I’m glad I keep getting pleasantly proven wrong lately. Grand Cayman was tight.
Grand Cayman wasn’t boring, in the way the nicer parts of Austin aren’t boring, they are just wealthy. Grand Cayman is rolling in it. The tourist area near the port isn’t filled with only depraved trinket vendors or Jimmy Buffet soft-ball tourist trash. It has a whole district of Rolex boutiques, Cartier boutiques. Swatch, Swarovski, luxury out the ass. It feels disgusting and self-indulgent to fawn over something like a Rolex… but Rolexes are so, just so… so so beautiful.
I’m a watch guy maybe and an engineer. I appreciate fine and beautifully crafted things that are tiny, impeccably precise machines too. The craft and culture of watchmaking is the Everest of mechanical engineering I think, the highest summit meant for only the truly serious, just like laser design is the Everest of optical engineering. BUT, Jimminy Fuckmas is this a boring tangent. We can cover this topic any time we like.
Things like that though are beautiful enough to turn the heads of the most juiced Mafioso, who are precisely the folks who stash their dough in the Caymans… unbeknownst to the tax laws and paper trails of the world folks like us are subject to. Yes, the Cayman banks are the modern-day replacements of the old skool buried pirate’s chests.
It’s where the high rollers stash their good shit. There’s probably more laundered dollar bills in the Caymans than there are laundered undershorts in the entire United States at any given moment in time.
So it’s no wonder that when the fuckin financial pimps and their trophy wife hos out there come to their real banks to open a new checking account to handle the Accounts Receivable department of their latest Ponzi sch- *ahem* investment firm, they have a place to go shopping before being heliported back to wherever the hell they want.
Nobody’s in too harsh of a mood here.
Nope, me and Jordan just fucked around for an hour. Easy Peasy Japanesey. I drank from a freshly-opened coconut (kind of like drinking warm piss with a hint of nonfat milk), honked a note out of a street vendor’s conch shell (I still have the muscle memory of my trumpet embouchure from back in high school), walked around till just outside of the Pimp District near the port to where the real eats and shops are (the ones the normal islanders frequent), got dished up a rockin authentic-style Trinidadian chicken roti with home made scotch bonnet hot sauce and shredded mango chutney. Yikes, by the way! It was severely badass. And in stark contrast of the cockroachly customer relations policies of the Jamaican rip off artists, the proprietor of the shop was a beautfiful, relaxed, downright motherly Trini woman, who was so kind she scolded me to store my leftovers in my “knapsack” rather than carry them by hand.
*Pause for smiles*
Well, while eating our rotis and bullshitting with the motherly lady about my pepper garden (brownie points: I’m growing Trinidad peppers back home. I made sure I whipped that one out right up front.), we got directions to a nearby record store. We hauled ass to the shop, which didn’t have any vinyl LPs but, as you might image, did have a pretty legit reggae cd section. So I snapped up a few of the more witchy and obscure looking discs and we trucked it back to the port just in time to catch the last ferry of the day back to our cruise ship. Branson it was not. More like Santa Monica. Santa Monica as a motherfucker. Santa Monica is good times.
Back on the boat we got our minds blown by the reggae we picked up. In particular, the 1978 album “Dread Beat An’ Blood” by Linton Kwesi Johnson was so on fire with mystical rebel spirit that it made me come to my big head change about Jamaica. Any island that can create that album is one I’m going to always honor. The spirit of Jah is truly alive in Jamaica.
Jordan and I had a long trip talk last night about the Caribbean’s dark past. The Carribean is nothing more than ground zero of a massively evil ghost story. Columbus Fuckwad Dickmouth Christopher massacred a tribe of human beings. If you believe in psychic impressions left behind after the scence of a murder, what in the name of holy Hell do you think is going on down here?
Voodoo, the Bermuda Triangle, Jimmy Buffet’s fame, this place is soaking with bad chi. It’s infested with a legacy of curses, murder, torture, starvation, white folks who finally found their a chance to take out their small dick issues on human cattle. These men were some wonderfully accomplished cowards, and the injustice will never be righted here until, God-willing, Jah actually does lead his people to victory.
In a vulgar display of power of my own, I just got done ordering two pieces of chocolate cake, two orders of cookies, and two cups of apple juice from room service, not because I was hungry for all of it, but because I woke up from my catnap with a sweet tooth. A mighty man am I.
But you should see that fat fucking hogs here up on the Lido deck. I am no match for their eating skillz.
No comments:
Post a Comment