28 Days Later

(South) America

Milagros calls them the conquerors, who arrived in Peru and started killing locals and building churches and changing the face of South America and the world forever. She won’t say the Spanish. The Spanish and the rest of Club Colonial proliferated via excursions to seek out new life and new civilisations and boldly bump them off to commercially exploit indigenous resources until the world dies by climate change and we head for the moon.

Artemis came back almost right away. They conquered the moon for the views of Earth. Must have been a tense re-entry. That’s the movie part when they hit 30 thousand kilometres an hour and the heat shields, oh those heat shields we all know what they are, will they hold under the scorching molten attack from the atmosphere, protecting all of us, for now.

…

I had this dream last night is the worst thing a person can say to another. No one cares about your dream. It didn’t really happen. Our brain manufactures and experiences dreams simultaneously, Leo DiCaprio explains in Inception -him and Ryan Gosling explain science through long movies- so the brain is director and audience, which shows to go you it’s better to divide labour because dreams are dumb and this auteur theory of dreams is just too art house.

…

Milagros is showing off a notable piece of Peruvian history, Huaca Pucllana, smack dab in tony Miraflores in Lima, an ancient place of gathering, which makes you wonder at the indifference as the site fell into disuse and then disappeared and kids used it for motocross. No one noticed as the architecture was covered by sand, which you understand because people are busy and there was no one at the local daily tablet covering the relics beat.

Same thing happened at Machu Picchu; it took an American looking for something else, (explorers who um, ‘discover’ places are always looking for somewhere else, I mean there’s a place outside Montréal called Lachine) and now global citizens arrive in Peru to make the trek wearing expensive hiking shoes, or less expensively by bus and a pretty cool train with windows on top, I mean who puts windows on top! or even really expensively by fucking helicopter, yes there were helicopters a couple of times transporting Spanish royalty, who landed in Machu Picchu and broke something because that is what royalty is for, making unforgivable mistakes and then going for canapes (ok fine, no more canapes for Andrew) and so, because space travel is still prohibitive, I took time from my incredibly busy pisco schedule in Barranco, maybe the best place on Earth and thereby the known universe (don’t go there, any more tourism and it will just become Barcelona, go to Montréal in May, c’est très chic, ce freak) and engaged my attorney to put together a reconnaissance mission to Machu - we’re on a first name basis- which according to my attorney is a total bitch to arrange. The number of people trying to see Machu Picchu before the place closes due to overfishing for dollars is staggering, if you are staggered by numbers.

…

I had this dream last night. There were kids on an island with guns and by their recklessness I was injured, and then I woke up, it was that dream you are relieved to find out was only a dream, and I didn’t need Freud or any of his contemporary caffeinated avatars to tell me the dream about kids playing with guns was about Pete Hegseth.

The Inca, or is it Inka, you decide, outpost of Machu Picchu, it was explained to my attorney and I by our intrepid guide Carlos Eduardo Cuba Estra, and can I have a name as fucking cool as that please, was a religious power centre, which is how I have heard some younger men describe parts of the female anatomy, or as Samuel L. Jackson entered into Gen X’s lexicon tablet, the holiest of holies. Indeed, the place is forbidding but then yields to a marvelous explorer’s delight. Us visitors, non-colonial explorers all, are here to take pictures of ourselves even though you could ask AI to put a fake together in like six seconds, but as Laurence Fishburne imprinted upon Gen X’s permanent record: Welcome to the… real. The Real is real, baby, this heaving, breathing assembly of human ingenuity set into a valley surrounded by misty mountains. You don’t need to be stoned or anything.

They sacrificed their own here, children sometimes, to assuage a coterie of imagined gods, and left ruins behind. So welcome to Tehran.

We take a bus up from Aguas Calientes, a place you should not spend more time in than absolutely necessary. We spent the night there because we intrepid reporters for this worthless tabloid woke up at four in the blessed morning and Aguas Calientes, doorway to Machu Picchu, is what happens when you capture people in a ballpark and you charge ungodly amounts for really awful food and t-shirts that say stuff like Toronto, Home of Sports that make it to the ninth inning and then die.

The Aguas to Machu bus up the twisting mountain tests the mettle of the most seasoned adventurer, your life in the hands of a driver not paid enough to support their young family and who, only hours ago succumbed to the offer of one more pisco for the road. This road.

…

We mount the stairway to heaven, encircled by clouds. We can barely see our hands. The fauna is impressively green, shining through the mist. Then, as only celluloid, and sometimes life, can deliver, the clouds part and we get to the guitar solo, and the centre of the Inca empire unveils and our faces melt at the awesome spectacle. We have pictures.

COFFEE KLATCH

The modern world runs on coffee and so it follows that Peru, with a staggering number, if you are easily staggered, of fucking amazing coffees, is the religious power centre of the known universe, including the dark side of the moon, where I expect we will enjoy a nighttime cappuccino.

Next Play extends thanks to Fabio, barista of the tiny alley coffee haven Onírica, in Cusco, who introduced us to the Stumpy, a coffee and milk delicacy of algorithmic perfection. Fabio is wearing a System of a Down t-shirt. I express my admiration for their oeuvre. He went to their concert and: “I died and was reborn”. Good show.

Lots of kids at Larry’s Place this morning, a next generation of caffeinated avatars.

And a café denizen wearing a Phantom Menace shirt unironically, evidence of a generational chasm between X and those who came after. To be fair, the scene depicted is the light sabre fight at the end between the jedi and Darth Maul, which is fucking epic. We can build bridges, one Star Wars movie at a time.

INKA SPILLS

· From the Rooftops of Tehran by Anonymous, in the current issue of New York Review of Books. Worth it for the free part before the paywall. Or hey, pay for it!

· Ceasefire is a word whose meaning has disappeared, waiting to be discovered by future generations, and resurrected.

· Name of a bad fusion album I won’t be recording; First Name Bassist.