‘DYER MAKER JAH MAKE A JAMAICA ME HAPPY, ‘CEP…

The change comes over me all of a sudden, almost imperceptibly and without warning. One minute everything’s fine; then the next minute I’m losing it, my health, that is. First it’s just a funny feeling of myself being divided and separated with an ensuing lag time between the two halves, and then a little chill and involuntary shudder as my body tries to create some artificial warmth for itself through motion. Or maybe my body is simply trying to shake it off, deny the existence of the other now inside me. But it’s too little too late. I have no choice but to ride it out now, let it run its course. But what is it? It’s not some drug I voluntarily ingested and now I’ve changed my mind while waiting for it to ‘kick in’. It’s another being, another life form that’s found its home in me, whether by accident or design, sitting in the driver’s seat and taking over the wheel. They say the worst virus the world has ever seen, Ebola, still lives in some cave in Africa, just biding its time… in expectation. What’s found its home in me? Whatever it is, it’s wicked, splitting me apart, twisting my view of the world to its own diseased perspective “as all seems yellow to the jaundiced eye.” But I’ve already had HepA, so I should be knock-ulated for life. No matter, the important thing now is to stay warm, drink lots of liquids… and take a vitamin pill.

Some cold weather in Cuba is one thing; that’s not even the Caribbean proper. That’s only a stone’s throw from Miami and subject to major cold fronts coming down over the plains from Canada, one after the other, like planes taking their turns on the runway. Most don’t make it to Jamaica of course, nor Cuba either, running out of steam at around Orlando, maybe leaving a little patina of frost on the fruit crop at worst. But when you stay in your room in Jamaica to stay warm, not cool, and the AC takes a full day off, then you know you’ve got some bad weather. The East Coast has been getting battered all season, so I hear, while California has been getting fried, basking in record winter highs, so I tell my wife. This is good to remember, because I got chills to the point of going to bed early and getting under the covers. That’s not normal; I generally like cool weather. But it makes no difference when something’s got you in its grips, a bug or virus or something. I hate that feeling, that out-of-body experience that puts you beside yourself with fear and anxiety, not to mention unease and disease. The weather actually serves as something of a consolation, not just that I’m not missing anything, but that the chill is not only internal. It’s almost like the front came to Jamaica through me.

It’s no big deal I think, probably just a 24-hour bug, but it’s probably enough to keep me close to home for the remainder of my stay in Jamaica. So that means I spent three weeks in Jamaica total and never got out of Montego Bay. Oh, well. I did the same in Port-of-Spain for a week when I also had wi-fi and a cheap (by Caribbean standards) room. At least here I don’t have to piss in the sink. Actually that’s one of my favorite things while traveling, to actually put down roots in a place for a while. For me traveling is not merely an end in itself; it’s the background against which my life happens. It would’ve been nice to tour the island, but taxis in Jamaica are not cheap, with prices that would make a New York cabbie blush. How about $10 for the five-minute ride from the airport into town? Or $100 for the one hour ride to Negril? Prices might be negotiable as long as you’re not at the airport already, and depending on how well you speak patois. Hating pretentiousness I try to remember black Southern US dialect, complete without conjugations nor declensions and frequent use of the word pickaninny. Given the similarities, it just may be possible that this was the marshalling yard for African diaspora culture, given that slaves were typically ‘seasoned’ in the Caribbean before moving on to the big time in the US. When transcribed to Roman alphabet, Creole is easily understandable, so hardly qualifies as its own language as far as I’m concerned. Dem belly no full wit bacon fi dey only be talkin Jamaican. You neva git dat trip to Rio talking dat Krio. Dem mullah dey no issue no fatwa talkin dat patwa.

There’s local mini-van transport here, but they look pretty cramped and crowded, and seem to only do about thirty minute runs, so for Negril you’d have to transfer at Lucea. That’s a lot of hassle just to go look at another geek-ass tourist resort. What am I going to do with seven miles of beach? If I could run naked down it that’d be different, but I doubt that’s the case. That’s the first thing I did the very first out-of-country trip I took over thirty years ago to Yucatan. I ran down a deserted beach naked. The rest is history; now I look for simpler pleasures. That’s the nice thing about Montego Bay; it’s been surpassed by upstart cousins Negril and Ocho Rios and their $500/nt resorts. So I got lucky here, less than $50/nt and wi-fi coming in my window from next door. But now I have other health issues also, which I won’t go into at any depth. Suffice it to say don’t despair if you get an attack of hemorrhoids at the beach. Jump right in; the salt water works wonders. Who needs Epsom salts?

So I spend my last ten days of this trip getting as domestic as an old mother hen, even buying a rice cooker, so I can cook brown rice and pumpkin squash and callaloo and ‘ground provisions’ like yams and sweet potatoes, supposedly the secret to Jamaican runners’ success. Aahh… real food. Supermarkets here aren’t great, but I bet they’re better than Negril or Ocho Rios. Of course anything that boils water can also make coffee, and Jamaica’s got some of that too. It’s almost like home. I can make a drip coffee maker out of anything, but Styrofoam cups are the preferred raw material. So life takes on a certain regularity, taking a walk on the beach or a swim, walking into town for provisions, but mostly sitting right here in my room with my Internet and Cable TV and MySpace and Sype, doing business and talking to my wife and writing and reading and… just living, almost like the real thing. The big excitement was when I thought there was a Seinfeld episode that I hadn’t seen yet, but it was a false alarm.

Jamaica of course is old news in travel and music circles, reggae music pretty much single-handedly spawning the world music industry after Bob Marley’s death. Jamaica is now so dependent on tourism that I doubt they could do without it. This spawns a certain dependency, both economic and psychological. Though famous for its ‘friendly natives’, which is true, that’s not to be confused with the scads of hustlers pretending to be your instant friend. Aside from the simple offering of goods for sale, including ganja, they have a couple of interesting come-on lines I haven’t encountered elsewhere. One starts “I can see you’re not a racist” and the other “Hey! Remember me?” at which point the hustler claims to be the cook at a restaurant he assumes you’ve frequented or security at your hotel, i.e. everyone’s hotel. What, do they go to scam school? They’re still groveling, trying to get in the back door when the front door’s wide open, at least to any legitimate product of reasonably good quality that I actually need.

Michael Phelps would probably love it here. He could toke up all he wants and there’d be almost no place to upload a video to YouTube. It’s funny though. I smell ganja here all the time, literally ALL the time, but I’ve only rarely actually seen someone smoking it. The Phelps hubbub is ridiculous, though. If somebody wants to rag on him, why not blast him for doing a Rosetta Stone ad and never speaking a word of Chinese in the process, not a ni hao nor a wo ai ni nor even a simple chi fan ma? It’s a joke, but maybe appropriate for Rosetta Stone, which I consider to be almost a consumer fraud in addition to bogus linguistics. We all wish there were some magic way to simply Chomsky-like absorb a language, and Rosetta Stone plays and preys on that philosophy, but I don’t believe it. If you want to learn a language, crack the book. I didn’t notice Chomsky speaking perfect Spanish on Havana TV. He spoke English. Actually you don’t need a book now, much less a dozen. You just need a laptop and internet, ditto for guide books. You can shift my paradigm anytime, baby. To be continued…