities and it makes little sense for them to stop learning more and more about it. I know it sounds uppity, but it isn't intended to be. I mean, who wouldn't want to surround themselves with people who have been there and done that; who don't judge books from the covers; who know that Bolivia isn't a country in Africa and that they speak Spanish there? Who wouldn't want to be a part of that informed perspective of the world?

Of course, my cadre of non-TCK friends tends to reflect these qualities, too. It's just natural that I would gravitate to them. Open minded? Well traveled? Read a lot? Rational? Fret that the international community seems decidedly anti-American, but really know first-hand why? Wish you could do something about it or, in fact, do do something about it? Then you are a friend of mine - whether you are a TCK or not.

Excerpt from "A Farewell to Arms"

This excerpt from Hemingway's book has nothing to do with me. It does have to do with a foreigner in a foreign place, so I guess that is qualification enough to include it here. It does have to do with adventure, so that too merits. I include it mostly because it makes me want to give up writing. It makes me think that I will never be a writer.


"That night at the mess I sat next to the priest and he was disappointed and suddenly hurt that I had not gone to Abruzzi. He had written to his father that I was coming and they had made preparations. I myself felt as badly as he did and could not understand why I had not gone. It was what I had wanted to do and I tried to explain how one thing had led to another and finally he saw it and understood that I had really wanted to go and it was almost all right. I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do: we never did such things.


We two were talking while the others argued. I had wanted to go to Abruzzi. I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord land there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have it you know. He had not had it but he understood that I had really wanted to go to the Abruzzi but had not gone and we were still friends, with many tastes alike, but with the differences between us. He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget..."


I typed this out, word for word. It was better that way, but I felt unworthy doing it.

Yankee Go Home - The Story of Anti-Americanism in Latin America

      I know where I’m coming from writing this book. I grew up in South America. I spent the better part of two decades in Venezuela and Ecuador before attending college in the United States. My father worked for major oil companies – companies that were subsequently nationalized and companies later accused of leaving behind legacies of environmental and social injustice. After college, I followed in my father’s footsteps and, just like him, I worked for oil companies. I did this because I loved life as an expatriate in South America, and it seemed like the best ticket back. I did it because I wanted my children to experience what I did. So, before re-inventing myself as a writer, I spent most of my career living or working in other South American countries such as Argentina, Peru, Colombia and Bolivia. I can honestly say I’ve been there and done that.

      But a funny thing happened. When I moved with my family to Buenos Aires in the early 1990’s, I found out that things had changed. Things were no different when I took my family with me to Bolivia ten years later. I didn’t feel welcome and soon realized that I really wasn’t welcome. I wasn’t feeling the love. It hadn’t been like this when I was growing up in the oilfield camps of Venezuela or in the mountains of Ecuador. Back then, things were great. Everybody loved me – especially the locals. I spoke Spanish like a native. I was practically one of them, appearances aside. So it came as a big surprise – as an adult and father of three boys – to realize that things may have always been this way. The locals may never have liked me, may never have liked us – los gringos, los Yanquis.

      In fact, they didn’t, and still don’t, like Americans. I realize this now, and it makes me sad. I like them. Why don’t they like me? And just what are these things that I thought had changed, but have always been there? Well, that’s the million dollar question, and one that I hope to answer with this book. I’m hoping that my findings will help me, you, and them understand why anti-Americanism is so prevalent in Latin America. I’m hoping that, with a better understanding of what is at the root of this animosity, we might be able to make some changes. I’m hoping that my children’s children may enjoy the experience of growing up as Americans in a Latin America where things are good. This book is about those things.

The Mosquito Cloud

I keep a manuscript called Those Little Moments in the Life of a Third Culture Kid. It is a recollection of many of the events, experiences and adventures I had growing up - the same ones that inspire my books. Maybe it will turn into a book of its own someday. This is one of the recollections.

The Mosquito Cloud

      I grew up in Campo Mata, an oilfield camp in the middle-of-nowhere Venezuela, not very far from the mighty Orinoco River. This was in the 60’s. We didn’t have TV, so most of what we did as kids we did outside - and most of what we did outside had something to do with El Monte, what most folks call the jungle. It was a perfect place to grow up.

      Looking back, I did lots of things that people would consider dangerous. Now I call them adventures. One thing we did a lot was fish for caribes in the river. Most people call them piranhas, but caribes is what the locals called them. They named them after the Carib Indians, who were cannibals and were supposed to be pretty fierce. I guess they left a big enough impression to have the Caribbean Sea named after them too. Anyway, if you were fishing by the river, you were smack-dab in gator and anaconda country too. Little kids like me were perfect lunch size meals for those critters. Of course there were all kinds of other biting, chomping, stinging animals around: sharp-clawed ocelots, Africanized killer bees, hand-sized tarantulas, strangling boa constrictors and finger-sized biting ants that we called Machacas. But the worst of all of them were the mosquitoes.

      Mosquitoes were a big nuisance but, as a kid, I never did understand why my parents were all fired up worried about them. They said that they carried all kinds of diseases. We’d always be getting shots and vaccinations at the clinic to put all the anti-mosquito diseases medicine in our bodies. Those weren’t the only shots we got. We got shots for tetanus and small pox and polio and all kinds of things. We even had to get a gammagobulin shot – whatever that means – and it really hurt. But it wasn’t even the worst of them. That award went to the rabies shots. If you got bitten by some crazy mammal, and it happened all the time, they’d stick the needle straight into your stomach – and they’d do it five times!

      Anyway, mosquitoes were everywhere. It wasn’t so bad during the day, because it was usually as hot as the dickens, and they mostly stayed hidden under leaves in the mango trees until it got cooler in the evening. The problem was, that it was also when all the humans also liked to get out and do things - things like go to see a movie at the outdoor screen at the golf club, or go to a party in the back yard of someone’s house, and there was a party almost every night it seemed. So, to fight back the blood sucking menace, we had the mosquito truck.

      The mosquito truck came out just about every night. It was just a normal pick-up truck, but it had this loud machine in the bed that put out a humungous white cloud of mosquito killer. It was like a great big huge can of bug spray on wheels. I don’t remember where it was – maybe on the machine, or the side of the truck – but I remember the big sign surrounded by skulls and cross bones, and lots of X’es. The sign had just three letters: a “D”, another “D”, and a “T”.

      I remember asking my parents what DDT was. My Dad told me, but all I remember was that it was a word almost as long as Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, which everybody knew was the longest word in the world, so it must have been the second longest word in the world. He also told me that DDT was the ingredient that killed the mosquitoes, and most any bug. He said it could even kill a kid like me, if I got enough of it in me. When he told me that, I knew I was a goner.

      You see, Billy and Todd and me were the only members of a super-exclusive, no-girls-allowed-ever club called the Machacas, and we spent a lot of time chasing the mosquito truck on our bikes. We did lots of other cool things as Machacas: we jumped the river on our bikes, had secret meetings in our tree house in the mango tree in El Monte, hunted critters in the jungle with our sling shots - all kinds of things. But one of the things we did the most – because it came out every evening – was chase the mosquito truck on our bikes. And our mission was to hide in the great big white cloud of DDT so that the driver couldn’t even see us in his rearview mirror. We were really good at it.

      All I knew for sure was that we Machacas were all going to die on our backs, with our legs and arms all curled up, and black X’es over our eyes, like big dead cockroaches. He didn’t know it, ‘cuz I never said anything about it, but my Dad had basically told me that I was going to die. There was no doubt about it. I had gallons of DDT in my body, to go along with the gammagobulin, tetanus, small pox and polio medicine. I wondered if it would all mix together and turn into TNT or nitroglycerin. I started worrying that I might blow up the next time I ran over a bump with my bike.

      The next evening, after barely moving around the whole day for fear of blowing up, I went outside without putting on any bug repellent. I was going to check something out. If I was really so full of DDT that I was going to die like a bug – or blow up – the mosquitoes probably wouldn’t get near me. They’d know if I was a walking can of Raid. So I stood out in the middle of the back yard, in my shorts and no shirt.

      It didn’t take long. Pretty soon I was being bitten all over my body by a cloud of buzzing mosquitoes. I was never so happy to lose so much blood. I wanted them to suck as much of it out as they could, so my body could start to make some more new blood to replace the contaminated blood.

      When I showed up at school the next day I looked like an alien from outer space. I had swollen, scratched-up bumps all over my face and neck and arms and legs, and each one of the bumps was covered in pink dabs of Calamine lotion. Funny thing was, when Billy and Todd showed up they looked just like me. I was pretty sure that we were all going to live. We never chased the mosquito truck again.

Exploration and Adventure

I recently joined a writer's group called the Explorers Club. It was a natural for me - I am an adventure writer, after all. But there is a subtle difference between exploration and adventure.

Exploration is the search for something. I was going to say something new and unique, but that's not quite right. In my former career, I was a geologist exploring for oil and natural gas, which is not something new. I suppose you could argue that the discovery of a new oil deposit is, in fact, something new, but that's splitting hairs. The traditional, behind a desk, search is not new. Lots of geologist do it.

But take yourself back to the early days of the oil business, say the early 1900's. Imagine a young American geologist, dressed in Indiana Jones khaki's, with a holstered pistol on one hip, a rock hammer on the other, shouldering a heavy canvas back pack. He's just walked down the gangplank of a rusty steamer and into a maelstrom of dark-skinned, bare-backed locals unloading the ship's cargo. It is hot and humid in the port of Cartagena, and his shirt is already wet from the sweat of apprehension as much as from the stifling heat.

The young man is about to set off to the middle of the Colombian jungle in search of black gold. He will go where no white man has gone before - perhaps where no human has gone before - in search of that oil. He is an explorer and he is already experiencing an adventure. He stands a very good chance of experiencing many more during his travels in those tropical forests.

Exploration opens the door to adventure. It is not the only way to experience adventures, but it is definitely one of the coolest ones, especially to readers. That's why most of my characters are explorers, of one sort or another. They do what they do precisely because they will have adventures. They force them to happen. They are addicted to them. They are members of the Explorers Club.

The African Slaves of Northern Ecuador

I've spent the last few days researching for my new project. Today I've been all over Ecuador, and came across this excerpt from Wikipedia.


"Since African slavery was not the workforce of the Spanish colonies in the "Terra Firme" (South-America) given the subjugation of the indigenous people through evangelism and encomiendas, the minor African descendant elements are found in the northern provinces of Esmeraldas and Imbabura thanks to the 17th century shipwreck of a slave-trading galleon in front of the northern coast of Ecuador. The few black African survivors swam to the shore and penetrated the then thick jungle under the leadership of Anton, the chief of the group, where they remained as free-men while maintaining their original culture not influenced by the typical elements found on other provinces of the coast or in the Andean region."


I thought, "What a cool story this must have been." If James Michener had run across this, he would definitely have included the event in one of his historical fiction books. I don't know, maybe he already did.


Think about it. The slaves get shipwrecked on the coast. Nothing but jungle right up to the ocean. I've been in that region. It is beautiful but, without any civilization around, it would be a pretty harsh beginning. Makes me wonder too, about the slave masters on board the doomed vessel. My guess is that you wouldn't have wanted to survive the ship wreck if you were one of them. 


The other neat aspect is that they "remained as free-men while maintaining their original culture..." I wonder if they've been able to keep that up, now that the modern world has caught up to them? Do they still maintain some of those African traditions, play the same music? Where did they come from, which part of Africa? Did they come from a tropical jungle region, or from a dry, arid one? For their sake, I'd hope for the former. 


Back to the research. Cheers.