A Day in the Life of Chaos

The other day I looked at death.   Not my own thankfully but in the declining health of a dear friend.   Life constantly prepares us for death in many ways.   As we age the percentage of those we know who die increases proportionately with the years.   If you own a pet, death is a regular part of our life.   Animals unfortunately have lifespans far shorter than our own and we are always reminded of death when we lose a close four legged companion.   We all approach death differently.  Some of us turn away because it is simply too painful.  Some of us never let go.  We carry the weight of loss daily with us often perhaps hastening our own demise. Death is a heavy part of life and an unfortunate constant.  There is no life without death.   Last week I flew to Tampa to visit a man who has been a part of my life for 28 years.  He has been mentioned many times in the course of this blog.  He is one of those people who for one reason or another became a part of me.  A very odd man, he is

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