“The Rude Guy”
Everyone who is calm and sensible is insane – Rumi

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Report from a Mexican village on Latin American anti-globalization

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Mexican village life and Latin American anti-globalization

This is Rich Zubaty. [RG voice] The Rude Guy. Ideology assassin. Globe trotting hot air balloon. Escapee from the Corporate Cult. Welcoming you back to Reality… Fuck fantasy. Your government is a fantasy. Your job is a fantasy. Your marriage is probably a fantasy. And unless you paid cash for your house or your car, you don’t own them… they own you. Fantasy. Welcome to the show where we don’t suck up to liberals or conservatives. Progressives or Libertarians. Screw ‘em all, and their dead-end ideologies. And screw corporate branding and marketing too. We do not accept advertising on this program. Welcome to the show where we talk about ideas. Not ideologies, not opinions… Ideas. Because America is suffering, from an apPALLing lack, of ideas, for how to shape our institutions, and manage our lives. In the marketplace of ideas, America is the most impoverished country in the world. The average Bolivian potato farmer, or Bangkok taxi driver, has more ideas in his head, than the average American.[/RG voice]

This episode is so personal I may chicken out and never post it. I’m trying something different with The Rude Guy podcast. It’s not sex talk or refried ideology. I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to provide something useful. I’m trying to be sensitive without being sentimental. I’m trying to present art, not news. Art lasts a thousand years, news lasts a week. This podcast is intended to be an audio archive of pertinent and useful ideas.

Since I did the very first show in Hawaii, two years ago, I’ve been wanting to do a show from the Third World. The REAL tropics. So here I am…

Back in the same Mexican town where I wrote my first, and most successful book: What Men Know That Women Don’t. I wake up every morning, in fear. I have a leaky heart valve, called mitral valve prolapse, and one of its side effects is frequent panic attacks. But that’s not the only reason for my fear. I feel like a runaway hot air balloon, buffeted around the globe, by winds of insanity, with no place to land. I’m lost. I have no home. No family. I’m trying to recover my soul. As I said in Podcast 38, soul is where you connect ideas with actions. If your ideas are disconnected from your actions, you have no soul. And that’s me. The Iraq War, and my mom’s death, have shattered me somehow. My pure hatred of George W Bush and Dick Cheney has POISONed me… Literally made me sick. They’re not worth it.

And frankly, America’s not worth it. The 70% of Americans who oppose the Iraq War do not oppose it because it was a dastardly, vile, shameful, murderous invasion, violating both the U.S. Constitution, and international law. They oppose it because they see, at last, that this war is UNwinnable. Fuck ‘em. I’ve had it. I went through the same shit with Vietnam. And that’s why we can’t get out of Iraq. Because… as I say over and over and over again in my books… opinions don’t matter. We inhabit a feminized society, where having an opinion, has taken the place, of performing an action. People are opposed to the war, but they won’t take fifteen minutes off work to go to an anti-war rally. Fuck ‘em.

And another thing I can’t STAND, is the Liberals PRAISing our soldiers for their SERvice to their country. What VILE hypocrites. Our soldiers are not SERVing the country, they’re desTROYing the country. They’re stomping all over the Constitution. If they really wanna help, they should surround the White House and arrest everybody inside, and cart THEM off to Guantanamo.

Like Vietnam, this war won’t end until the soldiers stop fighting it. And the more smoke we blow up their asses about how they’re serving their country, the longer it will take for them to REbel. We need to shame them, for scaring women and children. Call ‘em baby killers if that’s what it takes. Then fewer babies will get killed. And more of our guys will come home BEFORE they accidentally kill a baby, or a grandma or grandpa… then freak out from guilt and kill themselves. This is not a war. A war is where soldiers kill soldiers. When soldiers kill noncombatant civilians, it’s called murder. It’s called slaughter.

[Ride Guy wretch]
[bird?]

Anyway……..Every few years I go through a mental cleansing I call “falling apart”. It’s based on the idea that I have to get rid of the old mental shit, before any new inspirations can enter my brain. It’s always easier to do that in a foreign country, where you don’t speak enough of the language, to know what the fuck they’re talking about on the news, or on the TV game shows. [Ride Guy wretch] It’s a really great filtering system.

So, like on a Buddhist retreat, I’m left alone with my thoughts and obsessions. It’s frightening. Not fun. Frightening. All the shit that’s wrong with me bubbles to the surface. I can’t get awAY from it. Like I have “you are an asshole” sunglasses strapped to my head, and I can’t get them off. Maybe I beat off a lot for a few days. Then that loses its ability to distract me. I run out of books, get too tired to go fishing. Got no phone or TV or internet connection. All the ways I use to distract my self, from my self, disappear. I start thinking about what a total failure I am, which is, of course, egotistical pity-pot bullshit. But it is also, EXACTLY, why I make paintings, and write books. To fend off that feeling of uselessness and failure, and conGENital shame. Norman Rockwell, the famous painter said, that the instant he stopped painting he felt awkward, useless, and worthless. Like he might as well just curl up and die. His wife would invite folks over for Christmas or Thanksgiving Dinner, and he would greet them at the door. But an hour or so later they would ask “Where’s Norman?” and he would be out in his studio. PAINTing. I have the same problem. Shame. So do Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for that matter. I think they have it worse than me and Norman actually. Why would ANYbody want to be president of the United States???? Power? Fame? Those are just antidotes to shame.

This summer I met a guy named Lawrence Bennett in the South of France. A Brit, who used to play double bass for the Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra. He got Multiple Sclerosis, couldn’t play, and got pensioned off. But… he told me it took seven years for, quote, “the music inside my head to stop.”… “the music inside my head to stop.”

That’s what I want. I want the writing and painting inside my head, to stop. Yeah, I suppose I will make more art. But I am sick to death of being obsessed about it. I’m sick of the feeling that the only thing that gives me any self worth, is if I write or paint.

So maybe THIS is something useful. I’m certain I am not the only person with this problem. Maybe we can start a group for Recovering artists and musicians… and presidents, and even CEOs. We can call it Recovering from All of It, Anonymous. Our entire society is run by deeply shamed, insanely ambitious people. Hillary Clinton anyone? That’s why our country doesn’t work. We have a systemic problem… a problem that runs so deep, people don’t even see it. Recovering from All of It, Anonymous.

[bird]

Some of my listeners say I’m living the good life in Mexico. Maybe, maybe not. I’m gonna tell you the good and bad of it. I’ve already sketched in the fear and insecurity of it. The personal neurotic crap that bubbles into my brain. But there’s more.

The place I’m in is so goddam noisy, I can’t find a quiet place to record this show, to save my life. So I’m just gonna leave all the ambient crap in: birds, burros, dogs, roosters, motorbikes, trucks, street vendors, taco pop music, swinging machetes, crying babies, the whole village scene. This is how most of the world lives. Outside. With no windows. I’ll use some editing tricks to erase some of the crap. But I can’t erase all of it without erasing some of my own voice too.

[bird, donkey]

So… Here I am… back again… in a place where women carry baskets of food on their heads. Where the main talk of the men is fishing, and I can stroll down to the wharf any morning, and buy a fresh fish for two bucks. Where pelicans stretch their necks, and crash insanely into the ruffled waters of the cove… then perch on the gunwales of the anchored fishing boats, to dry their wings. Where the greasy smoke from broiling lobsters and shrimp, wafts through the streets at dusk. It’s Ernest Hemingway time… but he’s dead, and this is still here, if you search hard enough to find it.

They aren’t gonna send you here on a tour, to a homemade hotel, where you rent an ocean view room for nine bucks a night. And go fishing with the son of the owner, who built the place by hand over 20 patient years. We caught two twenty-pound Dorado this morning, Alvaro and me. The fish running and charging and leaping in backwards somersaults, over the sparkling blue water.

Dorado means golden, for the spectacular green-gold color of these dolphin fish, that hunt the mackerel in packs. We went far out on the Pacific in our little outboard motor boat, but the sea was a desert. So we came back in close to shore, and stumbled on the Fishermen’s Wet Dream. Thousands of birds smacking the water, atop thousands of silvery baitfish, that are driven up, from below, by the mackerel. So they’re trapped at the surface. And deeper yet in the clear blue water, shooting golden arrows of Dorados, exploiting the mayhem. Picking off unwary and crippled fish here and there.

Twenty years ago I smashed my ankle, slipping on Dorado blood and slime, on a boat off Pompano Beach Florida. Wrecked my ankle and my marriage at the same time. Once I couldn’t work like a mule, what did she need ME for? I’ve often said that my wife divorced me when I bought her an electric garage door opener… But this time we are careful to clean up the blood and slime after each fish we gaff, and beat on the head, and fling, thashing, onto the floor of the boat.

We fish from six to ten in the morning. That’s enough. That’s when the wind comes up and the waves get rough. So I take a long siesta, then go down to sit by the water and write. Right now I’m watching eight Mexican kids play volley ball on the beach… with NO volleyball net. They’ve got a ball but no net. No net. No problem. They just IMAGINE where the net is supposed to be, and give it a go any way. Works pretty well too. That’s one of the things I love about Mexicans. They have fully functioning imaginations. They know how to IMAGINE something into existence. It’s like they discovered quantum physics three thousand years ago. Of the infinite possible waveforms for a volleyball net, that exist throughout the universe, they simply collapsed, one, volleyball net waveform, here – inside their group mind, on the beach.

[bird]

In the market I see wheelbarrows of avocadoes and oranges and bananas. Women standing by buckets of fish, chopping them up with meat cleavers. Snappers and jacks and tuna and a big silvery blue Spanish mackerel. I spied a baby snook, and I bought it. Couldn’t believe it. SHOULD be illegal. Too small to kill. A snook is the best tasting tropical fish there is, and gets to be five feet long and 50 pounds, but this one was less than a foot, and less than a pound. I SHOULDn’t have bought it. Must’ve been caught by barefoot kids paddling around in the mangrove lagoons, instead of going to school. And of course, the snook tasted sublime.

[bird]

I’m living in a second story apartment that has no walls, only knee walls on three sides. I’m shaded by a mango tree, but my view of the hills around the harbor is blocked by the tops of the coconut trees, between me and the road below. I can almost reach out from my porch with a broom, and knock down coconuts, they’re so close. But the mosquitoes are brutal. Gotta have a mosquito net at night, and even a fan pointed at my feet in the evening, to blow the bastards away. But my little house is only 120 bucks a month, and I have a big porch for writing and painting. And Gracias a Dios, I’m NOT living in my car, THIS winter.

However the water has been off in the entire village for four days. And it’s not an accident. The electric company shut off the power to the water commission, because the water commission honchos have been pocketing the money they collect from water bills, and not paying the power bill. So the electric company shut off the power, and apparently the municipal water pumps don’t work.

This house, however, is built over a cement cistern, where about five days worth of water is stored, specifically to outlast just such problems. We can only bath and wash dishes quickly, but it’s OK for awhile. You would think the water commission would have back-up diesel generators for such eventualities, but no. Each individual house has to build its own emergency water storage system.

[bird]

The hardest thing to get used to here is the goddam noise. There are no windows… anywhere… you either got screens, or nothing. The staccato bleating of TV game shows, soccer games, and horrible Spanish pop music, where someone is losing his fucking Corazon every two minutes, suffocates the air between the houses, on the weekends, and most weeknights. And as soon as the amplified sounds go off at night, the dogs begin. Guttural, murderous, howling, growling… screaming at each other from ridge to valley. Hundreds of insanely barking dogs. Threatening to tear their rival’s throats out.

[record dogs barking]

They stop around 2 am. Thank god… Then the roosters start. Same macho crap, only birds this time, threatening to rip the hearts from their feathered enemies on the next block, for four hours… until the sun comes up, and the REAL birds start in, chirping and tweeting and reeling off stunning melodies… and the audio landscape becomes pleasant again. For a half hour, until the trucks and motorbikes start.

There are several good reasons to get up early in the tropics, and one of the best is simply to cease tossing and flipping and cursing, because of the insane screaming of animals. Ear plugs are a life saver. Actually, I learn to block out the animals after a week or two. But TV is not so easy. God I hate TV. (more…)