Dispatch Number 58 -The Psychiatrist

I met Francis a retired psychiatrist from Kansas when I was in Panama City, he told fortunes with a deck of playing cards that he spread out over a big piece of purple felt. It had an astrology wheel and other crudely painted symbology on it. People at our cheap hotel loved to circle around him in the evenings and have their fortunes told. The reception guy and I were compatriots in our non belief and poked fun at it all. We were ignorant for we made fun of what we did not understand. Inventions of the mind , I say.

Francis was harsh and judgemental about most things, including a man neither of us knew performing construction work below the balcony of our dumpy hotel.
"Stupid idiot! He's not wearing ear protection. He'll be deaf in a year.", as the high pitched power tool roared through floor tiles.

Francis loved the words fuck and shit and used them in typically uncreative ways making it difficult to believe he was the science fiction writer he claimed to be. I never saw him read. I was careful not to ask for one of the manuscripts I saw him passing around to unsuspecting backpackers. When I saw one returned it was done without much comment and I didn't want to be in that position, I may not have been as delicate.

He believed in UFOs and life on other planets. They are an odd lot the silver disc believers, like missionaries who want to recruit or confirm you into their subculture. They can be zealots, too. Area 51 people. In Costa Rica, I met a local artisan, Freddy who had me watch a video fraught with technical problems in the camera work. He defiantly claimed this was proof of UFOs. Freddy used a portable DVD player instead of a bible.

Francis asked, just like Freddy did, "Do you believe in UFOs and extraterrestrial life?"
I am not delicate anymore, probably since I'm not trying to sell people things, and replied without hesitance, "No. Not a believer. Shall we talk about God next?"
Francis would not be deterred and pressed on in an accusatory manner that linear thinking was the cause for not believing in UFOs. He used the label and made it sound dirty or contaminated, and it warmed me to debate.

He was not a crafty debater and his attacks were obvious and clumsy. From the start it felt like a set up. His line of reasoning was rehearsed and when I began to out debate him he resorted to talking over me. After some time it was clear he had another agenda and went on with his unpolished monologue. I began to wonder how his science fiction manuscripts read.

Constructions of the mind help us cope with our world, some make them and never break them. Others adopt religions and philosophies. As for this traveller, it may take years before I reluctantly challenge the constructions I create, and revise them or completely break them down. I believed in UFOs until I was eleven.

Over lunch with a group who liked to spend time with him, fortune lackeys I called them, Francis choked on a piece of meat. A Finnish man helped him cough it up using the Heimlich Maneuver; I'm told Francis sat back down as if little had happened, while the others stared at the huge piece of meat that came out of his throat.
"Francis, you have to chew!", exclaimed one of the Spaniards who took lunch with him.

David
Cartagena, Colombia