unable to run pip

[Skaperen]

i had some free time today so i went through the tasks of trying the install of pip, running pip to install awscli, catching what it could not find, installing that, and repeating this whole mess. after about a dozen installs pip seems to work. but when i install awscli, it creates a directory tree at /local and puts awscli submodules in there. then awscli can't find them. but it names it as //local in error messages, suggesting to me that something should have "usr" but has "" instead. ouch! any guesses?

i would be tempted to manually wipe out all python stuff and start over, but ubuntu now depends on python, making that difficult to do.