I believe I’ve been lucky because if there was one thing I ever wanted, it was to do what I love for a living. Now, what I love to do is to write, and when you’re in a Central American country with practically nil reading culture you could say I was in a little bit of a pickle. Enter, the Internet: finally, after years of freelancing doing graphics design work in various degrees I landed my current job as a copywriter for a pretty big Internet development company. This place is pretty big, and I’m the only copywriter here (it seems they can’t get someone as good as I am for the job to help me out… modesty aside. I’m such a jackass) so this keeps me pretty entertained. I’m happy to say I write for a living whenever I’m asked, and even happier to explain what the job implies. As it seems, this is a pretty new kind of work in Panama.

When they ask me exactly what I write about is when the fun starts.

If you’ve been reading my articles and what not, I hope you’ve taken with you a sense of scope of how socially backwards the country is as a society. That said, when I tell you that a good 80% of the pages and portals I write for are pornography sites you might not be that shaken up… but everyone here sure as hell is. The question come at me almost immediately: “do you write the movies? Have you met Tera Patrick yet? Strippers probably walk around the floor at will…” and sometimes I let them assume whatever they want because it’s funny to trip out on that. They’re expressing their personal desires of what a porn-producing website company should look like. Sorry to say it’s nothing like that, though… the setup is sort of like a call center, but instead of taking phones there are designers who create web pages and thumbnail galleries.

As a result I’ve become sort of immune to porn, which is a shame but now and then I get the tingles. I’ve seen some of the sickest shit you could come up with and some stuff you can’t even fathom (by the way… the Japanese? I love them to death but they’re disgusting pervs. I dig the anime a lot, though!) and I wish I could post some stuff but I don’t want this to become a smut portal for you and your buddies. For that, you have the Gorilla Mask link below. Anyway, I believe I’ve been ridiculously lucky in this regard, since otherwise I would’ve just had to freelance until I gave up on writing and that would’ve made me a very sad man… before this copywriting gig things looked grim in the authorial (?) world; Since I’m young and reckless I stand out like a sore thumb with the other writers in the groups and guilds and what not. I seriously do, I feel like I can’t open my mouth because someone will take what I said as an insult. I shouldn’t care, and in many ways I don’t but some of them are really great, and it’s a shame that even still I feel alone whenever I’m in there because there’s no one like me there for me to relate to. I know I’ll stick out like a sore thumb when the International Book Fair ‘06 comes along next month, because of my ideas and my views contrast so much with their own. One time there was this one event that was supposed to “shatter all the book presentations that had come before it;” a book by a rather accomplished (read: OLD) national writer. Please don’t ask me what I think of the guy, because doing so would throw me into playing the same hypocritical game he plays all the time. Point is that the gimmick of the presentation was that of getting people to dress up as some of the characters from the book and a have a “band.” This “band” was actually one guy with his guitar playing covers and a song inspired by the book which was lukewarm and out of key overall.

“It was a nice try,” I thought. Made me buy the book and read it, and in retrospect I can say that the fictional story based on real places, people and situations is a great history lesson for anyone born in the 80’s all the way until now. “La Calle del Espanto” by Ricardo Ríos, if you feel like hunting it down. Now, this writer community is small, and since there isn’t that much public that reads (much less reads national authors) you tend to see the same faces over and over in the same events. Also, it’s important for me to say that a lot of these old-school writers are university professors, and in order to fill up their events they con their students into going to these presentations for an extra grade or whatever. Now, these guys are my crowd. When I got there, instead of sitting down with the writer crowd in suits, I sat down with the college crowd sitting out back, in their jackets, Chuck Taylors and an utter lack of interest in the proceedings. I remember there was even a point when one of the people around me said “This would be better if I was on weed.” Oh, she couldn’t have been more right.

So, the writers were on their own island having fun at the quirkiness of the event while the college crowd made fun of them. Both islands were having a lot of fun, but I was a little torn. I could see why the writers were having fun just as much as the college kids… but the college kids were so much more fun.

So, a couple of days pass by and I get a chain mail talking about the event (the community is not only small, but also mostly computer-retarded. So, I get a gazillion emails of events and shit that weigh 300kb and they stack up my inbox with the same stuff sent over seven times) and everyone was chiming in. I had never participated because ever since I decided to step into the scene with my crazy obnoxious book (that would be “Mada Faká,” kids) I quickly felt myself an outcast. Kinda like Piccolo. Whatever, point is that the event lingered in my mind and I felt that I needed to get some stuff out of my chest. Of course, the memory was fresh in my mind and wrote down my impressions of the ordeal pretty much the same way I am now… but with an extra hint of sarcasm. Needless to say I single-handedly created a rift between the community the same way Moses parted the Red Sea. In one fucking blow, I created two factions: those who agreed with me, and those who didn’t. Former friends would be the participants of ALL CAPS screaming matches and I got chewed out, of course, because I didn’t know what I was talking about. This comes from people who are 65 - 70 years old who had tried to discredit me and brush me off ever since I set foot on the scene. All it took was one piece of criticism to cause such a biblical turmoil… naturally, I decided to pour some salt on the wound and invite them all to discredit what I was saying (mind you, I wasn’t hiding names. I pointed fingers. Hell, I didn’t just point fingers, I shoved their heads with said fingers. OF course, I was making fun of myself and the college crowd because none of them wanted to invest time and it’s a two-way street but of course, they didn’t care about silly shit like what the youth thinks). Eventually the water calmed by taking a shot at me, calling me “megalomaniac” and that seemed to calm everyone down. I apologized to the one person worth apologizing to, and promptly got on my horse and galloped into the sunset.

When I got into this whole writing thing, my mom helped me out a lot… she’s connected but, God bless her soul, is not the type to use connections to further her career or anything else. She’s passed this on to me, so when we were discussing calling her friend, the director of the National Literature Board, we were skeptical because she was the type that goes “I’ll do this for you, but what can you do for me?” I went, was charming, she fell in love with me and put me on her TV show. I owned in that TV show, which couldn’t be said with the radio show I had been on the week before where I was obliterated, ironically by the same people who organized the book presentation I mentioned earlier. I made up for that though, but that’s a story for another day.

After the whole chain mail debacle, I kept a low profile… popping up here and there, causing looks of shock from the attendees. I’ve been battling with the idea of getting back in there, since my message from the start was that it was indeed possible to write for a living in Panama and they looked at me like I was crazy… but the thing is, writing for a living is exactly what I’m doing.

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