Went day sailing today to

Went day sailing today to a little island. Gorgeous lighthouse two beaches and drinking coconut. Plus met friends of andy ross for pizza.

New mp3s

I made a couple new remixes today. It's the "San Francisco" one, and
listen to the others if you haven't yet, I guess? They are pretty fun.

http://wstr.org/nynex

Todo: download numa numa merengue.

Todo: download numa numa merengue.

Ps. My tent has coral

Ps. My tent has coral reefs five minutes away. Cool stuff. And i woke up to rain and a big rainbow yesterday. A bright rainbow!

First sunburn. Like my first

First sunburn. Like my first hangover. You play such rigorous defense that you begin to disbelieve in the threat. Then.... Bam. Notso bad tho.

Something about post by email is screwey

Something about my post-by-email system is screwy. Hopefully it will
get worked out at some point. That's why the posts have come in
floods, instead of gradually.

Remixes

I'm bored and on an island, but I have a laptop, and I can make some music. 

http://wstr.org/nynex/

By the way, ableton live is awesome, and you can try it out for free.  You can't save in the free trial, so to get your work out of there when it's done use Audio Hijack (for Mac) or Audacity (for Windows) to just record the audio going to your speakers to a file.  Thanks to Willy Shakes for sending me those acapellas.

Still in Margaritaville

So... the guy I was going to sail with found a girl to sail with ("no
gas, no ass, no grass, no ride" says Nick) but there's some English
guy who said he could use somebody along for the trip, so I should
still be able to get to St. Thomas. Then there's the weather issue.
Kinda wavey out there for the boats (and a bit rainy for us in tents).

This island is totally Margaritaville. Last week at the local
karaoke night I endeared myself to a bunch of puerto rican ladies by
singing "My Way" in Spanish ("a mi manera"). But I find out that, a
few weeks ago, in attendance at karaoke night was Jimmy Buffet
himself. A friend of mine was there. She got dragged into karaoke,
and was butchering (by her standards anyway) some song with her son.
Then she realizes the guy standing behind her was Jimmy Buffet. By
that time some drunk guys were singing Margaritaville.

Two things. First, this island is totally Margaritaville, and I'm
totally here for another week.

Second, if I had been singing in a karaoke bar with Jimmy Buffet, I
would not be returning home the same person. What a mind explosion.

Cloudy but friendly

Yesterday it rained while I was at the beach. Apart from being
slightly worried about keeping my laptop dry (it was fine in my
backpack) the rain was great. It came while I was attempting to body
surf and generally dick around in these big-ish waves (from the
blustery weather) with a group of a dozen or so people. Ran out of
the water, checked on the lappy toppy, and read a book for a while
under some beachy shelter. When it stopped the beach was mostly
empty, the sky looked awesome, and I think it even washed some of the
salt and sand off me because my hair didn't feel as salty that evening.

Because it's a small island and most people here are on vacation (of
the normal or extended variety) everybody's very used to doing each
other favors. So you can sort of insert yourself into the favor
economy and run with it. Yesterday I woke up and the evangelical
family insisted I eat breakfast with them (a cheesy, meaty, egg
submarine sandwich--very PR). I must be throwing off some serious
"lost soul" vibes, so they worked with that in a pretty touching
way. I practiced my spanish. They told me to watch out in Brazil
cause I could get kidnapped.

Walked downtown and an old ("not crazy, eccentric") lady who I'd
previously noticed some people avoiding asked me to help her walk to
the breakfast joint. She said she sometimes had seizures, but she
also clearly wanted company. She wanted to buy me breakfast, I let
her get me an OJ. Later in the afternoon I got a ride to the beach
from a couple that had spent the long weekend here and were killing
time before the ferry left. Surreptitiously drinking Heineken in
their new red rental jeep (there are tons of these in assorted
colors, so new and uniform that they look like toys and remind me of
Jurassic Park). An older couple gave me a ride back from the beach
as far as the restaurant they were going to. There I saw this couple
who I'd cooked dinner for on Friday (a motley crew dinner party at
the house of an author I'd met: Honeymooners from New Hampshire, a
husband-and-wife pest-control team (him: NYC italian / her: from PR,
had the intense warmth you'd have when talking to a TV audience of
children, reminded me of Sesame Street) and another mild mannered
couple in their 60s with an ex-hippy air). It was the last couple
who spotted me out at the restaurant. It had started to rain, so
they offered to buy me dinner and I let them get me a yummy pumpkin
soup, explaining that I had to run once the rain stopped, because I
had a date to cook for another family I'd met (her dad was in the
band that wrote "Ghost Riders in the Sky", her son plays xbox live
with a phone headset for making, talking to, and blowing-up-the-halo-
characters-of off-island friends). Ate my pumpkin soup, took off
down the road, and made it to the supermarket just in time to get
fixins for a delicious rice and black bean dinner for four. Yum yum
yum!

It's happened at least once that I'll leave my sunglasses in
somebody's rental jeep on a ride back from the beach, and they'll see
me again and be like "hey, we have your sunglasses".

Spent yesterday afternoon working on a couple dance mixes of R&B favs
(Rhianna SOS / Timberlake My Love) and I did a Jay-Z / Beyonce Deja
Vu remix yesterday. Maybe if I really get stuck here I can DJ my way
through the favor economy? That would be hilarious.

Reef Traverse

This one is for John Knapp and anybody reading Against the Day, on
the topic of the character "Reef Traverse". Prepping for the sailing
trip I read almost everything you could about sailing on Wikipedia.
Turns out that "reefing" is a nautical term meaning to reduce sail.
That is, when the wind is really strong, or a storm is coming, you
need to reduce your sail surface area or the force of the wind force
will flip or otherwise fuck up your boat.

Reef modulates between anti-capitalist dynamiter and resort-hopping
card shark, pulling back emotionally and strategically when things
get too hot. This "reefing" action defines the character in relation
to his family. The story centers around the approaching storm of
WWI, and uses a lot of nautical language (from the first line "single
up all lines") so the category works.

I think reefing is a good word for what I've been doing these past
six months. Getting a bit sick of it, want pick up my elephant gun
(so to speak) and start pushing more of myself against the world.

Culebra

Right now I'm in Culebra. Search for it on flickr, it's nice here.
I decided to extend my trip, give myself a week here, and see if I
could find somebody to sail south with. Put up a few flyers, made
some announcements on the VHF radio (old school boat chat room) and,
most importantly, went up and started talking to people in bars.

Got a cheap k-mart tent at k-mart (do they even have those in the
US?) and am sleeping in a sort of unofficial campsite on a field that
until two nights ago was unoccupied. Now a bunch of 'vangelicals are
staying in a trailer there. Kind of awkward at first, but then
they're like, yeah sure you can keep camping here. Last night
somehow the topic of my sister comes up and I find out about the
evangelical part...

"Mi hermano estaba a Philadelphia"
"Oh, I have a sister in Philadelphia..."
"Esta casada?"
"Well actually..."

...and they say "well you know in the Bible". I got out of it with a
smiling "I 'respectfully disagree' but I'll sit and let you talk to
me about jesus for the next 20 minutes until you get sleepy". Sodom
and Gomorrah also came up in relation to my mention of Brazil as my
principal destination. Ah well, it doesn't cost $20 a night to camp
there, and my shit is very unlikely to get stolen.

Anyway, somebody's going to take me along to St. Thomas (the next
island, and a place where tons of boats come through going south) and
I'll learn some stuff about sailing along the way. Turns out it was
the first guy I talked to the first night I rolled in here, all on a
mission. There's some Malcolm Gladwell article there, I think.
Since then I've been kicking back, and swimming every day.

Since I finished <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Against_the_Day">Against the Day</a> a couple days back (could barely
read the last 200 pages through the "this is so awesome" tears) I'm
kind of sick of cold chillin and started doing some internet work
(like starting this blog).

Scooter day ride

Took the scooter up into the hills outside San Juan. The roads are so, so, so steep and windy, and the landscape is either lush grass or rainforest. So basically it was like scootering through tuscany, only with cooler fauna and less self-importance. Like, in toscana they'd remove the wrecked cars by the side of the road. Here they are memorials or trophies (to whom is ambiguous).

The way houses were built into the landscape was incredible. And the houses had that amazing tropical quality where they are maintained just enough to be comfortable and not fall down, so they get beat up and the aesthetic gap separating them from the shrubbery around them narrows.

Stopped for a beer and to eat some peanuts, and a few guys at this little hill town bar saw my map and came over to ask where I was going. I road with one of them for a while (he's like, follow me) and then he gave me his sunglasses, cause I'd need 'em for the highway, he said.

In San Juan there's a beautiful low bridge across a lagoon, like that one in Miami you take to go out to South Beach. Blasting across it at 60 on a scooter is one of the best things ever.

Motorscooter night ride

Right now I'm in Culebra. I got here after visiting a friend of ours in San Juan, and coming out for a weekend. It was also the only place I could find that rented motorscooters. Scooted around the island for an afternoon, but then nervously took that rocket on the ferry back to the mainland.

Nervously because 1) it wasn't *exactly* kosher to take the scooter off the island I don't think (thought the rental agreement didn't say boo about it) and 2) I had only the faintest idea of how to get where I was going. Wanted to get back to Bea's house in San Juan. Had some directions off mapquest puerto rico (useless ones, it turned out) and had 50 miles of route-9 style highway to rock at night.

The scooters they rent on this island (almost all the scooters in PR, it seems) are made by this Chinese company. They've got big 4 stroke engines and go 50 without breaking a sweat, and 65 on a straightaway. It was Saturday night and I'm blasting along a highway from Fajardo (where the ferry docked) to San Juan, along the coast. Not used to going that fast, and the helmet I had didn't cover my face from the wind, so in my ears there was this Thunder. Damn. Anyway, I made it to San Juan, made it back to friend's house with her directions eventually, and the next day I had a scooter in the city. Freedom!

Let's see how this post-by-email thing works, and continue.

A travel journal for y'all

So it looks like this trip to Puerto Rico is expanding (as I hoped) into a broader adventure. I'm not sure when I'll be back, but it will be soon. In the meantime, I thought it would be good for those who care about me to be able to read what I'm up to.

A few first thoughts: I want this to be semi-anonymous (like, not show up in google under my name) so don't I'm not going to use my first name, and don't use my first name in the comments or anything. The second thing is, I want to be able to give you the straight dope on how I'm traveling, which would probably worry my mom. I'm going to be safe, but I don't want to worry her, so don't tell my mom about this blog. If you think this is unfair, I'll show it to her at some point in the comfortably distant future where she can believe my inclination to do stuff like this was a phase, I promise. Does that help?

Great, so let's get started.