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Truly Based on a Story

To the left is actor Leon Jaramillo. Handsome, fashionable, a sort-of Latin-American George Clooney in his ER years. To the right is Pablo Escobar. Twisted, balding, unkempt, with those blank dark eyes that bespeak an evil unhampered with doubt or remorse. The left stars in a popular biopic miniseries depicting the life of the right, who may or may not have dressed entirely in black, carried a gold-plated pistol, and let his looks go as soon as people starting photographing him.

The show is called “El Capo.” When Jim Dalling first visited Fortuna, I pointed it out to him.

“Have you seen El Capo, Jim? It’s kind of a Panamanian 24.”

I watched the television as Leon Jaramillo stared at the screen in a series of increasingly close close-ups. Some paramilitary-types were closing in on his cave, and him and his two bodacious bodyguards were reacting by posing dramatically and approaching the camera. It was a sequence that may single-handedly have repudiated the axioms of Alfred Hitchcock, namely that lack of action is what leads to suspense. His adversaries always seemed just around the corner, but there was just more cave, and El Capo had time enough to exhaust his catalog of vivid squints.

“No no,” said Jim. “This is a true story. This is all about Pablo Escobar.”

More squints, more bodacious bodyguards, deeper descent into the cave.

“They seem to have taken some artistic liberties, Jim,” I pointed out.

“I think it’s pretty accurate,” he said.

It’s strange how, once you get outside your native tongue, TV and movies get reduced to the thick paint strokes of genre. Dramatic chase, tearful vows and promises, gun fight where nameless goons and policeman are traded but no one with a speaking role dies, suspension of action, betrayal by best friend, scene-where-you-are-sure-the-main-character-won’t-die, his improbable escape, a casual strut from an explosion, an angry police captain barking into a radio in red-faced and spittle-heavy futility.

From what I can tell, Pablo Escobar is the hero of the story, which has him alternating tears with stoic manliness.
“How many Mexican stand-ups can this man survive?” I ask. I am told to shhh. El Capo has taken his shirt off, to be replaced later by an identical black shirt, from a closet full of black shirts and pants and coat-jackets and shiny black shoes.

I recall from the book “Hunting Pablo Escobar,” the man’s naked and coke fueled soccer orgies, binding the hands and legs of a thieving party bartender and drowning him in his swimming pool in front of a house full of guests, shooting down an entire jetliner to kill a single person on it.

Filthy lies. El Capo would never do any of those things. Look at the way he befriends orphans and loves his mother and stays true to his one love, amidst so much temptation in the form of a loyal and buxom security force. And doesn’t use drugs. Or sell them. Not onscreen anyways.

A cop holds a gun to El Capo’s head, but El Capo isn’t nearly as terrified as I am. Not El Capo! Shoot anyone but Pablo Escobar! You just don’t know him the way I do!

But I’ll have to wait next week for the thrilling ten-minute denouement of the gun-held-to-head scene, complete with the hammer-being-pulled-back and the finger-bracing-hard-against-the-trigger. But it’ll take more than a mere bullet to kill El Capo. I’ve seen the man shot dozens of times, in and out through the leg or the arm—anything to get him out of those soiled black clothes and into some new ones.

Three and a half stars.

Sometimes I get to kill people

When I speak with Arturo, I have the terrible power to either kill or spare various famous people. Frank Sinatra? Dead. John Lennon? Dead. Marlon Brando? Dead. Ringo Starr? Alive.

Alive?

Yes. And looking great.

Arturo wipes the sweat from his brow as I press my finger tips together and prepare to obliterate his next line-up. Stevie Wonder? Alive. The members of the Eagles? I take a sip from my canteen as he shifts nervously in his seat. I don’t know for sure and smile at the sadistic joy of either killing or sparing them—me, the possessor of up-to-date VIP obituaries, with the aging celebrities clamoring before me, a gladiator-game for hair-bands, pop-stars, lounge singers and actors—we who are about to die salute you!

They’re alive, I say.

All of them, says Arturo, hopefully.

I give each of them a penetrating stare through the cross-hairs of my mind’s eye, but am moved to mercy.

For now.

What?

Yes, all of them.

NOTE

In my confusion I once accidentally killed Paul McCartney. It happened because Arturo was trying to ask me IF he was dead, and I exclaimed “Paul McCartney is dead!?” This left me with the awkward task of bringing him back to life, but Arturo was skeptical. “Why haven’t I heard any of his music in years?” he said. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Paul is living on a farm,” I said. I stopped short of explaining how he was happier there, now that he was able to run around freely over all those sprawling acres.

Funding

I received a small grant today. The Tinker Field Research Grant! At $1000, it is a relative whopper. Let me break them all down for you:

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Short-Term Fellowship -- $2800
Clark Research Support Grant -- $500
Tinker Field Research Grant -- $1000
Sigma-Xi Research Support Grant -- pending ($1000 requested)
Govindjee Research Support Grant -- pending ($1000 requested)

These are not really research grants. They exist to defray ordinary living expenses your advisor would rather die in extraordinary pain than pay. These include hostels, groceries, gasoline, bus, taxi, and airfare.

The other two grants I have pending are the big ones, applied for in November of last year, each for three-years of tuition and an annual stipend of $30k, with a one-time travel award and access to a Cray Supercomputer thrown in to spice things up. I should hear back from these sometime in April but I'm not optimistic. These are the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy's graduate research fellowships, respectively.

It's not readily appreciated just how cheaply things have to be done. I'm using the steel frame of a greenhouse I had to disassemble by hand and send up to Fortuna. I was only allowed to do this because the owner was essentially muscled into acquiescence by the co-adviser on the project, Ben Turner. Literally a steal. I bought plastic and shadecloth for about $100, all of the conetainers, racks, and tables were either sent up to Fortuna by me or fashioned out of scrapwood by Carlos on site. The microscopes and glassware I'm using are loaners, the various chemicals sum up in cost to about $850, and housing at Casa B is free. Which is why it is packed with people.

The sand, which I've mentioned earlier, is literally beach sand, sold at less than $1 / 75 lbs. I sleep in a borrowed sleeping bag. Every week Arturo and I trade off whose blood gets injected into the ink cartridge so we can continue to print things. That last one is a lie.

My point is, today is a big day for me. I just got $1000.

Problem/Solution (?) -- a day in my life

Problem: Plants are dying from transplant shock and excessive dryness

Solution: More shade cloth


Solution 2: Bigger plants

The refrigerator: Scientific Samples and Sandwich spread only

Soil Clay Content

While most the plants I grow go straight into sand, it is necessary sometimes to form a que of volunteers ready to risk their lives in the soilless media. So I pot them in soil.

This activity CAN be rewarding. There is something intrinsically refreshing about putting a fresh bare-root seedling into a dark pot of soil. However, Fortuna conspires to rob one of this simple pleasure.

The problem is that the soils are often formed of a thin layer of humus over a solid mass of pure clay. The humus layer, besides being thin, is a tangled meshwork of roots and leaves that is difficult to obtain in any quantity. And the clay is a malleable, solid mass. Fun to play with, and even efficient at holding onto nutrients, but in its super-abundance it often forms one solid puck in the pot, whose center is virtually impenetrable to water.

There are multiple tests designed to assess the clay-content of soil. Here I review two.


First, if you can take the soil and easily spell the word "CLAY" with it, it is almost entirely made of clay. This test has yet to achieve the status of universal standard, but has much to speak for it. The letters involve circular arcs, perpendicular intersections, and 45 degree intersections. And don't even get me started on that awkward horizontal line near the top of the "A". A litmus test if there ever was one.

Of course, there will always be critics. Some hold onto the old standard, which says that if, and only if, the soil can be used to symbolically represent two interpenetrating realities, is it truly clayey.




However, most feel that this is a waste of time.