Doing stuff on my extra (extra) day at sea
I was meant to be doing two things today – packing and watching the Panama Canal. As I’m doing neither I’ve started Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck – another book I’d been saving. Really quickly, the whole problem with America/Americans has resurfaced. I don’t know whether to call it naivety, or lack of awareness or capitalism-inspired blindness, but it’s there again in two paragraphs a couple of pages apart. In the first extract he talks about the mountains of packaging (“we love so much”) and how we haven’t got a spare planet to go to when we fill this one with rubbish. Two pages later he’s singing the praises of disposable aluminium pans – “You fry a fish and throw the pan overboard.” This is bloody John Steinbeck, for God’s sake. Supposed to be clever, you. You’re not. You’re thick. Mind you, I could never have come up with the phrase ‘with cornsilk hair and delphinium eyes, red-edged by the dull wind’. And it was 1961 when he wrote it.
The other thing about Panama, of course, is it is the original client state – entirely created in 1903 by our friends in the North to serve the needs of Capital. Apparently the Colombians (within whose borders the canal used to reside) still haven’t forgiven them.
Word of the day – Vacilando.
Quote of the day:
“I wanted a spark of some kind, a crusade, an ideal. All around me I saw a society that had lost its sense of … community. Where the future extended no further than next year’s balance sheet … A materialistic society that had lost sight of the sheer joy of being alive, and replaced it with self-assembly wardrobe units from Ikea.
“It was a f*cked-up world and I couldn’t find any purpose or direction in it.
“Maybe I’d find one in South America.”
Mark Mann in the Gringo Trail. Doesn’t quite describe my sentiments or my current situation, but I thought it was a good one as I’m about to officially leave Central for South America. Rather depressing is the fact that my spell check allowed ‘Ikea’.
See you soon.
Today’s song – Death is not The End, Nick Cave’s version.
Tags: Panama canal, Travel
JohnnyBoy