Google Blogger keeps flagging and taking down my mercury mines post

I thought Facebook AI bots were bad, apparently Google Blogger also is using the same idiotic AI bot workforce. Are they in cahoots? I was revising an old post from December 21, 2020 that I had started working on when I was staying one summer on Aquinas St. in San Rafael—it took a long while to gel. 

When I hiked up San Pedro Ridge, I could see the characteristic telltale red earth—which piqued my curiosity about mercury mines. I banged out a rough draft, then, later, I began to research it and ran into multiple dead ends. It seems no one has ever written an overview of mines in the north bay.

I have worked on this particular blogpost intermittently since 2020, due to a lack of stamina and a lack of information, and suddenly the post was flagged after being published for four years. Hindsight? I thought it was photos or graphics that was triggering it. Not. 

No, my violation of community Standards was: Regulated Goods and Services policy. “Regulated Goods and Services. Do not sell, advertise, or facilitate the sale of regulated goods and services. Regulated goods and services include alcohol, gambling, pharmaceuticals, unapproved supplements, tobacco, fireworks, weapons, or health/medical devices.” 

DEAR GOOGLE: Huh? You mean my writing about historic mines goes against Google’s policy of portraying regulated goods and services? How so? Just because the military once used mercury, then deregulated it, doesn’t mean I am facilitating selling something illegally. Maybe it’s the word “mines” that is triggering this flurry of censorship flags. Of course Blogger doesn’t tell you what it objects to.

I must be getting onto something significant. Nothing like raising the interest of a journalist to do more investigation. Am I willing to go down with the ship for my writing? You betcha. Mercury plays a huge role in California history from the gold rush to the Cold War. I write in order to learn. I didn’t know enough about the historical background of mercury mining, so I sat out to teach myself by writing about it—only to get slapped in arrears (pun intended) by Google. 

Well, the good news is the erroneous flag forced me to rewrite portions of the blogpost, so at least it’s finally in a semi-finished format. Alas, no writing is ever truly finished. I did change the title from Mercury Mines in Marin to Historical mercury mines in the North Bay to include Sonoma County as it shares many of those mine sites near Petaluma.

Thinking it was the graphics that caused the flag— Google doesn’t tell you why it flags a post—I went back and researched all my sources, trying to figure out why the blogpost was flagged. But my sources were from publicly, funded agencies and organizations, I am not breaking copyright. Besides, there’s this thing called fair use. 

What a horrible way to force a rewrite. And the hours of undo stress the Google flag caused because I couldn’t fully access my post (or changes) in order to save it off-line. I am increasingly unhappy with Google. Their parting email shot: “We encourage you to review the full content of your blog posts to make sure they are in line with our standards as additional violations could result in termination of your blog.” They brought weapons to a tea party. Shades of 1984 and Doublespeak. 

I wonder who in Facebooklandia flagged my post? I had posted it in a Lost Marin group hoping to get more leads and help with revising my post. It looks like my link and post was removed. 

I am reminded how poet Ron Silliman was harangued by Google and his poetry blog was taken offline because someone had flagged it— And Google would not divulge which particular post was considered offensive or why it was breaking community standards. At least I knew which post was the offending post. Small mercies. I also now make an archive of my writing.

• 
  

  

  Dear Google, have you any idea how many times you have flagged this post within the past 24 hours and how many times you have reinstated it? Shall we go for an even 30 tries? Every time I make a correction on a typo you flag it take it off-line again. It takes me upon average of five attempts to contact you before you reinstate it. Will it hold?

  
  
I finally resorted to taking screenshots and posted them on my Facebook artist page in order to preserve my blog post. I think that 30 attempts to remove my blogpost is a bit excessive on Google Blogger’s part.

More on those historic mercury mines of Marin (the short version)

A rather long note bene: Since I went through so much grief the other night trying to save my old 2020 mercury mine blogpost from Google Blogger AI censorship bots, in desperation I took screenshots of the original post and reposted it on my artist page on Facebook. I also made a very truncated version (below) for the Facebook group, California History as I was afraid the information I had worked so hard for was going to be forever lost. 

The original mercury mine blogpost had its inception Labor Day weekend when I was hiking San Pedro Ridge in San Rafael. We were still in Covid sequestration, and to keep my sanity, I wrote many articles I might not have other otherwise written. 

In this case, I wrote a stub that didn’t go anywhere, no real leads, and then I delved into it again in December 2020. I discovered that I was in over my head with the material, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t finish the blogpost—partially because I couldn’t find the discrete information I needed. 

And also, I thought I didn’t have the chops to figure out how to present the material. Why a writer, suffering from dyslexia, is a writer is a mystery, but there are many of us out there. It’s not like I’m earning any money off my writing. I’m not getting paid for any of this. I write because I have to.

I suspect my writers’s block, or rather, my revisionist block, was due to the fact that it was too big a subject. The more information I uncovered, the more of the post grew. I was in over my head. I despaired. It was an albatross. But the only way out was through. 

Sometimes I think I can’t write my way out of the paper bag. or, that I don’t have the intellectual  chops. This time I was in one colossal kevlar-lined paper bag, but I persevered. It was probably one of the most challenging blogposts I have ever written. 

My Night Train to Moscow post (which began as an email), my redhead, pacer, bees, and daffodil blogposts also gave me some serious writer’s grief, but at least the posts weren’t banned by Google. 

I face enough unwarranted censorship from Facebook for writing bad similes, or thinking outside the box. I sure don’t need this kind of grief from Google either. I expected better from Google. (Google fail.) I feel betrayed.

The other day, when I made another stab at revising the original blogpost because of a Facebook post on the old mines in Lost Marin, I finally made some serious headway—only to have Google Blogger take it down and literally trash my blogpost, then reinstate it—some 30 times. When Google takes down a blogpost, you can’t even see it. It just disappears into the ether. No warning. Poof! Gone.

A while back, Google suffered a serious systemwide matrix glitch and took down multitudes of my innocuous posts—only to reinstate them later but I had to physically find my blogposts in the trash and then reinstate them. Before that, I didn’t know that Google had previously removed some of my other posts. Sadly, some of those posts are lost forever.

Thinking it was an email spam, I ignored the red warning label Google had slapped on my posts, and I lost my Juanita Musson memorial post, plus others. I reasoned, how could a memorial post be considered spam? It was not logical, as Spock might have said. But it was for real, only I found this out in arrears. 

I was able to salvage some of the removed old posts from first drafts that I had stashed elsewhere, but not all. Not Juanita in the bathtub. I despaired thinking I had lost all my revision work on the mercury mine post. I was 12 hours deep into it. So, of course I fought furiously to save my post, and to get it reinstated. Again and again.

Now I’m afraid to make any further changes on my original mercury mine post for fear of triggering the AI bots. Google no longer adequately warns you that it is removing posts. It no longer uses the red banner. And it took a long time for a Google warning to show up, explaining what the reasons were for banishment: violating community standards.

Google warned I was violating community standards, but it didn’t specifically say what. I had no idea. Googling it did not elucidate or shed any light on the subject. So, I kept removing images, revising, checking on all my links, and nothing worked. I wasn’t over quoting anyone, and it was my own intellectual property, not to mention, photos. And all the graphs I used were from publicly funded agencies, therefore within fair use parameters. I couldn’t remove the ban. I despaired.

A Google email eventually appeared, claiming this time that I was violating community standards by promoting or selling controlled substances. Huh? How is a blogpost on historic mercury mines even remotely considered to be promoting a controlled substance? Maybe it was the word “mine” itself that triggered the bots. So, this post below is a test of sorts.

(I am not trying to bite the hand that feeds me. If it wasn’t for Guy Kawasaki’s evangelical support of Google Blogger, I would not have delved so thoroughly into the new medium of cyber-writing. It all began innocently enough, I had lost some of my earlier poems to ASCII gibberish, and decided to put them online. Then I discovered I could back-post my work. One thing led to another. MySpace was no longer cutting it. It was a grand liberation to be free of the physical page. As it is, I now have 5000 blog posts. I must admit, I feel betrayed by Google at this point.)

See, during one of those rare moments, when I could actually re-access my ephemeral albeit temporarily reinstated mercury mine blogpost, I took screenshots of it and posted it on Facebook so I wouldn't lose my work completely. I also made a truncated version for a Facebook group I belong to, California History. I have previously taken several of my blogposts and revised (shortened) them for the group. 

Then I realized that the revised post I wrote for California History  is also a separate entity. New work. Probably closer to what I had hoped to originally write. It’s posted below. Now watch, Google Blogger will ban this blogpost too. Don’t worry. This time I have a link to someone who works at Google and I will complain mightily. How’s that for throat-clearing? Are you still there, Dear Reader?

Historic mercury mines in the North Bay (below is a truncated version of my original post. Click on the link/title for full post and research notes).

When I was a child, I was fascinated by my uncle’s old mining survey maps of Bolinas Ridge and Mt. Burdell dotted with old cinnabar (and copper) mining claims. Curiosity got the best of me.

Our red California earth is oftentimes a sign of the presence of iron /hemitite, or cinnabar (Remember Napa’s Silverado Mine on Mt. St. Helena, made famous by Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1884 novel, The Silverado Squatters?)

There are several historic cinnabar mines in Northwest Marin, including four at the Gambonini Ranch, near Solajoule Reservoir, some sites on Mt. San Antonio, and also on the ridges above Novato. The old mine shafts on San Pedro ridge in San Rafael seem to be gold claims. But where there’s gold, there’s cinnabar.

During the Gold Rush, cinnabar ore mined in California, for mercury, was originally used for silver and gold extraction. The crushed ore was processed in high-temperature smelting ovens. 

Those unstable leftover cinnabar tailings are what has caused the mercury runoffs into our watersheds, including in the San Francisco Bay—destroying one of the most fertile marine ecosystems in the world.

There are numerous historic cinnabar mine tailings throughout Marin and Sonoma counties, some that have also added to the high mercury levels in several of our reservoirs, including Bon Tempe, Solajoule, and Nicasio reservoirs and their drainage watershed, Tomales Bay. 

The fish warning signs that rim several of our reservoirs serve as a grim reminder that mercury poisoning is cumulative. Tomales Bay in Northern Marin County has higher mercury levels than San Francisco Bay—and it’s not from naturally occurring cinnabar deposits, as the mineral mercury oxide is inert unless it’s been heated and extracted.

According to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), there is an fish advisory or warning that Nicasio and Solajoule Reservoirs contain methyl-mercury, as does Bon Tempe Reservoir on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, which once hosted several historic mines, including mercury, copper, gold, and even a nickel mine.

I assume that the rest of the Marin Municipal Water District (MMWD) reservoirs (our drinking water supply) also contain trace amounts of some form of (inert) mercury too as they’re all downstream of Bon Tempe dam and empty into each other, exiting via Kent Lake into Lagunitas Creek that drains into Tomales Bay. 

Naturally occurring mercury oxide does not enter the food chain the same way manmade methyl-mercury does. But at the Nicasio Reservoir methyl-mercury pollution is significant enough to trigger OEHHA advisory warnings about cumulative mercury poisoning from carp, sunfish, black, and large-mouth bass species (apex predators such as bass contain the most cumulative methyl-mercury in their systems). 

Why Nicasio? It doesn’t butt up against any known mercury mines, it doesn’t share the Solejoule Reservoir watershed to the north where there’s also an OEHHA advisory warning for black bass and crappie.) Why am I mentioning Solejoule? because in 2000, it became a Superfund cleanup site.

In a nutshell, in 1964, a PG&E subcontractor, Oakland-based Buttes Gas & Oil (BG&O), ran a lucrative open pit mercury mining job at Gambonini Ranch near Walker Creek in northwestern Marin. 

But in 1970, when the price of mercury fell, BG&O pulled up stakes and left the open pit mercury mine tailings exposed to the elements behind an earthen dam that epically failed during a series of fierce storms in 1982—which dumped ungodly amounts of leached methyl-mercury into Tomales Bay. More than in San Francisco Bay! 

BG&O had leased the land from Alvin Gambonini’s father from 1964 to 1970, never disclosing to the Gambonini family the potential dangers involved with the toxic heat-processed mine tailings to extract the mercury, or that the leftover toxic mercury particulates leach out of the rock tailings whenever it rains. (I wanted to ask, what about all the cows?) 

BG&O never sealed the four mines, nor capped the tailings. It took nearly two decades for the EPA to discover the mishap. It triggered a $3 million Superfund cleanup in 2000. 

Back to Nicasio Reservoir. The methylmercury is coming from somewhere. Not from abandoned mercury mines upstream that I know of, or from the isolated Solejoule Dam which empties into Walker Creek. Question is, from where?

However, some of those old red earth mine sites really were manganese, or hematite, a type of iron, not cinnabar—like the Sausalito mine, and the prehistoric hematite site on Mt. Burdell. Inert red dirt. Sometimes a red rock quarry is just a red rock quarry. Just don’t eat the fish.

Caught my electronic solitaire game cheating

Caught my electronic solitaire game cheating red-handed (er, red-carded)—again. It was bogarting—it had a 7 of spades up its sleeve. And the app designer wants me to review it? It CHEATS! Should I shoot it, or the screen?

While waiting for slow pages to load on my browser, instead of staring at the spinning beachball, I play a rousing hand of cards. Yes, ATT DSL is that slow... It caused my browser to hang and go white as I was writing a post on Blogger, I lost an entire post. So much for auto-save.

I had loaded all photos, made hotlinks, etc. It should've been auto-saving. The only thing that was saved was the photo. Writing ofline, yes, I used to do it— but the immediacy and lining up the HTML, readying it, are all part of the process. I'm not dong simple word-processing. If I suspect it'll crash, then I tend to copy to clipboard before I upload. This was a weird blanking of all fields. Never stood a chance. 

Google fail. ATT fail. App fail. But hey, it's raining! My laundry is getting an extra special soft rain rinse.

Dear Google, why do you keep flagging my posts? I have no idea what you want me to do.

URL is not available to Google

It cannot be indexed. Learn more 

Somehow I don’t think it’s the URL that’s the redirect problem. You are the problem. You changed the software. Not me. I only provided the content. Not HTML code. I used your software. So this is an internal problem. Why shoot the artist in the foot? Dodging bullets is not my thing. This doesn’t even make sense. But then, I’m arguing with a bot. A lot of good that will do. 

About Laguna Lake….

I think this is an 1890s map, lookimg for date.

An aside. I know that I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. As I was navigating my way back north on an alternate route as the traffic was slow on Petaluma Hill Road, as I crested Wilson Hill Road, I noticed that the old Laguna de San Antonio was back from the top, so you know I had to go there. 

The once massive Laguna de San Antonio, California’s largest vernal pool, and a major flyway, used to span all of Chileno Valley, from the vast distance from the Laguna School to Chileno Creek, at the other end of the modern day Laguna. But all the old waterways were recently drained off in the name of progress.

Google map, and the silly name, most of the wetlands were drained in the 1960s-70s,

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, I remember the Chileno Valley shining with a series of gem-like pools, and in spring, the wildflower carpets were amazing. But someone decided they needed to live right across from the school and they did a massive hydrology rerouting. That kind of thinking would never fly now. Now, no more massive Laguna, and no more wildflowers. That’s how we measure progress. 

We began messing with the Laguna by calling at Lake Laguna. You won’t find its full name on Anglo maps. What a stupid honky mistake. Or was it a slight? Laguna and Lake mean the same thing in two languages. Its original name—and I actually looked it up—is Laguna de San Antonio. So I am all for bringing the original name back. Besides, we also call the Laguna de Santa Rosa, the Laguna. We need San Antonio, which is also the name of the creek that probably once drained the laguna, also divides Marin from Sonoma, to differentiate between the two massive lagunas.

Laguna de San Antonina, ©️ScottHessPhoto.com 2023

The water level at the Laguna proper is about three feet from Chileno Valley Road West. Way over its banks. There were only two wild swans. I wondered about the rest of the flock. I didn’t want to go all the way out that end of Chileno Valley Road because it is gnarly and another storm was threatening.

So I headed back towards Helen Putnam Park and then, on a lark, I went out Spring Hill Road. OMG. They paved it! I was on a roll. Intricate laced waterways and reflecting pools everywhere. Beauty times beauty. But I was racing daylight. Not time to stop. And my drive-by car photo shots were an epic fail.

The oddest thing I saw was a line of swans in a field with black cows near the old creamery. I could not figure out why they weren’t at the laguna just on the other side of the hill. So I got out to investigate, and it looks like one of the swans got caught by a wire in the water trough and drowned. Then I realized the swans were holding vigil for their fallen comrade. Since there was nothing I could do, I put my hand on my heart, wished it well. And continued on my way.

1834 map shows a large body of water, Laguna y Arroyo de San Antonio

Yet another epic Facebook fail—censored twice in one month for correcting typos!

 

Facebook AI bots really have it out for me because I edit my comments, or post a blog link. In this case, I was responding to Ron Silliman‘s post where Lyn Hejinian had read for our RRWG reading series at the Johnny. Otis Cabaret, that I produced back in 1993-94, and as I typed in her name, I was immediately thrown in the FB slammer again.

Last time it was for trying to add the word crêpes with circumflex to my Shrove/Pancake Tuesday comment. The time before that was because I was commenting on my cousin who had recently demised himself and it also happened with another Irish cousin too. And the time before that was for posting a botany post about native uses of California fan palm seeds.

Apparently the words GAZA and DEATH trigger the FB AI bots. And I guess in this case, RIP triggered the bots too. Or  it was the Google blogpost link itself? I had posted a Press Democrat obit in honor of Johnny Otis. I thought Ron Silliman would enjoy seeing it since they all read at his cabaret. He had mentioned reading there for us. And Kit Robinson too. I do remember Kit’s reading because I hadn’t seen him since the early 1980s CPITS days.

Now I’m just flummoxed. I would love to have the RRWG flyers—and especially the dates of those readings because I made a Russian River Writers Guild archival blog post listing all the poets who have read for us over the decades. It’s a pretty impressive list.

And now I am reduced to writing to my friends in my status update.

Andrew – this will have to suffice as a link.

Zana – no, it is not a friend reporting me. It’s FB.

Marylu and Maxine – this is the comment in question. Alors! I had added Lyn’s name and misspelled it, and when I tried to correct it, I was thrown in the Facebook comment jail. That’s why I’m writiing to you here because I can’t add any comments to any posts, including my own. But I can LIKE comments.

Donald – Tori and I are definitely on Facebook’s frenemy list because we’re outspoken and we have posted about gauze a.

Joan – tell me more, or post the link below. I would be very interested to read it.

Molly- Second time this month in the comments slammer means can’t post poems in your Poem a Day group.

Weirdly I can post photos and a status report on my home page so I guess this is how I will communicate with the world for the next six effing days. I just can’t post, nor can I correct any comments. Oh bhuel.

See, Facebook otto-krect loves to substitute the wrong words in my comments, or add excessive, commas, (case in point), or inserting random periods. mid-sentence after I post them. And I am definitely OCD when it comes to typos. FFS, I’m a writer plying my trade. And yes, I have completely turned off AutoCorrect on my iPad.

So today I am deleting all Facebook ads and reporting them as irrelevant. Sweet revenge. Literally every second or third post is a sponsored ad. Talk about irrelevant ads. Poop ads for cats AND humans! Maybe they come in tandem. A new batch of shitty irrelevant ads, and the Facebook AI sniffer bot—and certainly the word for one’s demise seems to be a trigger as well. I refuse to use the word passed. I wanna say DEATH. Unfortunately, because Facebook is a private entity, there is no recourse for this continued bullying.

Yeah, I’m more than a little cranky now and don’t worry, Facebook, I am keeping track of you. and I won’t be silenced.  #keepingitreal #badarticle 

MoHurley's Amazon Book Reviews 2017

Dear Ones,

Thank you for stopping by and reading my ebook reviews. I am primarily interested in women's fiction and the well-crafted murder mystery genre. I delve into historical fiction, and cozy mysteries, sometimes even alpha make action adventure series, but I am no fan of chick-lit Regency bodice rippers, nor am I a fan of sugary cupcake who-dun-its, though I will read them if there's nothing else to read.

Updating old technology for tax season: The horror! The horror!

I'm about to upgrade to El Capitán/High Sierra, as my trusty Mac OS companion of 8.5 years, Snow Leopard, is no longer long of tooth, but bereft of any pearly whites whatsoever. The latest discovery that the Intel chip has a back door, much to the delight of Hackers Anon, means every technological agency is tightening up bootstraps in order to stick their big toes (and cocks—whatever is largest) to shoal up the wall of data vulnerability.

And in turn, data service providers are also tightening things up. This translates to my web browser Firefox being no longer upgradeable, Safari  5 is next to useless, having long since lost The Great Browser Race. I can't even load a Daily Kos petition because my browser's too old and therefore "vulnerable." I can see tighter security needed if I'm actually donating money (I'm not), but to fill out a petition? And who knew that MacWorld articles were top secret documents FYEO fergawdsakes? (For your eyes only.)

Then there's the new and improved software: take TurboTax. Ah, yes, the tax season rears its ugly head, and shoves it up yer arse looking for fool's gold. That's the litmus I use to update software. When I need to load TurboTax. That's how I updated another hard drive to Mountain Lion, and later, to Mavericks.

Suffice to say, I hated both Mountain Lion, and Mavericks with a passion (I hated all the OS updates until Catalina), but I managed to convince TurboTax to play nicely on my MacBook, so I could file my taxes. Sort of. (BTW, TurboTax did not require such stringent hoops for Windows users during this time. And we KNOW how vulnerable Windows is. My partner has an old PC laptop with a crusty virus-ridden version of Windows that still runs TurboTax. What's with that?)

So, after I blithely purchased this year's version of TurboTax, I read the FINE PRINT. Minuscule. Unreadable without a microscope, or #2 readers, whatever's handiest. Minimum system requirements, written in 6 point white type on grey background: such secretive minimum operating system requirement: OS 10.11. Whoa, Nellie! That's El Capitán. O Captain! My Captain! Decapitate me now.

We went from the rogue sneaker waves of Mavericks, that's OS 10.9 to you, to the heights of Machu Pucchu, I mean—that mile-high monolith, that sheer granite wall of El Capitán, AKA OS 10.11, that has challenged so many climbers—in one fell swoop? In one year? What happened to OS 10.10? Holy crappy crampons! The Krampus came late this year. Or he came back for seconds.

So, (remembering to breathe), I took a shot, and steeled my nerves. I girded my loins, and began to upgrade a hard drive to El Capitán. Painful. After more than an hour of upgrading, it worked swimmingly. Until it didn't. This I found out after I went two OS'es further down the plankety-plank road to perdition, to the holiest grail of OS of time present—High Sierra, AKA OS 10.13. Lucky 13, it wasn't. I was locked out. Epic password fail. Black screen. Spinning cursor of death. Random restarts. Complete disappearance of the Finder. Again. And again. And again.

So I spent an entire day (and most of the next day too), trying to coax two fussy operating systems to play nicely on my souped-up 2011 MacBook Pro. I learned some things. New tricks, old dawg. I practiced deep rebuilds and even deeper cleanses. I gnashed my teeth. I invented new portmanteaus swearwords. Corrupted kext files? I found combo update fixes. Suffice to say, El Capitán is now working. Or at least, I can load it. I haven't even opened TurboTax. Too exhausted. I'm afraid to even restart High Sierra.

Ah, well, there's always next year.

Amantani, Lake Titicaca, Peru (article)

AMANTANI, LAKE TITICACA, PERU     8/17/88              

In the heart of the Peruvian Andes, Lake Titicaca, a deep blue inland sea intersticed with umber and sienna, reflects the sky and desert hills surrounding Puno with a vengeance. Horizons shimmer with lapis lazuli luminescence—the refractive quality of light on the altiplano so different at this great height.

An Indian in our boat plays a thin, atonal melody over and over with his quena flute, a bamboo penny whistle. "No, he corrects me, "it’s a piruru.—carved from a condor’s wing feather shaft  My perception begins to waver as he repeats the simple notes over and over. Or maybe it’s the thin air above 12,500 feet that’s affecting me.  

A channel wends along a wall of reeds; miles and miles of reeds; serpentine hissing, like pines in a high wind. Small mats of vegetation, algae and lakeweed carpets undulate, and constellations of bubbles escape from the shallow floor.

Uros fisherman

As we approach the land of the Uros nation—floating reed islands—giant Andean coots honk and scuttle among fallen tortoras. Ripples divide an Andean gull’s reflection  into four parts, a broken mirror, the four corners of the earth. “Reeds tied together in a clump mark the edges of the channel,” says the old boatman in halting Spanish, as he polled the reed boat with slow measured movements. Tortoras—everything, even the floating islands are made from the tall reed. We debark onto a bowed wooden plank. The islands make a rollicking motion beneath our feet, like walking on a huge waterbed.  

An Uros fisherman, perhaps the village idiot, repeatedly shakes our hands, pats our shoulders and peels a reed for me to eat. He strips off the outer bark and hands it to me, “Para comer,” he says, with a decayed smile, “Eat.” And stares. I hesitate, hoping that the reed has filtered the raw sewage pouring from the open gutters of Puno—a desperate town if ever there was one. It tastes mallowy, of dank, white underbelly, like the insides of the river elder stem.

A tethered pig roots and squeals when I approach. Uros is a landless nation. Soon, the pig will root his way through the island and drown!  Grubby children sell replicas of reed boats. The women hawk crudely embroidered wall hangings. We buy nothing and feel saddened by the children begging, it’s much worse here than in Cuzco.

At least in Cuzco, home to more than 3,000 street children, there are more tourists to beg and steal from. We escape to the boat, it becomes a refuge from this poverty and bleakest of lives. We have no words in Aymara to say hello, goodbye or sorrow, for that matter.

I watch the young ones play at the water’s edge; they are like children anywhere. A rotting reed boat with someone’s bundled manta inside, plastic litter, a charcoal brazier—pathetic remnants of a way of life that’s no longer viable. Soon, they will be all gone.

The Uros language is all but lost. Most Uros islanders have intermarried with the Aymara Indians. Anthropologists speculate that like the Pomos of Northern California, where I'm from, the Uros are among the oldest native peoples in South America. Persecuted by the Incas and by the Colla Aymaras for centuries on end, they took to hiding in the reeds. This way of life among the reeds became their culture—like that of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. 

We bear witness to the last breath of a dying nation that so vividly captured the 1950s imagination of my youth. The Lake Titicaca of my dreams held vast ornate cities and large floating islands—not these small barren straw bale outposts of civilization, if you could call it that  More like subsistence survival.  Where were the big-breasted women in grass skirts posing in reed boats I'd seen in back issues of National Geographic?

Santa Rosa de Amanti, the place where the falcon rests, Google maps.

We head for the island of Amantani because the boat happened to be going there to drop off the mail and supplies, our original destination was the more populous island of Taquile but there was no scheduled boat. It’s a grueling four-hour boat ride to Amantani and onto yet another culture. This is the seat of the Quechua Incas, the Inca conquerors who built the fabled stone cities we'd made pilgrimage to: Machu Picchu, P’isac, and Sajacmarca.

Lake Titicaca is a desert lake the size of an inland sea situated more than two miles above sea level. I keep looking for seals and test the air for the familiar salt tang. It smells more of the earth, dank cellars or moldy grain.

The barefoot men of Amantani wear thick black wool pants, white billowy shirts and vests, knitted hats with long tassels and earflaps. There is such rivalry between the island people of Amantani and Taquile, they won’t even intermarry. I imagine a Quechua version of Romeo and Juliet set in the weaving and textile capital of the Andes. The indio says “Amantani  es mejor. Hay muchas ruinas” He tells us the island of Taquile has none...

But later I find out that the island of Taquile, the more popular tourist destination, too, has many ruins. I am saddened by the boatman’s zealous misinformation. When will I ever have the opportunity to come here again to bear witness to this place? 

These ancient cultures we seek are swiftly dying from the vicissitudes of tourism. We too are part of the problem, but our varied and sullen art helps us document what we see. I am traveling to the underbelly of the world with my boyfriend, poet and translator, John Oliver Simon—we are on a quest in search of the poets of South America.. This is a side trip. Kavafy's Journey, not the destination.

Small trout and gorgeous large, gold-headed fish swim among the aquatic plants. I sense the movement of something large under the water—what loch monster lives in these depths? The suche, the world’s largest freshwater fish, lives here along with sweet water mackerel, or the pejerrey. Are they truly mackerel? or are we having a cross cultural linguistic conundrum? How did ocean-going fish get into this lake two miles above sea level? If they're really mackerel, an ancient lake, or perhaps even a sea, Titicaca must have risen up from the sea floor with the Andes themselves. The trout were introduced.

“We use small nets, fishing only at night, we fish under a full moon or at dawn—and still we catch nothing,” says a fisherman. “The water’s too deep and cold here. There is better fishing there among the reeds.” This highest navigable lake, as all the guidebooks proclaim, is the largest navigable lake above 2,000 meters in the world. Higher than Lake Victoria. Bernardo O'Higgins launched his dream of the Chilean Navy from here.

Vital statistics in feet or meters mean little to me. I have to experience it though my senses. At nearly 12,600  ft. above sea level, Lake Titicaca, with its 36 islands, not counting the artificial islands of the Uros, is 105 miles long. We’re in open water, buffeted by offshore winds. An incongruous red lateen-rigged sailboat on a long reach makes it seem like we’re in Egypt instead of Peru.

The fisherman talks of the fierce winter storms that ravage this place and how huge waves mercilessly pound the shore. We watch the steamship from Bolivia belch thick black ropes into the painfully thin blue air.  No place for pollution to go in a fragile ecosystem perched at the ceiling of the sky.

The volcanic island of Amantani looms up, like terraced breasts. We manage a rocky beach landing and crawl up from the rocks like antediluvian ancestral ooze over terraces of bright green corn sprouting up like bamboo forests, and eucalyptus. We climb over tilled deep red earth and stone fences, panting from the altitude. No roads, not even a path. No horses, no carts, no automobiles.

We gringos are assigned to a family for the night. The island swallows us up like darkness. I spray our tortora reed bed and blankets with bug spray for fleas. They are busily feeding on my ankles. We take refuge on the wicker bed. But the bed’s so short, we have to sleep diagonally. The local maté, muña works a a flea deterrent.

The outhouse on the cliff, with its raised (Middle Eastern) foot-rests, has a great view of the sunset across the lake. All the terraces are sloped at a 45-degree angle. Though the village of Santa Rosa de Amantani was founded only 20 years ago, the Quechua Incas still live a an ancient lifestyle untouched by the coming of white or mestizo cultures.

Amantani’s whole, like the town of Otavalo in the Ecuadorian highlands. No disease of dominant Euro-culture demanding conformity, has encroached. The thread of craft and pride are unbroken. No electricity, no hot water. Communal water from the ditches. No litter! No usual toilet paper and the ubiquitous plastic, in pink and blue, that is so much a part of Peru.

Children play fúbol in an empty field. Rock arches everywhere. Magical doorways frame lake and sky at every turn. Adobe, brown on brown. A baby cries, its mother exclaims over it in Quechua. I gasp. It literally hurts to breathe up here.

Modesto-Stanislas Poetry Center NY 13 Prompts

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center

I suppose I should post this thread under 12/29, as that’s when I received the poetry prompts. But the writing marathon began 12/15. Either way, that’s not much time to respond, but here goes as I am a few poems short of 52 for the year. I will post them here for now and move them later when I've had a chance to revise them. —MH

My Amazon Book Reviews 2014

A little known factoid, I sometimes write Amazon Book Reviews. It was a confluence of Amazon probing me to write reviews of purchases, an overload of bad (free) ebooks on my Kindle, and the rest is, shall we say—history.

OK, so now you know I have a Kindle, and a pipeline for free ebooks from the eReader Cafe and BookBub—and I've been an involuntary invalid. I've been known to read as many as four books in a day... Sometimes escape fiction is the ticket. However, I just can't believe there's so much bad escape fiction out there. In self defense, I'm doing something about it review, by review. Maybe it's also self-inflicted punishment for reading so much drivel. Cat-o-nine-tails. Reviewing books is not an easy writing form for me.

So far, I've over 30 50 reviews under my belt. My reviews rarely get read, but when I strike a negative chord—the loyal fans of authors with dreadful books, vote en masse. On one particularly atrocious novel—from a woman who teaches creative writing in San Francisco, no less—the negative votes outweigh positive tallies 21 to one. Ouch! Must be her loyal students voting. Rule of thumb: the more atrocious the book, the more negative fan votes I garner. Fans reward bad writing.

I'm not one to write a fluffy review, I try to be fair. I also try to be entertaining, hopefully not at the cost of the author—but sometimes I wonder if most ebook authors have ever heard of spellcheck, let alone, editors.

At present, I am writing under the handle of MoH (it's a hot cross-pun on moh, and the mohs scale of mineral hardness). I'm awaiting to see if there's any kind of backlash—so far, so good. I may upgrade my Amazon user name to MoHurley. But the problem is that makes me traceable on Google—as that's also my Twitter handle. And I'm not sure if I want unwarranted attention. Amazon's a big place.

Moh (Sanskrit muh: “to become stupefied, to be bewildered or perplexed, to err, to be mistaken”) stands in ancient texts for perplexity or confusion as also for the cause of confusion, that is, avidya or ajnana (ignorance or illusion). In another context, it stands for “the snare of worldly illusion, infatuation. —Wiki

If you so feel inclined, mosey on over to my Amazon Reviews, and if you like them, click on the Yes button. (You do need to have an Amazon account in order to participate, however...)

I still haven't gotten the generic title thing down. They're pretty sucky. I'm open to suggestions. I also have trouble entitling poems as well. Most of those generic titles may change when and if I get inspired.

When I write a review, I often push the publish button (there's no save draft button) to save my first draft before Amazon crashes, or stalls and wipes out my unsaved review. It's happened. I generally lose interest and won't rewrite a review if Amazon crashes.

Then, when I do go back and revise a piece (and I revise early and often), it's often an Amazon-inspired nightmare as it sometimes takes 10 or more tries to save the updated version/title. I never could get my final version and title of Worse Things Happen at Sea to load.

I can hear you saying now—so why don't you write a review offline? Don't be so sensible. There's something about the pressure of writing live, and knowing that it might crash before I've saved a draft that spurs me on. Apparently I need whip & spurs coupled with the ephemeral threat of textual oblivion—in order to write, so S&M!
   
(Don't know how long I'll keep up with reposting my reviews here. And I'm forever revising them as well. I noticed that the copy and paste method isn't quite working but I'm not willing to reformat all of these. They still should lead to the reviews, if it's easier to read them there. And maybe vote or leave a comment? Love ya.
It's getting harder and harder to "save' these posts as I add new reviews. I think the HTML is choking Blogger. I might need to make a new blogpost in order to continue to repost my Amazon reviews. "Allison" may be the proverbial straw... )

TO READ MORE REVIEWS, PLEASE VISIT:

MoHurley's Amazon Book Reviews 2017 
MoHurley's Amazon Book Reviews 2016
MoHurley's Amazon Book Reviews 2015

My Amazon Book Reviews 2014
My Amazon Book Reviews 2013