17

"He has the habit of hijacking reality"

“The smell of rain on frozen ground” When we first started hanging out I learned he lived beneath the brambles. Soon, any significantly entangled bush or brush, tangled enough to hide a spirit, was a good place to have a beer and say hello.

“Helig Geist” Being one to enjoy a good plague he would have loved an ancient hospital named after a ghost.

While working on this post, devoted to baba Omolu and the Number 17 this story popped up on my Twitter feed:

Here's my story on the world’s last lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco, drank 17 beers a day, kissed a seal and became an international celebrity before things went wrong. - Andrew Chamings

“Not only is his number 17 he’s also the spirit of beer” Which is what I was thinking having come from San Francisco to this spot outside Bangor Maine. It makes for a nice excuse until it doesn’t.

“After Jonathan Sellers moved on, I fed him beer and cigarettes.” An excellent summary of San Lazaro, with details on ancient and modern worship of Omolu and Babalu Aye’: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2765&context=etd

The Oba-lu- Aiye cult was known to have great curative knowledge of the human body. During times of war this tribe was the first one to use germ warfare or biological warfare against neighboring enemies. The way that they would do this would be by using a spear like stick [JA] and position it where decaying corpses were laid to rest. These corpses which usually died from smallpox or from other contagions where full of bacterium. They would then get the spears and poke the dead carcasses of these bodies. In the evening they would use a camouflage and go out to the neighboring enemy territory which was damp and muddy and they would stab the dirt. At that time the area would then be contaminated with smallpox or yellow fever or any other contagion” (Pichardo, 2014).

I think I’ve said enough for today. Maybe too much. Con/Jur/d

“Well, you could walk it in a day. Maybe not in 1977, but still.”