I am playing the best pool of my life. Not once, in four games tonight did I cause the cue ball become airborne and jump over the f-cking rail of the third floor loft of an Assisi bar, falling three stories below into the dinner of an displeased Italian man capable of wild hand gesturing as happened in 2004 when I played billiards with some of my just-graduated high-school mates. Italians, I would learn, take such things as serious as surgery.

Now tonight, nine years later, at the pool table in Antigua, Guatemala “New” Reilly’s”, without even practicing, I have learned the art of keeping the white ball on the table. I am shooting the ball somewhat, if not usually, straight. In between scratches and absurd missing, I am occasionally putting the odd ball sometimes in the hole. Once, I did that twice in one game. Victory! But giant bummer, there is no one to celebrate what has to be relegated to a personal victory since my skills, which used to be at the level of tequila-wasted orangutan, have only nudged up to a skill level of highly trained, but slightly buzzed, golden retriever and everyone else at the bar is at the level of highly advanced pool cyborg.

I’ll take that though.  It is after all, a Sunday. Antigua’s weekends have been doing plenty bacchanalian without me. I would expound but in text that is as difficult as conveying how it would feel if your margarita suddenly burst into medieval choral music only to disappear from the table and reemerge later, at your window, busting in, stealing your wallet and Aloe Vera plant. In case you haven’t enjoyed a holy-crap-this-is-Antigua night, the “New Reillys,” is now occupying the place of the Esquina, which before is a space that has been occupied by a dozen or so other places in as many years, each closing soon after opening. I think Reillys will make it though, since in the world of Antigua bars Reilly’s is the Guinness fed Irishman that doesn’t pick on anyone, but also won’t back down from a barage of dancing singles ready to fall for the first person who can remember your name for more than five minutes—a recipe for a smashing success.

I’ve been back in Guatemala for twelve days, and it’s time to go higher, up a mountain 10k from the city, near, but far in sense of occupying worlds. I call it “my” mountain in conversation, but it’s actually my friends’ mountain, who have purchased the top of the same mountain that hosts the holistic hostel Earth Lodge. They have a vision they call El Hobbiton which involves filling the place with Hobbit holes, building a hobbit hostel that no one can tell me they aren’t going to have to check out. ‘

As it is, you pass Antigua on the highway, go beyond the hill of the cross, continue along hillsides that are pretty enough to cause a pile up on the sparsely trafficked road. You keep going, there are some lush estates, but also Mayan families living simply, away from what they might consider the riffraff of Antigua. Antigua is a getaway, but it is also a place that sometimes needs getting away from.

 

My plan is to stay three or four days in one of the lean twos on top, 9,000 feet or so up. With a view that makes you feel like you are flying, cities below, stars above by night with the frequent rainy season storm couds rolling in, often far below your vantage point above the world.

I wrote 65,000 words of my “Non-fiction Guatemala book” while in Kenya away from the realities of cell phones, Internet, and constant interactions. In NYC, where the Internet lived in my phone, people were never more than ten feet away, and working to pay rent took up half my time, I added only 3,000 words. Not awesome at all. To remedy this I am leaving everything that operates on the magic of modernity but my camera and bringing up paperbacks and paper and a guitar and a copy of the the first draft of themanuscript. I plan not to come down until I’ve dragged it into a second draft.

Sometimes I envy more introverted writers, those who are able to be massively productive without forced isolation. Intellectually, I preach a game of using devices and social networks and not letting them use you. This was an easy stance to adopt when smart phones and ubiquitous Internet came since at the time I lived in a land of dumb phones and snail slow Internet connections.

I fell into the gap. As soon as I got an iPhone in New York, I fell just as far down the rabbit whole as anyone. During every spare, limbo second of life I would instinctively reach for my pocket to see what could possibly have happened on Twitter, Facebook, Email or whatever (I deny my involvement with Tinder) in the last thirty seconds. Usually, very very little.

While I continue to work on having the self-control to place personal bans on the Internet rabbit hole, I can still go off the grid when I feel I need to.  I’ll be writing a post a day from the mountain, but there will be some lag in getting them on the site because, do you remember pens? I’ll be using those, wishing, probably at some point, that I could recall how to write in cursive.

My second grade teacher told my class that we would need to write in cursive when we were adults. Well, you were wrong about that Mrs. Sebesta, and little did you know, that your name was a continual source of anxiety in my 8-year-old life.

My dad cannot help it when a catchy rhyme involving someone’s name arises out of the sing-song corner of his mind. That corner yielded him a song he was quite fond of about my second grade teacher that went, “Mrs. Sebesta, you’re the besta!, yes, yes,  yes, yes, yes, yes ,yes.” He sang it often at many a dinner table.

“Dad, never sing that song again.” I said as authoritatively as an 8-year-old can.

“But you like that song, right.” He would ask me despite my feelings being quite clear on the matter—I hated the song. There was an unspoken tension in my life when parent teacher conferences approached, since my dad would say that he could not wait to sing “The Mrs. Sebesta” song to her.

I never fully believed he was capable such extremes. But I never could be sure. My dad has always been a wild card.

“You’re not going to sing it?” I’d tell him, not as confident as I wanted to be.

“Don’t you think she’ll like that song?” My dad would counter, water-boarding me with his words.

Anyways, I can’t write in cursive, so the letters I plan to place inside the twelve envelopes I am bringing to the mountain will have to be written in a script as neat and legible as my pool playing impressive and awesome.  But no worries, if my hand gets tired from all the letter writing I can lean on my new skill that a friend taught me that allows you to use envelopes smoke tobacco and oregano.