This is a very important blog.

You know, I never used to blog. My brother really was the one who got me into it. He chose his words carefully and said to me calmly and patiently, “Mike, if you don’t blog, I’m gonna punch you in the junk.” How could I argue with that? So ever since then I’ve been blogging as seriously as any regular Bloggie. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have a place to express myself, where my ideas actually mattered.

For example, if it weren’t fo’ blogs, I wouldn’t have a place to tell this story:

So today I was in a trufi, which is a form of public transportation here in Bolivia. It’s kind of like a mix between a micro, which is a small public bus, and a taxi, which is an expensive car ride. It’s a car like a taxi, but costs the same amount as a micro, and only goes around one ring of the city. Endlessly circling for all eternity as a sort of purgatory. Anyways, sos I gets in there and the guy is all “Hey, you’ve been in this trufi forever! I could have had 5 passengers by now. I’m not taking you all the way around this ring unless you pay me for two rides!” He obviously didn’t notice that I was American, so I said, “Excuse me, sir. Does that American flag car freshener hanging from your rear view mirror mean nothing to you?” And he kicked me out of the car.

So, the moral of the story is that I should have just said that in a blog instead of in real life or at least said it better.

Which gets me thinking, you know? Thinking about words that I say. Well, you know what? I think that words are more like a 6th or even 7th sense. Take smells for example. I smell things so that I have a faint grasp of the world around me. And it’s no concrete thing you know. I say to myself, “It smells like cookies,” as in I’m not sure for a fact. I’m never sure of my sights and my sounds and my feels and my tastes and my smells. It’s a vague blur of senses that you just kind of feel, you know?

You feel it. Like how people don’t agree on the color of a shirt or politics. They feel differently and have different sensory organs to gauge the world, such as the fore brain and its use of words. Just as some people are color blind, some people see the world as a bad place or a good place.

“That shirt is purple!”

“No, it’s blue!”

“Communism is an evil political concept!”

“No, it just turned out badly but was meant as an intermediate step to change the reproduction of the means of production for a more democratic society!”

So, this is it, ladies and gentlemen, our language, the words we use with other people and in our head, is just another sense! A survival tool, an opposable thumb with feelings. Dogs, hell, they can’t say a word. They just uses their smells and sounds and things. But we humans! we have to use language to construct the world around us. Like builders we are! Builders with language! How great. I just feel the world around me with my words and build a conversation and take it down. I am a maker and destroyer of worlds of words.

So, back to that trufi driver example. I messed up! I realize that now. I shouldn’t have been mean to him like that because then I had to walk all the way home like an idiot. I should have rephrased what I said as such, “Excuse me, my good man, I happen to be an American. Can you not see by my hair and my clothes, that I am just like one of those?” indicating his air freshener. “So, if you may, I would like to rebuke that extra fee you are demanding.” And all would have been well. If only I had used language as a 6th sense instead of just a thing to throw around.