He comes to a stop before a hut with signs of commerce. He gravitates to an open door, desperate now for a life-saving short bottle of rum, a beer, something, anything, fuel, sustenance. An old man leaning on a wooden post stuck in the mud there stares at the traveler, unblinking, expressionless, with the look of a dumb domestic beast. A silver dollar sized birthmark dominates the side of his balding forehead. He continues staring with eyes like a guilty rat. What could he possibly be thinking? Who gives a fuck? Jonathan stands by the door and waits. Nobody comes out. No sale. Growing irritated now under the guilty rat eyed gaze, he wanders off again, feeling those rodent eyes behind him, following him down the muddy road like a beggar.

He walks on as if he really knows where the fuck he is going. But it’s always worked before. He can feel his boots sinking sadly into the red clay earth that permeates his cells in this place which is like an unwelcome part of his own lowly being. And this red clay earth knows his despair, knows his interminable irritation, frustration and unease, taunting him in the subtle molecular frenzy manifesting all around him now, as if conjuring and creating these perfectly irritating visions of scrawny mutts barking behind rusty barbed wire fences where tough bald skinned chickens run in circles of futility like tiny alien beings. Naked children gape and point and giggle like a horde of demon runts as they follow the strange looking traveler. Their numbers grow steadily as he trudges along wearily like a pissed off plague-ridden condemned sideshow attraction.
Dull-eyed gaggles of locals point and gawk at him like a spaceman as he approaches a mud-hole of an overgrown plaza, only recognizable as such by the crumbling monument to some ignoble looking military honcho. Indians are sitting around. They seem to be too bored to stare or even see the traveler as he passes. And he is invisible again now, standing finally in front of a ramshackle building with a weathered hotel sign and a glaring bare light bulb surrounded by bugs. Jonathan ducks inside quickly, as though afraid it will fade away like a mirage if he were to wait any longer. And then he is facing a counter where a wrinkled old mummy of an ancient woman takes some limp bills from him and hands him a bundle. There is a folded hammock, a towel, a tiny bar of white coconut soap, he notes as he hears her grunting something unintelligible at him. She hands him a key, pointing a skeletal brown finger down an unpainted wood hall. He goes.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009

“When Mick Jagger came down to Brazil,” said Shaw, who lives in Rio, “he was a total wimp. He had all these bottles of vitamins, his special water, creams. All he cares about is his looks.” Shaw had been friends with Jim Morrison and he ran briefly with the Manson gang. He knew the wusses from the punks.

Article by Gerry Visco. Read Full article >here<

Pictures of Tuesday’s event will be up soon!

The long grey eternity of limbo on the river has eaten into the traveler’s brain like an infestation of invisible jungle termites by the time the boat finally reaches its destination. End of the line. He steps like a sleepwalker off this floating Purgatory onto a clattering dock crowded with boxes and bundles and pigs and chickens and people, all clamoring all around like overgrown ants of inscrutable purpose. The traveler walks away from the riverboat, his watery home for weeks now, to finally resume his travels by land. He walks away from the chattering wooden dock, swatting at the living cloud of tiny mosquitoes that intensifies its devouring activity as the day slips feebly into night like a drowning man’s final gurgle.

Jonathan’s dulled senses guide him like a water-logged compass along a primitive street now, aimless, sweaty, dirty, exhausted, stumbling forward, unconsciously swatting, swatting impotently at the intermittent alien humming in his ear as invisible insect predators battle each other for his poor weak life blood. Larger insects, millions of them, billions, trillions, more insects then grains of sand of all the deserts on all the planets of time are buzzing and rattling and chirping and singing and twittering in a mad blood-thirsty riot, a depressing dirge of the infinite malarial swamps surrounding this god-forsaken fly-spot on a moldy map of hell’s forgotten regions. Too tired to think, too tired to breathe, the traveler staggers like a broken war-battered refugee down a muddy road of primative thatched-roof buildings and huts.