1. Jamaica is that Paradise You’ve Always Envisioned…Yah, that One
Whether you know it or not, you were in fact always envisioning Jamaica. You know when I mean. Perhaps you were drifting off at work. Or while ignoring the speech of another person—while they blabber on about something irritating, say, “social media”—there has always been that hyper-idealized paradise image during moments of intense boredom: the sun a glowing orb in Technicolor, the sky blindingly blue and electric, water see-through like glass, powdery white sand, drink in hand, all against a slow rendition of “Sleep Walkers.”
(Does the one above on the left not look like something out the classic PC game Myst?)
This, sweet friends, is Jamaica. How you received the image, in your private daydreams—again, usually while a friend, or someone behind you on a plane, pontificates endlessly about the dual nature of Facebook—without ever having been there, is one of the shrewdest acts of tourism marketing ever deployed. This would be one way to explain the Jamaican economic hardship: all of the money goes into the research of telepathic marketing at the intensely bored. Genius. They make their money back and call it even, I’m sure. Has to be.
I must note to you my surprise, upon arriving in Jamaica and realizing I had been there in my head so many times. It exists?!, I thought.A land of the lushest, freshest green imaginable. The kind of lush that makes you drool when you say “lush.” Near-jungle, entirely, though not quite jungle. That precarious balance between forest and jungle. A land of cops with machine guns in black, red-striped pants (where they got the name for the beer). A land of transparent waters, the ocean like one hugely heated calm pool. People everywhere sitting, lounging, swimming, leaning against everything in sight. A land of the most bountiful supply of marijuana imaginable. The fields in the countryside reeked of it, whole fields, mountains of it baking and growing strong. Men riding bicycles everywhere rolling joints. Men passing by on the beach offering jet skis, and also, if you would like it, ganja. Bartenders singing with the radio, slowly making drinks, pausing to sit on a stool to watch the Olympics and smoke a joint. Aggressively smoked and sold, though technically illegal. Illegal for Jamaicans the same way spitting in public is illegal to Americans. The most formal and silly of laws.
This amalgam of sloth, heaven, Earth and ocean, all were Jamaica. You doubted its existence. What an asshole you had been. You thought its existence was fairy like, a natural and powerful opposite created by your mind, the only beauty powerful enough to buffer the unwavering speech of internet enthusiasts when they bore you. Which is true, but I guess that’s how the Jamaican tourism board designed it. Genius.
