Nine months was a good stretch but it’s time for a change of background scenery. Even in a city like Buenos Aires, where everything is alive and moving 24 hours a day, it’s possible to stagnate. So I’m off.
I’ll miss the city and the people.
I won’t miss the North Americans who’ve swarmed here like locusts and are doing their best to turn this place into Cancun south.
I’ll miss the food.
I won’t miss my menopausal nutjob bitch TEFL instructor.
I’ll miss the nights here.
I won’t miss the fat, non-contributing coke addict with whom I interviewed for a shitty job writing scripts for his stupid ad company’s stupid language CD campaign and who I later saw drunk and high in a bar, gyrating to a rock ballad and performing a vomit-inducing dance/mating call for a girl across the room.
(Note: His name is David Garrett and he looks like a date-rapist and he sucks so bad and I hope he gets prostate cancer and his future wife has a miscarriage and then he gets run over by a panel van.)
I’ll miss the city itself.
But I’ll get back sooner or later. For better or worse this place has its Porteno claws in me and will always be home.
Which brings me to where I’m going. Now that I’ve found gainful – albeit mind-numbing – employment I was planning on flying to Los Angeles to see friends, but the bottom fell out of that idea when I realized I couldn’t get a ticket out of here for less than six or seven hundred dollars. To get that kind of money I’d have to supplement my current gig by prostituting myself to wealthy Argentine aristocrats. While that’s certainly an option, it goes against the firm decision I made some time ago that I would never allow my body to be violated for money. In the interest of full disclosure it should be noted that I made this decision right around the eighth time I allowed my body to be violated for money.
So the reality is that I have to get to a place on this continent where I can catch a flight to California on the cheap. I’ve turned the idea over in my head a few times and I keep coming to the same conclusion: Medellin, Columbia.
Now for those out there with less than a cartographer’s grasp of South American geography, Medellin is on the opposite side of the continent from where I currently reside. So I’ve got a bit of a hike ahead of me…through earthquake-ravaged Chile, across the highland desert mountains to Boliva, around lake Titicaca (ha!) past Machu Picchu and North through Peru to Quito at the top of the Andes where I’ll catch a plane to Medellin, that little El Dorado nestled between lush green mountains at an altitude with a year-round climate of about 75 degrees.
It sounds pretty good and I think I’ll enjoy the place – provided I don’t get murdered, drugged, raped, or some combination of the above while on my way there. To make things even more attractive I only have one source of income right now and that situation is tenuous at best. That means if I lose my job while on the road I will be more fucked than all of those who have been fucked before me. But I've managed to survive the results of every stupid decision I've made in the past -- and this won't be any different.
When Ernesto Guevara finished his trip all those years ago, he came out of it having been transformed emotionally and with a desire to dedicate himself to a cause. If I survive the same trip and come out the other end I probably will have had my laptop stolen and contracted an STD.
We all make our own way in this life.
Ciao putos!
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