So glad to meet you, angeles......

Do you ever find yourself uncovering something inside where you're like "holy shit, I should do this from now on"......or finding yourself wanting to write down something but accepting the fact that there's no way to actually uncover the thoughts in written words. what do you do then...try to write a song, write in a journal, draw a person. but those are just way too cool of things to do I suppose.....in the mean time....hello! how are you? did you have a good day? decent? ohhhh i'm sorry to hear that, but don't worry, school will start soon and we'll just have other things to complain about......can't wait? netiher can I.

I have finding new inspirations in old music. Inspiration with my hair pulled back, no one to see me, I was meant to be a hermet. Only to re-surface once a month for daily tea parties....distribution of goods. The sun is quite different here. My Dad told me this before I came, but typically I seem to always assume he's just crazy. Well, I must say either I'm beginning to think I'm Clark Kent and that the sun gives me power, or I'm just crazy. I must say though, that looking at and feeling the sun soak into your skin is somewhat or a trival yet overlooked experience. I know it's just frying my skin, but something about the warmth brings hope.....maybe the sun just makes me think about really lame subjects like this. See once again, I drew you to this same old screen you look at everyday, and bore you with nothing more than common jubberish.

My father and I took a Everglades excursion this morning at 10:00. Before the boat tour, my father insisted in going up to the information area and taking not one but two copies of every brochure they could possibly provide. What did he say when he caught me starring at him in awe? "i'm gonna start a collection of brochures so I can have things planned when you come again next month". So you need TWO copies? One for the house, and one to throw in the hurricane that will probably hit next month.

That wasn't the only incident at the information center. Turns out the owner of the guide tour was in the marines.....so basically my father had a field day talking to this man about covert operations, Vietnam, and smuggling of drugs. Of course half way into the conversation the owner turns to his son, Capt. Judd (the guy who was the real tour guide) and said "This guy's a "spook"! Look at the pin he's wearing". This is what my father lives for....he's got spook bling bling you could say. Anyway we hop on the boat, and venture off in search of our first goal: a manatee!

Which for the first 40 minutes.....was a no show.....but all of a sudden! BOOM! we heard a splash in back of our boat. What you want to look for is a pattern of circular waves. This is made by when the manatee surfaces then dives, in which his back tail smacks the top of the water. Well, we had quite the encounter. And from what I could see, I think this manatee wanted to do more with me than just look. It came all the way up to the boat and stuck it's head all the way out to me! So what did I do? Reached out my hand, patted it's head and blew it a kiss. In which is slowly started to re-submerge back into the water. But ohh no, it didn't leave....it came back about 3 minutes later to give me another goodbye kiss! It's skin was unbelievable. Imagine the thickest leather ever made...then multiply that time 10. I've never felt something quite like that.

We saw this Manatee in the canal leading to the Gulf Of Mexico...Cuba was 60 miles away from us. And it turns out that we were on the main smuggling route from about 4 years ago. the stories get better. Although we saw no gators, onced we reached the salt water we encountered a sting ray, which for some reason, I was petrified to look at. It was like a black cloak hoovering across the top of the water. To be honest it reminded me more of a demon than any love stricken manatee I just blew kisses to.

(and by the way this is mostly all recorded, except of course for my intimate moments with Bertha the Algae infested Manatee ((she told me her name, it derives from the fact that she was almost 7 ft. long, and probably weighed over 250 pounds while wearing a nice light green algae night gown.))

So at this time, we go down narrow canals and watch as flocks of these huge white birds (I should know the name but I wasn't listening) fly over us. It seriously felt like I was in some kind of Amazonian boat tour. Straight out of National Geographic I tell yeah. Capt. Judd even sang the theme song from National Geographic. We cruise by many little islands, in which he states thatmany people actually camp out here. And in fact the law is that you can camp out on any island in this region for 30 days, but then after that, you have to go home for a day, but then you can come back and camp out on these deserted islands for another 30 days. I will get into this more in just a little bit. Ohhhhh you can just imagine where i'd go with this. Anthony plus deserted island equals Malaria and imaginations of actually becoming Superman, and or Batman if I were able to find a mask.

So we make our way all the way to the edge of the Everglades, which I must say, is confusing as hell. You completly lose any sense of direction and after about 30 minutes of being in a boat surrounded by Mangrove trees (the building block of all their wetlands) everything begins to look the same, even the canals. I don't know how the tour guide does it, but he well deserved his tip. You know, this is a really positive blog spot.........should I go get checked out? Shouldn't I be like "I fucking fell in the water, an alligator stole my converse, and a male dolphin tried to molest me!" Maybe next time if I'm lucky.

Anyway, at the edge of the Gulf we saw a gaggle of dolphins playing, actually kind of rolling over each other. But this time it wasn't seeing a dolphin that got me excited it was the fact that for once I heard absolute silence! I'm not kidding, the only sound I heard was the noise the video camera was making. Half of the time I turned it off because I realized just how annoying it was. No waves, no loud boad motor, just my own voice saying "ohh my god, it's so quiet". I think the boat captain thought I was on drugs cause I got out of my seat, and climbed to the platform on the edge of the boat and just stood there trying to observe the silence. Seriously.....you think you know what it sounds like......but it's nothing like this.....I know I'm probably making this too big of a deal, but this is what I was referring to at the beginning of this entry. There are absolutly no words to describe how this felt inside. Life made sense, beign alone made sense, thinking to myself made sense, smiling made sense, blinking made sense, everything you never understood or had trouble grasping makes sense when there's a brief moment of total silence. I couldn't even hear myself breath.

anyway, I know im obsessing but this is what made my trip worth while. On the way back Capt. Judd described how certain islands were natorious for being the safe haven for a local pirate back in the 1900's. Something like around 1867, there was a Floridian who claimed to be a pirate, and in his legend him and his brother lived on this island called "Panther's Cove" in which they used to hijack ships coming from Cuba, or any other ships coming through the canal. "Panthers Cove" got it's name cause these two brothers were obsessed with raising goats for food and what not on this certain island. So eventually the panthers in Florida evolved and learned how to cross the canal, in which they usually killed all of the pirates' goats. I know it's a crazy story BUT IT DID HAPPEN!

So basically they stole a bunch boats and treasure and hid them in very small inlets within the mangrove canals. Capt. Judd showed us one of the most famous spots where they used to hide the boats. Anyway, this pirate is suppose to have left his treasure buried somewhere on the island, he lived to 102 and never reclaimed his treasure. he actually died on the same island he stole all the boats from by drowning while net fishing.

My point is, a couple of months ago, a guy found two real gold doubloons on the shore of this exact island we cruised by. The theory is that the hurricane last year uncovered some of this burried treasure.


okay this story is getting boring, too many facts....i'll continue it tomorrow.