This morning I awoke and though I was miserable I sang a few notes inadvertently in the hostel bathroom and it made me realize I haven't sung since I've been here. I've hummed though...in my sleep. And it's led to three nights on the couch in the hostel lobby. $13 a night to sleep on a fucking couch.

Last night Jay and Edwardo and I went out to a club in San Jose. It was packed with Tico college students and loud live music and smoke. Again, the women were amazing and abundant, but I was too inhibited to talk broken to them over the music and loud rumble of the crowded room, which sounded the same in Spanish as it would have in English.

The Gringo guys sat around with their folded hands between their knees because they couldn't carry a conversation yet. But the Gringo girls had their hands full. Women are rarely lonely unless it's self imposed. I could have chatted up the Gringo girls but I was ready to leave by the time I realized how many there were, and also, speaking English feels like a temporary state of giving up. So I was still and quiet and the beauty around me hurt and I had no fun and I sat static, thinking about the conversation Jay and I had with the Canadian with the mangled face. He said, "The women here play a different game." He couldn't explain what the game was. "But they definitely don't like sensitivity." Jay and I found this disheartening as we both agreed that, in America, sensitivity is our hook.

Eventually I left the club by myself; an independent gesture that had me feeling a little better until I was awoken from my hostel bunk by Edwardo coming in at 4 a.m. saying, "Michael, I am Edwardo, quit making that noise." So I went and slept on the couch. Again.

In the morning I was supposed to take a nine hour bus ride to Puerto Jimenez. But the bus station was in an abandoned Coca-Cola plant in a part of town that everyone said was extremely dangerous. So I cashed some traveler's checks in return for 24,000 Colones (I've never had 24,000 of anything, save freckles) and booked a commuter plane to Puerto Jimenez, the final destination for my artisitic haitus.

The plane was a single propeller job like the one that sliced that big guy's bald head off in Raiders of the Lost Ark. A fifteen-year-old kid waved the orange flags that guided the pilot off the runway and into the sky. I don't think much about death ever, but flying over the endless waves of mountains and rain forests, I almost wanted it to happen. I was very happy on that death trap plane.

Carved in the tops of the mountains were roads and all I could think was, 'People are crazy.' Some people talk to themselves loudly in public and piss their pants, and others carve roads where there needn't be any. I guess that's art as much as it is insanity.

I didn't, however, see any volcanoes. Costa Rica is famous for volcanoes and prostitutes and I haven't seen either yet. But at one point the plane flew through a thick of clouds and it was unlike anything I've known. It was much different than flying through clouds in a large plane; everything went white like heaven or what you might expect beyond the edge of the solar system and it was so bright that it hurt to look out the window.

When we came out, the rainforest was even more tangled and the ocean was swathed in red tide like brush strokes. It was all breathtaking, and I realized that I'd never had my breath taken by anything but a fist to the gut or a woman. There is indeed more out there than The University of South Florida, New World Brewery and a new woman's bed every few months. That had never hit home until today. I stared out the plane window at it all and silently hoped that this new relativity would stick around. Maybe things will change now.

We landed at the airstrip and an eccentric, American hippy couple loaded me into the back of their truck and drove me into 'downtown' Puerto Jimenez, on display like an Easter float, the citizens staring. Jimenez is a fucking village in a movie. I will describe it better when i have seen more, I want to do it justice. From what I understand there really is very little to see, but it still makes me giddy and crazy and reminds me that I don't know what the fuck is going on.

My room for the night cost a little less than $4. Aside from the rain forest out the hole in the wall that serves as the 7' X 7' room's 'window,' I can picture Bukowski in my room with its stained mattress and bare hanging bulb. He is squatting over a typewriter, sweating and drinking and happy that he's so cramped and low as he re-iterates again and again how funny it is that he's miserable.

(click here to post your opinions on this s(h)ite. --- Ed.)