¡Chi, Chi, Chi, Le, Le, Le – Viva Chile! June 21, 2015
We have defeated Ecuador! Those stupid, useless, clubfooted Ecuadorians are crushed beneath our cleats. We are supreme! ¡Chi, Chi, Chi, Le, Le, Le, Viva Chile!
Anyone who knows anything about international fútbol, will recognize that I have obviously timed my Chilean visit to coincide with the Copa América. The America’s Cup is the annual competition between 12 national soccer teams from the Western hemisphere. This year Chile is hosting, and my second night in Santiago is opening ceremonies, followed by the first match between Chile and Ecuador. This is a big deal for Chile; in fact, I’m not sure that deals get bigger than this in Chile. I’ve landed in the middle of it; the stadium is blocks from my hotel. I watch the second half of the game on television. The postgame coverage shows fans gathered in the plazas I’ve visited hours earlier, and I can hear them live blowing those obnoxious soccer horns in the street.
Four days later we are pitted against Mexico. This time I watch the full game. Our heroic forwards score 3 times, but our buffoon of a goalie humiliates the nation with overaggressive play. And Vargas, damn him, he blows a goal attempt any schoolgirl could have made. The game ends in a tie. In two days we meet Bolivia. Those land-locked, toad-suckers haven’t a prayer. ¡Chi, Chi, Chi, Le, Le, Le, Viva Chile!
I noticed that American basketball came on after the soccer match. It got rather less attention. Hey, Lebron, why don’t you try a real sport!
(Update, we crushed Bolivia 5-0, a humiliating defeat. Those hapless mountain-monkeys couldn’t block a llama with a petrol truck, and they scored the fifth goal on themselves! – Be sure to catch our next match, June 24, 8:30pm against Uruguay. Uruguay is stupid.)
I woke up Sunday with a sore throat. Went bicycling anyway. The streets were nearly empty, and the city was wonderfully quiet. For Jeannette’s sake, I visited one of the homes of the great poet, and notorious communist apologist, Pablo Neruda. I wish I liked poetry, or at least communism. I ADMiRE poetry very much, but I don’t actually enjoy it, or at least I don’t enjoy respectable poetry. Most humiliating, I only like rhyming poetry with jokes; I like Shel Silverstein, Edward Lear and Edmund Gory.
Confessing a preference for rhyming poetry is similar to saying that you don’t “get" abstract art. Ooh, I don’t even like to think the thought. It makes me feel like I work in a factory, and vote Republican. But there it is, I’ve said it; generally speaking, I don’t enjoy poetry. I’ve tried many of the brand names: Whitman, Yeats, Dickinson, Eliot, Thomas, Ginsburg, Neruda. They put me to sleep. I fear some mechanism within my soul is broken.
Prithee, listen to my song, It’s very short, and not too long, When in thine heart, a secret’s found, Expressed in phrases most profound, With me, thou sharest not, I pray, For I won’t get it anyway. Oh, this is stupid. I’m sorry… I’m dreadfully ill. I’m probably going to die. It’s like this: I ignored the sore throat, and I spent yesterday riding and exploring Santiago. Today I have a fever. Yes, I have pushed myself pretty hard, and I’ve been living on beer and empanadas, and moreover, it is nearly winter so it could be a cold… But who am I kidding? I know what it is: I HAVE THE RABIES. I’m certain of it.
I suspect I was bitten by someone on the subway. I took it at rush hour to visit the Paraguayan consulate. A sardine metaphor would be appropriate, but I don’t know whether they eat sardines in Chile. So let me say that we were jammed together like a full jar of olives stuffed with a guinea pig. (Just to be clear, I have in mind one of those tall narrow jars, not some gallon jug you get at Walmart into which one might easily place a smallish guinea pig. And please note, this is merely a metaphor, do not attempt to insert an actual guinea pig inside an actual olive jar; unless you just happen to have an extra guinea pig that you do not need. And finally, please don’t confuse this metaphor with the similar, but obviously different idea of placing a full jar of olives inside a guinea pig. That idea is disgusting and disturbing, even if, a popular delicacy in Peru.)
Getting to the point, crammed together on the subway with literally billions of Chileans, I was very susceptible to being bitten. In fact, I may have bitten a middle-aged man in a business suit myself. We were passing through a zone of nibbles. It happens...
So now I have the rabies. I go to the pharmacy. I try to explain my situation to the clerk by barking. Unfortunately I cannot bark in Spanish so she does not understand me. I growl, and show my teeth, and demonstrate by biting my own arm. Apparently she thinks I’m hungry, and directs my attention to a display of over-priced Ding Dongs. Eventually she understands; she recommends throat lozenges and ibuprofen. I already have ibuprofen, but maybe the South American variety is more effective against rabies. I don’t know, I buy it.
I return to the hotel. Somewhere I have heard that when you get rabies, they give you shots in the stomach. I thump myself in the belly button a few times, but it doesn't help. I fear I am foaming at the mouth, it happens every time I take a sip of beer.
I anticipate death before dawn. I google “haiku” and make a final attempt to appreciate poetry.
Rabid guinea pig stuffed with olives and meaning very much nothing. The delusions are beginning to set in.
It’s a common philosophical idea that any phenomenon that is in anyway dependent on human thought, representation, or interpretation is metaphysically suspect, perhaps even illusory. The tranquility of Chile, the security of Santiago, the meaningfulness of my day in Las Cuevas, the moral inferiority of a country without wash cloths; all of these things are in significant part a function of subjective human evaluation. On reflection it’s not difficult to see that they may be convenient abstractions that we have manufactured, with only rather tenuous connection to anything substantively REAL Thus one might say that truth about these things is at best relative, relative to something like an individual’s perspective, or a cultural framework, or a linguistic practice.
If we want to be serious metaphysicians, we may be tempted to dismiss these things. As candidates for the really real, morality, meaningfulness, and every other phenomenon infected by subjectivity may be shut out.
But in contrast, surely there are things which are not subjective, and not dependent on human thought or belief or description. The Biblioteca Nacional de Argentina, IS where it is. A truck IS larger than a motorcycle, and if the two collide the motorcycle will fare worse. When I ran out of gas, I could not believe myself back into gas (I tried, it did not work). The sun rises on its own schedule, and is not affected by my entreaties. Today, June 15, 2015, an American dollar will buy 625 Chilean pesos, and there is no point arguing with the ATM for more.
There are features of the world that are not under our control; they do not yield to perspective or belief. Surely these are the sort of substantive things that direct our attention to reality. But on reflection, my list includes some poor examples. For instance, the value of money is one of the things philosophers, and economists, have worried about. What makes a certain piece of paper worth more than another? Indeed, in a world where most money is backed by faith in the economic system that prints it, and the vast majority of money exists merely as digital tallies in a complex international banking system, from whence arises value? Isn’t the value of money ultimately dependent on our beliefs?
But surely the sunrise is not dependent on our beliefs. Well, except that the sun doesn’t actually rise at all; that’s an illusion based on our perspective. Moreover, we can and do alter the time of the “sunrise.” We call it daylight savings time. Beyond that, we invented the whole schema of time-keeping…
But wait, behind the words, there IS a reality, no? There is a massive furnace in the sky, and our planet spins round it. Forget about the language we use to describe it; there is a foundation of physical stuff out there without which there would be nothing.
Or is there? Imagine you are God, and you decide to make the world. Do you go to the store and buy blocks? There are no stores, so do you make your own blocks? But what do you make them out of? Well, here’s an idea: Why don’t you just think them into existence? What if reality is merely ideas in the mind of God?
Seriously, if you’re God, what difference does it make if the stuff of existence is mental or physical, as long as everything fits together.You have the perception of a chair at the sometime as I do, and when I kick it, i see my foot hit the chair and feel the pain. As long as all these sensations are coordinated, what reason does God have for making actual physical stuff? I take it that this is more or less the thought that occurred to the great 17th century idealist, George Berkeley. It’s his fault that philosophers are always asked about falling trees and the sounds they make when no one’s around to hear them. I take it that Berkeley's own answer is pretty simple: there’s always someone there to hear it, namely God.
But if we remove god from the story, then we have to have the physical stuff, right? Well, what if what’s really real is mind. What if the primordial universe is composed of isolated points of consciousness, and all of our thoughts and experiences are an elaborate framework constructed and evolved to bridge the gaps between each other. What if the real big bang is the emergence of consciousness, and it metaphorically postulates a physical universe within which to understand itself. What if the physical world is the fairy tale we tell ourselves in childhood while we’re too immature to grasp the bigger picture?
Or again, what if our existence is merely a facet of the Godhead? And what if the distinction between physical and mental is illusory, what if they are neither dual phenomena nor resolvable one into the other? What if thought and object emerge from the same core of reality, exploring itself eternally?
Shhhh. Philosophy is full of such nonsense. Shhhh. Let’s do science.
The evidence for the reality of an external physical world is our ability to manipulate it; it’s the lights in this room, the computer on my lap, the ibuprofen in my bloodstream. It’s buildings and bridges and rockets to the moon.
But what a peculiar physical reality science appears to reveal. According to my computer there are more than 25 wifi networks available in my room. Why can’t I see them? And where are the cell phone conversations and the TV stations? They’re waves within fields of electromagnetic radiation; do you want to see the equations? And the air isn’t empty, it’s composed of molecules of gas, and within it are molecules of poisons, not to mention microscopic animals riding on microscopic dust particles. And molecules are composed of a zoo of atoms which are nearly completely empty space, except for a few odd perturbations in the zoo of quantum mechanics. Do you want to see the equations? And the universe itself is newly full of dark matter and dark energy, and what we see is merely the fingernail of the giant. Do you want to see the equations?
Science does what it does, and does it well, but it doesn’t do philosophy. Philosophy needs to tell a story that makes sense.
Notes:
1. The Chiean flag is oddly familiar. (Chile’s is older.)
2. In Chile, spicy food is not common; they’re not fond of chiles! Am I the first person to see this irony? (Turns out that “Chile” is probably derived from an Indian language, though the details are lost in time, and it has nothing to do with peppers. Next I’ll learn that Turkey isn’t named for Thanksgiving dinner.)
From skepticism about meaning and morality one can be drawn into skepticism about everything. I take it that most of the mid 20th century philosophers who make up the analytic canon, from Wittgenstein through Quine and especially Goodman and Rorty, all thought these thoughts and recognized these threats. They all struggled with what to do in the face of such overwhelming unknowing.
Quine appears to retreat into science. For all its flaws and inadequacies, science just is our best attempt to systematically describe the world. Any meaningful questions, even those about the nature of knowledge should be absorbed into science. About that which we cannot do science we are best silent.
Goodman recognizes that the sciences are merely one kind of story told for one of kind of purpose, and there are other sorts of stories with equal claim upon our attention. Or in Goodman’s language, we occupy different worlds when we participate in different aspects of our lives. The world of art is Goodman’s frequent example, but I think he might be willing to concede worlds of traffic, worlds of economic activity, worlds of gastronomic pleasure, etc. But Goodman is especially keen to point out that we mustn’t hope for a world of worlds; that’s what the metaphysician wants, and that’s what we cannot have. (I don’t agree.)
Most notoriously, Rorty suggests that we abandon philosophy, specifically metaphysics. To do philosophy is to believe that we can create an accurate model of reality. We cannot do that; we can get no deeper than the fragmented games we play with each other, the same in science and in all other endeavors. Fine to play games, but let us not fool ourselves with the idea that we have accurate representations of reality anywhere near by. Time to close down philosophy, and get on with the business of living.
I think Wittgenstein anticipates all of these views in his often cryptic way, but everyone has their own Wittgenstein.
In reading these thinkers (and others), I often sense that their relativism is never more than epistemologically deep (Wittgenstein may be the exception). Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and for nearly 400 years philosophy has been mired in questions about how we can KNOW anything at all. By the middle of the 20th century the verdict was in, we can’t, not where knowing satisfies anything like our traditional conceptions of certainty. You might well think, that’s all I’ve been on about myself. How can we KNOW what the world’s really like? If it turns out that we can’t, then maybe we should just shut up about it. There’s the world as we experience and describe it, and that’s all we’ve got. Let’s stop trying to complete the ancient Greek project of knowing the world as it is in itself. But I want to say something a bit more radical.
Quine’s retreat into science, Goodman’s caution against a world of world’s, Rorty’s outright rejection of philosophy, are all grounded in a sort of despair about knowing the world. They would undoubtedly reject my use of the term “despair," but I think it’s not necessarily wrong. Their positions all assert that we are captive within our own conceptual frameworks, and because we can’t hope to get outside of them we must be silent about metaphysics. To be sure, even talk of being outside of our frameworks is strictly incoherent.
But put this way, I think their positions reveal an unjustified assumption: Namely, that the origin of relativism is representation. They abandon metaphysics because we are in principle unable to describe the world as it is in itself. The key argument is that the the unique correct description of reality can never be given to us. It can only be created and constructed by our perception and interpretation.
The idea that the multiplicity of representation is the source of relativism exposes two dogmas of determinate structure:
1. The world in itself, the one that we cannot talk about, would in itself have some unique determinate structure. It is because it’s obvious that we can never get to that unique determinate structure that we must remain quiet, and give up on metaphysics.
2. Representations and things in the world as they are in themselves are fundamentally different. For one, representations can be inconstant, indeterminate, and imprecise; things in themselves would be necessarily uniquely determinate.
I reject both of these dogmas. I want to consider a much deeper origin for relativism; it’s not just that we conceive of things from different perspectives, it is as well, that existence is not determinate in itself. Existence is multiply conceivable because existence is indeterminately structured. It’s not just that our descriptions don’t capture the unique truth, but that there is no unique reality for there to be a unique truth about. In many important respects there is no unique way that reality is. About meaning and morality this seems almost obvious, but the phenomenon is not essentially different for any phenomenon.
But perhaps my rejection of the second point will make my game more obvious. The way in which philosophers distinguish words and world is almost perverse. We try to use words to model the world even as external reality always slips from our graph. Meanwhile we ignore the the properties of language itself, and fail to appreciate how language itself gives us insight into the nature of reality. Are some words mellifluous? If so, then mellifluousness is a property within reality for words are things in the world. Are some words vague or otherwise indeterminate? If so, then vagueness and indeterminacy are real phenomena as well. Words, and thought, and all forms of representation exist. There has to be room in our metaphysics for even the phenomena of language.
If our experience is any guide, indeterminacy is ubiquitous. It’s in all our thoughts and fears, our language and beliefs. Perverse then that we insist that existence apart from us should be determinate.
What if the metaphysical moral of relativism isn’t that we should bite out tongues, but rather that reality in itself is not uniquely structured? What if relativism isn’t a cautionary tale against philosophy, but an insight into the indeterminacy of existence itself?
Yes, metaphysics cannot conceive of itself as settling all questions for all time; in that sense, a world of worlds is a world well lost. But there is yet metaphysics to be done, directing our attention to the amorphousness of reality, it’s strangeness, it’s wonder, it’s complexity, it’s beauty.
Headlines: Marzipan; Miracle Cure for Rabies!
So I spend a couple days in bed eating marzipan, and I recover! It’s truly a miracle. I have always had faith in marzipan, but now its effectiveness is anecdotally proven for all time. (Unless it was the beer; it might have been the beer.)
Full confession: I only bought the marzipan because they didn’t have licorice. I really wanted licorice, but they don’t seem to have licorice in South America. I have asked at candy stores on several occasions: “Dulce de anís?” They have never heard of such a thing. Guidebooks often compare South America to Europe, but without licorice, I’m not seeing the likeness… God works in extraordinary ways. He deprived South America of licorice in order to spare my life from rabies with the miracle of marzipan. Hallelujah!
Today, Chile has fallen in my estimation. At this moment I place it somewhere between Belize and Hell, recognizing there’s not much space between the two. It has miserably failed the test of bureaucratic idiocy; a test which I am loathe to administer, but am on occasion obliged to perform in my role as simple human with interests. I went to the post office with a package to send home, a few odds and ends I’d purchased, and a few more I shouldn’t have brought with me. It took over an hour of interaction at the desk, and two repackagings. The woman at the counter was friendly, but mindlessly adherent to a ridiculous system.
I tried to do my part; I brought the package unsealed along with a roll of two inch tape. Immediately I had to remove the iPad; I was disappointed since that was the single most important thing I had hoped to return, but OK, I get it, batteries do occasionally catch fire, I guess. Understanding the principle, I voluntarily remove two small camera batteries as well. Then I seal the package, and we start the paperwork. I am supposed to produce an exhaustive list of every item in the box along with a valuation. When I mention the camera she looks surprised. Yes, there’s a camera, the one whose batteries I just removed. But she says there can’t be any electronics at all. Why? Because there can’t. I recognize that I too am being tested, so I try to remain polite and understanding as I reopen the box and remove the camera. Then I reseal it.
Now she notices that I have included “magnet" on the list, and magnets are prohibited. "No, this is a trinket, a refrigerator magnet,” I protest. She shakes her head and apologizes, but it’s got to come out. This time, I cannot conceal my contempt as I reopen the package. This time we remove each item and go through them one by one; every stupid llama, every stupid glow-in-the-dark plastic madonna, every stupid aspect of my stupid life.
There are certain things I do not handle well. We reseal the package again. The woman is kind and apologetic, which only makes the stupidity more grating. I do not scream at her; I do not stomp. In fact, I sign 3 documents affirming God knows what, and pay nearly $50 for a box which no longer contains the two most important things I wanted to send home. I offer her a sincere thank you, but in my eyes it’s clear that I despise her country and her culture.
I leave in defeat, but with a secret. There were actually two refrigerator magnets in the box, and we only removed one! I suspect the other will explode and bring down the entirety of the Chilean mail system. If I’m not mistaken, that’s how Che pulled off victory in Cuba, refrigerator magnets.
Having survived rabies, it’s finally time to leave Santiago. Wednesday morning I hit the highway heading South. It was warmish and sunny when I left, but by midday I’ve entered a Zona de Nieblas, and the Nieblas are out. Visibility isn’t dangerously low, but without sun, the termperature plummets. The ambient temperature gauge on the motorcycle flashes when it falls below 37. Apparently, it wants to remind me to shiver, but I haven’t forgotten. Eventually I stop and put on warmer gear. In truth, I am well-prepared, and I’m pleased that I have an opportunity to use the items I’ve brought. Except for leaving Las Cuevas in the low 30’s, I’ve faced very mild temperatures. With the tall windshield and full face helmet, I’m already more protected than I’ve been on any previous trip. My 23 year old self might have thought I am cheating, and sacrificing half the challenge by avoiding the full effect of the elements, but my 51 year old self thinks it’s pretty awesome. With the helmet and windshield, the world is calmer and quieter and noticeably less tiring, not to mention warmer.
The only real problem with the helmet is that you have to learn not to itch. I mastered not scratching the first day; knocked my hand into the face shield three or four times, and I quickly recognized that it was ineffective so I stopped, but figuring out how not to itch is far more difficult. I’m trying to think of it as a Buddhist challenge. I attempt to embrace the itch within my field of awareness, to become one with the itch, and appreciate its intrinsic itchiness from its own perspective. The itch itches, reality realitizes, we are all ephemeral fluctuations, reverberating in the flow of being… Sometimes, I just push up the face shield and rub my glove on my nose. Wow, that feels good.
I shouldn’t fail to mention that the bike also has hand warmers. As a result, my fingers reject Buddhism, and dabble in paganism. Appropriately bundled in wool underwear, the cold is almost pleasant. Of course, 2 hours later, it’s back into the upper 50’s and by the time I stop in Concepción, I’m uncomfortably warm. My fingers convert to Judaism.
Yes, I have made it to the Pacific coast. I had’t expected a pristine ocean paradise, but Concepción is markedly more maculate than you might imagine. It’s an industrial town, with an industrial soul, and a Chuck E. Cheese on the main thoroughfare. I observe a man hauling a load of scrap metal in a horse cart in front of a brand new Chuck E. Cheese. I don’t know what to say. McDonald’s and KFC and Starbucks, they call the world home, but beyond that I’ve not seen many American storefronts in Chile. Chuck E. Cheese? Is it here for the sake of alliteration: "A Chuck E. Cheese in Chile.” I have never been inside a Chuck E. Cheese because I don’t trust their mascot, a rat obviously drawn by an alcoholic car salesman; he’s not a good rodent.
I learn a little more; I am on a part of the Chilean coast struck by a Tsunami, and currently the beneficiary of government revitalization. In 2010 devastation; four years later, Chuck E. Cheese. My heart goes out to the people of Concepción. Tonight I may go on a mission to place refrigerator magnets all around a certain pizza place.
Actually, Concepción is not an unpleasant place. After finding a hotel a couple blocks off the main square, I wander the streets. They’re bustling with people, shopping and eating, and being people. I’m often struck by how many humans are tucked away in odd corners of the world. I wonder if these people recognize that they are tucked away in an odd corner? Is it possible that they think that living in Concepción is normal? Do they feel fortunate to be here? In fact, I am almost certain that most of them do. And why shouldn't they?
Is my life so much more special than theirs? Obviously, this is the type of question whose answers are subjective on more fronts than I can disentangle. Having a motorcycle, being an American, enjoying philosophy, none of these things is a good candidate on which to establish my superiority. Having more money? Is money the only thing that distinguishes me? In truth, quite a few of the people in this town have more money than I do. But what does money get you anyway? Perhaps the best answer is opportunities, but what is the value of opportunity? By typical American standards money and the opportunities it affords are inherently valuable, because they create the ability for individuals to shape both self and world. And there is no higher ideal in American culture, than the self-created individual. But in a world where other values precede, money and opportunities may generate mainly destructive chaos.
Born into a living catholic community, one is gifted a framework of meaning as a birthright. In that framework, family and tradition are the guiding principles. On what grounds would you sacrifice that structure for the egoistic thrills and spills of competitive meaningless individualism?
On grounds of truth?
It’s much more complicated than religion. We have communities of faith in the U.S., and within Chile there is a rising rejection of the church. (Chile’s female president claims agnosticism.) Moreover, religion is not the only source of meaning, and individualism is not necessarily a direct route to meaninglessness.
I blame it all on Chuck E. Cheese.
From Concepción I return North, hugging the coast as much as possible. Going South I rode highway 5, the interstate out of Santiago. Well, it’s similar to an interstate, four wide lanes, restricted access, but there are bus stops in dubious places, and people run across it more often than seems prudent. But it is fast. Except when it’s not. In many towns there are signs depicting images of men dancing with shovels. In these towns the vehicles all form a single line and slow to a crawl to watch the performance. Fortunately, motorcycles are exempt from paying homage to this tradition, or so I declare. I glide by on the shoulder. I’ve seen men dance with shovels before; it’s not that exciting.
I will spend three days retracing the same 300+ miles on lesser highways along the coast. But these are the highways I’m looking for. The last three days are a blur of images. Mountains, beaches, mists, wind, sun, farms, towns, bridges, speed bumps, fires, logging camps, olive trees, grape vines, agaves bigger than the bike, a million, billion, trillion things I can’t list, and wonderful curvy, nearly empty roads.
In two stretches I run out of pavement. It wasn’t a surprise; I saw them on the map, but the choices were to be adventurous or detour inland to follow the pavement. It was enormously satisfying to negotiate the dirt roads well. As it turned out, they weren’t really challenging, but it’s always hard to make the decision to abandon the predictable and safe, for the unknown. It’s great when it works out; it’s awesome when it pays off in unexpected glory. The unpaved roads themselves were interesting, but more importantly they kept me on the coast, including a stretch of highway between Bucalemu and Pichilemu. It was occasionally spectacular. For a short distance it followed a ridge with the ocean on one side and a wide valley on the other. And just to add magic, you could see White-capped Andes in the distance. I parked along the highway and tried to make space for a memory. Not a single car passed. It’s like I always say, you can find almost anything between two lemus.
The question ought to be: Why DIDN'T the chicken cross the road? I was taken down by a chicken in India. It ran in front of me, and I slammed on the brakes just as I hit a patch of loose gravel. I busted a head light, tore a gash in my leg, and bruised my ego. I have already vowed that I am not stopping for chickens on this trip. There was at least one chicken in Chile that didn’t get the memo. OK, I know that chickens can’t read, but what’s shocking is how bad they are at spacial reasoning. They will walk three quarters of the way across the road, and then when they notice your approach, they panic and rush back from where they came. I was expecting the action, and I tried to give it room… I didn’t even feel the hit, but in the mirror I saw the result, hysterical flapping in the road. I felt sick. Not so much for the chicken, but for its owners. I wondered if I should go back and pay them. I wondered if they would have pollo for dinner.
The rest of the day the animal kingdom worries me. I hear the blaring horn of an approaching truck. As I round a corner I see a horse in the road. Has he heard about the chicken? I slow way down. He wants to race. He’s running down the center lane; he turns his head and whinnies a challenge, says something about American Pharoah. But I’m not falling for it. I let him run until he’s tired, and then I dart ahead. But there are also cows who stand at the edge of the road gazing judgmentally, and dogs that charge out of nowhere barking wildly, trying to scare the hell out of me. Some succeed.
My ride into Val Paraiso deserves it’s own story, but I’m in Viña del Mar today, June 21. The rabies seem to be sneaking up on me again so I’m going to rest until they pass. Then I’ll head North to Peru.
It’s Father’s Day, Happy Father’s Day, Dad.