The Bosteros

Home.

Our neighbor destroyed our bougainvillea and one side of our garden while we were gone. He does this every few years but really outdid himself this time. The weeds decided to eat the rest of it. Our other neighbor is selling her house and everything has gone to seed.

Crap. Everything looks like crap.

Plottie is tired. Those last five hours on the plane were 'way worse than the 17 before them. The last hour the pilot must have landed in Bend, Oregon and pushed the plane to Saint Plotniko with his hands.

Everything around here looks a little -- shabby. Plot has been catching up with his emails this morning -- and realizes how much crap he looks at on a daily basis.

But he also missed reading the blogs from his friends. He hadn't realized some of them are having a really tough time and today he feels...crappy about it.

He and Duck couldn't open the front door yesterday because a month's mail had gone through the front door mail chute and was piled up against it. How much of that mail was worth reading? One small check from ASCAP. The rest went in two huge garbage bags.

Phone messages: solicitations for crap from the Crap Institute.

Back to work? Plays to set up, good. Music to work on, good. Old projects -- Plotnik spreads himself too thin, he knows he does it, but it's hard to know when to stop. Crap.

The key seems to be to pick out the jewels. But how do you know what is a jewel and what is just, well, crap? If you wrote it, you like it, but you're also 'way too close to it.

Mummy Plotnik. She's OK, but Plotnik must get down there, though right now stepping on an airplane or driving six hours in a car does not sound very good.

While they were gone, Plot had set up a signal with Mummy P. He would text her, her helper Lilian would read her the text and then they'd text back. He set himself up with an international text package for that purpose. She'd hear from him and he'd know she was all right.

She didn't do it, of course, and that meant he worried. Then the earthquake came. Everybody in the family heard about it before Plotnik did and they got understandably worried. The Great PD was awakened at 6am to hear there was very bad news, that there had been a terrible earthquake in Chile and Plot and Duck might be underneath it all.

Plot and Duck were a thousand miles away, but hey. Luckily, PD texted Plot and said "How are you?" and Plot was on a bus where there was actually a cell phone signal at that point. He texted back "Fine, and you?"

PD advised Plottie to immediately put up a notice for Plotnikkies but, of course, there was by that time no internet signal anywhere near where Plot and Duck were. But it all got sorted out eventually. It's actually very good to know that people are interested in your welfare.

Baseball? Plot doesn't care. Basketball? Ehhh. If he could have stayed one more week he might have spent the hundreds of dollars to go see the two big rivals in Argentine soccer play each other. La Boca versus River Plate.

This is the way athletics are supposed to be -- to the death. River Plate wears red and they are the upper crust team. Their nickname is 'los milionarios,' when they're not using their other nickname, which is 'Gallineros,' which means chickens, because when they lost a very important game a few years ago the other team taunted them by waving live chickens.

The River Plate stadium is huge, where the Stones and Nirvana come to give concerts. La Boca, on the other hand, wears blue and their stadium is called La Bombonera, which means firemen. They are the lower class team from the slums. Their nickname is 'bosteros' -- which literally means horse shit, because they were the ones who always had to clean up after the rich people's horses. They chant during the game, like Queen: "WE ARE THE HORSE SHITS!"

So it's the millionaires against the horse shits. You couldn't write this any better. 150,000 screaming people in the stands and barbed wire to keep one sections' fans from tearing the other ones apart.

Who is the most revered Argentinian of all, after Evita Peron? Maradona, who led Argentina to a World Cup championship thirty years ago. Where was he from? La Boca, of course. A really fast little horse shitter.

Plottie would have been on the La Boca side for sure.

But no. He's in Saint Plotniko, looking at crap mail. And email. And phone solicitations. The same-o same-o. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

Thanks for everyone's emails. You all have presents. BZWZ and Cousin Seattle, Patagonia is the land of rocks. That's all I'm sayin'.