Now I’m not what one would call a terribly religous man. I was baptized (in the Montana River) but never went to church, except when I was with my religious cousins.

Nevertheless, freshman year I found myself in the Religions of Latin America class with a few hundred other saps, unwillingly learning about all that boring crap. Boring, that is, until we got to the part about Voodoo and Santeria. Now that stuff, that sounded interesting. Killing chickens, speaking in tongues… damn cool. So when the time came for a class project, the choice was clear: visit a botanica. [Ahem, botanicas are the places where practitioners of Santeria go to purchase all their mystical whatnots]

So me and a classmate went up Vermont until we found a place (and I took this picture of a mural of Edward James Olmos), and it was weird so we bailed pretty quickly, but not before I picked up a few candles and a Jesús Malverde amulet (he’s the patron saint of drug dealers).

I didn’t think anything of the candles I’d bought until about a year later, when, on a whim, I decided to light them up. And, as my whims are often long-lasting affairs that can span months if not years, I continued to light the candle and speak the little incantation on the back, in English and Spanish, pretty much every day. And you know what my friends? It worked. La Divina Chuparrosa, the Divine Hummingbird itself, extracted all misfortune from my life, in the same way a hummingbird extracts sweet nectar from a flower, and as a result I got way more play, which was the intended effect. And like I said, I’m not a religious man, but hell, what works works, dig? The only thing is, I didn’t realize it worked until after the candle burnt down all the way and it stopped working. The only way I could see out of my dry spell was to run out and buy another candle, which I soon did, a nice pink one that the man prepared for me in the back room, especialmente.

My problem? The damn holy thing cost me fifteen bucks. And that was after I negotiated him down from twenty! How dare they, taking advantage of the real magic that they somehow possess and my own religious devotion in order to turn a profit… Well anyway, that candle’s almost burnt down too, and I can already feel the dry spell looming in the distance – guess it’s time to shell out another fifteen. Damn expensive botanicas.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 3:19 am and is filed under LA Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.