Mail Bag
When is Paul gonna post?
Oh Lord, I know. The weather is unpredictable around here.
when i chucked ‘golden gate’ into iTunes, it set up house right next to pavement’s “elevate me later.” huzzah!
That was a mix tape regular, back in the Silurian Period of mix tapes. Very glad to be range-roving with the indie stars of yesteryear.
what are you going to be for halloween?
Probably, for the second year running, we’ll be old people who hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. My favorite of last year’s costumes was the girl dressed in a dashing pinstripe suit and rakish fedora, with lots of conspicuous bling spilling out of her pockets: “What are you?” “A jewel thief.”
paul, where were you in guatemala in relation to the mudslide zones?
The worst of it hit the shores of Lake Atitlán, which is both one of the country’s biggest tourist destinations and a collection of highly traditionalist indigenous communities—of course the people are presented as another tourist attraction, along with the beaches and volcanoes. I did visit, and it was beautiful, but the part of the country I’m writing about is farther east along the Chixoy river, where the hydroelectric dam was built.
Maya burial customs dictate that bodies be interred within a day of death; since many of them cannot be recovered under these circumstances, the mudslide zones are being declared mass graves. Many villages are reluctant to accept help from the army, since the time when army and paramilitary units would appear without warning to carry out massacres is barely a decade past. If you have any room in your budget after the other recent tragedies and would like to send something to Guatemala, I can recommend Rights Action, good people who met with me in Guatemala and very graciously helped put me in touch with indigenous communities affected by the dam. (They take credit cards; donate on behalf of “Hurricane Stan Relief.”)
Regarding the other side of the world, Manan at Chapati Mystery is taking donations and selling T-shirts to support the Edhi Foundation in Kashmir; if you haven’t found time to send anything yet, I can vouch for him unreservedly.
