21 Jan 5
La Paz, Bolivia

Today I’m leav­ing an inter­net cafe I’ve been to a few times. I like to vary my inter­net cafe rou­tine, because if some­one knew exactly how much time I was spend­ing online, well they might think I’m a loser. Here trav­el­ing in a for­eign coun­try, and all I can do is go from cafe to cafe, from web site to web site. So I can pre­tend to be cool by just going from one to another.

This cafe is up a flight of stairs, and pretty “faux hacker.” Lots of black, dim lights, online gam­ing, and quite a bit of smok­ing. I like it, you know, other than the smok­ing. It’s over a cloth­ing store cater­ing to teen and early twenty year old girls, with sexy man­nequins all aver the place. As I pay for my inter­net time, I see that it’s rain­ing out­side. When it rains here, it rains hard, not the kind of rain we get in Seat­tle. Being in a bowl, the rain on the hill­side fun­nels down into the city, and there is rain run­ning down all the streets, a lot of the side­walks, pud­dles galore, etc. And every­body has their 8 sided eye pok­ers ( I think they are called umbrel­las by some people.)

As I’m leav­ing the cafe, I have to go around a guy stand­ing on the stairs. I slip, and it was glo­ri­ous — a per­fect, fly­ing karate kick to the mid­sec­tion of a man­nequin at the bot­tom of the stairs. The man­nequin explodes into as many pieces as it can — the legs went one way, the upper torso the other. Three peo­ple run over to pick the man­nequin up, but well, it’s in too many parts. One guy picks up the torso, but he can’t. As he’s pick­ing it up, one arm falls off, which he reaches for. As he went for that arm, the other arms starts to fall. He goes for that one to, drop­ping the torso in the process. I never saw the head again. I’m lay­ing there try­ing to fig­ure out how to be funny, but all I man­aged was a “des­culpe” — which I think means excuse me. And no one else ever said a word as I stood up, zipped my jacket and walked into the rain.