how i met ms jen steil, author

june 1st, 2020
costa rica
it rains
it rains the rain of a billion years
each and every drop that condenses and falls and evaporates are each and every drop that has ever condensed and fallen and evaporated, since rain was rain, before each world, itself.
each drop is the tiny miraculous gem of atoms once weaponized, now returned, restored, repaired both before and after cern went on and offline.
this is, a year within a year, zero sum to replenish and revitalize all time and all memory, undoing ritual and rite of passage, dark magic, cabals, secret societies, clearing the minds of hate, hurt and worry, the washing of the water, in sleep, filters and removes the thoughts that plague and torment, dissolving the fine grains of bother, unravelling the muddled confusion of threat, revealing every hoax and hex that stood to gain from separation and neglect.
water is life.
and yet, in conversation, what do we say? "que pereza la lluvia".
we attribute rain to sloth.
with one flippant word, for the sake of mundane conversation, we disdain what is most precious, perfection.

it rains on this town.
this town cannot write itself...
under the hum of this rain on its rooftops.

circular timelines between rains, sun kissed, the neighbors don't bother with gossip unless the fights are real, so the quarrels end quickly, some forever.
punchlines are forgotten here and same jokes are laughed at repeatedly.
the mayor closed down all the bars, eventually.

our bar was at the bottom of the hill i'd lived on forever.
once a christian social hall, always a dive, i'd known two men killed near the premise:
billy pichuza and freddy pejibaye.
billy was killed by a blow to the back of his head, in the central market, as he walked home, by a taxi driver who was afraid of him. billy was black and tall and handsome.
freddy was killed by electricity, while welding. freddy had once looked like pop singer Gerardo of "rico suave" fame, before he died though, he'd turned the color of a pejibaye, a very reddish orange.

our bar sat on a corner and was full of caverns.
sometimes it had windows, mostly it had the lingering dusk of every tropical storm, of every time the song dust in the wind had reached someone's ears, the wood floor creaked, the tile remained unfaded, the tin roof leaked and the toilets flowed into the yard. the decorum swung between retro caribbean candle light and trova, to a white washed fade into argentine pop and rock deprogramming, to simply oscar's bar.
jen showed up when trini subercaseux was the keep, she liked to play cepillin pinpon, for last call.

at the other side of the bar, jen was flanked with two eager townies.
she had long wavy black hair that flowed from two silver stars forming at her temples, top mascara over bright blue eyes and proper red lip stick.
trini took her drink and set it over next to mine.
"i hope you don't mind" jen said to me as she sat down.
"not at all, what's your story?"
"i write"
i was glad, because i like it when gorgeous people, who i don't know, be they men or women, admit that they too are constantly on the lookout for another anecdote, metaphor, punchline, irony, epiphany to mull over, share and reflect upon, to spin forwards and backwards, till the staggered walk home feels like a musical number in a movie scene. cepillin pinpon.
writers are the best drinkers.
on that night she explained she'd been holed up at roger white's artist colony in the hills finishing a manuscript, getting over a heartbreak, swimming every day. she was between jobs, assignments, flexing her wings for what would end up being a long flight to Africa, for what i knew, then and there, would be a long career writing about other people and their cultures.
if i recall correctly she'd aim for Malawi, but end up in Yemen, editor in chief at a struggling newspaper, before the internet caught on.
"they don't know the formula for reporting" she said "you know, the who did what where when and why".
she told me about pace makers and the shifting sound they made, about the distractions of dutch men with big brown curls.
it was cute.
like all tourists, larping about overseas, who feel shocked "to their cores" when they see costa rica's sex tourism first hand, the very young girls, boys, the old war veterans in ugly shirts, the drugs and the taxi rides, the politicians and film stars.
i'd no way of informing her, any more than what she could see first hand.
i chose not to be embarrassed.
"it's business" i told her.

wikileaks is business.
the business of journalism at it's finest.
tax payers deserve to know how their money is spent.
how the media they consume is managed.

just writing shit down can bypass television, radio, cinema, cgi, games, brands, chemistry and has the power, if it's in the service of truth, to cancel black magic.

when i met jen, julian assange had published his first wikidrop.
i was coming down off the high of having my first novel win a publishing deal in perú.
trini's argentine disco pub was the cross between macondo azul and oscar's bar.
jk rawling was finishing the last tome of her ten year saga covering the adolescence of a privileged white contemporary warlock.

the bar no longer exists.
the corner building was razed and a parking lot was laid for a bank built on the soppy end of the yard where the toilets flowed.
and rawling has fallen on hard times with her fans for restating that male-female identity are paramount to both reality and magic. without the nature of the female and the male there is no fantasy. the political movement with it's preference specific gender identification is mostly the imagination and as a legal entity or literary device, serve no purpose.
she blew it when she outed dumbledore, a common female misuse of power.
but i did the math. the cold hard numbers. if the tomes of her seven books totaled 4,224 pages and she sold half a billion copies, the number of pages printed is 2,112 billion pages in which none of the adolescents at hogwarts show any interest in occult sexuality.

june 12
third time community standards "violation" back in facebook prison, as of yesterday.
i can still scroll through the 13 year history between the time jen and i became friends, thousands of shares, loves, likes, tears, wows and memes, gifs, congratulations and condolences.
the timeline i share with jen since then is like a brisquit, which neither of us is sure exactly what it is but that it sounds delicious and tricky to cook.