Welcome to Coriolistic Anachronisms

Located to the left is the new Visitors Geographical Localization World Map powered by Geoloc. Sadly, the Cayman Islands being nothing more than a spec of rock in the middle of a lot of water, the map sometimes shows me as being somewhere in the US. But it should work fine with all of you users from real countries... Green dots represent currently logged in visitors (or who have been here in the last 5 minutes) and red dots are a log of past visitors, updated once every 24 hours.

I invite you to leave a comment if the map seems to show your location accurately, or to complain that it does not...

2009 Update: The Geoloc widget has since been replaced with ClustrMaps, shown on the right.

 

I was recently reading a book when suddenly, hidden in the middle of a chapter, I recognized... Myself.

This would be me, I realized, if I remained in Kiribati any longer, a dissolute man untethered from his own land, a foreigner who has adapted to the queer realities of island life, but a foreigner always, disconnected from the world beyond the reef, and possibly from his own mind.

That’s a quote from « The Sex Lives of Cannibals » by J. Marteen Troost, an excellent story about life on an island, set in the Pacific but so completely pertinent here on Little Cayman. It’s a modern version of the classic « Don’t Stop the Carnival » and I strongly recommend it to anybody still nursing illusions about the island myth...

 

It looks as if the prison gates will open up for me at the end of March or the beginning of April. I have done my time, and so the time has come to move on once more, aiming for mountains and a change of scenery...

I long for fresh high altitude air, for the sound of cowbells, for a smoking cup of coffee on a chilly morning. I miss looking up to find my horizon instead of low. I can’t wait to be driving (with both my feet!) along a sinuous narrow road. I deeply, almost desperately need to be flying under my paraglider’s canopy, high in the sky, reading invisible air patterns and looking down at the world.

And yes, I will miss dearly everything I had grown so used to about the island life. Once my roots have been pulled out of the sand, no more walking barefoot, no more diving, no more laziness, no more tropical sun.

I’ll miss, surprisingly, the local beach bar nightly gatherings, where two dozens brothers and sisters exchange daily local gossip in an ever forgiving, optimistic way, while complaining bitterly about the small miseries of our golden prison.

As Nicolas Peyrac once sang it, « Je pars ».

 

I’ve felt it before. It comes out of nowhere and wants to take you back there. At times it makes you sweat, but then it chills you to the bones. No way to sail along with it for it is unpredictable and gusty.

But it carries many new scents and the perfume of unknown lands fills the air, speaking of faraway places and undiscovered treasures. It makes your feet itch and your eyes sweep the horizon.

It’s then a matter of timing, I guess. The one gust will come that has the potential to carry you away. Like in strong waves on a beach, the secret is to not fight it. But why, if I know this so well, I am still worried to miss my wave?

 

 

1:00 am. I’ve just put the final temporary touch to the new site header. It’s still being adjusted here and there but I’m rather pleased with the way it looks so far. The logo will eventually be changed into its final form. The guestbook is also wearing its new skin, check it out!