Zebulon’s Weblog

Dowdy has this little one-eyed, electric stove that he bought after selling a spoon a couple of months ago. I was naturally feeling pretty good about the situation, about myself, and now about the fact that there is kitchen I can bum off somebody when my gas runs out as it did this week. For the past three days I have been heading over to Dowdy’s shop with seasonings, yams, and whatever else I have leftover from this months effort to feed myself with a Peace Corps living allowance.  Seeing that he is going to get to eat, Dowdy is pretty excited about his too – something I realized this morning after he proclaimed his good fortune with my gas running out and everything.

Today is sunny and mild, a big change from the last three days of rain. I had planned on washing this towel that was long overdue a good cleaning. It started to smell like road kill about a month ago and now…I wont even say anything. The point is that it was ready for a wash, but the rain kind of called for a bit of rescheduling. So, today I washed it and you don’t have to go around saying that this Peace Corps guy named Zeb is a dirty dude, because now it is clean and I am not dirty anymore. It’s not really my fault that it got smelly though. I live in a damp, mildewy basement that gets about as much sunlight as the deepest caves in the Cockpit Country. Everything feels damp down here even if you don’t expose it to water, so the idea of hanging something up to dry is pretty well out of the question.

Jamaica has indigenous parrots – the yellow and black billed parrot. As far as I know, the Black Billed Parrot can be found no where else is the world except Jamaica. Like most developing countries, Jamaica does a pretty good job of exploiting their wildlife, especially parrots. Thanks to their pretty feathers and uncanny ability to mimic humans’ form of communication, their demand in the pet trade is quite high, pretty much ensuring that they will eventually be captured into extinction. For whatever reason evolution made them so colorful and smart, or God made them so irreducibly complex, if they are to survive the environment of the future then they’re going to have to 1) change their diet to human babies or 2) get a lot uglier and stupider. If I were a parrot I would be doing the down and dirty with as many ugly, stupid females as possible, but unfortunately they are all pretty and smart – a surprisingly poor defensive mechanism in a world where the number of humans is growing exponentially.

There are quite a few parrots in captivity in Maroon-Town. This of course is illegal, but Maroons don’t seem to be too concerned with this little law. They have bigger fish to fry with all the drug trafficking and illegal firearms to worry about Babylon coming to confiscate their parrots. After about a year and half here, I can now say with utter confidence that I know the name of every parrot in the Cockpit Country. I could know the name of every parrot in Jamaica, but I am sure that there is some Kingstonian hippy out there who thought they were better than everyone else and named their parrot Rainbow. Still, I have never met a captive parrot who has not been given the name Pretty. Indeed, for such a beautiful bird, I guess it fits right in with Jamaican pet naming- every cat is Puss, every bird is Pretty, and every dog is…you guessed it – Dog.

After about 3 days of inviting myself into someone else’s space you would think that I would begin to be slightly unwelcome, but much to my surprise I have once again managed to stay far enough off the radar that even my presence carries little or no impact. Grace Titus is a Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Santa Cruz at the Red Cross – one of the most mature 21 year olds I have ever met in my life, and she gets extra points for putting up with me for three days.

My recent decision to be a bum on this weekend has done me little good until this weekend. Grace has high speed internet which has been quite the treat. While here I had a video conversation with an old romance among other less productive things like writing this blog. It is unfortunate how little practice I have with technology while I have been here. Things change so fast in the tech world and I have been on the outside of all the developments in social programing like Skype, Facebook, and …I am sure that there is something else out there that I am forgetting.

Sorry I don’t have anything to amusing to write about right now. I didn’t see many Jamaicans or Mongooses today, so life has been comfortably boring. I feel very relaxed down here with Grace, and I thank her foor supporting my efforts to reconnect with friends and get Accompong out of my life for a bit.

Forest Conservation Fund just asked us to come to Kingston for a signing over of the check for the Quick Step Trail Project. This is going to keep me busy for the rest of my service.