The second chapter in the travel chronicles of Eduardo Próspero is live on Metapsychosis, a site of the highest caliber. This time our hero appears in Brazil and, as per usual, nothing goes his way. He falls on his feet, though, and lives to fight another day. And no, I’m not spoiling anything. The story is in the journey, not in the destination. And it starts dramatically:
Más, mucho más después del salto
LOL, I can’t believe it took me so long to publish this here, it happened more than a month ago. Arguably my biggest accomplishment since I started writing in English, I got published in Hacker Noon. This site is a daily check for me and there I am, among their pages, among their contributors.
I want to keep writing for them, keep the momentum going, but my aim is to write about cryptocurrencies from a user perspective and I already spent all of my Bitcoin. And that’s where the story starts:
I sold all my bitcoins before the latest stage of the crypto winter.
I’m not proud of it and I’m not a seer, I was just broke and hungry. That money was my safety net and now I’m free falling into the abyss, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is I’m not a Bitcoin owner anymore. And cryptocurrencies seem to be falling into the abyss…
Then I go into my usual conspiracy-minded-type-of-argument:
I don’t claim to know exactly what’s happening, I’m as confused as the authors of the articles about the crash I’ve been reading. What I do know is that Bitcoin’s economy is not strong enough yet and it’s still vulnerable to attacks and manipulation.
(…)
Intrigue, prestidigitation, dirty tricks. An attack, that is how I see this crash and that is how I see the boom and super high climb of 2017. That shit wasn’t natural and this isn’t either. Dark forces are playing with our heads and with our money supply, testing our behavior, watching us run for our lives. And taking notes.
And then and only then I start telling my story. Which is a good one, and complements my more dramatic guest-post on Metapsychosis from a few months ago.
So don’t waste more time, go and read it –> “How cryptocurrencies opened the doors for my escape from Venezuela” — According to Medium it’ll take only five minutes and at the moment of publication has 182 claps that support the message.
So, I let it all out and got my first feature in an online publication I respect and admire. I don’t know if you’re aware of Metapsychosis, but they publish articles of the highest caliber and everyone involved seems to be some kind of genius, present company excluded. Anyway, my piece is a first-person shooter about my recent experiences as an immigrant and it starts like this:
I haven’t admitted to myself that I left my country for good. If you ask me, I’m on vacations, looking for business opportunities and establishing contact with likeminded people. Everyone I’ve met told me not to go back, to at least get some kind of legal documentation from another country, to spread my wings. They all want to talk about the crisis, most of them ask me for possible solutions I don’t have and look at me with understated pity. And I understand.
Later on it gets political even though it pretends not to:
I don’t feel comfortable discussing politics or economics, but I’ll say that every article I read about Venezuela’s situation, from both sides of the conflict, feels shallow and agenda driven. I wouldn’t even consider the opinion of an outsider that gets its information from the media, I’m talking about high level journalists that live inside the country. All of their analysis seems to be evading basic truths, facts, causes. They seem to ignore the macro, the big picture, and what a small but crucial dot in the grand chessboard Venezuela is.
And almost at the end it gets all cinéma vérité:
The last time I set foot in Caracas it offered me a sad and creepy spectacle. It was a Saturday and a shopping mall I used to walk by frequently when I lived there was almost deserted, most of the shops were closed and only a few lost souls were there. The streets weren’t empty, but they weren’t exactly beaming with life, and the traffic was so light you might as well have been in a frontier town. And the faces, oh, the broken faces…
But please do read the whole thing, it’s not that long and it hits you hard.
I wrote this in one of those pesky Discordian fakebook groups:
So, a few months ago, on my birthday, I woke up groggy and alone in the house. The sun was giving a weird light, and I immediately noticed something off in the CDs shelf. I went there and picked up an album I’ve never seen, the cover was an intense electric blue, metalic, and it reflected the light. I examined it, the title was “Discord” and I knew I was in the midst of it. I put it on and it was the most amazing music. Of course, nobody in this house knows where it came from.
Hail Eris, All Hail Discorja!
It’s not over until you listen to the whole album, above.
P.S. This song uses Ryuichi Sakamoto music, also.
Look, there’s no way around it: I’m a published author now.
I contributed five or six paragraphs to “Together” by Andy Gell, a The KLF inspired collaborative book already available.
It’s part of the huge amount of art The 400 are producing following this event, one which you should be familiarized with to understand the novel or even what I’m talking about here. It’s also book two on the “WTF Trilogy” by Mr. Gell.
Since I haven’t read “Together” yet, this post consists of a few quotes from the first glowing review it received: Continue reading
So, I fled to this town in Los Andes, Venezuela to finish the damn novella. I guess its a novel now, “La Tormenta” grew to almost 200 pages, but whatever… I´ll be back soon to get this blog into gear. I have so many plans for it.
Greetings from Boconó,
Amílcar Ortega.
Samples and Examples 