Here are the pictures from Panama. Click the bird for more.

I wish I could say that I haven't been writing here because my life is boring and there's nothing worth saying. But when has boring ever stopped a blogger from writing about themselves?

I haven't been writing because I learned some things about myself in Panama that I'm not real happy about. In past adventures I was always the shit talking, tough as nails, world-weary guy who could travel forever. Fixed addresses, owning more than could fit in a pack, speaking the local language -- that was all for other people. I was going to circumnavigate the globe and never stop. I was going to crawl into every strange and exotic hole only to emerge when I had a story worth telling.

Traveling is a lot of things but it isn't easy. No one ever talks about it being lonely or boring or scary. No one talks about having days with nothing to do or how after a week of sleeping in a hostel dormitory you kill yourself if it meant five minutes of peace away from the awkward blowjob the guy on the top bunk is getting from his girlfriend while you're trying to sleep on the bottom bunk.

If we do talk about this stuff, it usually ends up sounding hopelessly romantic. Or at least, it does to me because there's some lose wire in my head that tells me that it's better to be miserable than bored. I'd rather the experience be scary than dull. I'd rather have the story than the money. If I had to list my insecurities they wouldn't be about my clothes or my appearance or the car I drive. I'm afraid of being one of those dull, boring people you meet around the water cooler who has nothing to talk about except what was on TV last night. I'm afraid of missing out on an experience, of being left behind.

And even though I'm pretty fucking far from that person, insecurities are rarely rational. Which makes them worse because no matter how many times I tell myself this isn't true, or show myself how far I've come from the office life, part of me still thinks I'll end up in some Monday morning ego session where people in badly fitting business casual khakis talk about things they don't fully understand and we're all nice to each other because of the almighty label of 'professionalism' and not because we actually like or respect each other.

But at some point in Panama, the stories stopped sounding romantic and I found myself craving routine over adventure. I found myself thinking about how nice it would be to indulge in all those things I had sort of held my nose up at before. Suddenly, I wasn't fucking hardcore. I wasn't handling it or maintaining. I was just another kid who wanted to run home the minute things got too hard.

It really sucks when the reality of a situation smashes through all the carefully maintained assumptions we hold about the person we think we are.

And so I haven't been writing here because who wants to engage in excessive naval gazing and endless introspection when they've looked under the hood to find something that they didn't like?

But I'm learning to deal with it. And I'm starting to get more comfortable with the idea of publishing here again instead of obsessively writing things down in my little black moleskine. I'm realizing that the path to being that person, the one I want to be, lies in getting out there and confronting all the shit I don't like. Not hiding from it, alone in my apartment behind the dull glaze that a bottle of bourbon and cable TV can provide.

Click me for all the drama

The web is getting more dynamic.

And the longer we spend online the less we respond to static content. Some of us, those who use RSS, never even see the static content because we simply get the articles as they're published and all that fancy web design is lost in our reader. Same if you subscribe to a site through email. Or, if you're reading this on facebook (I have facebook suck my content into it's notes feature) you're never going to see the static content on bencorman.com.

By static content I mean my masthead, my blog roll, the list of other Rudius sites and yes, my advertising.

Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you that you're stealing my content or call you a bad person. I'm happy you're reading what I have to say. Keep reading no matter how or where you choose to read. Share with your friends.

For a moment, lets take a look at those who do come to my website or really any of the Rudius websites. Since we're all fancy here with google analytics, I see how people interact with our sites. Let me share a dirty little secret with you. That "Friends or Rudius Media" blog roll. Almost worthless when it comes to driving traffic. Sure it might feel good to appear there, but it's basically an exercise in vanity.

And that "More Rudius" blog roll of all the Rudius Sites? A little better. Not much but, because of placement, it drives a little more traffic.

The only thing that really works for driving traffic is when someone writes a post about you. That drives many orders of magnitude more traffic than blog rolls or sidebar links. I'm not saying anything new here, just that people don't interact with static content. If you run any sort of website you know this to be true.

But it does raise an interesting question. Why do we spend so much time on website design?

If people aren't interacting with the non-dynamic parts of the page, if they're not hitting the sidebar links, if they've all got ad blindness, then why include those elements at all?

And my original assertion stands. The web is getting more dynamic. The point isn't whether RSS becomes mainstream or not. It's that between RSS and personalized homepages like igoogle and my yahoo and web enabled smart phones and devices like the kindle (and now the kindle is on the iphone), we're creating more and more ways to interact with content. People don't care about the underlying technologies, they care that they get the content they want in the way they want to consume it.

The website isn't going away. But it's place as king of content distribution isn't writ in stone. If your strategy is "drive as much traffic to my website" instead of "make sure my content is as widely distributed as possible" then you're missing the point. And you might want to go get a job at a newspaper.

highs and lows, ups and downs.

I've been thinking a lot about this post and this podcast (transcript). Obsessing over it. Going back and re-reading and re-listening to it. And it made me realize that I'm Doing It Wrong(c).

I'm obsessed with fiction. Reading it, writing it. I make people up and I let them live in my head. I put them in weird situations and I'm delighted when they react in ways that I didn't expect.

I grew up reading. My parents are not big TV people. There were some years where we were too poor to afford cable and some years where we didn't have it because of a lack of interest. Their interest, not mine. I was much more interested in TV than they were. And my mom, if she caught me wasting away in front of the TV would yell, "Go read a book." Go. Read. A. Book. I heard that refrain daily. It was the sound track to my childhood.

And the result was that I fell in love with books. I read all the time. I was the only one of my friends growing up who read fiction. They had video games and MTV. I had an endless stream novels. I'd spend hours and hours and hours in my room, lost in worlds that others had created for me.

I haven't been doing so well since Jeff and I left Panama. I've spent a lot of time, more time than I like to admit, wondering what the fuck I'm doing with myself. Part of my life is easy. I love what I do. And I'm not saying that for boss points. I find what's probably an unhealthy amount of validation and happiness in working with my authors. Helping someone find their obsession times voice and giving them the tools to express that is incredibly rewarding. Rewarding enough that I happily let it overrun other parts of my life without complaint.

But another part of my life is hard. And I make it harder than it has to be. It's the bencorman.com part. It's the part where I think that I have something to say and I want to put it out there to see if it connects with the world. Since Panama I've been struggling to find something to say and let's face it, my life is fucking boring. I wake up at noon. Some days I work until two in the morning and some days I work for two hours and then call it quits. Believe me when I say it's not worth writing about.

bencorman.com was supposed to be a way for me to get my fiction out to the world. Because that's what I'm obsessed with. But I let the medium overrun what I had to say. I thought 'blog' instead of 'writing' and when I looked around at those who were 'blogging' I simply tried to copy their success. Which is stupid because I'm not obsessed with the same things that they're obsessed with. I was trying to push a writing peg into a blogging hole.

I know I'm not alone in this. I see the submissions we get from people who want to work with. Every. Single. One. And I've got to tell you, a lot of you out there are Doing It Wrong(c). You're writing what you think we want to read or you're writing about a topic that you don't understand because you think that's what you're supposed to do.

I understand the urge. I did it. When I first discovered TuckerMax.com and Philalawyer.net (long before Philalawyer was with Rudius) I thought that I had to be writing crazy stories about my life. And I did that for about six months. And it sucked. The writing sucked and the stories sucked and writing the stories sucked. It's not that I don't have my own slightly irresponsible nights, I do but I'm not a comedy writer. Consequently, while I can occasionally write something funny, it's not what I obsess over.

What people seem to miss is not that Tucker is obsessed with his own life, it's that he's obsessed with comedy. He's obsessed with being an entertainer, with being the center of attention. To the point where it can get annoying and I've wanted to tell him to just shut up about it already. But that's exactly the type of obsession that you have to have in order to create something amazing. You have to live and breath it, whatever your "it" happens to be. If you're not annoying the people around you with it, you might not love it enough.

I think we as people have a deep need to create. That's what so exciting about the internet. It gives everyone a printing press and an art gallery and a music label and a TV station. It allows the creator to connect directly with the consumer. It gives us a chance to be obsessed with something other than celebrity gossip or what car we're driving. It gives us a chance to be obsessed with what we're accomplishing. But all that promise and excitement is perverted and ruined if we're just running around copying each other's art, and doing it poorly because we assume that we're supposed to follow in the footsteps of those who came before us.

I know that's what a lot of you are doing. Your submissions tell me even if you don't know if yourself. Because I'm not seeing a lot of original work. I'm seeing copies of copies of copies. And none are as good as the original.

It's all right though. In a lot of way we're all in this together. We're all figuring it out together. I know the internet feels old and mature and boring and that blogging is passé and that twitter is even a little 'OMG NPR is totally on twitter' and so we're all onto the next thing but the act of creation is timeless. And so no matter what new technology is almost here, it shouldn't affect what you're doing. Technology only ever changes the distribution.

As I've been to figure all this out for myself, I reached out to a few people I admire and look up to. One of them sent me this

What you're feeling is a pretty normal thing that any artist who sacrifices in order to work feels from time to time. Sacrifice is fucking hard. Being broke is fucking hard. Frustration is a wicked bitch who'll whisper in your ear every chance she gets.

So take a break. Stop writing for a minute, and don't worry about it. Read. Read a lot, all your favorite shit, remember why you fell in love with writing in the first place. Relax and allow a little time to give you something you really want to say.

I took his advice and the first thing I picked up was my copy of Lonesome Dove. And that's when it hit me. I'm a fucking idiot. When I went to back to what I love, I didn't go to some fucking blog post or website. I went for my favorite book. Novel. Fictional account of people who don't exist and who delight me when they react in ways that I'm surprised at.

I think we can all do better. I think if we all stop and we're a little more honest with ourselves we'll see that sometimes we just write bullshit for the sake of writing bullshit. That sometimes our motivations suck and we want the ad revenue or X number of readers or respect when really, we should be doing it out of love. We stir up conflict where there really isn't any. We stand on our soapbox because we want the attention that yelling brings even if we're not yelling about something we care deeply about. I think if we try, we can get back to doing this for the right reasons.

My 2008 Christmas Letter is now online.

And if you're new, or just want to relive past glories, here's 2006 and 2007.

Enjoy.

I can only assume that sloths are basically dumb animals with no survival instinct as this one was on a tree branch about seven feet off the ground, in a tree that was in the middle of the beach with absolutely no cover. When we found him, there were maybe 10 people standing around taking pictures. He wasn't panicked at all, even when Jeff poked him five or six times in the side.

After almost exactly two month in Bocas del Toro, we're back in Casca Viejo. This time we're staying at a hostel called Luna's Castle which is owned by the same guys who own Mondo Taitu. The staff generally migrates between the hostels as a way to stave off burning out on one place. It's strange to arrive here and see friendly faces that we'd seen just days before bocas. It makes it harder too. Instead of Luna's feeling like a simple waypoint on our way out of the country, it's too friendly, too comfortable. Too much like having to say goodbye to bocas twice.

Next to me is a floor to ceiling map of the world mounted to the wall. Maybe 10'x15'. Jeff just looked at it and said "I can't do it. I can't leave. There's too much of the world to see." Looking at that map it's hard to think that in a few days I'll be back in LA. For as far out here as it feels like we are, the distance from LA to Panama isn't really all that far when you consider how big the world really is. We've seen such a tiny, tiny part of it.

[Written February 16, 2008]

The good news is that my ankle is not broken. Not even a little. It's not fractured, there's no need for casts or wheel chairs or crutches.

The weird news is that I don't know exactly what's wrong with me. Third world medicine, or maybe just Bocas medicine, is an inexact science. When I went in for x-rays today, the x-ray guy (tech? operator? doctor?) sat me on a table, put a black plate under my leg, threw a set of keys next to my leg (for size? for position?) then left the room and when he came back less than a minute later, he handed me the x-ray of my ankle. He didn't say anything, just gave me an expectant look. I stared at him, waiting for the news. He stared at me, waiting for ... I still don't know what he was waiting for. Curious, after a moment I took the x-ray and held it between me and the light fixture like I've seen on TV. Of course, I don't know a goddamn thing about reading x-rays, so I just stared at it for a moment. Nothing looked broken, I guess.

Me: Ok?
Him: Ok.
Me: Ok, ok?
Him: Ok.

Then, grinning, he shuffled me out of the x-ray room so that the next patient could come in.

It's a strange and lonely place to find yourself in an abandoned hospital corridor, standing on one leg, the other in a plaster and ace bandage cast holding your own x-ray with no one seemingly taking an interest in whether or not you'll walk right again. So I went to the only place I knew I could find a doctor. The emergency room.

When I had left the hospital on Saturday, they told me there was no need to come to the emergency room area. That everything would be taken care of in the regular part of the hospital. They were very insistent on that. What they didn't tell me was that the rest of the hospital had been abandoned twenty years ago.

The Bocas hospital is not a bustling place, even on a Monday afternoon. The hospital is a squat, concrete, single story building that has the charm and aesthetic of a communist era fighting bunker. The rooms are low and wide and sparsely furnished with beds and very old medical equipment and while they're clean, immaculately so, there's nothing that can wash away the yellowish aging of time. There is no staff walking around, no nurses, no patients, no security. There is almost no noise and standing outside of the x-ray room, all I could hear was the traffic from the road outside. The nurse who had shown me in earlier had disappeared.

Walking to the emergency room was like a walk through hell. Every room except one was empty. In it, a lady lay on a bed, attached at the arm to an IV and rolled back and forth in obvious pain. She didn't make a sound as she moved. At the front desk, two tired looking nurses watched a Spanish soap opera almost on mute and when I approached the desk they took one look at me and shook their heads to let me know that they wanted nothing to do with me.

Further down the hallway, a paramedic and a mother sat next to a hospital bed as a little girl with a shaved head underwent what I can only assume was some sort of dialysis. She was hooked to numerous machines and IVs and her mother held her hand. Why this was taking place in the hallway I have no idea.

I'm sure it only took me a few minutes to limp down various hallways and into the emergency room but it felt like hours. Ignoring the authorized personal only signs I pushed my way out of the horror movie behind me and into a proper waiting room with actual nurses, patients and even a TV. No one bothered to look at me* and when a doctor walked out of an exam room, I pushed my x-ray into his hand. He looked at it, looked down at my feet and looked at me, confused.

Me: Is it broken?

But he just sighed and led me into the exam room he'd just left. I almost cried when he put the x-ray onto that weird light box mounted on the wall and took a long and very professional look at it.

Him: Is not broken.
Me: Not broken?
Him: Not broken.
Me: Ohthankgod.
Him: Stay off of it, six weeks. Better.

And with that he ushered me out of the exam room and I found myself back in the waiting room where everyone went back to ignoring me. Five minutes later I was in a taxi headed home.

*That's not entirely true. As I was waiting for a doctor to appear, a street kid I know named Roberto came out of one of the exam rooms holding an x-ray of his own and trailing a very, very pissed off mother or grandmother. Now, the rumor going around was that Roberto had been stabbed outside of Mondo on Saturday night (while I was home popping pain pills and sleeping like a baby) but no one really knew what happened to him. Well, the kid got himself stabbed right between his shoulder blades and from the size of the bandage, whoever did it wasn't playing around. Roberto never really bothered me but I know he rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I guess it caught up with him. I didn't get to ask him about it as I really only had time to shake his hand and look at him in amazement before him mom or grandma ran him out the door.

[Written February 15, 2009]

This is no longer fun.

It hasn't been fun for a couple of weeks now but it wasn't a problem either. I burned out on Bocas sometime in early February right around the time that we had six days of rain and when the rain stopped I didn't want to go to the beach or sail or go to the bars or go to starfish or really do anything anymore.

At that time we had vague plans to move onward. Spend March in Nicaragua or Honduras. This whole trip was never specifically about Bocas or even really about Panama, and so when this place became a burden the easy answer, the right answer, was to get back on the road.

When we first got here, I think it was the first trip to wizards, I rolled my ankle on the hike out (I can't remember if I wrote about that at the time). This isn't a surprise, my left ankle has been a weak link on team Corman ever since I rolled it nine or ten years ago in Hawaii and spent a week on Vicodin and crutches getting over it. Since then, every few years it'll go out on me when I'm trying to come down a hill too fast or when I step on a rock wrong and it takes a few days before the pain goes away. This time was no different. After wizards I took it easy for a week and eventually it cleared itself up.

Two nights ago my ankle swelled to three times its normal size over about four hours and by the end of the night, Jeff had to help me from the dock where we'd been having a drink to my room because I couldn't put any weight on it. I figured I'd rerolled it (although I don't remember doing anything to reinjure it) and that I'd take a sleeping pill and sleep it off.

That didn't work. The pain just got worse, I didn't sleep, and after six hours of lying in bed, hyperventilating and trying and failing to find the one position where my leg didn't throb with pain, I called Capt. Ron and asked him to call me a taxi because I needed to go to the hospital.

It was one of the longest nights of my life. Lying in bed, watching the minutes tick by on the cheap Panamanian cell phone I bought and wondering what the fuck to do. It's stupid to lie in bed for six hours in pain and it's amazing the excuses you'll give yourself. I don't want to ask for help. I don't want to wake anyone up. There are no taxis at this time of night. I don't even know if the hospital is open. I can't walk so I can't get myself downstairs. This is embarrassing. I'm being a pussy. Another hour and this will get better and go away.

The truth is I was scared. Scared to go to the hospital by myself, scared that I was in a foreign country with only a passing idea of how their healthcare system worked. Scared that if I admitted to myself that there was a problem, that this wasn't just some passing pain, that there really would be a problem.

Eventually I caved and I went. The doctor took one look at my ankle and wrapped the whole thing in a plaster and ace bandage thing to immobilize it. He took one look at me and wrote a script for painkillers. The nurse told me to come back Monday morning at 8am for x-rays. The joys of third world medical care is that while what passes for an emergency room visit down here only cost me $7, there's no x-ray tech on duty on the weekends.

That appointment is in less than five hours. I'm going to be late. Partly because when I first got home, I started eating those painkillers like they were candy. I was so tired and so tired of being in pain that I ate them until nothing hurt. Then I slept 13 hours.

When I woke up at four am with all of Sunday ahead of me, I ate the painkillers because I was bored and depressed and lonely. With nothing to do but lie in my room and read and sleep, sleep sounded like the better option. At four am when you can't walk and you're hungry but there's no one awake to even bring you some crackers and you're embarrassed that you have to ask for crackers, sleep is an easy way out.

And that's pretty much how I passed Sunday. Reading and sleeping and at one point Capt. Ron brought me breakfast and Jeff bought me a cheeseburger and this really nice couple down the hall did some grocery shopping for me. We watched a bootleg copy of Varsity Blues then I slept some more.

And now at three in the morning, I've got wicked insomnia. I'd like to say it's because I slept too much today but really it's that I stayed up too late reading because I didn't want to be alone with my own thoughts. And when I put down the book and tried to sleep it was awful and so instead I'm writing this.

Insomnia is a terrible place to find yourself. It feels a little like drowning. There's a helplessness in it that I don't like. An implied fear of my own thoughts I don't want to admit to. A loss of control that is bitter. The more I try and sleep, the more I simply think about the shape of my life to come over the next few days. I'd like to believe that some third world Panamanian witch doctor will simply lay his hands on me like a cheap faith healer and yell "arise my son and WALK" and I'll walk out of the hospital with a dumb look and a goofy grin on my face. Unfortunately, even now hopped up as I am on whatever they gave me, I can feel that there's something seriously wrong with my leg. Words like "fracture" and "break" and "cast" and "six to eight weeks" bubble to the surface of my mind whenever I put my book down.

I see myself stuck in this room, this single bedroom apartment with it's shared kitchen and bathroom, until I can walk again, grinning dimwittedly as I hop around making myself food that others have bought for me and trying not to be a burden. Or worse, I see myself in a wheelchair being led down the concourse of an airport suddenly shuffled into those passengers who have medical needs that allow them to board first.

Worse than either of those, I see myself back in Los Angeles. A city that, if I can steal a quote I recently saw, can only be described as "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." There is no part of me that wants to stay in Bocas as long as I can't walk and there is no part of me that wants to return to LA. I think about my life there and I start to involuntarily look around the room like I'm looking for fire exits.

But that's probably where I'm headed. Back to LA. Back to the land of Internet access from my apartment and cable TV and Chinese food delivery. If I'm going to be crippled, I want to be crippled in my own bedroom. I want to be crippled and surrounded by all the comforts of the first world and of home, even if it's a home I don't particularly enjoy. And so the grand adventure to Panama will end with a whimper, in failure, in full retreat. My three months of living down here will always have an asterisks and a footnote.

The urge to flee is overwhelming and complete.

When I first told my mom that I wasn't flying home, that I was going to stay down here for a few months and work, she said something like "oh, well you must really love it there." When she said it, I was standing in the middle of the main street. Stray dogs wandered past me eating whatever happened to be rotting in the gutter, the taxis slowly wove their way around the foot deep potholes and the street kids on bikes who'd cruise past me offering, as always, "coke, weed?" forcing me to cover the mouth piece so she wouldn't hear them. I thought it was a weird thing for her to say because Bocas is just Bocas, it's not like I felt some deep connection with the place that made me call it home, it's about par for the course as far as third world Caribbean islands go, at least in my experience.

I didn't really think again about my mom's comment until the other day. Marike and I were sitting around having drinks when she turned to me and asked why I'd decided to stay. I rattled off some bullshit, most of which I don't remember. But for all that I said -- I've got a flexible job, it's a good opportunity, it'll be a good test to see if I've got what it takes to travel for a year or two, I'm not all that happy in LA -- I didn't have a reason. Those are all symptoms, they're the reasons I'm able to do it, not the reasons I want to.

I don't know why I'm doing this. Certainly not because it's easy. We run out of everything here. The stores run out of food, Casa Disaster runs out of water, the power randomly goes out, the internet connection between Bocas del Toro and the mainland regularly fails. It can take a month for the mail to be delivered.

And now it's rained for five days straight. Five straight days of nothing to do but wait for the internet to work and read and sleep and eat and sleep and have the same conversations over and over again with the same people. Paradise is starting to feel like a prison cell.

But given the chance to spend three months living in Panama, how could I say no? I'd spend the rest of my life wondering what I'd missed.

I know it's not the choice most would make. Even among some of my closest friends this would be intolerable. But given the choice between the safe and easy route and pushing the limits of what's sane or good for me, I always seem to go with door #2.

It's not something I'd advocate. It's gotten me in more trouble than I care to think about. But if you're like me then you know that you're never going to end up as a lawyer or an investment banker. If you're the kind of person who feels uncomfortable in business casual and spends every second of sitting behind a desk wishing, desperately for something, anything else, then there really isn't a choice. Some people make it work. Some people can find the happy medium between who they are during their work week and who they are outside of it. I'd probably be a happier person if I'd found that balance but in 31 years, it's eluded me every step of the way. Instead of buckling down and doing whatever I'm supposed to be, I'm always running off to do whatever I want.

And so I guess that's why I'm here. In the end I didn't really have a choice. I just did what came natural. And at least, when it's all over, I'll have a great story. I hope.

Mo works over at Mondo's and it's sort of the worst kept secret in Bocas that Mo used to run girls in Cartagena. From what I understand this was a pretty legit business and Mo did really well at it. Mo is also a friend and we hangout with him whenever we're over there. The other day Marike (friend of Jeff's who is down here staying with him) walked into the bar and gave Mo a kiss on the cheek. One of the guys at the bar asked "Hey Mo, is this one of *your* girls?" That's right. Marike's been here about two weeks and she's getting mistaken for a Columbian prostitute. Ladies, how could you not want to come to Bocas?

Of course, because Marike is awesome, she looks at the guy and says "One of his girls? You mean like a prostitute?" And when the guy gave a weak nod, she grinned, stuck out her hand and said "Yes, yes I am!"

But as bad as that is, tonight I got mistaken for Kevin Smith. Like Clerks, Mallrats Kevin Smith. I sincerely hope that means that I look successful and clever and not just bearded and overweight.

The key to something like this is to get local in a hurry. It's the people you meet who will make or break a place for you.

Getting local isn't easy. There's a lot of homesickness along the way. There's a lot of looking back through rose colored glasses and wondering why you bother. There's a lot of compromise, there are trade offs.

But if it's going to stick you've got to get local. You've got to get outside the compound. It doesn't matter if you're moving to a third world country or if you're off to college or relocating for a job. Go local, don't look back.

We've done a pretty good job. Even in a place as small as Bocas, it's easy to fall into circles. There's the ex-pats living in their compounds accessible only through private bays out there on the scattered islands we can see from Colon. There's the marina with it's collection of retired Texans who live on half million dollar yachts and the sailors running charters so they afford their boats. There's the surfers spread across a collection of hostels from Aqua to Mondo to the Grand Kahuna. The hardcore backpackers renting apartments out on Saigon Bay and dodging the machete kids on their way home at the end of the night. And everyone else who falls through the cracks. People who couldn't afford their lives wherever home happens to be. People on the run for crimes that seemed like a good idea at the time. People who sold everything after cancer scares or who couldn't see a way out of a life that made them miserable. And there's a whole group of locals who alternatively pray on or supply to all of these groups.

These are the people you meet when you get local. You cut across all these circles if you stay long enough and get out of your compound. Hiding won't get you anywhere, the Texans get their outboard motors stolen whether they ever leave the marina or not. But meeting people might save you some trouble. Even the most hardcore backpackers, people who've traveled for years, need a heads up when immigration sweeps down through the island and deports anyone working without a work visa. Last week there were a lot of nervous white faces working the bars and the cafes around here.

That's today's lesson. If you're going to make it work, get local. And do it fast.

I´ve gotten a few questions about us running out of water, so here is your official bencorman.com guide to Bocas del Toro´s water situation. Or something.

Casa Verde runs completely on two 550 gallon water tanks that fill whenever it rains. Yes, you read that right. Our total water supply is dependent on rain water. We shower in rain water, we wash our clothes in rain water*, we cook with rain water, we flush the toilets with rain water, etc, etc. This isn´t a problem normally because it rains here every day or every other day but when you get a week like last week where it didn´t rain at all for five or six days, well, then you have trouble.

This is not a unique situation. Most, like 95% of Bocas operates this way. People have big tanks, the tanks fill, the tanks empty and that´s life on an island. Indeed, if you´re not on Bocas, say you live in one of the ex-pat houses built on one of the surrounding islands, you don´t get a choice. You learn to live with a rain water system or you learn to bath in sand.

Now, theoretically in Bocas you should have a choice. There is a city water plant here with it´s own reservoir and everything, just like a real city. Unfortunately, unlike a real city the infrastructure here is held together with hope and positive thinking. There isn´t enough power to fully pressurize the system so while places like Mondo, which are near the water plant, almost always can pull city water, places like Casa Verde across town, can´t.

The problem is made worse by the big hotels and restaurants here. Since they like charging first world prices in the third world they can´t tell their lily white guests that ¨sorry, there´s no water, pray for rain¨ so they install what´s called a demand pump. I´m not sure 100% how it works but the idea is that instead of relying on the pressure from the city water plant, they pull it from the reservoir themselves. This further reduces the pressure for places like Casa Verde so we´re almost guaranteed to be without city water.

Why don´t we have a demand pump? Excellent question. Like many things here in Panama, demand pumps are technically illegal although there is absolutely zero enforcement. So while other people are flushing their toilets with reckless abandon, we´ve got the only honest landlord on the island and he´s all ¨but I don´t wanna break the law.¨ Pussy.

It´s not as bad as I´m making it out to be. First, we at Casa Verde aren´t nearly as helpless as perhaps reading my words would lead you to believe. The first night we were back, Shawn managed to hook the bilge pump from his boat to the tap so in those odd hours where we actually had city water pressure (file under: few, far between) we pumped water into our tanks. It was a slow process but goddamn if we didn´t feel like kings for figuring out that little system.

And second, the next night it absolutely poured. The rain filled our two 550s in probably four hours. If you think you know rain, you should get yourself good and stuck in a Caribbean squall. They´re breathtaking.

And that´s your island living guide for the day.

*It was recently brought to my attention that I may have been washing my clothes all this time in fabric softener and not laundry detergent. Of course, none of us can figure out if that is true or not because the bottle is in spanish. Regardless, my clothes have never smelled better nor been softer. I consider this issue closed. Thank you.