This is a special report from the Intercontinental Radio News. At forty-five minutes before ten o’clock, central time, an un-named official in Washington confirmed that terrorist Osama Bin Laden was entering his third day of interrogation. Yesterday, the interrogation team sent out for two extra…
Jimmy Gabacho
151 Articles
Gabacho– according to the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy– is derived from an old Provençal word “gavach,” meaning a person from the foothills of the Pyrenees who spoke incorrectly. These days, it means “outsider,” somebody who just doesn’t fit in.
Jimmy Gabacho
3 Min Read
The Last Temptation of Osama bin Laden II Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you up to date coverage of the interrogation of terrorist Osama Bin Laden. We take you directly to the Supermax facility where he is being housed….
Jimmy Gabacho
7 Min Read
The Last Temptation of Osama bin Laden We interrupt our regularly scheduled program of travel narratives to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, un-named governmental sources in Washington commented that the initial reports announcing…
Jimmy Gabacho
5 Min Read
Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt this post for a special report: Jimmy Gabacho, a virtually unknown blogger who posts regularly on Bark, Bugs, Leaves and Lizards and on My Ongoing Struggle just found out that Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy Seals last week. …
Jimmy Gabacho
4 Min Read
In Los Cabos, we arrived at the hotel right at dusk as the groundskeepers were lighting the candles and tiki torches that illuminated the paths through the garden. The place was beautiful. The architecture is traditional Mexican: terracotta floors, whitewashed walls, colorful ceramic tiles, red-tiled…
Jimmy Gabacho
7 Min Read
The ride to the airport across the desert sands took about thirty-five minutes. I couldn’t help but notice the maximum security penitentiary, just out of sight from the tourists. It was only in the 80s at the time, but by summer, when the temperature reached…
Jimmy Gabacho
5 Min Read
It came over me like a dark cloud: a wave of muck, broken tree branches, moss, liquid filth containing the putrid remains of reptiles and rodents. I was drowning, suffocated by a toxic funk. I couldn’t breathe, my throat was parched, my eyes burned, and my ears were ringing. It started off slowly and the sound grew. I figured that if I was going under, I might as well be able to do it in peace and quiet, but the sound grew louder. I still couldn’t move. I was trapped, caught up in a swamp with darkness closing in. I couldn’t move. I tossed and turned, but it was to no avail. The sound grew louder.
Jimmy Gabacho
4 Min Read
After weeks of gibberish, he had finally given me something juicy for my conference paper. And, let’s face it, I was intrigued. It is not every day that Chicken Man walks into your office. Sigmund Freud had his Rat Man, an old Russian guy who fantasized about a rodent crawling up his anus, and that case made his career. I was thinking book contract, movie rights, lecture tours, the works. This was heavy stuff. It was much better than the stuff I was used to hearing: “I feel guilty for what I did to my father” or “my parents didn’t love me enough.” I could spin this into an endowed chair.
Jimmy Gabacho
4 Min Read
After several months away from my writing, I’m finally back. I had gotten myself bogged down for a month and a half working on a paper about one of my patients. I usually don’t talk about work in these blogs, but I might as well tell the world that I am a specialist in psychoanalysis, and I do occasional work in the field. I had taken on a client: a thirty-two year old obsessive-compulsive; his condition he had been diagnosed as neurotic by half a dozen psychiatrists, and was so acute that most of them had broken off their professional relationships with him.
Jimmy Gabacho
4 Min Read
As I wrote in last week’s post, Peter Conners’ Growing up Dead: the Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Cambridge: Dacapo Press, 2009), brought back a lot of memories. But not all of them were good ones. If the bad memories are missing from the…
Jimmy Gabacho
4 Min Read
I just finished Peter Conners’ Growing up Dead: the Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Cambridge: Dacapo Press, 2009), it’s a good read that brings back a lot of memories. It is a coming of age story about a teenager in upstate New York who decides to “flip off” his white middle-class background, forego the Game of Life, and become a modern-day gypsy, traveling from campground to campground, attending the shows of the Grateful Dead. His narrative describes traveling from show to show, sleeping in a green VW microbus, smoking copious amounts of marijuana, dropping LSD, living without the luxury of a shower, and living hand to mouth for months on end.
Jimmy Gabacho
4 Min Read
This post may be a little out of character, but there are things here that need to be said. It is regarding one of these projects I work on in my other life as a blunted academic, teaching an endless line of adolescents who think…
Jimmy Gabacho
5 Min Read
After I uploaded the Chris Owens post, I high-tailed it out of the country as fast as I could. I wasn’t waiting around for any midnight knock at the door. I packed the usual: shorts, t-shirts, sandals, and plenty to read. It never seems to fail: I’ll be reading a book every night for a week and right before I travel I will be close to the end, but not close enough to finish. So, invariably I end up finishing the book on plane and having to lug the book around with me for the duration of my trip. This time it happened with Ru Freeman’s novel, entitled, A Disobedient Girl, which by the way is a great read. The story takes place in Sri Lanka and revolves around the lives and loves of Latha, a strikingly beautiful servant girl, and Thara, the pampered daughter of the upper-class/caste family. Because the two girls are so close in age, at times their relationship becomes one of sisters, confidants, and dangerous liaisons, but when boys (and later men) appear on the scene, they become competition for each other. Despite their close relationship, the class/caste difference is forever an impassable obstacle.