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Curiosity Roving

The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.27 : Grinchmas

in which we commit to the afterlife

___________________________

Greetings and Salutations! Welcome to the twenty-seventh volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention. It is a truth universally acknowledged that an artist possessed of a great despondency must be in want of a project. Reader, here I am. 

New subscribers, welcome to the jungle and I hope you enjoy the show. All past volumes of this newsletter (since 2019!) are available in the Tiny Letter archives: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive

back in business

This particular letter is my grandiloquent year-end recap, and it ain’t much more than that, because I just found out that my distribution platform will be discontinued in February of 2024. It’s unfortunate; Tiny Letter has always worked for me, and I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to engineer a new production routine. For now, I’ll probably let Curiosity Roving gracefully ascend to the fine company of the 27 Club and take January to safely file away the aforementioned archives and my list of subscribers. I will consider whether I want to migrate and evolve the offering of this newsletter, or if I would perhaps prefer to do something else. Smoke ’em if you got ’em and pour one out for the homies; like every good beginning, it turns out this is also an ending. Yesterday, before I found out that I was losing Tiny Letter, I had already been down to the frothing ocean to share my beer with three very thirsty ghosts. The internet can’t hurt me.

For the tl;dr crowd: why yes, this letter is quite long. The first half is heavy and the second half is light. They’re both hilarious. Scroll to the part about making a list if you’d rather skip over the dark spots. For the rest of you: length is a promise, never a threat. If I’ve caught you at an inconvenient time, please come back later. I’ll be right where you left me.
 

make it spacious

I put Curiosity Roving on pause back in May, because I had experienced a series of bizarre life events that served me a fascinating buffet of contingent emotional and psychological scramble, so I wasn’t really able to Do Things. I wasn’t able to Do Things for a long time. I took a complete hiatus from creative work and instead I performed labour, and I drove my car, and I lived my life without observing it or mining it for content, and I gave myself a free pass to go absolutely batshit crazy. 

Have you ever heard of Kamikaze Fun Mode? That’s when you’re trying to kill yourself without the whole dying part, or maybe trying to die without the whole killing yourself part, so you start having as much fun as possible but instead of sparking joy it mostly just feels like a savagely raised middle finger pointed straight at the cosmos and the mirror and also everyone you know. I switched my settings to full-blast Kamikaze Fun Mode around mid-July. Imagine wrapping your lips around a firehose and telling your tonsils to duck; that’s where I’ve been living. Lately, I’m trying to dial that intensity back a bit, but I don’t really know where I’m going with it next.
 

make it crowded

In case you didn’t get the memo, let me just get this sentence out of the way: I was in love with someone, it was mutual, we were having the conversation about whether or not we would be spending the rest of our lives together, and then he died on my birthday while I was waiting for his phone call. Seven months later, I can tell you that there are many things that are terrible about surviving this kind of tragic and clichéd twist of fate. One of the worst is that silly rom-coms and soap operas and Korean dramas, with their over-the-top plotlines that should be a source of happy escapism, are now going to remind me of the worst week of my life for the rest of my life – or until something happens that is even more surreal and potentially worse. Another thing that is really, really lame is that I now have to produce The Sentence all the time because I realize that I’m acting deranged, and not only is it the easiest way to simultaneously excuse my behaviour and stymie further questions, it is also the plain truth, albeit a somewhat an ugly truth, and I’m still wearing it like a badge, because it really just ties the whole look together. 
 

self-portrait

I don’t want this very unpleasant story arc to become the most interesting thing about me, but to be blessed with my practiced fluency and choose to say nothing would be miserly and dishonest. I’m acquainted with two other women who experienced something similar; they appear to be just as insane as me, and as far as I know, they didn’t write about it. I wish they had. We don’t have enough writing on the pure lunacy of grief. We don’t have enough common ritual around grief. In Western culture, we spend our lives alternately fleeing from and in combat with the aging process, death, pain, loss, unhappiness, and the entire raging cohort of the abominable; always in stubborn refusal to acknowledge that all of these are important. We are estranged from death and we have stigmatized and cheapened grief with the capitalistic narratives of progress and improvement, and that is why modern people are so damn stupid and useless and delusional about it.

I keep getting well-intentioned personal recommendations from fine, lovely, highly motivated individuals about what I should “do” to “feel better”. Nobody has ever asked me if I want to feel better. What people don’t talk about, and what I have never seen in print anywhere to date, is that in the profound and permanent absence of someone irreplaceable, grief can become the last bit of raft that we cling to, because to let it go is just unthinkably lonely.
 

portrait of an absence

I beg your pardon for the sound of my eyes rolling back in my head throughout those last two paragraphs, but frankly, I feel entitled to my commentary on this dark matter, because I think I can tell you about it more stylishly than just about anyone, and I think you deserve to know. Still, I’m not going to squander more than half of my word count pouring highballs from my open bar of personal hell; it’s December, let’s make a list! 

In the time since my last newsletter, I’ve been a cleaning lady, a riverside kitchen wench, a spare part for various processing facilities, an audio technician, a professional cat cuddler, a trash fairy, a workshop facilitator, a DJ, a filing assistant, a farmhand, a background actor, a part-time girlfriend, and a substitute teacher. I continued writing, but only mechanically. I spent the summer on the West Coast; an enchanted kingdom that numbers among the world’s finest regions in which to drive your body like a stolen vehicle. In October, I finally pulled a long-awaited trigger and bought the flight to Taiwan. I’m writing to you today from the north coast of the island in the village of Qianshuiwan where I am subletting a charming seaside apartment from a friend who has stepped out to see the world.
 

home-for-now

This year has seen the refinement of a niche societal role in which I serve as a responsible medium-term babysitter for adult lives. When I untethered myself from the maypole of the mainstream in July of 2022, I wanted to work with the magic of being available. I know myself to be competent and versatile, and I wanted to see what assemblages of life would arrive if I provided enough space to welcome them. As it turns out, there are plenty of fully-fledged adults who want to flit away from their obligations – pets, jobs, plants, rent – for a little while, and I am usually well-positioned to casually fill in until they get back. In the last twelve months, I lived with three dogs and ten cats in eleven different spaces on three different continents. I bought my groceries and did my banking in Spanish, English, and Mandarin Chinese, and somehow sustained my own goofy existence under twenty different job titles. I just checked and I’ve been living in the wind for a little over five hundred days now; small wonder I’ve been feeling a bit tired.
 

common Box Kitty in its natural habitat

When new acquaintances inevitably ask what I “do”, I have three standard responses. The first is, “I’m in the business of this and that.” The second is that I have a desk job with the Bureau for International Women of Mystery. The third is that I’m currently reviewing the terms and conditions of my deal with the devil, but it’s taking a long time because the whole contract is written in Gothic-Cyrillic-mirror-lettered-invisible-ink and the font is really small and his advocates are dead tricky. All of these are equally true. Sometimes I also call myself God’s Favourite Clown or talk about being a full-time silly goose or tell people that I’m LARP-ing some form of employment in exchange for cash, but on those occasions I am usually being facetious. When I have to do paperwork, I call myself an artist, because that is not a lie and the word fits in the box.

I touched on a similar theme for my post-COVID reboot in V.18 : artists have a different bargain in this lifetime. We’re not really allowed to avoid the art. We can’t not do it. Not for long. There are too many consequences. We eat ourselves alive without it. The art will and must look different from one season to the next, but we absolutely have to create it, if only to throw some tinsel and blinky lights on the great seething emptiness that is the horrifying fact of existence. This is our basic agreement and our sacred duty.
 

okay fine if u say so

I’ve been watching a Taiwanese TV series on Netflix called At The Moment. In the seventh episode, the female lead is leaving her husband and her home, packing keepsakes into cardboard boxes, bathed in the blue haze of a Taipei afternoon. She says, “What we don’t want to face is the happiness that we once promised. In the end, only endless patience is left.” Then I read a tweet that defined the language of loss as “the dictionary”. As all of my ESL students already know, if you can still point to a thing, you don’t need a word for it. Anything for which we have a word is something that someone at some time has lost and missed and named and screamed for in a desperate effort to recall. Then I read an interview with David Byrne in which he discussed the Western cultural emphasis on individuality and suggested that free will might be more dictated by social context that most of us are willing to admit. He examined curiosity and said, “there’s a growing sense that lots of different things in the world are related to one another and connected in ways that we are still discovering. It’s not quite religious, but it is amazing.” And then I wrote this paragraph to let you see what I see, because that’s one-twentieth of my job.
 

look at it

Life can be framed as a long series of “before-and-after” snapshots; we undergo processes, and we eventually become. Sometimes it’s so gentle that years go by before anyone notices, and other times it’s a full-scale pyrotechnic pageant of the phoenix that stops whatever we thought was important exactly where it stands. Each of us is poised, at all times, on the honed and glinting edge of a chance that we might, at any moment, abruptly go through the looking glass and enter a new reality of “after” that obliterates our access to everything that defined “before”. I’m only thirty-three so I don’t actually know much about anything, but in my experience, this much is true. Life is a dynamic place to live.
 

he would know

I’ve spent the last few months watching myself surface slowly and carefully from the birthing cauldron of transformation into the harsh prospect of another “after”, and now I’m relearning how to operate myself. This version of me has deeper frown lines and a vicious new smile to showcase her sharpest teeth. She is categorically undateable. Her desires are few, obscure, and highly specific. Her patience is infinite but her tolerance is selective. The labyrinth of her heart defies direct approach. She says “no” a lot. She is more bitter and more cocky and so much more evil and so, so much funnier. Her commitment to the bit is as firm as it is demented. She wants to be scary and disliked and notorious while also being sweet and absurd and desired. All of her extremes are now more extreme. She is equally more fragile and also stronger. She keeps a terrifyingly dense black hole in her lap and enjoys its cold company. The black hole is also a fuzzy little kitty; it purrs. She craves structure to support the interminable complexity of Things. She is experimenting with feeling entitled. She will tell you that the opposite of grief isn’t joy; it’s forgetting. She still laughs the hardest with the people she loves the most. She hates Christmas but she adores the Grinch, and she is at peace with the reality that the one necessitates the other.
 

noodle will always love you

Reader, if this proves to be the end, thank you for being here with me. Special thanks to the 42 subscribers who have been with me since May of 2019. It’s nice to meet you, still and again, in this latest quotidian theatre of all that is myriad, mystifying, and malleable. Thank you for joining me on my magic carpet made of words, each of which you may read as a summons and a prayer.

Tiny Letter is dead; long live Tiny Letter. I may see you in the spring, but we all know that it will never be the same; nor should it be. If this is your season of celebration, I wish you massive happiness with your treasured people. May your fun feel like fun. Pour one out for your thirsty ghosts and then pour one out for me.

Until next time, stay curious.

— Rose

—>>>>||:||<<<<—

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Curiosity Roving

The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.26 : Lone Star

in which we surrender to change

___________________________

Greetings and Salutations! 

Welcome to the twenty-sixth volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention.

In the time since my last letter, I have been out and about in Austin, Texas. I’ve been to the Capitol and to Campbell’s Hole, to the Shiner Saloon and Dirty Martin’s 97-year-old burger joint. I found the Yellow Rose of Texas at the end of my street – it’s a strip club – and I heard gunshots from the adjacent construction site. I’ve been to three art nights at Highland Collective, to the Commerce Gallery of Lockhart, and to the Shrine of Colette Club. I’ve been catcalled on 6th Street. I partied on every level of the Neon Grotto and gave myself a butt blister rocking the courtyard horses at Mama Dearest. I picked up four days of work as a keyboardist with the Goddamn Comedy Jam at Moontower Comedy Festival, learned thirty songs in five days (some of them by sauna osmosis) and delivered not only an entire evening of Billy Joel (Scenes From An Italian Restaurant inclusive) but also the Bohemian Rhapsody singalong with which we closed the event. I sweat through a weeklong free trial at Corepower Yoga. I took in a concert at Emo’s featuring Jessy Lanza and Yaeji, and was abundantly satisfied to see a lineup of all-female artists dominating a night of music. I let a comedian pour me a bottomless coffee on a chilly Sunday morning. I applied for the oddest jobs that Austin Craigslist has to offer. I bathed in the humid hipster ambience of ten thousand Edison bulbs. I splashed with the divers of Barton Springs and dined in the darkest corner of Casa De Luz. I opened a dating app for the first time in four years and met a number of handsome, articulate, witty, adventurous people for coffee, drinks, dance classes, and other City Things. I’ve stacked up hugs and high-fives with three more old friends from Taiwan. I wrote twenty-odd poems and my first song since 2020. My recycled phone number landed me in a family chat with eighteen people who welcomed me as their new cousin. I celebrated my thirty-third birthday on May 1st, and one of my bar-none best and closest VIPs departed this world on the very same day.

I could write about Texas – believe me, I have stories – but my heart isn’t here, and no story compares to the legend of us.

singing you skyward

I lived with Jesse for nearly two years through the pandemic. We created a paradise of two people. Our secret language was intricate. Our souls were deeply mated. We doted on each other. He always felt like home to me. I had left him at the end of July because we were spiralling into a purgatorial misery and I wanted to disrupt the pattern, but he visited me twice, most recently in Guatemala, just two months ago. We maintained a constant online banter of halfwit inside jokes. We spoke regularly, and often for hours. My backpack holds a selection of small and specific gifts that were intended for him, and a few that he had given me. I always ached to return to our garden of earthly delights, and I was planning to pay him a cautious visit at the end of this month. I was searching for a way to be together that wouldn’t destroy us both. There were some very real problems in our relationship, but we loved each other madly, greedily, vibrantly, generously, indulgently, patiently, mutually, and in complete inclusion of our many respective flaws. I was open to the possibility that we would eventually be reunited and share our stupid little lives once more. I know he wanted that.

homeslice

On the morning of my birthday, we were trading texts to schedule a phone call. We agreed to do it later, because we both had some business to handle. Moments after he sent his last message to me, Jesse collapsed at home in his living room. He had willfully cultivated a social contract that allowed him to drop off the map from time to time, so nobody worried about him for a while, but when I hadn’t heard from him by the evening of the next day, I knew that something was wrong, and I knew that it was out of my hands. His body was found by a friend on May 4th. I walked out of a very corporate yoga class to find an email informing me of his death, and my world exploded into shrapnel and grief.

two become one

I’ve had many visits from Jesse this week, in the form of red birds, weird bugs, creative inspiration, and one incredible Tiger Swallowtail butterfly that played in the traffic with me for nearly ten minutes. He will always be present to me in everything that is beautiful, playful, mischievous, and classic. He loved nature, and now he has become nature. He was a deeply attuned, vaguely mystical entity, and he was loved by many. It was the highest compliment and privilege to share this long season of my life with such a good man, and I am a much bigger and better person for having lived through these last years in his company and under his influence. We really got the best of each other; and I mean that both in the sense of high quality and also of reciprocal defeat. I wanted a lot more time.

to the meadow

And there are mixed feelings. Now that he’s gone, I’m able to love him with a wholeheartedness that was harder to access when I had to actually cope with the fallout of his copious shenanigans. I wish that I had spent all of the last nine months glued to his side and showering him with unconditional love and care, but I know that by getting out of the way, I made it easier for him to make a final lap of his own social circle with more lightness, without the nagging complication of a woman at home, and it was the right thing to do. The loss would be much harder if I hadn’t spent this year investing in connections and experiences with my own wider network, and it would be much harder if we were still living together. I’m glad he got to experience me in my element and my true form, as world traveler extraordinaire. There’s an odd sense of narrative satisfaction in the discovery of how our story ends, and a kind of graceful perfection that settles on a relationship that no longer needs to be practiced. There is new spaciousness on my horizons now that the question of how to approach our big, big love is no longer in the air. There is gratitude that I will never have to weather another argument with him, and we will never hurt or betray or confuse each other ever again. There is black humour in the final cheeky bird-flip stunt of dying on my birthday while I waited for him to call – no gifts this year, but he sure did give me a choice anecdote. There is comfort in knowing that this gorgeous man, who carried so much pain through this life, has arrived at the end of his suffering. We had spoken at length about the future during our recent visit. He was staring down the barrel of some big changes in the coming years, and I’m not sure that he actually wanted to make them. I do think that he was ready, as much as one can ever be. 

under the bridge downtown

Death was the only force that could have ended the hypnotic bloodbath of our ardent combat, and I think maybe we were ready, too. One of us had to die before the other would know peace; now the plot can move forward. The peak absurdity is that I am as eager to claim him in death as I was reluctant to do so in life; I went straight from feeling myself brashly single to feeling myself positively widowed. I had left him last year partly to demonstrate to both of us that I would be fine on my own; it’s an empty victory, but it would appear that I have proven my point, perhaps to excess. And I know that I will – actually, eventually – be quite fine.

made for walking

I’ve been humbled by the swell of support and care and affirmation that I’ve received from our mutual friends over the last week; we built our bond at a time when the world was completely locked down, so it always felt quite insular and private, and I’ve been genuinely surprised to find that so many of his people were aware of me. In losing Jesse, I’ve gained a community that seemed strangely inaccessible to me while he was alive, and I’m grateful.

When I rebooted Curiosity Roving in September, I had just lost my darling father. It is such a sick and fitting joke that I am closing this cycle with the death of another cherished companion. Reader, this is the end of the road. The cosmic clock has run out of time and I have nothing more to give. Thank you for sharing this journey with me. If you’ve enjoyed my offering, please consider making a donation in support of the art – links are at the bottom of this letter. From the crossroads, I take my bow.

big shrug

I’m flying to Canada this Saturday, where I plan to get my car back on the road and go for a long, leisurely, unexamined drive. If you’re on my route, I hope we can catch a visit. I have work in Victoria, BC for the months of July and August – come and see me if you can. Following that, my canvas is utterly blank. I’m feeling very sad and weary, but I’m still excited to find out what happens next on this wild ride. I’m living the changes in loving celebration of life’s many unexpected curveballs. Your friendly neighbourhood wordsmith-adventurer will be back in action when the time is right, and we will once more kiss the joy as it flies. 

Hug your friends. Love your people. Live your life. Savour the dance.

Until next time, stay curious. — Rose

—>>>>||:||<<<<—

send this grieving bitch a little treat : 

www.buymeacoffee.com/curiosityroving

Venmo: @LRose-Goossen

PayPal: GooseRoses@gmail.com

Curiosity Roving

The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.25 : Great Divide

in which the tocks are ticking

___________________________

Greetings and Salutations! 

Welcome to the twenty-fifth volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention. If you’ve missed any of my previous letters, they are always available in the archive: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive

In the time since I told you all about life at the lake, I was mostly just living it. I also enjoyed some wildly serendipitous opportunities to connect with an unexpected selection of friends and family, traveled to a couple of stunning scenic sites, and, facing both facts and music, roused myself from a very pleasant and healthy state of torpor to dismantle one version of heaven and chug along on to the next weird chapter in this long strange trip. I’m shipping out this letter from Austin, Texas, where, by the grace of God and my tax return, I will be installed in a housesitting job with three charming cats, one of whom shares my name, until sometime in May.

goodbye and hello

We are halfway through National Poetry Writing Month – in which I and thousands of other people around the world attempt to write one poem every day – so when I am not kitty-wrangling, I am fully employed in mining the murky depths of memory, imagination, and word on the street for the truest expressions that are available to me. If I wax poetic today, please indulge and excuse me. If you’d like to join in on the fun, it’s at napowrimo.net.

Back in December, when my plans came to an end, I had three ideas for what I might do next. I wrote them on a piece of paper with the intention to make a list of pros and cons that would lend some practical and structured thought to my decision. I never made those lists – instead, I made an intuitive decision grounded in feeling that ultimately proved to have hilarious results – but I kept the paper, and in the end, I’m doing all three of those things: Costa Rica, Guatemala, Texas. Clockwork. It’s a thrilling and surreal stunt to pull, and I’m grateful. Especially because it’s still snowing in Canada.

destination = destiny

I’m living in Girl Paradise. The usual inhabitant of this space has gone to Coachella to run a bike taxi, leaving me as temporary custodian for the feline residents (Rose, Felipe, and Paloma), as well as her piano, her sauna, her bathtub, her crystals, her jungle plants, and her record collection. The place is what we would call a wendy house in South Africa; basically, a little house behind the big house. It was built in the 1930s, and has been extensively decorated in colours, patterns, textures, and trinkets. I’m still recovering from the four days of travel and chaos that were required to get here and get settled. It’s a relief to be back in Anglophone territory, and I’m excited to see my nascent local personality coming into its own. So far, Texas Rose is flamboyantly polite. If you have Austin recommendations, I will take them!

time-forgotten

People who see my social media have historically been inclined to ask how my life “works”. Like every other life, I guess it does and it doesn’t. Magic, risk, uncertainty, instinct, effort, commitment, deep trust, personal connections, willing surrender, and a few well-honed skills all play a role in the alchemy of making the Thing Happen. Honestly, it’s so messy over here – my mail, my money, my social circles, my paperwork, and my favourite things are splashed around the world, and the geography constantly interferes with access. I even get spam emails in six languages. I really wouldn’t mind consolidating my existence a bit, but given that it took fifteen years to create this glorious mess, I reckon it might take at least another ten to clean it up.

i’m looking through you

I live with the guilty pleasure of augmenting my life with many short-term rentals. By that I mean: when I need something, I buy it, and I use it, and then I abandon it to a fate independent of me. My cultural heritage is Mennonite, and we are a notoriously frugal people, but the reality of carting a life around from place to place is that you become accustomed to dropping whatever gets too heavy. In this season alone, I’ve blown through seven SIM cards, three yoga mats, three wallets, two mini-backpacks, untold bottles of cooking oil and shakers of salt and bags of coffee, and a couple of excellent purpose-purchased costumes. I’ve played bumblebee in the pollinating flight of English-language books through hostels, coffee shops, and Little Free Libraries. I’ve sunk hundreds of dollars into ATM fees, currency exchange, and onward tickets that I had no intention of ever using, and I’ve accepted that as the cost of doing business. Over the last few weeks, I threw out all of my shoes, socks, and underwear and completely replaced them. It took me just seven months to completely obliterate my high-end trail runners – a new record. Some people count steps; I count pairs of shoes.

On the other end of that extreme, I am also the proud owner of a large and carefully folded plastic bag from Qatar Airways that I’ve been carrying around for eleven years. You gotta know when to hold ’em.

passion is the name

Reader, I’ve been making plans again. Next month will mark the four-year anniversary of Curiosity Roving (!). I’ll write one or two more volumes, and then I’ll go on hiatus. It’s a good thing I know how to let a good thing go. Birthday number thirty-three is fast approaching, and certain astrologers have promised me the best year of my life. To that end, I’ve been investing in the future: I’ll be working and living in Victoria, BC for July and August of this year. I just put a very large deposit on a very beautiful apartment in a very good location. Welcome to visit! I’m also looking for casual employment in June and September. Obviously, I am willing to travel for the right opportunity.

as above, so below

If you’ve been enjoying the content that I create – this long and convoluted epic poem slash durational performance that is my life and the way I choose to share it with you – please consider supporting the art. I have links to my digital tip jars on three different platforms at the bottom of this letter. I lived many years as a street performer; the internet is now my street corner. Spare change?

If you yourself have experienced financial stress around basics such as food and shelter within the last six months, please do not donate.

next in line

I recently rewatched George Roy Hill’s 1973 classic The Sting. In the final scene of that film, Robert Redford and Paul Newman have, with great effort, pulled off a very elaborate, successful, and profitable caper. They exchange a few words, instruct the many collaborators to collect their take, and shamble out together, empty-handed. Reader, this is how satisfied I am trying to be. It’s always worthwhile to do a thing well, and with style.

The plain fact of it is that nothing compares. I’m a hopeless junkie for the road, for the window seat, for the sense of possibility, for the chilly dawn and the sweat of a hard ascent. I love to wonder what might happen next. I love to open the door, walk down the street, turn a corner, and find out. I think I might do that right now.

Until next time, stay curious. — Rose

—>>>>||:||<<<<—

www.buymeacoffee.com/curiosityroving

Venmo: @LRose-Goossen

PayPal: GooseRoses@gmail.com

Curiosity Roving

The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.24 : Lake Life

in which we make a splash

___________________________

Greetings and Salutations!

Welcome to the twenty-fourth volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention. To new subscribers, my finest hi-hello-and-how-d’you-do. If you’ve missed any of my past volumes, they are always available in the letter archive: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive

I’m leading with gratitude, as is often the best policy. To my supporters: Max, Flossy, Joy, Gloria, Nadège, Jim, Neesha, Ayushmaan, Vincent, Lane, Marcus, and Andrea : my heartfelt thanks for your donations to my cause. I got two very cute emails from the platform with the subject line “Your wish is granted” when my two wishlist items were financed. It’s been emotional. I’m safe, I’m comfortable, and I’m feeling the love. Thank you.

all of the above

I’m also feeling very, very tired. It took two months of high-stakes tightrope stunting to find a place and a set of circumstances that would allow me to stop for a minute. I found it and I’m taking a break. It is a time-honoured truth that my body will wait until I send the “relax” signal to serve the back-taxes on my energetic output, so I’m also recovering from my third bout of yeah-that-was-probably-COVID, taking a break from material vices, reading on the various permutations of good and evil, processing grief and other feelings, watching objectively bad movies with great enjoyment, striving to understand the basic tenets of fair play in this neck of the woods, and allowing myself to be so deeply drained. I observe a semblance of a healthy routine, and every so often I take my trumpet out to play.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

i live here now

Welcome to Panajachel, Guatemala. We’ll probably just call it Pana, because everyone else does. Population 15 000, elevation 1597 meters above sea level, located on the northeast shore of the famed and sacred Lake Atitlán.

This is culturally Mayan territory, ancestral home of the Kaqchikel, the Tz’utujil, and the K’iche’. It was all built by volcanoes, and it carries a fitting sense of grandeur. Aldous Huxley, in Beyond The Mexique Bay, famously described the lake as “too much of a good thing”. It is honestly a bit excessive, even for the most indulgent and permissive of aesthetes. Last month, I was stunned by the perfect cone of Volcán Arenal in Costa Rica, then I arrived here and laughed because this looks a whole lot like that, but with two bonus volcanoes and a much bigger, deeper lake. On a clear day, it is a limpid, lucid dreamscape.

soup cauldron

The lake itself is a caldera that was formed by volcanic activity about eighty-four thousand years ago, and it is more than three hundred meters deep. It is fed by two rivers, and it does not drain to the sea, instead finding its equilibrium through seepage and evaporation. The terminology for this kind of isolated water body is a terminal lake, or an endorheic basin. The area is also alive with seismic forces, and the last large earthquake, in 1976, actually fractured the lake bed and caused significant drainage. There is at least one sunken city, preserved from the Mayan settlements of two thousand years ago and recently declared a UNESCO heritage site, which is thought to have been abandoned when volcanic activity caused the water levels to rise. 

truly a bit much

Following the first supervolcanic event that built the lake, the later, smaller eruptions began to embroider the edge of the ancient caldera. San Pedro came first, and ceased eruption about forty thousand years ago, at which time Tolimán, and its “parasitic lava dome”, the Cerro d’Oro, began to grow. Volcán Atitlán, which rubs shoulders with Tolimán, is the only active volcano of the area, last erupting in 1853. These three giants often wear cumulus sombreros in the afternoon, and the peaks are home to beautiful cloud forests that look nothing like the dusty slopes. I recently climbed San Pedro (the “easy one”) and my companion patiently endured my breathless game of bromeliad search-and-find. All those hours spent wandering in the botanical gardens of the world finally taught me something!

not bromeliads

There are eleven towns that circle the lake, with varying degrees of access. Pana is the gateway to the area, the place where all the buses stop. To get anywhere else from here, you generally have to take a boat. This is one of the most charming features of life at the lake: once you’re here, there are only two modes of transit. You can take a tuk-tuk to go scooting around the narrow alleys and the steep hills of any given town, or you can take a lancha to go to a different town. The lanchas are covered speed boats that typically carry about twenty-four people (six benches, four bodies to each), plus the driver, who stands at the back, steers the boat, and collects the money, and a sort of conductor who mans the front, calls the stops, and throws the ropes. Your standard ride to any other town is somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty minutes, and costs about three dollars for foreigners.

The lake is a different place from hour to hour and day to day. We have a local weather phenomenon called the xocomil – “the wind that blows away sin”. It generally stirs up the chop between noon and dusk, so an early-morning boat ride can be spotlessly serene, while a five PM boat ride might have you rightfully fearing for your life. In a fit of truly spirited gusts a few weeks ago, at least one person died when a lancha capsized.

going to a place

People will tell you that the lake is dirty. It’s true that 1) there are probably dead bodies in it, 2) people do laundry on the shores daily, 3) the rivers that drain into it look none too healthy, and 4) there have been troublesome algal blooms in recent years. At the same time, the water where I swim is crystal-clear and I’ve frequently substituted swims for showers without any consequences. In a sleepy breakfast exchange that I recently tolerated with a new herbalist-in-training, she mentioned that you could easily confuse lake-sickness with food poisoning. I had to wonder if it was, perhaps, the other way around. Of course, two things can be true.

splash zone

Tourism in the area has been actively encouraged since the mid-20th century, and it’s interesting to see how that has developed. Each town offers a very different experience and ambience. I’ve only visited four of the eleven, but it was genuinely surprising to find myself in such a different place each time. Pana is home to domestic tourism – boys from the city who hire a boat for an all-day booze cruise, families who come to enjoy a meal and take photos, Guatemalan weekenders making a cheeky getaway. Tzununa is a hotbed of seemingly recent investments by foreigners who bought land and do something wholesome, like run a farm, a BnB, a bakery, or a kombucha factory. San Marcos is all quasi-toxic spirituality, with vaguely appropriative posters for hundreds of workshops in tantra-breathwork-medicine journey-massage-meditation-horse healing-etc. papering the alley walls. San Pedro is backpacker central, equal parts pub crawl, Spanish school, and adventure tour, and it’s also the Israeli outpost in Guatemala, with signs in Hebrew that line the main walk and a suspicious prevalence of falafel.

interesting development

Digital nomadism has taken to Atitlán. Most of the English-language resources on Things To Do around here are blogs written by online workers who spend a few months annually at the lake. In the last couple of years, a group of savvy foreigners has created the Lago Bitcoin enterprise, which somehow converts used cooking oil into cryptocurrency, resulting in a prosperous circular economy and improved lake health…or so it says in their propaganda. I have no idea how that’s working out for them, and crypto narratives make me queasy, so you can look this one up yourself. All I want to share here is the beautiful and jarring incongruity of finding that life in the setting of the global south now includes Bitcoin signage on every shop. 

see what I mean

And then, running through all of this like a vein, there are the ubiquitous, timeless institutions: the tienda and the ferretería, the boisterous church gatherings, the goats by the river, the signature textiles, the perpetual slap of tortillas, the bare cinderblocks, the two-faced street dogs, the barbed wire and corrugated tin, the entire-family-on-one-scooter, the gold-capped teeth, the bagged water, the stone-cobbled streets, the garnachas and chuchitos; the Guatemala of it all.

I live in a house that has a name instead of a number, in an alley too small to accommodate even a tuk-tuk. We are Casa Shalom (I’ve also seen a Dental Services Shalom and a Hotel Shalom). In the Judeo-Christian tradition, shalom is wholeness, prosperity, and peace. It is the end to which all righteous people strive, both in this lifetime and whatever happens next. Is it attainable? Does it matter?

don’t ask me

Reader, I love chasing down the facts, but I know that I don’t have the answers. In fact, as time goes on, I find that I understand even less than I might have once thought I did, and I’m glad. My questions multiply, my confusion escalates, and my capacity for delight and wonder expands apace. Thank you for being here to dwell in possibility and live the questions with me.

Phones are open throughout March – find me lying around on my brand new mattress in my big old room. We also have a guest room upstairs – you’re invited.

Until next time, stay curious. — Rose

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Curiosity Roving

The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.23 : Pura Vida

in which hope springs eternal

___________________________

Greetings and Salutations!

Welcome to the twenty-third volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention. If you missed any of my past letters, they are all available in the archive: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive

I have been living some wild times, reader. It absolutely was not my intention, but it is how things happened. Who am I to fight the tide?

Shortly after I sent out V.22, I took the cheapest, most cumbersome flight path from Medellín to San Jose, Costa Rica. The facts are these: I had been looking for a volunteer job for a while and I found something that seemed like a perfect fit. A new music festival cropped up, and the organizer said she could use me. The venue, an adventure ranch with all the usual touristic activities, was looking for an English-speaking volunteer to live onsite more or less immediately. It looked like a great way to get some rest, learn some things, keep my costs down, stay busy for a couple of months, and then cap it with an amazing party. I made a few phone calls, and then I made a decision.

It resulted in one of the strangest experiences of my life.

bubble bubble

I traveled for about twenty-four hours to get from A to B, including a quick nap near the San Jose Airport. I cried in a Wal-Mart while struggling to get on the local cell network. I eventually had to give up and go to the bus station, where a shopkeeper told me that I was having trouble with the process because it was Saturday. I had worried that Costa Rica might be overly gentrified, and I was strangely relieved to discover that I was still in Latin America, with all the usual quirks and challenges. When my bus pulled into Jacó around sunset, I alerted the person with whom I had been corresponding. He sent my new neighbour to pick me up, and she charged me ten dollars.

I asked if I was expected, and my contact confirmed that I was, but the ranch was mostly deserted when I arrived at sunset. My neighbour disappeared. I was welcomed by a group of four visiting girls aged six to thirteen who immediately began my education in the names of local wildlife. The kids and the animals would prove to be the best features of the place.

kitchen helper

After dark, I walked into my accommodation and sat down on a bunk bed. It broke underneath me, so I elected to use the other one. I had been instructed to pick up some rice and vegetables on my way, but there was no knife or cutting board. I chopped carrots with my teeth and mostly failed to sleep amid the sound of someone snoring in the next room.

The next day, I got out of bed, made two cups of instant coffee with some random carton of not-milk that I had purchased dazedly in the unfamiliar supermarket, and started to analyze the situation. I had instructions to go on a tour with the group that was arriving that day, and to “discreetly” collect cash from them with one of the guides. I was ready at 9 AM, and welcomed a group of six New Yorkers, each of whom paid 150 USD to spend a day being entertained in the jungle. The staff seemed to be confused by my presence, so I stood back and observed, answered questions, translated, and generally stayed out of the way. Some time after noon, our group swelled to ten, and we went into the forest. We rappelled down a waterfall, and zipped through seven forested lines. It was just business; when I spoke with the owner, he asked me “What do you think of the products?” I wondered if any of the tourists who had been shaking with fear in their helmets and harnesses had thought to consider the experience a “product”.

tools of the trade

This continued for a few more days. I wasn’t invited to the zipline again, but started to work with various guides providing translation on nature walks and horseback rides. I slowly pieced things together and found out that: 1) the person with whom I had arranged this volunteer position was not in the country and wouldn’t be for another six weeks, 2) he is the owner of the land, but his wife is the manager of the business, 3) the guides are all relatives of the wife, and 4) the only volunteers they’ve hosted in recent years were local university students completing mandatory credit hours.

This was actually okay for me – the job really suited my skill set and I could see an opportunity to make a significant contribution. As an alumnus of more than forty volunteer, exchange, and festival positions around the world, I have the experience to improve a disorganized situation. I immediately started writing an orientation guide so that future volunteers wouldn’t be thrown to the sharks like I was. I made a list of basic equipment that was lacking in the facilities. I created a resource for assessing the balance of value between the volunteer and the host. I started planning English lessons for the guides. I laughed on the telephone and assured everyone that I was prepared to be patient.

the neighbourhood

The problems started when the tourists noticed that I was very, very good at this job. They wanted to tip me. Of course they did. Tourism in Costa Rica is heavily monetized. Tipping is standard practice. I was the only person who had enough English and enough hospitality training to tell them where the bathrooms were and how their itinerary for the day was planned. I translated “Love Of My Life” for a Dutch woman who wanted to surprise her partner with a tattoo and I slipped it to her on a card in secret. I was Miss Congeniality, and they knew I was in a volunteer position. Obviously they wanted to tip me.

The guides didn’t like that. I accepted ten thousand colones, about twenty bucks, from a fellow Canadian after a three-hour combination nature walk and horseback ride with eight international guests who were based at a neighbouring retreat centre doing “yoga” (but I think that meant “ayahuasca”). They tipped the local guide as well, but they tipped him less. One hour later, I had six minutes of voice memos in my Whatsapp from the absent owner, explaining that I would have to give half of my tips to the paid staff, to make things “fair”.

clink clank

To recap: I was living in very uncomfortable (of course they called it “rustic”) facilities in the middle of nowhere, performing skilled and strenuous labour at a high level of competence for hours every day, spending hundreds of dollars on my food and transport, and receiving in exchange the dubious privilege of facilitating horseback rides with nervous tourists in the noonday sun, access to some busted-up bunk beds, and the opportunity to either stay in at night and listen to the neighbours or step out and brave the snakes. 

I was polite, but I was very dissatisfied, and things rapidly devolved when I tried to negotiate for better conditions. I could see the wheels turning in Whatsapp, as the absent bosses slowly realized that they were exploiting me. The guides (all male, all family) started turning off the WiFi when they saw me using it – that was spooky, because I also didn’t have cell service. The organizer of the music festival, who had originally connected me with this position, arranged to pick me up on her next site visit. The manager, who is rumoured to be a Costa Rican woman about my age but I wouldn’t know because she had never actually introduced herself and existed only as a business account in our shared chat, brusquely dismissed me in a Spanish text message and gave me five days to get out. Thankfully, I was already packed. The owner wished me luck with my “objectives in Costa Rica”, blissfully oblivious that I had actually chosen to come to this country at his glib invitation.

no rainbows without rain

So, what do you do when it all goes down in flames? I know what I did:

First, I let a sixteen-year-old spontaneously bleach my hair. Then, I went to the beach. I jumped into a pool from the second floor balcony. I rode some sweaty buses to places I had never been. I encountered a hurricane and let it tousle me while I straddled the continental divide. I jumped off a swaying platform fifty meters above the forest floor and came out swinging. I kissed a tattooed shoulder. I put my whole body in a warm volcanic river; moonlit, firelit, deafened by the current. I screamed from high places. I climbed into an inflatable vessel with a company of strangers and went careening down some rapids that are fierce enough to be illegal in other countries. I sang Spanish pop songs and Hotel California in a bar that shares my name. I nipped rum from a baby bottle in a Catholic churchyard and licked my fried-chicken fingers. I faithfully toasted each far-fetched coincidence and every grasping superstition with the weightless gravity of suspended disbelief. I watched the sunset, the moonrise, the moonset, the sunrise (in that order). I will never financially recover from any of this.

Jacó from above

For the record: there’s no man behind the curtain. I do all my own stunts and I do them out of my own pocket. I don’t have travel insurance, I don’t have a trust fund, I don’t have a sugar daddy, and I don’t have online employment. What I do have these days are limitless opportunities to perform skilled labour without compensation, while everyone who benefits from my labour makes the comfortable assumption that my money must be coming “from somewhere”.

I added a tip jar to this newsletter when I rebooted last fall. If you’ve ever thought about recognizing the value of my work – as storyteller, as wordsmith, as entertainer, as connective tissue, as living legend, as content creator, as court jester, as cosmic intersection, as puppet of the universe, as fearless fun goddess, as bardo bookie, as committed artist, as world-wide-web-weaver, as sacred clown, as conversation piece – this would be a great time, because January was frankly disastrous. Being alive in Costa Rica costs about twice as much as it does in the neighbouring countries. My credit card very nearly melted. 

I’ve had multiple people ask for my OnlyFans (sorry family – just for context, that’s a popular platform for monetizing independent erotic content), but I haven’t yet gone that route. It is profoundly discouraging to invest in the best that I have to offer and to endlessly come up against the hard reality that the only thing that might represent currency around here is my naked body, or more accurately, my naked body divorced from my personhood, because everyone who actually shares my bed still expects me to split the tab.

keeping the flame

For the last half-year, I have engineered the extremely expensive and complex scenarios that provide me with these unparalleled stories, and I’ve told them. I can do this for another month or two. After that, I’ll probably have to disappear into some meaningless drudgery that pays in actual money again. You won’t see me – I’ll be quietly cleaning floors or packing grocery bags, carefully titrating my doses of homeopathic nihilism until I garner enough spirit and enough cash to have another bash at my strange vocation.

For today: I’ve relocated to Panajachel, Guatemala, and I’ve rented a room in a beautiful shared house near the lake – four women, three dogs, and all of our friends. If you visit my Buy Me A Coffee page at the bottom of this letter, you will see under the Wishlist tab that I am fundraising to offset two specific large expenses. If I have successfully entertained you, made you think, made you chuckle, given words to what was previously inchoate, sent you running for the dictionary, imparted valuable information, sent you down a rabbit hole, or inspired you to try something just a little bit crazy, please consider recognizing that with a donation. I didn’t do any of this by accident.

quotidian miracle

Ah, reader. I do hope you’re enjoying the show. Every day happens once in a lifetime, and even this is one of those days. Remember: when the plot thickens, you have more soil for your garden. Spring beckons.

Until next time, stay curious. — Rose

——>>>>|:|<<<<——

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/curiosityroving

Curiosity Roving

The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.22 : Tierra Querida

in which we examine Colombia

___________________________

Greetings and Salutations!

Welcome to the twenty-second volume of Curiosity Roving. I hope this letter finds you.

Thank you kindly, as always, for choosing to spend your precious internet minutes with me. This newsletter is my arcane batsignal and it pleases me to know that my people see it. This is a public project, so if you love Curiosity Roving, please do tell your friends! New subscribers, thank you so much for joining me here and I promise it’s not a cult. All twenty-one of my past volumes are available in the archive: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive

It’s been about four months since I recommitted to publishing one of these letters every month. I’ve traveled roughly ten thousand kilometres, characterized by four time zones, two languages, and three cosmic appointments. I’ve already got my ticket to country number five, but first, we’re going on the quasi-journalistic edutainment deep dive. I’ve been in Colombia since the beginning of December and I can’t leave without saying a few (hundred) words about it.

handroanthus chrysanthus

When I performed with La Cumbia Del Sol in Taiwan, our set often included a cover of a song, “Colombia Tierra Querida”. This is a classic cumbia from the 1970s that carries the status of a second anthem, and it served as my de facto introduction to the Colombian national character. “Tierra querida” translates to “beloved land”, and the incredibly hooky feel-good chorus goes “cantando, cantando, yo viviré” : “singing, singing, I will live”. Having spent six weeks on the ground here and gained a minimum of context, the line that now stands out for me is the opening of the second verse: “Colombia, tu hiciste grande con el furor de tu gloria” : “Colombia, you became great with the fury of your glory”.

It conveys the sense of this country’s illustrious and violent history. I’m not usually into geopolitics, but the trauma of this place is so fresh and so visible that I had to go digging, if only to gain enough understanding to appropriately calibrate my empathy for the people around me.

mean streets of Medellín

I spent Christmas at a beach hostel on the north coast. My roommate in the bunk-bedded dorm was a man called Carlos from Medellín. We went to town for a hamburger on my first night. He held my hands across the table and he shook them until my elbows started to bruise as he talked about the murder of his father when he was a child and the suffering of his family. Later, sorely uncaffeinated and walking a dog at 7:30 AM, a man on a bicycle approached me and spent ten minutes telling me about the corruption and microextortion that he experiences as a humble hillside homeowner and lamenting his country’s inability to make something of its vast resources while I stood there with a poop bag on my hand, mostly comprehending the content but utterly baffled by the scene.

Everyone starts these conversations with the same question: “So, how do you like Colombia?”

my neighbourhood, my country

When I decided to get curious about the history of this place, I had to learn some new terms. Asymmetric warfare describes conflict in which combatants are fighting with widely differing tactics, power, and resources. Internally displaced persons are those who were forced to leave their homes, but have remained within the same country. There were a number of niche vocabulary words for my Spanish studies that were invented as shorthand for the novel forms of murder, torture, and mutilation that were invented during the long period of La Violencia in the mid-20th century – have you ever heard of a Colombian necktie?

meat street

For many people, Columbia is synonymous with cocaine, and the drug trade is intimately intertwined with all of Colombian politics. It’s true that Colombia is the world’s leading producer of cocaine, but the USA remains the lead consumer. Maybe you remember Plan Colombia, the foreign aid initiative of the Clinton era? In the early 2000s, the USA performed “aerial eradication” of coca crops with intensive use of devastating herbicides on 8% of Colombia’s arable land. The Plan Colombia wiki also contains sixteen entries on US military programs that have been engaged to combat the FARC-EP, a revolutionary people’s army that has been active since the 1960s. In 1999, the FARC also worked with a UN development project that aimed to transition coca farmers into sustainable food production. I can tell you that the dollar value of social aid provided under Plan Colombia was a small fraction of that provided for military aid. I can also tell you that as of 2021, Colombian production of coca leaves had increased 43%. Viva la pandemia!

our lady of perpetual succor

These head-spinning facts are a fraction of the tapestry. The online articles for these subjects are so dense and convoluted that I thought it might be better to just talk to people. One afternoon in Medellín, I shared a table with Andrés at a local patio while we waited for the rain to stop. When I made some clumsy second-language allusion to my interest in Colombia’s storied history of conflict(s), he summarized it as “everyone against everyone” and then we changed the subject. I took a guided tour of Comuna 13, hoping to get a little more information, and the tour guide also had to bow out, saying that if he tried to explain The Situation, we would need at least eight more days.

Colombia embodies an extreme expression of plurality. Even before the common era, there were at least nine indigenous tribes operating in this territory. In the modern understanding of geography, there are six distinct regions that vary greatly in their climate, topography, music, food, and culture. All of them are rich in natural features and wildlife; nowhere in the world has more birds. As I traced the threads of all the multifaceted social, political, and military conflicts, I often found the use and distribution of this beloved land, this tierra querida, at their starting points. I suppose it stands to reason that anything worth loving is usually worth fighting for. If you’d rather be shown than told, I can highly recommend last year’s award-winning Colombian film, Los Reyes Del Mundo, for a gut-wrenching study of that truism.

infinities upon infinities

The joint forces of colonization and immigration, active here since the sixteenth century, have created a human genetic pool that is also extremely diverse. My roommate at the current petsitting job told me in the midst of a kitchen catch-up that people always say he doesn’t look Colombian. I blinked and asked him, “What does a Colombian look like?” Walking down the street, there is no clear unifying theme for eye colour, hair type, build, skin tone – people are just people and they look all kinds of ways. I’ve had numerous comedic encounters with other Anglophone foreigners at the dog park in which we both spoke Spanish, mutually trying to ascertain in that sidelong-semisocial-dogpark kind of way whether or not the other person was a local, and mutually lacking the language skills to be sure if the other person was or was not speaking fluently.

a fine handsome gentleman

Yesterday, at a red light on a busy street, I saw three men form a human tower by standing on each others’ shoulders. Then they all started juggling flaming clubs. Someone blew a whistle, and they dismounted to collect tips from the vehicles before the lights changed. Another time, I saw a man wearing a helmet who performed an unceasing headspin on the crosswalk pavement for what seemed like a full minute. Someone walked down our street and sang La Llorona through a karaoke system three times last Sunday; if I hadn’t gone to walk the dog, I would never have known that it wasn’t a recording. On a bus passing through Santa Marta, a rapper boarded with a strap-on speaker and performed a spontaneous freestyle for every passenger extrapolated from a word that each provided. It is a dissonant experience: to know that all of this colour exists due to rampant poverty, and yet to be delighted nonetheless.

One of my favourite authors, in a work of fiction, repeatedly described South America as “too damned vivid”. To that I say: if you don’t like it, you can leave. Personally, I don’t mind a little fury mixed in with all that is glorious, especially if we get to sing.

Until next time, stay curious. — Rose

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my internet tip jar – are you not entertained?

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/curiosityroving

Curiosity Roving

The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.21 : Cycle Closer

in which the mischief has been managed

___________________________

Greetings and Salutations!

Welcome to the twenty-first volume of Curiosity Roving and thank you kindly for joining me today. If any of my past editions failed to reach you, they are all preserved in the letter archive: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive

In the time that has been spent since Volume Twenty broke upon your inbox, I have completed the esoteric to-do list that I started assembling in the early months of this year, and now I am taking a great big breath, resting on my laurels, and letting the mysteries dance at my perimeter. These words come to you from the frothing churn of the Caribbean coast in northern Colombia, where I am contentedly celebrating a tropical, and solitary, holiday season.

pelicans over Cañaveral

Where did I go? What did I do? Well:

I took a bus to Mexico City and immediately made a jaywalking foray into the night to hear Manuel Garcia play the glorious Teatro de la Ciudad; nothing like a red carpet to make a girl feel welcome. I made big plans for the weekend, and then, on a fated Friday, found myself at an otherworldly funk and disco event that ultimately rendered all those plans impossible. I didn’t mind.

I had my first unambiguously bad Couchsurfing experience; I was gone and in a hotel room and off to my first Lucha Libre show with other, better people within thirty minutes. For those who aren’t in that circle, Couchsurfing is a social network for travelers to connect with local people and find accommodation and friends on the road. I’ve been using it for thirteen years, and I’ve seen many changes in that time. Important note for anyone who uses that network: I tried to leave this person a public review that detailed my experience and it doesn’t show up on his profile because the references have to be mutual. Creeps and weirdos can continue with impunity as long as they keep their own mouths shut. It’s a sad truth that my attitude toward all strange men in this part of the world has now been reduced to a wholesale “guilty until proven innocent”, and I often don’t give them a chance to prove anything at all.

all-seeing, all-knowing

I flew to Bogotá the next day, where I was reunited with three of my very best friends and bandmates from Taiwan. Two of those friends are now married and they organize a beautiful event called Festival Ritmos Del Mundo, where we four, plus five more incredible musicos Bogotános, performed as La Cumbia Del Sol. Our band enjoyed a great season of accomplishment in Taiwan, many years ago now, and to bring our music to life in the ancestral territory of cumbia music was a real piece of magic. We spent two weeks in a soup of togetherness, vacillating between English, Spanish, and Chinese language depending on who was in the room, with Japanese honorifics and pleasantries thrown in the mix for umami. It felt like coronation, it felt like homecoming, it felt like the grand benevolent forces of the universe were spotlit at center stage. Sometimes it happens that way, and it’s nice when it does.

A note of public gratitude is appropriate here. My participation in this event was sponsored by my old buddy old pal Max Farrell aka. Max Power aka. Maxie who, in an act of true chaotic good, decided to help me purchase the trumpet of my daydreams back in August just because he believes in my work in this world. It was the first time I walked into a music shop and just bought right something off the wall. Hey Max, guess what? We did it! Mischief managed! Great success! High five! Thank you!

The man, the legend, and his work in the world:

https://www.instagram.com/maxpower_visual/

https://www.mixcloud.com/maxpowerrr

lottery ticket feeling

In between these major landmarks, I also stomped the muck at Rock al Parque, which is one of the largest music festivals in Latin America and also free (thank you, cultural patrimony of Colombia), consumed a formidable selection of tacos and arepas and patacones and galletas and cazuelas and tamales, swigged aguardiente from a water bottle and chica from a wooden bowl, sampled three flavours of Bogotá nightlife, gasped for thin air at 3000 meters above sea level on the cliffs of Monserrate, pointed out the planetary parade to anyone who would listen (last night at sunset we had Venus, Mercury, the moon, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars all lined up across the dome), attended two African dance classes that changed how I took my seat for days afterward, swam the rivers and waterfalls of Minca, left Tayrona National Park with the standard-issue sunburn, and offered my blood as a gift to some small mystery insects that clearly wanted it more than I did. I absorbed the World Cup season from various street venues and watched Argentina win the title on a hot and dusty morning; I was looking for breakfast, but the whole town stood still and attentive for an hour or more while they played out the overtime.

plateau city

I’ve been meditating on the idea of Serious Fun; the kind of fun that requires effort and investment, that doesn’t “just happen”; the kind of fun that looks a lot like work. For example, traveling with a trumpet for four months, practicing in one hundred unusual locations, and then playing a show with a band with which I share seven years of history, or training for a lifetime and then winning a prestigious title on the cusp of retirement, or planning an event for an entire year with the understanding that the slightest random adverse weather pattern could render the entire endeavour an irredeemable loss. Risk and reward can be a fraught calculation, but the greatest risk might be to risk nothing; to arrive at the end of life to find that it was only half-lived, that life itself “just happened”.

During one of the closing ceremonies at Festival Ritmos Del Mundo, our firekeeper told us that the winter solstice is the time to ask for what we want. This has always been a challenging task for me; initially because I didn’t have enough of an individuated sense of self to be sure about what I wanted, then because I didn’t feel deserving of things that I wanted, and then because I subscribed to the approximately Buddhist understanding that generating desire would result in suffering, and now because I am experimenting with a maximalist sense of desire, in which I am terrifically greedy for knowledge and experience and resources and connections and Things. Sylvia Plath already said it, but let me tell you again: it’s funny how wanting everything feels very much the same as wanting nothing. On the tasselled bus that brought me to the beach, there was a palm-treed poster with the reminder that, “Con ganas, todo se puede“. It’s been a theme.

in the flow

Having completed this five-month course of self-determined geographic prescriptions, I’m not much closer to knowing what to ask for in the Big Picture, but I do know this: the things that I am having are most definitely the things that I want. Reader, I hope that you can say the same.

Today: I will send this newsletter and I will watch the light change and I will drink another coffee. I will carry on with this careening trajectory of existence in the evolutionary spiral as it brings me closer and closer to the perfected expression of my true form – same as you. I’m off to Medellín this evening, where I will lay low for two weeks and provide care for a dog called Ramón while his owner is away. Phones are open from December 29th until January 10th if you’d like to catch up.

day’s end

In the spirit of the giving season, I’m also leaving a link for my friend’s fundraiser. This is another person with whom I collaborated over a period of years in Taiwan. He’s fighting for his life. I’m far away and I don’t know much and I’m actually avoiding knowing too much because it’s horrifying and not precisely my business, but if our positions were reversed, I would probably want him to share my damn fundraiser. So here it is: https://gofund.me/303ff4e4

Among his many projects, Chris makes a very good podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6JoQGCbQkVpZd0uKjDMcQH?si=fFiwEHS_RAi3_pTBnHHqqQ

Our interview that became Episode 16 is a very fond memory.

Reader, life is fragile and precious and it happens just once. I’m glad we get to exist together in this lifetime. Whichever hemisphere you are in today, enjoy this season of extremity with all the trimmings. In fact, get yourself some extra trimmings and put them on my tab. You deserve it.

Until next time, stay curious. — Rose

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Curiosity Roving

The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.20 : Morelos Chinelos

in which we observe the ritual

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Greetings and Salutations!

Welcome to the (landmark) twentieth volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention. A big special gratitude shout-out today for everyone who chose to use their hard-earned internet money to buy me a coffee or five. I am generally caffeinated to bumblebee frequency when I start composing these letters every month, so you can trust that your good deeds are going to good use. In celebration, I’ve given myself free rein on the word count in this edition. Fair warning: it’s a bit maximalist (and completely worth your time).

In the month that has elapsed since Volume Nineteen, I have weathered a border, a bautiza, and a boda, all of them Mexican. I’ve seen Dia de los Muertos in Peñón de los Baños and chuckled at the humbled hangovers of the following morning with the only other person who didn’t have one. I’ve churned up the alphabet soup of my brain to stumble back into my Spanish state of mind and affirmed that the best place to have a partner is on the dance floor. I’ve wandered shoulder-width alleyways decoratively paved and walled with the same porous volcanic rock – terrible cell service in there. I’ve seen the moon turn as red as the Coca-Cola camions that resemble a cosmic apparition when they squeeze through streets designed for horse and cart. I’ve eaten mysterious meats and flowers and by this method learned their names. I’ve enjoyed the symphonies of goats, roosters, cats, small dogs, and the occasional passing cabalgata. I’ve contemplated the ravages of age, the relationship between custom and culture, the evolution of friendship and its limits, the ambiguity of the spiritual, the earned nuance of family and manners and tradition, and the fierce necessity of rest. The other day, I had the opportunity to explain very slowly and with very poor grammar that I require a great deal of time to engage with my vocation and purpose in this lifetime, so I try not to work too much.

available resources

Deep in a dusty milk crate tucked at the bottom of some shelves in one of the bookshops in downtown Tepoztlán, I found a copy of Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Year of The Mayan Prophecy. In the introduction, he writes of feeling “less like a person than a convenient intersection for ideas to meet and mesh, a magnet or strange attractor, compelled or fated – perhaps tragically misguided – to draw together” a wide selection of diverse arcana and systems of thought. This is precisely how my life feels lately; viewed through a practical lens, so much of my activity would appear to be dissipated to the point of utter uselessness, but then a moment arrives when the magic of it all breaks a chiming dawn, and I have to lean back and accept that whatever it is that I am or am not doing, it is working and it must be correct.

peak over market

I’m writing to you from the mountains of Morelos, one of the smallest states of Mexico, which lies directly south of Mexico City and carries the name of a hero from the 19th-century independence movement. Human settlement in the region dates back to the Toltec farmers of 2000 BC. I arrived in the area on November 2nd, and I haven’t found it necessary to go anywhere else. Sitting poolside in an outer barrio of Tepoztlán, I am just a hop and skip from the canonical birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of the ancient Aztec pantheon, and one slope from El Tepozteco, the temple of the god of drunkenness and fertility in the same tradition.

moon over sugar cane

The economy of Morelos is based in services, manufacturing, and agriculture; tourism appears to be mostly domestic. Last week, I had the immense fortune to experience one of the primary attractions of the area, the carnival of the Chinelos, in Los Arcos de San Carlos.

Let me begin this section by saying that for a person raised in the multicultural beige of the colonized north, there is nothing so thrilling as to witness a tradition that remains intact. In my country, culture is localized by residence; go door to door in a Canadian city and you encounter different food, different manners, different languages. To experience the energy of an entire town, even a small one, with a commonality in their ritual and a deep commitment to its execution, is a true thrill to a consciousness that is accustomed to fragmentation.

Los Chinelos is a festival of costumed dancing, with particularities that vary from one town to the next. It is a subversive tradition. In the nineteenth century, Spanish colonizers in Mexico celebrated the traditional Catholic Carnevale and, in their infinite compassion, allowed their indigenous labourers a rare day off. Those labourers decided to use their free time to make mockery of the pretentious Spaniards in costume, pageant, and public spectacle. Thus, the Chinelos were born. 

tiny dancers

In Los Arcos, the standard costume is a long robe of white and blue stripes, with silky scarves tied to form a fluttering diamond down the back, a wide fringed hat with tall and brightly coloured feathers, and a mask with a pointed beard. I saw Chinelos of every size throughout the weekend; I can confirm that the small ones are extremely cute.

faces for sale

The dance of the Chinelos is known as a brinco – not actually a dance, but a “jump”. During the four-day festival in Los Arcos, there were five official Brincos de Chinelo, each of them scheduled to last anywhere from two to twelve hours. Some of these brincos took place under a shade canopy in the town square, others were parades that traversed up and down the hill and the highway, roaming the entire town centre and wreaking havoc on street traffic. One such parade was accompanied by schoolchildren in costume, another by young men in flamboyant drag. Each brinco was accompanied by a live brass band that swelled between twelve and twenty people over the course of the weekend and played the same four or five melodies on repeat. The embouchure prowess was truly phenomenal. The horn players of Banda Joel y Sus Guapachosos blew up to eight hours a day at top volume from Friday morning until Monday night, often while eating, drinking, and smoking. I have never seen anything like it.

uphill flood

During the festival, every corner store in this little town also became a vendor of micheladas. In Morelos, a michelada is an entire litre of beer, usually Corona or Victoria, swirled into a disposable cup as big as my head with lime juice and salt, rimmed with sticky tamarind and sesame seeds or some other variation on the theme of red goo. It is a brilliant endurance beverage – the citrus and salt counter the effects of a hot day or a rough night – and also phenomenally unhygienic. The red goo invariably drips, very aesthetically, down the side of the very large disposable cup, and the drinker constantly has to negotiate a choice about whether to lick the outside of the cup or their fingers, or to cover everything else in the vicinity in sticky red goo. And remember, this is partner dancing culture – we are always hand-to-hand. It was a joyful inoculation of bacteria after some long, sterile years. 

My traveling companion lived through the sixties, and even he said that it was one of the wildest parties he had ever seen; locals told me that this was one of the smallest Chinelos events in the region.

under the big top

I have a long-standing theory about intense and unfamiliar parties, which I call the Phi-Phi Bucket Effect. It’s simple: to have a good time, you have to work with the format and you have to do everything. It doesn’t matter if you have two left feet – when they turn on La Sonora Dinamita, dance with somebody. Drink the beverages. Lick your fingers. Climb the hills. Accept invitations. Shout at the football players. If someone hands you a beer, or a costume, or a trumpet, take it, say “thank you”, and put it to work. Participate completely, and you will get to where you want to be.

unified effort

In the universe postulated by quantum mechanics, there can be no such thing as an observer – presence is participation. There is no thick glass wall to safely, sanely separate the audience from the play, the doctor from the patient, the child from the tarantula. When consciousness is embedded in the process that it perceives, the two are endlessly in dialogue, acting on each other, connected, under a mutual influence. And, if you are inevitably going to participate, it is usually more enjoyable to do it wholeheartedly. Following the guidance of the Phi-Phi Bucket Effect, Monday night found me pole-dancing with the gay boys in the central square until they shut the music off (there are one hundred thousand videos of me that I will never see). I really do recommend it. 

patterns, repeating

That’s it, reader! That’s all I’ve got! I’m about to go frolic with the trendy people of Distrito Federal, then off to Bogotá to show up for the last item on my to-do list. I literally do not have a single plan after December 14th and I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen. Life is wild. Stay tuned!

Thank you always for joining me here in my verbal playground, and if you happen to know of someone around central or south America who is looking for a competent Canadian to fill some sort of job or volunteer role, please do consider referring me, and even if you don’t, remember that I always love to hear from you.

Until next time, stay curious. — Rose

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Curiosity Roving

The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.19 : Gold Rush

in which we love California

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Greetings and Salutations! 

Welcome to the nineteenth volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention. If you’re a new subscriber, a special thank you for joining me on this odyssey. All of my past letters are archived for posterity and you can read them here: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive

In the time since my last newsletter, I have completed the first leg of my winter drift, alongside many other feathered friends. I’ve seen the Pacific and its dolphins, the Miramar dog park of Redondo Beach, the Chain of Lakes in Golden Gate Park, the Bay Bridge at midnight, the cheeky fog-swathed moon of SOMA, and a jaywalker nearly killed by traffic when making a jaunt across Beale Street. I’ve been exposed as a Canadian by the way I pronounce “no doubt”. I’ve taken one bus in the wrong direction, made two road trips between SF and LA, chanted kirtan at Bhakti, sweat through live music yoga with Yemanjo at HAUM, stoked the disco inferno at Make Out Room’s Diva Love dance party with DJ Brain Robber, stumbled into karaoke with DJ Purple and his saxophone at Slate, strolled Andy Goldsworthy’s Wood Line in the Presidio, pondered whether or not We Are The Medicine in Topanga Canyon, eaten four decadent lunches at LinkedIn, absorbed the aesthetic of Patrick Watson at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, and cleansed my pineal gland and auric field with ceremonial snuff tobacco that was blasted three times into my nasal cavity by some very kind, gentle, and generous people. Yesterday I saw an otherwise respectable-looking young man sprawled on the concrete next to a taco truck at midday, wailing to the skies above, and for the briefest of moments thought to myself, “yeah buddy same, honestly.”

honey, it’s anything but

The I-5 freeway served me the experiences of both the slowest and fastest driving that I have ever done; it took three hours to get out of LA after an accident blocked three lanes of traffic, so I blasted the rest of that road at one hundred miles per hour without incident or consequence. Fuel economy be damned – sometimes a girl just has to go faster.

In the sixth century, Greek philosopher Heraclitus proposed that you cannot step in the same river twice; the movement of the water creates a new river in every moment. In the same way, you can never return to the same city – but it’s less of a river and more of an infinite Rubik’s Cube. The interlocking pieces of a complex urban ecosystem shift and slide in one’s absence, and even after weeks of turning in circles, they never line up quite the same as before.

eucalyptus cathedral

I spent a significant stretch of time in this area three years ago – right before the plague. I had thought that I might try to live here. That desire has evaporated, but the love remains.

California is a lot of things. A coastal paradise, a producer of culture, a consumer hotbed, a gaudy playground of the wealthy, a social experiment, a limited time offer, basically Mexico, the cutting-edge razor of the West. I’ve spent the last few weeks questioning what it is that people love so much about this place. 

Standing in the scorched parking lot of an EZ Trip travel centre, I posed the question to Vladimir. He had just arrived in the open air, having immigrated from southwestern Russia with one thousand dollars to his name and then lingered through fifty-one days of detainment in a border control facility. I was holding the first product he purchased on American soil, a warm and heavy box of Cinnabon, while he removed his coat. Vladimir spoke elegant lyceum English, but his conclusion was silent: one arm gestured to the sky, two eyes squinted against the sun.

midday mirage

Sure, every migrating bird knows that California has the good weather. The Mediterranean climate makes this region the pipe dream within the American dream; take one standard-issue white picket fence with all the trimmings, then gild the lily, cross the highway, and learn to surf. A lesser-known fact is that this same climate has made the state home to the greatest variety of plant and animal species to be found anywhere in the USA, many of which are imperiled or already gone due to rampant development. 

On Sunday morning, I sat in a tall chair at the top of a cliff and slowly solved a crossword puzzle in the Sonoma County Gazette while drinking a coffee that was strong enough to peel paint. The theme of this crossword was the lakes and reservoirs of California. A disturbing pattern emerged in the clues: “shrinking”, “dried up”, “former”, “endangered”.

On the opposing page was a lifestyle article exploring the rarely-vaunted paradigm of pronoia (bear with me now, we’re looping back to ancient Greece) in which a person chooses to believe that all elements are conspiring in one’s favour; a functional opposite to paranoia, or a sort of radical optimism.

hope is not a bird

It’s one thing to have sunshine. It’s quite another to have happiness, hope, levity, daring, brilliance, resilience, and the will to try. I am convinced that there is a link between climate and prevailing demeanour, that people are shaped by the places we inhabit. When it’s already assumed that your region will eventually be 1) reduced to rubble by the next big earthquake, 2) consumed by wildfire, or 3) taken to the cleaners by the rising tide, then there’s really nothing to do but kick back, run a glass of water that’s traveled 700 miles from some dwindling glacier, think happy thoughts, and stay hydrated.

Of everyone I know in California, the majority were not born and raised here. The wild west has always belonged to the seeker, the rebel, the outlaw, and those prone to pronoia; it still does today. Anyone who chooses to be here is, in their own way, chasing the dream within a dream. On the strength of this characteristic alone, I am prepared to forgive California any and all of its trespasses. Even the urine stench in every concrete corner, the vampiric expenses, and those dorky lanyards that now seem to be flapping from half of San Francisco.

game on

My darling reader, thank you for joining me today and in this lifetime. If you ever want to respond to my letters, know that I welcome you. Don’t forget to let your breath breathe your body, and don’t forget to notice when it does. Go outside and say hello to the doggies. Open your eyes and see the world – it’s always available. Remember that wisdom might come clothed in nothing but a trenchcoat, and if you get even the briefest of indelible flashes, that’s a pretty good day.

Until next time, stay curious. — Rose

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