A Day in the Life of Chaos

In a professional career you come across all sorts of people but none have as much impact on you as the supervisors your work for.  They can make your professional life a pleasure and they can make it hell.  This year I am marking my 28th year on the job and with all sincerity I hope to stay around just just four more years.  Aside from loved ones and a few good friends I think 32 years is enough to devote to anyone or anything. My first two supervisors were illustrations of various styles.  The first was hell.  She was a demonic memory that made me question my initial decisions in life.  The second was a motherly personality never wishing to push the envelop.  After the fourth year of the second supervisor, I was convinced I might need a complete career change and contemplated trading my mind numbing cubicle for an academic life.  It was my third supervisor who changed my life.  She gave me wings by inviting me to work for her for close to six years on the  southern side of th

I am sure if one paid critical attention to my blog over the years they would rightly perceive I live my life in a constant state of internal analysis.   Many have told me I think too much and honestly they are probably right.   Still thinking is my trade as is analysis and the two skills while earning me a living, seem to haunt me in everyday life. I haven’t written much lately.   I think my urge to write is often stimulated by complexities or questions in life.   When they are present my creativity like water seeks a path and many times the blog presents the channel that I follow.   Often time’s questions in life are stimulated by my own actions and I suppose I am entering another one of those phases as I make another effort to secure a position overseas for the majority of the professional years I have left. I took a walk at lunch today.   It is spring in South Carolina.   The weather is friendly while the pollen chokes your throat.   Spring brings a sense of renewal

La Paz, Bolivia Humans always seem to be going some where.  It can be in reality or simply in our minds.  One way or the other we all seem to be making a journey.  Many of my titles I use for my blogs are hyperbole.  This is most certainly not one of them.  The road has been profiled in numerous adventure shows symbolizing a level of obscene terror.  It is the kind of place that people in suburban America will look at, gasp and wonder why in the hell anyone would ever journey down it.  At some point during my tenure in Bolivia it was my pleasure or misfortune depending on your perspective to experience it with my father and my neurotic Jew friend Ira.  Bolivia is an odd place that often defies explanation.  Things that shouldn't be are and things that are shouldn't be.  When the Spanish first ventured into the area and encountered the remnants of the Incan and Aymara civilizations on the shores of Lake Titicaca they decided to build a city.  It would be a grand city and

The street cars of La Paz Bolivia is a vast country nearly void of effective transportation.  Highways are often little more than dirt tracks that are closed from transit large parts of the year.  Like many colonial nations in Africa once the colonizers departed so did the infrastructure.  Once upon a time in La Paz street cars traversed the cities.  Images from the past have a strange tendency to seem more refined and more organized than images from the present. While Bolivia achieved independence in 1825 the colonial occupiers should be redefined from nations to commercial interests.  There was once a rail road that threatened to connect the country but never did.  Part of it stretches through the Andean highlands connecting Chile and Argentina with Oruro, La Paz and Cochabamba.   A second part of a different gauge runs from Santa Cruz to the Bolivia - Brazil border town of Puerto Suarez and south to Paraguay. A third and fascinating railroad was constructed in the far nort

Skip Garcia, JD, Ira In 1991 former president and nearly convicted criminal Richard Milhous Nixon, in response to "reefer madness," first coined the phrase "The War On Drugs." The name immediately conjures an image of a brutal land, sea and air assault against a tyrannical foe.   The battlefield was the world yet as time has progressed the often over used phrase seems to resemble the Hundred Years War as opposed to World War Two.  As part of the ongoing struggle against drugs in the late 1990's, the American Government dispatched an elite group of commandos to a remote corner of Bolivia.  Their mission was to identify and intercept elicit cargoes of chemicals essential to the clandestine production of cocaine. Two of the teams members are pictured to the right however since JD is still active I thought it best to conceal his face.  I like to think of him as the gravely voiced darkened image of an informant hidden on camera.  Unfortunately I was not pres