tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-237574772024-03-07T12:32:29.261+04:00Expatriate ActKung Pao Pan DaExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.comBlogger233125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-78006229393081474912013-03-16T13:47:00.000+04:002015-12-31T04:34:38.074+04:00The Summer Wind (or How I Broke My Wrist in Georgia)I reckon I would've
pulled it off gracefully enough at a younger, shorter, nimbler age. My instincts
told me that it was easy from here on out, pretty much inevitable: simply a matter of
pivoting on my left foot by way of setting up a blistering volley into the upper
90 with my right. Instead, the world shot out from under me and I flew upwards
and then backwards at such an angle and with such velocity that the control tower in my brain abandoned all hope of coaxing the rest of my body into a smooth landing. Mayday. I sat down on my left wrist.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There
may or may not have been an audible snap. There was not, at first, any pain
whatsoever. I remember holding my hand up in front of my face and observing,
rather calmly, that it looked more like a foot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some of
my students had gathered around to gawk. A few of them fought back vomit; the others shielded their eyes and turned away. My host brother, crying, ran off to fetch mom.
One of the teenagers extended his hand, offering some sort of assistance, and I
was disoriented enough to take it; he made as if to snap the joint
back in place and I lashed out at him like a wolf mother. He backed up a couple
paces.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am not a radiology tech, though my dad once was. Some trivia, there. I knew that I had
broken my wrist very badly. No bones were sticking out in any literal sense,
but not for lack of trying. An older high school student – incidentally, the only kid in the village
with frosted tips – approached with a rectangular chunk of cardboard that he'd
scraped up off the ground. With one of his own shoelaces, he rigged up
something to keep my arm level and blood-imbued until the ambulance came. I
asked him what his name was. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Giorgi</i>, he said.
No surprise there. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thank you, Giorgi</i>,
I said. <i>Thank you, thank you, thank you.</i> Then I asked when the ambulance was coming.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Word
travels much faster than ambulances in the Georgian countryside. The whole village had turned out to take in the spectacle of the vulnerable American. I was slumped over on the asphalt in a
pool of anxious sweat with my arm propped up in a rudimentary cardboard splint,
cursing in the Queen's whenever the pain flared up, making gallows amputation
jokes in Georgian whenever the pain ebbed away. These quips were my first attempt at skirting the fringes of something I really preferred not to think about, not then or hopefully
ever again: Georgian healthcare. In America, the situation would've
been clear-cut: I'd get my wrist fixed by a professional and tumble into debt for the rest of my
life. In Georgia, it was possible that I'd lose an arm for free.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My host
brother returned with the rest of my host family. He darted down an alley behind the school, where he dissolved into a puddle of tears. Earlier in the day - the first real day of spring - he'd
called me fat. So I'd tromped off to my room. I returned sporting a bootleg Chinese Nike t-shirt-and-shorts ensemble. "What the fuck," my host brother said - who teaches them this stuff? "I'm fat," I said, "so I'm going running." He wanted to come with,
so we went on a two mile jaunt up into the mountains. Then we trotted down to
the playground to do some pull-ups. Then we played soccer for four hours. Then
I smashed my wrist to bits.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My half-tight host
dad peeked over the heads in front of him, caught a glimpse of my
arm, and let fly a traditional Georgian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aüf!
</i>My host mom slashed through the crowd like a battleship and set about scolding me for inhabiting the body of the idiot that I am.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was
twenty minutes before the ambulance showed up: a first edition VW hippie van, scrap metal gray, rusted out, with red crosses spray painted
on the sides. The paramedics pushed through the crowd,
examined my wrist and the Giorgi MacGyver splint job, and decided it was good
enough for the time being. Then they told me to get up. It was evident from the
beginning that I was a liability. Nobody wanted to touch me. I nodded
toward frosted-tips Giorgi, who helped me to my feet, and with the
half-whimper/half-laugh that sometimes accompanies incomprehensible pain
(a noise my host mother found unmanly and therefore amusing) I began to hobble towards the ambulance.
Nobody helped me inside, so I climbed in and found a seat in the back by the window.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was
a sunny, dusty day in April. I've watched too many Vietnam movies. The way I
remember it, I was in the back of a chopper, tall grass tussling in a
propeller-propelled gale, smoke flares hotboxing the heavens, generations of
rice farmers gathered round to watch their wounded white-skinned hero spirited away in the bowels of
a strange metal bird, bleeding generously from head and torso, gritting his teeth
(also basted with blood) in order to flash a dogged American smile and a thumbs up
out the window as …</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I leapt
to my feet. A pain in my ass. I jumped
up and clunked my arm against the wall. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fuck fuck fuck fuck
fuck! </i>I turned around and saw that my pants were down, and that there was a paramedic kneeled behind me with a syringe squirting clear liquid all over the ass of my chaps. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">"You could've asked first," I said. I stuck my ass out. They injected something into my left buttcheek.</span><br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nothing happened. This was not morphine. My
host mom climbed into the ambulance. She would not help matters much. The paramedics slid the side door shut behind them. The driver tossed his cigarette and pulled himself up behind the
wheel. I steeled myself for my long-awaited Vietnam-era smile and thumbs up scene.
The engine wouldn't start.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The engine wouldn't start for a good long while. Eventually, the driver gestured
for Jgali's biggest and brawniest to gather behind the ambulance and give it a
push towards town. I halfway expected us to get pushed all the way <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">into </i>town until the engine sputtered to
life a click or two down the road. I winced a smile and flashed my dogged
American thumbs up out the window. Nobody seemed to notice.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
nearest hospital was in Tsalenjikha: ten minutes by bus, twenty by ambulance. A
pair of nurses ushered me into an office of sorts. I sat down. They asked me if
I wanted anything and I didn't know the Georgian for "the strongest opiate Soviet Russia has to offer," so I said "water" instead. I drank glass after glass of
water while the doctors copied the text of my passport by hand into a notebook. After a while, they pulled my pants down and injected me with more antibiotics. I couldn't be sure, but it
seemed like my fingers were turning blue. The doctors finally turned their
attention to my wrist, gave it a cursory glance, then left the room together.
On their way out, I saw the one say something to the other and make a chopping
gesture at her left elbow. The doors to the ER swung shut behind them. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"I'd like to talk to my boss," I told my host mom.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Yes,
Kiti," she said, over the phone, "what ees problem?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"I
broke my wrist," I said. "I was playing soccer. Or football."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"You
were drinking?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"No."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Then
ees no problem. Health care cover this problem."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Great. In the meantime," I said, "I
want you to ask these people what exactly it is that they're about to do to me."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When the doctors returned ten minutes later, I was given to understand that they were
probably not about to chop my arm off, but that their little hospital in Tsalenjikha was in no way equipped to treat an injury of such magnitude. They would give me a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rentgen </i>– an x-ray – and send me on down
to Zugdidi. A load off their shoulders. A load off my mind. Zugdidi was a city of sorts. Zugdidi was developed, within reason. There
was a kebab stand in Zugdidi, run by a real live Turkish dude. A whole street of shady 24-hour casinos managed by Armenian pimps. And where there are Armenian pimps, there are doctors.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A bald guy
in a white lab coat – I could've sworn I'd seen him mopping the lobby earlier –
came in some time later and told me to follow him. We were not headed for a lab or an office. He led me outside. We walked a couple blocks down
a pothole-pocked gravel alleyway until we arrived at a slipshod old barn. He struggled with
the padlock, knocked it open eventually. We went inside. He flipped on the lightbulb. A dirt floor covered in rat
droppings. In the corner, an x-ray machine.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When
the film had developed some 45 minutes later – it was dark out by then – I was finally told what I'd known all along: that my wrist was broken
and that I'd need to go to the hospital. The director of my school
had shown up (likely to cover her own ass) and the three of us - the director, my host mom, and I - piled into her
Georgian Geo Metro. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgroM5als_YTbbSAgzkp55anssjqo0C0WbLhgr6rAGqNaXIYHJKw0nWi9L6QAMG5ZwtB2UuaZshm9GsvGmBRl1dvtzo1qw3v1AkD4fQC5bYZllwyQNi7X412jl_0ZS3w4Xg93tNZQ/s1600/brokeasswrist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgroM5als_YTbbSAgzkp55anssjqo0C0WbLhgr6rAGqNaXIYHJKw0nWi9L6QAMG5ZwtB2UuaZshm9GsvGmBRl1dvtzo1qw3v1AkD4fQC5bYZllwyQNi7X412jl_0ZS3w4Xg93tNZQ/s320/brokeasswrist.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But we
didn't go anywhere. For half an hour, I sat in the backseat while my director
and my host mom argued with each other. My director, apparently, was not confident enough in
her driving abilities to shuttle me the thirty minute straight shot to Zugdidi. My host mom
offered to pay for gas. (In retrospect, the cost of <i>b</i><i>enzin, </i>I imagine, was the sticking point.) My director said no, driving wasn't an option, maybe they should just call
for an ambulance. This went on for a while. I was sitting with my forehead pressed against the glass, miserable to the <i>n</i>-th degree of f-bomb. I was starting to drift into the third person.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After an hour of talking it out in the car, my director hit upon an idea. She remembered that another
foreign teacher lived just across the street; maybe they
could go get her and bring her out and she would know what to do. My host mom
duly got out of the car and walked across the street. She talked to a
shopkeeper for ten minutes, much gesticulating and laughter, then wandered down
the road to a rusted metal gate, opened the gate, and stepped into the
driveway. A guard mutt went crazy. A middle-aged woman emerged from the house.
She and my host mom chatted for a bit. My host mom came back. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"The
foreigner is asleep."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My director called for an ambulance. We waited in the dark. I was no longer
talking to anybody. I clamped my eyes shut and pretended to be asleep, or dead.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
ambulance took an hour to arrive. But it was a real ambulance. I was helped out of
the car by real doctors. An old man, an old woman. I took one look at them and knew that they were
professionals and guessed that they were married, and I was right about both.
The old woman handed me a bottle of water. I guzzled. The old man checked out
my wrist and raised both brows and asked me if I was in pain. I nodded
vigorously. He asked me if I wanted medicine. Again with the vigorous nodding. A
syringe was produced, was flicked, and a shimmering arc of clear fluid was ejaculated up into the air between the doctor and me. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
After
the opiated ambulance ride, the hospital was a night terror. Like the
music video for "Knives Out" by Radiohead, if you've seen that. Flickering
fluorescent lights, everything metallic blue or concrete gray, or pitch black
when the lights crapped out, all manner of medical procedures taking
place side-by-side at a breakneck broken neck pace. I was shown to a bench
between two other benches. From the sounds of things, the
guy to the right of me was having his intestines removed, link by link. The
woman to my left was schizophrenic or worse. A busted wrist wasn't so bad at
all, certainly not in the state I was in. But then, it is easy to look on the bright side on morphine.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A tall, gray-scalped doctor with witty little
creases under his eyes came in and shook my functioning hand. He explained what was about to go down. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"We fix you arm," he said.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"You
won't be cutting anything off?" I asked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"No,"
he chuckled. "No cutting. You only go to sleep."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sleep I
could handle. I lay back in my cot with two entirely different kinds of
screaming going on in my left and right ears. Nothing mattered terribly much. They
plugged me into an IV. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"This,"
the doctor said, flicking the baggy dangling over my head, "make you sleep."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I laid
there a moment or two and watched the doctor
as he massaged a roll of gauze into a tray of gray slime, setting up shop next to my wounded paw.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Er," I
said, "I'm not ready for that yet. I'm still awake."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"It
okay," he said. "Soon you sleep, Kiti. Very soon you sleep."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He
began to toy around with my arm.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Oof. Ugh.
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aüf</i><i>!</i> Er. I just
don't think I can be awake for this, doc. I'm on some big drugs already, believe me, I
understand that, but I'm pretty sure what you're about to do to me ... it's still
gonna ... I mean ... I ... "</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I sat
bolt upright in bed. Something had catapulted me outside of time and space and
misery. My wrist belonged to somebody else.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"<i>There</i> it is," I said. "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">There </i>it is.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>I tell
you, doc. Whatever this stuff is ... whatever it is ... I tell you what ... you gotta
market this shiz ... the kids back home ... you'll make ... I
promise you'll make a fuggin' <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mmmint.</i>"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My head
hit the pillow. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
An existential second or two later, I was awake again, a wet
heap of gauze molded to my left arm.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"How'd
you do that?" I asked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Is
easy," said the doctor. He snipped off the last wrap of tape with a pair of office scissors. "I am doctor."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The day I broke my wrist was the first day
of the year you could really go outside. Summer was coming, with its promise of heat and sun and lukewarm
beer and lukewarmer women, subpar Georgian beaches, and three months of fuck-all to do. But
it was this summer that I was to serve out my penance for having never once broken a bone in my youth, for having never once missed out on a
childhood summer. For having never showered with a cast. For having never
sat idly poolside reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Boxcar
Children </i>#72 while everyone else cannonballed their asses off. This summer would be my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rear Window</i> summer. I'd sit and watch the
cows go by, watch my host aunt pin the clothes up on the line, watch my host
cousin get spanked pale-assed; it was the summer I'd learn how to work a Kindle one-handed, among other things …</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A month
later, the month of May, I went back to get my first cast removed, presumably to get my second
cast installed. I was reunited with the doctor who'd done the original cast job. I
offered him a fistpound with my operational hand and he received it, though he
didn't blow it up. He cut free the cast and I was overwhelmed at first by the
stench and then by the withered t-rexian appearance of my left arm. He sent me
to the radiologist's lair to get an x-ray. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The radiologist returned a couple minutes later with the good news. In English, no less.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"You
are not needing cast," he said, holding the x-ray up for my approval. "Is
healthy. Is fine. Are young, so excellent progress. You leave here today. You are
not needing cast."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This, I
knew, was false. It had been a month since my wrist had been smashed. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I
presented the x-ray, along with my translation of the radiologist's verdict, to my doctor.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He donned his bifocals and glanced at the x-ray, turned it from side to side. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Is
the bull shit," he said. "You need the new cast."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I
shrugged.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"I
thought so," I said, "but it was a little weird. The radiologist said – "</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Yes,"
the doctor nodded. "I know radiologist. He belong in hospital. He is doctor, but have qualities of mental patient. He have
something schizophrenia."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">[here, the blog post you are reading cuts abruptly to a "closing
credits" sequence in which our protagonist and pseudo-hero is observed from slightly
above and directly behind, reclined in a plastic beach chair, cocktail in one
hand, 39 pounds of Georgian plaster wrapped around the other, silhouetted against
the Black Sea at dusk, and "The Summer Wind" by Frank Sinatra swells into the
foreground and crescendos until the sweetness of the moment becomes almost unbearable – the
director of the scene pours himself a nightcap and sits and drinks and strokes his whiskered chin as he watches and waits and finally decides to allow the full two minutes and 53 seconds of the
original Concord Records recording to blow themselves decrescendoing softly to sleep]</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-50560260331586225152013-06-01T02:48:00.000+05:002013-06-01T07:44:03.150+05:00The River of Recurrent ShameI learned how to milk a virtual cow from a very young age.<br />
<br />
There was an exhibit at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo that I used to frequent on field trips, across from the pettable beast pen, tucked away in a foul-smelling, unpasteurized little nook they called Dairy World. The only real reason for visiting Dairy World if you were a kid was this kind of prosthetic cow that resided there. You could always pop in and find the cow unattended - it was by far the lamest object in the zoo - and its udder compartment was usually full. You'd yank on the udders and a funky liquid that wasn't quite water but certainly wasn't milk would come spurting out, sometimes into the aluminum bucket provided, but more often than not all over the one kid in class who was even dorkier than you.<br />
<br />
The problem with Georgian cows is that many of them happen to be alive, so they move around and stuff, and their udders aren't plastic and sanitized on a bimonthly basis, but are in fact made of flesh, are rather oddly shaped and floppy and slippery and bulbous and tumescent, among many other disgusting-sounding descriptors. Georgian cows tend to be particular about who is milking them, especially when your milking technique is something you've only ever practiced on yourself and a virtual cow somewhere in Omaha, Nebraska. Nothing in my years of training could have prepared me for the real thing. During my tenure as host son, I only milked the host cow once, and having milked everything there was to milk out of the experience, once was plenty enough for me.<br />
<br />
It was part of my host mom's last-ditch propaganda campaign to keep me in the family. I'd kept deliberately mum to mom about my plans because I secretly wanted to put myself up for host adoption, to see another side of Georgia, to bear witness to another version of host familial dysfunction. But my host mom wanted to own me for another semester, another year, probably for the rest of my natural life. So, at her behest, the whole village was coming together to show me all the authentic, down-home, rural-type experiences that I could get in Jgali but nowhere else in Georgia, and certainly nowhere in the more civilized world. Milking Jurga, the family cow, was first on the bucket list. So to speak.<br />
<br />
The extended host family had come out to watch. I plopped down on a stool and fumbled around Jurga's undercarriage. Her tail started swishing around, symptomatic of bovine anxiety disorder. She groaned and stomped a hoof. She mooed a deranged Transcaucasian moo. Panicking, I grabbed onto the nearest flap of flesh I could find and yanked. Nothing came out.<br />
<br />
"She's not working," I said.<br />
"You're pulling the wrong thing."<br />
"Jesus," I said to myself in English, "how many things can there be?"<br />
I brailled my way to another flap of flesh and started yanking anew.<br />
"Nothing's happening," I said.<br />
"You've got to pull very hard," said my host mom.<br />
"I don't want to hurt Jurga."<br />
"You can't hurt Jurga."<br />
<br />
Yank and yank as I might, I came to the conclusion that Jurga was all tapped out for the day. I shrugged and threw up my hands. My host mom booted me out of the way and went to work. Torrents of milk blistered the inside of the bucket.<br />
<br />
"See? Like that."<br />
I scooted back in.<br />
"Like this?"<br />
"... no, not like that."<br />
<br />
After dinner, I came down with strep throat and was laid up in bed for the rest of the week. My host mom made me wear a a damp hunk of cloth around my neck. By the end of the week, I still had strep throat and I also had a big red rash around my neck. I kept getting worse until I got better.<br />
<br />
The twilight of summer. Time to brace ourselves for winter. I came home one evening and found the neighbor dude, Ruslani, chopping wood in the front lawn. He called me over.<br />
<br />
"<i>Gaumarjos Kitis</i>," he said. "You want to put in some work?"<br />
"Sure."<br />
<br />
He handed me a cigarette. I thanked him and lit the cigarette and smoked it as I did some back stretches. Then I lined myself up, raised the ax, and brought it down upon the log. <i>Clunk</i>. The log bounced off the chopping block and went rolling down the sidewalk.<br />
<br />
"No," said Ruslani. "Not like that. Like <i>this</i>."<br />
<br />
Effortlessly, he split a log in two and handed me back the ax.<br />
<br />
"Like this?" I said.<br />
<i>Clunk</i>. Roll, roll, roll.<br />
"... no, not like that."<br />
<br />
My host family's primary export was hazelnuts. Harvesting hazelnuts was a job a six-year-old could do, so it was also a job I could do. It involved grabbing a hazelnut tree by the neck and throttling it until nuts came raining down, then finger-skinning the nuts one by one and popping them into a bucket. I'd challenge my host brother to hazelnut harvesting competitions and he'd always kick my ass by a couple of buckets or so. But it was a job I could do.<br />
<br />
There were weird little translucent spiders that lived in the hazelnut skins. They'd fly into a panic upon being outed and vanish imperceptibly into your pants. You'd wake up in the middle of the night itching all over, creepy bumps on your thighs.<br />
<br />
We worked all summer long. By the end of the summer, I'd scratched my body raw, but we'd filled the entire guest room full of hazelnuts, a hundred kilos of the damned things piled across the floor.<br />
<br />
"We're going to be rich," I said to my host mom.<br />
"Twenty <i>tetri</i> a kilo," she nodded.<br />
"Why that's ... twenty <i>lari</i>," I said. "Why that's ... twelve bucks."<br />
<br />
One evening, my host mom knocked on my door and told me that we were going somewhere. I had nothing to do and nowhere to go. We walked down the path between the hazelnut trees, past Jurga's barn and her thirty-foot leaning tower of shit, kept going until we'd reached the fence at the end of our backyard. My host mom opened the gate and we clambered down a steep hill. And there - still, I suppose, technically in our backyard - was a river.<br />
<br />
"This is ours," she said.<br />
"Cool."<br />
"If you stay with us, you can swim here every day."<br />
"Every day?"<br />
"Until it gets cold. Then you can't swim anymore."<br />
"Sounds good."<br />
"All of this is ours," she said, sweeping her hand over the water.<br />
"All of it?"<br />
"All of it."<br />
"Wonderful."<br />
"So you will stay?"<br />
"Maybe," I said.<br />
"That's a yes, right?"<br />
"That's a maybe."<br />
<br />
It was a very <i>Lion King </i>moment. Everything the light touches, Simba, and so on.<br />
<br />
"I'm so happy that you're going to stay," she said. "I hope you like swimming."<br />
"Are you kidding? Who doesn't love swimming?"<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I'd never
learned how to swim. I've never once swum in my life.<br />
<br />
It's not that I'm afraid of the water, more that I do not
trust it. I feel the same way about water that I do about flying, or joining the military, or joining a cult, or getting a desk job, or going to church, or ingesting anonymous drugs handed to me by strangers at a Flaming Lips show. I suppose it's the thought of giving myself over to something so vast
and powerful and beyond my control, something so potentially lethal or mind-destroying or just plain time-consuming and dull that frightens me, moreso than any
specific fear of water per se.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or
perhaps it is something about the water, after all. I have
buoyancy issues. The first step towards swimming is floating, or so I've been told, and I have never, ever - not even for an instant - been able to float. I have always sunk to the bottom of everything:
of the pool, of the sea, of the hottub, of the bathtub. I am genuinely perplexed whenever I find myself sitting on the periphery of water - on the
beach, on the dock of the bay, on a lawnchair sufficiently far removed from the Comfort Inn pool - and
watching other human beings of all shapes and sizes gallivant around in the water like a pride
of sea lions, so effortlessly that it's like breathing to them. I can't do that. I know full well
from experience that, even with little orange inflatable floaties strapped to all four
limbs, I'd be receiving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in no time. I don't know
how people do it. Float.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In 7th grade, I remember how horrified I was to discover that there was a mandatory swimming component to my P.E. class. I tried to get out of it, citing the heart murmur that I no longer had, the one that had gotten me out of weightlifting. No such luck. Instead, while the rest of the kids swam laps, I <i>ran </i>them: I jogged through the water from one end of the pool to the other, which isn't as easy as it sounds. A "safety buddy" was appointed to swim alongside me and watch me run, to make sure I didn't drown in the shallow end of the pool, while all the other kids hung out at the deep end. Naturally, this did wonders for my popularity. And I was already ever-so-popular in 7th grade. <br />
<br />
I don't know. Perhaps
it does have something to do with fear, after all. Once upon a time, I very
nearly drowned in the Atlantic Ocean. I must have been four or five years old,
still a plump little butterbean, and like Melville, my hypos got the best of me and I decided that I'd see a little bit
of the watery part of the world. I was not aware at that age of the phenomenon
they call the undertow, and within seconds I had completely vanished. My
parents - because they were and are good ones, after all - noticed immediately that
I was gone. They were and are also very smart parents, well-versed in the classics, and they used Archimedes' principle to deduce - from the heaving waves that came rolling in after
my fat ass had plummeted to the bottom of the sea - that I was buried somewhere in the Atlantic,
probably drowning. My dad sifted through sea anemones and jellyfishes, discarded bags of Utz<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">® brand </span></span>crab cakes and crushed cans of Schlitz<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16px;">®</span>, until he finally grabbed hold of a fat little cankle. He snatched me up "like a lobster" (his words) and smacked me instinctively across the ass - and so my ass was saved for the time being, one of many such fortunate little twists
of fate that have conspired to keep me alive long enough to write the words I am currently writing. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All of this is to say that, while it wasn't such a bad thing to discover a river in my own backyard, it certainly wasn't much of a selling point, either.<br />
<br />
Ours was not a mighty river, but it was very easy on
the eyes, beached as it was with the smooth, white stones peculiar to our part
of Georgia. The water was pure and clear and full of fish. Our little elbow of the
river was especially tame, tailor-made for human frolicking, with craggy
outcroppings of sedimentary rock that served nicely as diving boards, and natural whirlpools that, I
imagined, would be quite fun to wade around in with one's best girl. Strung across the river was
the ricketiest footbridge I have ever seen in my life - built, perhaps, by the
set designers of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana Jones and The
Temple of Doom </i>- a bridge that farmers and their cattle often used in their daily commute. In idle moments, I wondered what it was like to be crushed by a cow.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">One hot afternoon, my host dad, host brother, and I went down to the river. It was crowded. We removed our shirts. I was pleasantly reminded of how skinny I had become. Those nearby laughed at how pale I was. My host brother kicked off his shoes and scaled up the nearest crag. He stood there, twenty feet up, nervously sucking in his breath. He glanced at me for reassurance and I gave him the double thumbs-up. He plugged his nose and dove. He splashed into the water and came up a few seconds later, giggling. He invited me to dive in, too. I quickly lit a cigarette and, smoking my cigarette, gestured that I was smoking a cigarette. He shrugged and swam over to meet his friends. </span><br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">Dato, my host dad, possessed a weird kind of aquatic grace. He raised one arm and rolled his portly little body into the river, swimming against the current with long, slow strokes. I found a nearby rock with a built-in ass groove and sat there at edge of the river and smoked. I knew that I would be outed soon enough.</span><br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">The pretty girls from down the way swam over to flirt with me. I smiled and chatted with them without quite flirting back, because I never flirted back, because I was terrified of being tied down to the village forever. They invited me to come swim with them. I gestured at the cigarette, which had already extinguished itself by then. One of the girls plucked the cigarette away from me and flicked it across the rocks. Come swim, she said. I don't know how, I murmured.</span><br />
<br />
"You don't know how to swim?" Disbelief. "Why?"<br />
"Because," I said, "I am a moron."<br />
<br />
This set them to giggling, but it wasn't the right sort of giggling. It was as though I had cuckolded myself somehow. They swam to the opposite side of the river, and before long, everyone in the village knew: the foreigner didn't know how to swim.<br />
<br />
It was all Dato could do to get me into the water.<br />
<br />
"Come in," he said. "I'll teach you!"<br />
"I'm really bad," I said. "Really, very bad."<br />
"It doesn't matter. I'll teach you!"<br />
<br />
If there was anyone in the village I trusted, it was Dato. So I dipped my toes into the water, then tottered unevenly across the rocks at the bottom of the river, slipping every so often and splashing down on my ass, shuddering at how cold it was, already disturbed at the swallowing capacity of two feet of water.<br />
<br />
"Come out here," called Dato. "It's not deep."<br />
<br />
Depth is a very relative thing. There are people who think Dan Brown is deep. When it comes to water, I'm one of those people. I'm a little under six feet tall, so it stands to reason that it would take some effort for me to drown myself in the four feet of water I was stumble-wading my way into, but I knew myself well enough to know that it might not take any effort at all.<br />
<br />
Dato explained that the first thing I had to do was float. And that is how I learned the Georgian word for float. Learning a verb, however, is not the same thing as knowing how to perform the action. I knew lots of Georgian verbs by then, and I wasn't very good at any of them: <i>to milk a cow, to chop wood, to flirt ...</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Already shaking, I summoned something like courage and allowed my feet to lose contact with the rocks beneath me. I began to sink. I panicked. I slipped my way back up to verticality. Dato laughed, but not cruelly. I tried again, and again, and again, and eventually, I did manage (by flailing all four limbs) to suspend myself midstream, with my head above water.<br />
<br />
"Good," said Dato. "Very good. Now you have to stick your face underwater. Like this."<br />
<br />
He plunged to the bottom and stayed there for several seconds, then bubbled back up to the surface. It looked easy enough. And it was.<br />
<br />
But it was not. Not for me.<br />
<br />
It was the strangest sensation I'd felt in a long time. I stared at the thin skin of the water, one foot under my nose, the tiny layer of atoms that divided water from air, and I knew that it was the easiest thing in the world to cross that barrier. But I could not do it. Physically. I could <i>not </i>bring myself to let go. I dipped slowly downward and my nostrils filled with water. I came back up coughing.<br />
<br />
"It's water," said Dato. "You can't breathe down there."<br />
"I know," I said. "Wait a minute. I've got this."<br />
<br />
I plugged my nose and dipped. And this time, I somehow gulped the water into my mouth. I came back up and coughed violently and felt like crying.<br />
<br />
"Try it like this," said Dato, slowing things down, showing me step by step.<br />
"Like this?" I said, when he'd come back up.<br />
I sunk below for a millisecond, came up hacking, very nearly puked.<br />
"No," he said, "... not like that."<br />
<br />
I made my way over to the grassy bank at the other side of the river and I held onto the weeds behind my back while I half-floated in the water. This, I realized, was as far as I was going to get with my life aquatic. A small grey fish flitted over and started eating the gunk between my toes. I'd paid twenty bucks for a cleaning fish pedicure, once upon a time in North Korea. True story.<br />
<br />
I took no more swimming lessons after that. The men in my host family gave up on me, and I was relieved that they did. I often went down to the river and sat in three feet of water, wore my faux-Dylan shades and smoked cigarettes and let the fish clean my feet. But I did not swim.<br />
<br />
One day, my host brother took me crab hunting. This, I thought, was something I could do, and something I would enjoy doing. Hunting. Killing. Cracking the hard outer shell of nature and feasting upon the meat. Like a man. We set off one evening in our flip-flops with a couple of white PVC buckets.<br />
<br />
But when we found where they were hiding - under some muddy rocks along the shore of somebody else's creek - and it came time to kill them, I couldn't do that, either.<br />
<br />
"What do we do?" I asked my host brother.<br />
"Crush them with a rock!"<br />
"Like this?" I said, and took aim with a pebble, hoping to snipe one from afar.<br />
"No," he said, shaking his head, "not like that! Like this!"<br />
He handed me a boulder and gestured for me to bring it down with all my might upon a single-parent crab family of five.<br />
But I couldn't.<br />
<br />
My host brother shook his head. Of all the embarrassing things I'd never been able to do, this was by far the most despicable. It put him in a foul mood, and he no longer cared about crab hunting. He picked one of the crabs up and it pinched him on the palm, so he chucked it into a bush and we went home with two empty PVC buckets between us.<br />
<br />
One afternoon I woke up and wandered out to the living room and saw that nobody was home. I checked all the rooms of the house to make sure, then I went out to the backyard and snooped around: everyone was gone. Unprecedented. I popped over to Ruslani's house and asked him what the hell was going on.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
"Your family is in Sachino for two days," he said.<br />
"Two days?" I pondered.<br />
<br />
I went back up to my room and removed my shirt and my pants. In my boxers, then, I went to the living room and locked the door, just in case. Then I cracked open the fridge to see what could be eaten. Somebody had bought a bunch of eggs. They'd been holding out on me. I hadn't had eggs in months. I cracked a couple in a pan and fried them sunny side up. When they were gone, I threw in four more and scrambled them. I sat around in my underwear watching Al-Jazeera, getting up every other Syrian bombing or so to fry up some more eggs. By mid-afternoon, I had devoured a full dozen. Cool Hand Keith.<br />
<br />
Later on, I swiped a bunch of music from my computer, went back to the living room and pumped it up on the stereo. I sat there smoking cigarettes and drinking <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nescafé</span></span> and drumming on the bulge of my belly, feeling like the Lord of All Creation. It was the happiest I'd been in months. As evening came on, there was a knock on the living room door.<br />
<br />
It was Dato.<br />
<br />
"<i>Gaumarjos Kitis</i>," he said. Long live Keith.<br />
"<i>Gaumarjos,</i>" I said, shielding my bosom. "<i>A<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16px;">ü</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16px;">ü</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16px;">ü</span></span>fgh! </i>It's hot today!"<br />
"Yes," said Dato, not letting on that anything was out of the ordinary. "Very hot."<br />
<br />
I went to my room and put on some clothes. I decided to lay low for a while, read a book. Then there was a knock at my bedroom door.<br />
<br />
"Kiti," whispered Dato, "come out to the living room when you get a chance. It's important."<br />
<br />
He was sitting at the table with a two-liter Pepsi bottle filled to the top with an ominously clear liquid.<br />
<br />
"Do you want to drink with me?"<br />
"Sure," I said.<br />
"They are coming back tomorrow," he said, and I nodded.<br />
"You can't tell my wife," he said. "I will get in trouble if I make you drink."<br />
"I won't tell anyone."<br />
I sat down. He poured me a shot, then poured himself one.<br />
"Do you want to invite Hooha over?" I asked.<br />
"No," said Dato, shaking his head, "because Hooha will talk."<br />
<br />
We drank our first shot to family, the second one to friendship, the third one to women, and I lost track of all the ones after that.<br />
<br />
Dato was never one to get sloppy and loose-lipped while drunk, and he was almost always drunk. So I was surprised, round about dusk, when a wistful crinkle formed under his eyes, adding a tinge of melancholy to his customarily impish grin, and he glanced around the living room and said, in a low voice, "I built all of this."<br />
<br />
I took in the room, trying to see it the way I'd seen it the first time.<br />
<br />
"All of it?"<br />
"Everything," he said. "The floor, the ceiling, the walls. I put the tiles on the walls. I built the table we're drinking at and the chairs we're sitting on. I built this house."<br />
"You're very talented," I said, lacking the vocabulary to say anything more meaningful.<br />
"I built the whole thing with my hands. I built the bathroom. It's a very nice bathroom, I think."<br />
I nodded. It <i>was </i>a nice bathroom, the kind of place you'd be happy to defecate in, even in the West.<br />
"I did the plumbing, the electricity, the lighting," he said, "I did the painting and the carpentry and I built all the furniture. I built everything with my hands."<br />
"<i>Gaumarjos Datos</i>," I said, and we drank another shot.<br />
<br />
He stared into the bottom of his empty glass for a moment, then he poured us both a fresh one.<br />
<br />
"And the farm in the backyard," he said, "the vegetables and the spices. The cucumbers and the beans and the hot peppers you like. I planted them myself and I harvest them. We do everything with our hands. I think it is not like this in America."<br />
<br />
I shook my head.<br />
"Not for most people," I said. "For most people, everything is done at the supermarket."<br />
<br />
He nodded.<br />
<br />
"Here, we must do everything with our hands," he said. "I do everything with my hands."<br />
He held them up for me, to make sure that I had understood.<br />
<br />
"You are different," he said.<br />
"I know. My hands are stupid."<br />
"No," he said. "Not stupid."<br />
"I can't build, I can't farm, I can't cook," I said. "I can't swim, I can't chop wood, I can't hunt, I can't kill, and I can't do <i>anything </i>with my hands."<br />
"That is okay," he said, "you are a different kind of person. You don't need your hands."<br />
I laughed a bit.<br />
"I'm serious," he said. "You work with your mind."<br />
"Well, I don't know if I would say that my mind actually <i>works</i> - "<br />
"You teach. You learn languages. You travel all over the world," he said. "You teach my son English. He hates English, but you teach him things. He learns from you. Now his English is better. He really admires you a lot."<br />
<br />
At this point, I was blushing - blushing drunk, blushing flattered - and biting my lower lip.<br />
<br />
"You teach my daughter English, and German, and Chinese," he said. "All these languages, and for this, she will have a much better life. We are very glad that you are here."<br />
"Well," I said, "I'm glad to be here."<br />
"And in your free time, you read and you write. And I don't know any English, but I think you are probably good at these things. I know that about you."<br />
"Maybe," I said. "I don't know that about me yet."<br />
"I work with my hands. You work with your mind," he said. "But we are men. And we are not so different, I think, you and me."<br />
<br />
We stopped toasting after that and just drank. By the time ten o'clock rolled around, it was clear that I would have to use my hands to get Dato safely to bed. And there was nothing, at that point, that could save my mind from itself but sleep.<br />
<br />
I went back to my room and floated over to the bed and pushed open the window and leaned over the ledge and looked up at the stars and the stars were bright and clear and Orion's Belt looked like the kind of belt a dude named Orion might wear and you could see why the estranged host parents of humanity's youth were so taken by the constellations and the stories they told and I thought to myself I've got to get out of here before it becomes impossible for me to get myself out of here.</div>
ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-88197606294300722872013-05-21T12:06:00.005+05:002013-05-24T06:36:28.995+05:00Third World Man<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">Foreword</span></i></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">What
follows is an excerpt from a forthcoming publication of such intellectual heft
that it cannot be hefted or toted or otherwise lugged around, and all the
more less so in hardcover: <i>Third World Man</i>, the long-awaited magnum
opus of the recently late Dr. J. Edmund Postfrock - Untenured Professor
Emeritus at Slippery Rock University - whose life's work laid the foundation
for a vibrant new field of thought that has continued to flourish in the wake
of his untimely passing: <i>neoarchaeology </i>(literally: the study
of the newly ancient).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Not to be
confused or conflated with neoclassicism, postmodernism, or antique collecting, neoarchaeology<i> </i>is
the discipline that concerns itself with the analysis of structures,
institutions, and individuals that have attained a kind of <i>chintzy
obsolescence</i> in the very prime of their youth. Dr. Postfrock's concept
of c<i>hintzy obsolescence -</i> the essence of the neoarchaeological
object - will be unfamiliar to the uninitiated, but happily (or perhaps otherwise)
our hyper-attentive attention-deficit-disordered world is crammed to the
margins with textbook examples.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Structurally,
one might think of a 47-story apartment building that crumbles to dust just as
the red, red ribbon is clipped in half by a short, unctuous man sporting a
nasty combover and wielding a pair of novelty-sized plastic scissors. (I am
told that such occurrences are commonplace in mainland China.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Institutionally speaking, the United States Congress springs to mind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
When it comes to individuals - and here the reader must draw from his or her
own Rolodex® - the neoarchaeological man (though not always a man, he does
often tend to be a man) is a man who, through disorganized living or dissolute
behavior, or by the repeated bungling of opportunities, or by the repeated
bungling of romances, or at any rate by the repeated bungling of something or
other, has so bungled his time on earth that his worldly possessions (up to and
including his life) might reasonably be thought of as historical artifacts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Dr.
Postfrock was not, himself, a neoarchaeological man. It might be said that he
was the very antithesis thereof. "One must be a living man and a
posthumous artist," wrote Jean Cocteau - but if ever there was a man who
disproved Cocteau's premise; if ever there was a man who reveled in the spoils
of his own artistry prehumously, if that is a word; if ever there was such a
man, that man was Postfrock. He lived long enough to see his work canonized and
revered and photocopied without express written consent. He was a social <i>amuse-bouche </i>wherever
he went, on campus or off. Fawned over by nubile doctoral candidates, beckoned
by cleavage-bearing librarians, romanticized and mythologized in the press,
Postfrock was painted into the stuff of legend, a "real live Indiana
Jones," a rogue anthropologist and dogged hunter of rare and precious and
unattainable (or maritally inconvenient) treasures.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">As his
editor and closest non-female companion, I can assure you that these popular
caricatures of Dr. Postfrock are at best innocuous distortions, and at worst
total slander.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Postfrock
was not of an especially adventurous disposition. He was terrified of walking,
never mind flying. He was no Indiana Jones, not even a North Dakota Jones.
The artifacts he sought after were regular old "things" that nobody
in their right mind would consider precious. His Rushmores were the mundane,
the commonplace, the eminently replicable <i><span style="background: white;">bric-à-brac</span></i> <span style="background: white;">of the modern world</span>. He collected these
objects, archived them, and studied them with the sort of intensity one finds
only in mystics and the clinically insane, though he was most assuredly
neither. Truth be told, he was a very bland man. Postfrock was, to deploy a
couple of crudities, a collector of "junk," an historical
"hoarder" - but it was the torrent of banal insights yielded by his
decades of tedious research that gave rise to and nourished the then inchoate,
now burgeoning field of neoarchaeology: a word that Postfrock never once used, in
speech or in print, but one that has come to be tethered to his name, in much
the same way that we think of Darwin as the father of evolution, even though
the great naturalist much preferred the phrase "descent with modification."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Postfrock
was infatuated with ears. "Fifty-one percent of discovery," he was
fond of saying, "is keeping one's ears clean." To this end, his desk
drawer was always filled to overflowing with Q-tips®. His office trash cans
were filled to overflowing with rather grodier incarnations of same. Once
swabbed, Postfrock believed in keeping his ears occupied. Among his many
eccentricities, he had at any given time no fewer than five land lines in his
office. He would conduct several conversations at once, not unlike the way you
or I might mingle at a cocktail party. Except he did this sort of thing in his
office. On multiple phones. Which was very weird to watch. And even weirder to
listen to. But it was this aural openness that sustained Dr. Postfrock's long
career and ultimately led him to excavate his greatest excavation, the Tomb of
the Third World Man, and later to compose what I believe will be the work that
preserves his legacy as a man of letters: <i>Third World Man - </i>the
story of the sad, chintzily obsolete ghost whose chintzily obsolete life it was
Postfrock's calling to comprehend.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">It is
worth noting that Postfrock - who passed away of an unspecified illness at the
age of 73 - was very much a product of his generation, and of his nationality.
He was a proud Briton, of the imperialist sort. I do not know for certain, but
I have reason to assume that Postfrock voted for Margaret Thatcher at least a
decade after the Iron Lady had retired from politics. Though Postfrock was
undeniably open of ear, he was on occasion somewhat closed of mind. Certain
dubious remarks with regard to race and gender may charitably be said to
"abound" in his writing, but it is my sincere hope that his readers -
scholars, students, and laymen alike - will entertain the late Dr. Postfrock's
more germane ideas with as clean a pair of ear canals as those which Postfrock
so obsessively-compulsively swabbed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">- <i>Dr.
Lanny M. Mueller</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Associate Professor of Neoarchaeology, Indiana University-Purdue
University Indianapolis</span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.5pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><u><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 20pt;">Third World Man<o:p></o:p></span></u></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 20pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">Loomings: The Third World
Man Makes Himself Known</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I was
juggling three phone calls already - The One With My Wife, The One With My
Boss, and The One With AT&T® - when destiny reached me on line
four. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Destiny
wouldn't shut up. It is not my wont to be curt with fate, but bear in mind that
I have very delicate ear drums. I told the man on line four to shut up. Then I
encouraged him to shout more softly. He shouted sweet somethings in my ear.
Before long, I had lost all interest in the state of my wife's biweekly
meatloaf and the woeful constipated status of my tenure application; I no
longer shared AT&T®'s anxieties concerning my five-line telephone
setup. I deftly disposed of lines one through three. <i>Click, clack,
clock. </i>Then I urged the man on line four to speak more slowly, and
then to speak even more slowly than that, and then to speak in isolated
phonemes. I swabbed out both ears, and listened.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">He was a
Mr. K, a high-ranking public official from a well-known country whose cuisine I
had oft enjoyed, but whose language I had yet to master and whose borders I had
never knowingly trespassed. Mr. K was all in a tizzy because his homeland,
after a grueling five-decade slog up the ladder of human progress, had taken a
rather dramatic and cartoonish tumble back down. The Republic of Mr. K had
gone from Australia to Zimbabwe in less than a month! I apologized for his
misfortune, and politely suggested that he look into a less politically
culpable line of work. Then I asked the esteemed Mr. K what any of this had to
do with me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Lo, it was not internecine strife that had laid his proud nation so low, nor
could the blame be foisted upon any of the usual culprits: famine, plague,
drought, corruption, regime change, climate change, the free press, rampant
homosexuality - not even the Jews. No, what had tarnished his country's
newfound good standing was something that was "right up my pipe," as
Mr. K said, or "right down my alley," as I suspected he meant. His
beloved but besmirched motherland had gone from a first world posthistorical
darling to a third world failed state in the blink of an eye, all because of an
archaeological dig.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">It
buggered my mind to imagine the sort of find that could reduce<i> </i>an
entire country's standard of living by .657 Human Development Index points.
Outside of mass graves (and we're talking some <i>massive </i>mass
graves, here) or thousands of kilotons of improperly disposed-of radioactive
waste, I could think of nothing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
I heard a click-clacking of keys on the other end of the line as Mr. K ran my
query through Google Translate. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"No
no graves," he said. "No no nuclear waste. Indubitably most
not." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Then he
added: "But something most akin to the waste."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Do
tell."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"We
are find dead man in apartment," said Mr. K. "United Nation examine
the apartment. Examine the dead man. Now we a third world country. This reason
we call him - <i>the Third World Man.</i>"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">He
uttered the appellation with a kind of mystic reverence, then he grunted and
spat and (from the sounds of things) shook his jowls from side to side like a
cartoon dog until he had sufficiently recovered from his own mixed admiration
and disgust.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Mr.
K," I said, "with all due respect," I said, "perhaps even
with some respect that is not quite due," I said, "what the devil is
it that you expect me to do about any of this?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"You
are neo ... arcologist," he said, halfway between a statement and a
question.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"I
suppose that I am - though if you'd've bothered to read any of my work prior to
placing this call, you would know that I much prefer the term - "<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Come.
Dig. Look. Learn," said Mr. K. "Then make him go away."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Who?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"<i>Third
World Man</i>."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I sighed
but otherwise said nothing. My interest was piqued, but I was busy and I was
hungry and I was untenured and tired. I began to worry about the biweekly
meatloaf.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"You
not intrigue."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"No,
Mr. K. Believe me, I am. Quite so. But - "<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"We
pay money. Many money."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"I
resent the implication. If you think that I'm the sort of academic who can be -
"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">After I'd
successfully hung up, still shaking, I picked up the big red phone and collect
called my wife. She accepted the call. I told her to hold off on the biweekly
meatloaf.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Honey
darling. Cataract of my eye. Girdle of my loins. Love of my life. Get
dressed," I said. "I'm taking you to Cracker Barrel®."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">The Tomb of the Third World
Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I have
always traveled lightly and this trip was to be no exception. I brought with me
one (1) EASTPAK® brand backpack containing three (3) changes of clean,
brief-cut Fruit of the Loom® brand underpants, fifteen (15) 50-ct. cases of
Twinings® English Breakfast, twenty-two (22) 170-ct. packs of Q-tip® brand
q-tips, and one (1) teaching assistant (not in the backpack (eminently portable
though he was)) named Tattoo. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Of Polynesian stock, Tattoo stood in stark contrast to the Brobdingnagian
inhabitants of those scattered isles; he stood, in fact, no higher than my belt
buckle, and that only when on tippy-toes. Other than the tea and the Q-tips® and
the underpants and the backpack itself, Tattoo was to prove himself the most
invaluable of carry-on luggage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I have
never enjoyed flying, least of all by aeroplane, so I swallowed one (1) fistful
of Ativan® tablets, as prescribed by my family physician. Though there must
have been several layovers, I do not remember any of them. Tattoo revived me
with smelling salts as we were taxiing towards the gate of our final
destination. <i>Deplane, </i>he cried,<i> deplane!</i> Upon
deplaning ourselves, Tattoo and I were ushered onto a chopper by a phalanx of
Master's students who gun-barrel-prodded one's abdomen rather too forcefully
for one's liking. The chopper choppered us over countless clicks of Nam-green
canopy until we landed in a clearing. After we'd dechoppered ourselves, we were
escorted by several heavily armed interns to a Jeep® and we rode in the Jeep®
for close to twelve hours before we arrived at a nameless drool of a river
where me and Tattoo and our luggage were deJeep®ed and loaded onto a canoe. We
were canoed by canoeists - as part of some kind of academic work study - to the
site of the excavation site. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
En route, while Tattoo snoozed, I tried to make chit-chat with the head
intern. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
"What is your major, young man?" I asked him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"What?"
he said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Your
major?" <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"No,"
he said, "only lieutenant." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Having broken the ice, I inquired as to the whereabouts of the
esteemed Mr. K, our tour guide and supposed benefactor. This seemed to amuse
the interns. The head intern shrugged and replied with a monosyllable. I duly
punched the monosyllable into my Lingo® Voyager 6 translating device. "To
liquidate," it said. I pressed the "text-to-speech" button just
to make sure. LIQUIDATE. LIQUIDATE. LIQUIDATE. The robot voice had spoken. I
asked no further questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">We
arrived. I smelling salted Tattoo. He squealed his way into wakefulness. We
decanoed and set off on foot. Tattoo and I were handed a pair of
government-issue Hello Kitty® respiratory masks - an unnecessary precaution, I
thought, as our interns were merely shielding their faces with shirt sleeves
and handkerchiefs. What was good enough for my AK-47 wielding interns, I
proclaimed, was good enough for me. But before we had even caught our first
glimpse of the condemned apartment complex on the hill, my legs turned to
rubber. I grew suddenly very queasy and my mucous membranes told me that the
Hello Kitty® respiratory masks were rather too skimpy for our purposes. I
availed myself of the M40 Field Protective Gas Mask that I still do not
remember purchasing at the duty free shop during our layover in Houston. In my
drug-induced fugue state, I had not thought to procure a child-sized GP-5 for
poor little Tattoo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">The
interns would go no further than the kerb at the edge of the parking lot. I
glanced back over my shoulder to see them grinning at me as they retched into
their handkerchiefs. Tattoo and I lurched across the parking lot like a couple
of drunk crabs. I kicked open the front door. We entered the building. No sign
of a lift. Taking the stairs, then, we shuddered our way up to the second
floor, where we were confronted with an iron door criss-crossed in yellow
caution tape: the modern bureaucratic analog of "abandon all hope ye who enter
here." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Tattoo glanced up at me. I glanced down at Tattoo. I nodded. He sighed and
sucked in his breath and waddled towards the door. He could not reach the
doorknob. I walked over and hoisted him up by the britches. He grabbed the knob
and dangled there. I retreated to the opposite end of the hallway to watch. The
door clicked open. Tattoo dropped down to his feet and stepped inside.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">A beat.
Then there came a deafening scream, a murderous bellow so deep in the lower
register that I feared Tattoo had sonically exploded himself on the spot.
"Tattoo!" I cried, and ran in after him. Glancing around the living
room, I was convinced that Tattoo had indeed exploded after all, until he
tapped me on the thigh, looked up at me with a shrug and said, "It like
this when I got here."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I have
visited warzones. I have changed diapers. I have driven past Greyhound® bus
stations at night. Nothing could have prepared me for this. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
The floor was covered in Mead® brand notebook paper, Nescafé</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 10pt;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">® stained and cigarette </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">burned
and graffitoed with the blue-black ink of no earthly script I ever hope to
become acquainted with. Rotten banana peels were stationed at intervals, like a
crash course for a clown. Cigarette butts blossomed mycologically from cups,
Thermos®es, Mason jars, soda cans, every sort of container imaginable but an
ashtray; the gnarled orange filters pointed accusingly at the heavens like the
smokestacks of a Dickensian dystopia written in an alternate universe where the
bad kind of LSD was synthesized in the early 19th century. Pools of blood, or
bile, or worse accentuated the wall-to-wall college-ruled carpet of filth. Dust
and dirt and dinge seemed to have chemically bonded with oxygen, forming
monster molecules that were perfectly visible with the naked eye, the electrons
shuddering in their orbits with audible disgust. The only air that was even
remotely breathable came with several <i>tildes</i> of pubic hair
attached, like the CV of Satan himself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
The stench had a character all its own: a high-pitched, almost <i>whiny </i>stench.
For reasons unknown, the German word <i>peinlich </i>sprang to my
mind, though it does not mean "whiny," nor can it be properly used to
describe any sort of stench. Except for, perhaps, this one. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
I dry heaved, but kept it dry. Cringing my way through the haze, I could make
out a television in the distance, perched off-kilter atop a high fructose corn
syrup-encrusted DVD player. Reaching downward and stifling an uppity slug of
vomit, I pressed the EJECT button. Season 6 of <i>LOST </i>popped
out. I vomited. Tattoo, meanwhile, had flown into a panic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">De plague, </span></i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">he cried, <i>de
plague!</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">He was
pointing across the room. I followed his abridged index finger to the object of
his horror: there, seated in his boxer shorts, in a swivel chair, across from a
Dell® Inspiron™ 1525 laptop with a Pentium® Dual Core 1.73 GHz processor,
was the Third World Man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">He was
smoking a cigarette.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Back,
Tattoo!" I cried. "Let daddy take care of this."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Tattoo
raised a brow, never mind which one. I thighed him aside and approached the man
slowly, cougarlike. With fingers like tweezers, I snatched the cigarette from
the man's empurpled lips. I lifted up my gas mask and took a good long drag.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"American
Spirit®," I said. "Organic Full-Bodied. Maroon pack. Slow
burners."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"He
dead?" asked Tattoo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Very
much so," I said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"How
long?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Years.
At least three of them, I'd guess."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"But
he still smoking!"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"No,"
I said. "He just quit."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I sucked
the cigarette between my lips. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"You
ever smoked an American Spirit®, Tattoo?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Tattoo
shook his head.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Would
you like to?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Tattoo
shook his head again, more vigorously this time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Purging
myself had effected a marked decrease in nausea, and the carcinogens supplied
by the American Spirit® helped my nervous system acclimate itself to the
oppressive atmosphere of the Third World Man's tomb. To Tattoo, too, two
minutes or so was sufficient for him to regain his wits and breathe more
easily. He adjusted quickly, perhaps owing to his undersized lungs, which may
have filtered out some of the larger stink particles - or more probably because
he was accustomed to such squalor, given the profoundly unhygienic cultural
milieu of his native Polynesia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Tattoo,"
I said, "hand me a Q-tip® brand q-tip."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Unzipping
and rummaging through my EASTPAK® brand backpack, the pygmy placed the
double-swabbed cotton swab in my hand. I swabbed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"What
we do now, boss man?" asked Tattoo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Now,"
I said, "we snoop."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I pressed
the space bar of the Third World Man's laptop and found that it was password
protected.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Tattoo,"
I said, chasing a hunch, "be a dear and dust off the Third World Man's
t-shirt, will you?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">It was
just as I had suspected: the Third World Man was a Radiohead fan. I guessed his
password on the third try.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">Selected Google Searches of
the Third World Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">what
happens when two identical twins have a baby?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">what
happens when the babies of identical twins have babies?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">how many
fireflies in a mason jar are enough to light up a room?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">can you
breathe through your belly button?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">can you
eat your own flesh?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">can I eat
my own flesh?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">what time
is it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">where are
my keys?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">google<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">why?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">LOST
season 7<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">who is
lady gogo?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">who is
lady gaga?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">what is
this rash on my leg?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">what is
this rash on my face?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">how to
clean<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">maid
services<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">slave
services<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">arson
odds of getting caught<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">what is a
3d printer?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">how much
is a 3d printer?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">where can
I buy a 3d printer?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">can you
use a 3d printer to print out food?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">nearest
24 hour McDonald's®<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">what is
sideboob?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">sideboob
pictures<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">Excavating the Tomb of the
Third World Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Over the
weeks that followed, the erstwhile abandoned parking lot of the Tomb of the
Third World Man came alive with the staccato ping-pong catcalls of coolies and
the seismological shuddering of cargo trucks rumbling to and fro. Wherever Mr.
K was or wasn't, his people had come through. There were whole fleets of
specially modified garbage trucks - hermetically resealable, boasting three
times the carrying capacity of your garden variety Bruder Scania® R-Series -
and likewise tricked-out battalions of tanker trucks, outfitted with fire hoses
and 3,800 liters of highly pressurized Febreze® SPORT Laundry Odor Elimination
Boost™. We were simultaneously deconstructing and reconstructing the Tomb of
the Third World Man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Tattoo,
uniquely possessed of a photographic memory (Polynesians are notorious among
evolutionary phrenologists for their low-capacity RAMpacks), internalized the
exact disarray of the Tomb, later to recreate it in a floating shipping
container stationed in international waters, some 250 nautical miles off the
east coast of our host country to remain nameless. There, Tattoo and I availed
ourselves of a virtually unlimited amount of time to "snoop around"
the Third World Man's tattered and mouldy possessions, and to slowly piece
together the life that he had so diligently rent asunder. (His original tomb,
duly Febreze®d, was rented out to a family of six the following weekend. We did
not receive any sort of commission.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">We went
to work. Most informative for our purposes were the piles of documents
recovered from the original excavation site: journals, diaries, doodles, Google
Chat transcripts, cybersex transcripts, bowel movement logs, and half-completed
job applications. Tattoo - commanding his army of coolies with perhaps (if it
is possible) a little too much zeal - ensured that every crumpled grad school
application, every unanswered missive, every self-obsessed journal entry was
archived, transcribed, then re-crumpled and carefully scattered to its original
place of displacement. One afternoon, Tattoo, squinting at an especially
puzzling printed page, held it up for my inspection and asked, "What
speaky-speaky this?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I read a
sentence or two. Then I fell asleep standing up. Tattoo revived me with the
smelling salts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
"Wakey wakey boss." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I vomited.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Thanks,
Tattoo. Now what were you saying?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"What
speaky-speaky this?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"What
language does it look like, Tattoo?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Might
could be fuckin' Japanese for all Tattoo know," he scoffed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"No,
Tattoo," I chuckled. "It is neither Japanese nor Chinese nor Portuguese.
It's the worst <i>ese </i>there is."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"<i>...
disease?</i>"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"It's <i>legalese</i>."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Tattoo
shook his head, unable to comprehend my drift.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Our
Third World Man," I explained, "was a Peace Corps volunteer."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">An Excerpt from the Diary
of the Third World Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I sleep in
squalor. I awake in same. My apartment is big enough for a family of six,
provided at least one of them lived like an actual human being. But I am one
man, and I have not. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
The floorspace is subdivided into autonomous zones of garbage. They no longer
belong to me, are outside my jurisdiction, have fallen siege to the muttering
hordes of entropy. All that remains of my crumbling empire is the deflated air
mattress that I can no longer sleep on (for reasons I mentioned earlier, dear
Diary) and the heap of musty blankets on the floor under the AC unit that I
curl up into these days. All else is lost. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Across the room, staring into my soul, is the big black bag that contains all the
stuff I didn't throw away the last time I tried to clean my room six months
ago. I'd like not to think or talk about The Bag. The bookshelf now doubles as
a cupboard for unwashed and orphaned tableware. Untouchables. That's what I
call them, in my mind. What used to be spacious, human-appropriate rooms are
now clogged and uninhabitable cells, unworthy of a trash panda <i>(TWM's
personal slang for "raccoon" - JEP)</i>. Innumerable islands of dirty
clothes and Assorted Shit dot the floor like a Micronesia of Filth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
The lone silver lining in all of this is that last week I finally summoned the
courage to dispose of the lime green nylon mesh tube where I used to stash my
dirty clothes. I don't know where I got the damned thing, or why it ever seemed
like a good idea to get it. It used to dangle from a Chinese lantern that
itself dangled from the ceiling and the fusion of light and stink attracted the
flies in kamikaze droves ...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">The Innovative Third World
Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">There is
a peculiar sort of genius that arises out of extreme idiocy. It is a
two-steps-forward, fifteen-steps-back sort of genius, but a sort of genius
nonetheless. Stupidity can sometimes breed innovation, the kind of innovation
necessary to cover up stupidity and allow for more stupidity, which breeds
still more innovation, and stupidity, and so on. In this way, the late Third World Man was a
kind of <i>slob savant</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">After
several months camped out with Tattoo in our odorous catacomb on the sea, I
began to see the world as the Third World Man had once seen it. His crusty
microcosm started to make sense to me. I quit bathing, unquit smoking. For
hours at a time, I would speak to myself with his tongue. It was in one of
these strange, trancelike existential proxy states that I came across perhaps
the most astounding of the Third World Man's inventions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Tattoo, playing Grand Theft Auto® on an especially torrid afternoon, discovered
that the Third World Man's laptop tended to overheat and shut down before he
(Tattoo) could amass two stars (indicative of a mild-to-moderate police
deployment). This put him in an especially foul mood; Polynesians, as a people,
are insufferable without the regular catharsis afforded by virtual road rage.
To counter this ill effect, Tattoo (with my assistance) plugged in the air
conditioning unit mounted to the wall above the computer and, utilizing the
remote control I'd found wrapped in a pair of soiled boxer briefs, I switched
it on. Eventually, the computer room cooled down and this sustained GTA well
enough, but within minutes, a foul-smelling, ominously clear liquid began
oozing down from the AC unit and spreading across the floor. And within
seconds, a downstairs neighbor was knocking on the wall of our container. I
took a step towards the knocking, then I froze. Clearly, this didn't make any
sense: there was no downstairs, thus<i> there could be no downstairs
neighbor.</i> Tattoo, grokking the absurdity, held out both hands
palm-upward and shook them around: the traditional Polynesian gesture of incredulity.
Shrugging, I walked across the living room and cracked open the hatch. It would
have been impolite to do otherwise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Hello,"
I said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">The
downstairs neighbor was not pleased. I was able to pluck the words
"water" and "ceiling" and "foreign devil-buffoon"
from his diatribe. I apologized, and felt somewhat guilty, but I was far more
troubled by the appearance of a downstairs neighbor where there was no
corresponding downstairs apartment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"I'm
terribly sorry," I said, "but we are in a shipping container in the
middle of the ocean. It is rather impossible that you are here right now."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">He did
not understand this, so I had Tattoo punch the message into my trusty Lingo®
Voyager 6. He toggled the "robotic voice" feature and pressed
"speak." The downstairs neighbor listened to the robot. He nodded
grimly. He waved goodbye. Then he evaporated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
This discontinuity did not exactly put us in a comfortable place. Tattoo and I
spent that night huddled together in a single sleeping bag and surrounded by
flashlights. I have not yet lived out my time on this planet, but the incident
I just described may turn out to be the lone inexplicable occurrence of my
life, the one moment I happened to catch a glimpse of the Pilot of the Universe
asleep at the wheel - but as it is tangential to our excavation of the Tomb, I
will have to remain satisfied to explore the mystery in a book to be written
much, much later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Back to
the Third World Man and his genius. Pieces of his junk puzzle were falling into
place. The next day, in the computer room, I called Tattoo's attention to a
seemingly worthless configuration of plastic doohickeys, electrical cables,
clothespins, and coathangers that dangled from a Chinese lantern that itself
dangled from the ceiling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"What
do you reckon this is?" I asked Tattoo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Look
like a bunch of crap to me, boss."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Laptop
overheats," I murmured to myself, channeling TWM, my eyeballs rolling back
into my head. "Laptop overheats, thus air conditioning. But air
conditioning emits foul-smelling liquid. Thus flooding. Thus irate
sixth-dimensional downstairs neighbor. But laptop overheats. Grand Theft Auto®
is on laptop. Porn is on laptop. <i>Impossible! Unsustainable!</i>"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Guided by
forces beyond my understanding, I ran my fingertips along the hunk of dangling
junk until I found what appeared to be a rotten potato mounted to its
hindquarters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Please
not eat, boss," said Tattoo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Why,"
I cried, "this potato is not for eating! This potato is for <i>power!</i>"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I pressed
the potato down onto a pair of metal prongs and twisted it. Then, through some
minor electrochemical miracle, a robotic arm protruded from the hitherto
meaningless device, deploying a small plastic fan that, once it had come to
rest at its optimum angle, whirled to life and began to inundate the silicon
innards of the laptop with porn-sustaining zephyrs of cool, disgusting air.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"Wow,"
muttered Tattoo, "that stupid."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"No,
little Tattoo," I said, patting him on the head. "That's <i>brilliant</i>."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">He
shrugged and fired up the computer. I took a shower - my first in months - and
then I settled into the Third World Man's deflated inflatable mattress. And
while I lay awake marveling at the mind of the exquisite corpse rotting in the
next room, the night cricketed and sang, alive with the music of squealing
tires and chirruping prostitutes begging for mercy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">Noteworthy Artifacts of the
Third World Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">One (1)
TROJAN® Pleasure Pack™ Lubricated Condoms - 36 ct. - unopened<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Sixteen
(16) clovis point arrowheads<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Three (3)
bludgeoning tools - flint - ostensibly for the crushing and mashing of grains<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">One (1)
necklace of human ears<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Six (6)
seasons of <i>LOST </i>- DVD, bootleg, several key episodes missing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">One (1)
Wendy's® Big Bacon Classic</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">™</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">- of indeterminate age (results of carbon date
pending) - half-eaten - no outward sign of putrefaction</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">One-thousand
nine-hundred and twenty-two (1,922) pogs bearing designs ranging from the
highest of the highbrow - a limited-edition Michel Foucault slammer - to the
lowest of the lowbrow - "Have A Nice Trip," depicting a
"doobie" smoking skateboarder plummeting headfirst down a stairwell</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">One (1) pistachio nut cookie - cellophane-wrapped -
autographed by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg - Ms. Ginsburg's desk
did not return our phone calls re: why the Third World Man owned an autographed
cookie of hers, though the autograph has since been verified as authentic</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Eight (8) bottles of Elmer's</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">® Glue-All - tainted with
infusions of variously coloured ink<span style="background: white;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Five-hundred and seventy-one (571) off-brand disposable
lighters</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">$9,371.52 (USD) in loose change</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<u1:p></u1:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">One (1) copy of </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">First
World Man </i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">by Yours Truly - Penguin
Press, 2005<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>-</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"> the story of
the world's tidiest man, Janus Magnussen of Denmark - while I am flattered that
the Third World Man was acquainted with my work, it does not appear that he
read any of it - my book was perhaps the cleanest object he owned</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">One (1)
copy of <i>Infinite Jest </i>by David Foster Wallace - First
Paperback Edition - Back Bay Books, 2006 - heavily and pretentiously annotated
by the owner - fair condition; knife wound to solar plexus of book; wound
persists until page 639; cover is missing; otherwise eminently readable -
$10.99 OBO<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">A Second Excerpt from the
Journal of the Third World Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">There is
a frameless mirror slouched up against the wall, like a portal to another,
equally disgusting dimension where all the crap on the floor is reversed. There
is everywhere a constant droning, as though someone is drilling into cement. It
assails me at all hours, from all sides. Impossible to tell whether it is a
winged insect infestation, or if the drone is coming from inside my own
skull. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
There is a long hardwood desk where I do my paperwork. The desk is cluttered
with triple-folded applications, expired US passports, torn out notebook pages
bearing the crossed-out names and phone numbers of people who might be able to
bail me out of jams. There are half-eaten foil-wrapped bricks of rotten
HERSHEY'S® chocolate, stray Jolly Rancher®s that have chemically bonded with
the table, scattered bits of plastic that once belonged to expensive
technological equipment that I have destroyed ...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">The place
is so sloppy that I can no longer tell if it's getting better or worse, whether
I am having a positive or negative impact upon the overall level of entropy. It
is not thermodynamically impossible, not exactly, that the apartment might
spontaneously clean itself one day. The kitchen floor seems to be getting
progressively stickier; I mopped it once, but that only made things worse. It
is impossible to ignore the fruit flies. Maybe they followed me over from
America. Or probably they lived somewhere outdoors and mass migrated into my
kitchen when I arrived. I didn't really notice them until now. Fruit flies
become more noticeable as you go along. The Stink works the opposite way. You
notice The Stink the first time you enter a room and notice it less and less
every day after that, until the only people who notice The Stink are those
unfortunate souls who come over to visit, or the people who are buying your
drinks, because by then, The Stink is on you ... <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">The Generous Third World
Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Our
research kept us occupied for the better part of three years. We remained
offshore, contained in our container, rummaging and ruminating. During this
time, Tattoo and I held a peculiar place in the hearts of the natives. We were
friendly guests who should have been hailed as heroes, but we were regarded as
intruders, as a kind of superfluous, potentially malignant growth on the hide
of the body politic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Yes, we
should have been hailed as heroes. As a direct result of our research, the
country to remain nameless leapfrogged back to international respectability.
With the Third World Man and his Tomb safely disposed of - or at least removed
to an environmentally kosher distance - the national HDI had shot up a full
.627 points, very nearly back to its original place of first world good
standing. Meanwhile, the GDP had more than doubled. Formerly dependent upon its
vast reserves of slave labor and synthetic cannabinoids, the country to remain
nameless was now making a veritable mint in recycled liquor bottles, beer cans,
used clothing, and bootleg DVDs. We were in no way rewarded for our
contributions to national prosperity, but rather grudgingly allowed to do our
mysterious and arcane scholarly work in abject solitude. Every so often, a
stray shell from a passing gunship reminded us that our work visas were set to
expire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Mother
Academia was rather more appreciative of our efforts. No fewer than 500 new
species - some 237 new microorganisms, 99 fungi, 43 arthropods, six reptiles,
four rodents, two avians, and an unknown variety of feral cat (later returned
to its rightful owner, a shopkeeper down the road) - were classified from the
samples we sent home. All of these creatures are unprecedented discoveries,
given their habitat: they are the most extreme of extremophiles, each one
a testament to the resourcefulness of life.<span style="background: white;"> Many
of them have since proven medicinally (or otherwise) intriguing.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Take - to name but one example -</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"> <i><span style="background: white;">tholoma kasemium,</span> </i><span style="background: white;">popularly known as the AM/FM radiolarian. This rare
beast - unique among all life forms, save for my wife (who has a metal plate in
her skull (installed after an Original Frisbee</span>®<span style="background: white;"> Disc</span> accident in the late 1970s)<span style="background: white;">) - can transmit radio waves, albeit over a fairly
limited range (.6 mm). None of the stations it gets are very good, and the
little bugger seems to have a distinct fondness for Rush Limbaugh, but this is
a minor and rectifiable flaw. With a few slight genetic tweaks, we might one
day introduce the world of microfauna to the soporific pleasures of the John
Tesh Radio Show.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Consider the wheeled paramecium, the only microorganism that doubles as an
all-terrain vehicle.</span> Or</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"> <i><span style="background: white;">leptotrichia autophagia</span></i><span style="background: white;">, the bacteria that eats itself and, just before the
last bite, spawns a clone: this means that at any given time, there is exactly
only</span> <i><span style="background: white;">one</span> </i><span style="background: white;">of these creatures in existence, so we were very lucky
to have found it. Consider <i>desulfurobacterium</i> <i>orbisonium,</i></span><i> </i><span style="background: white;">the bacteria that subsists on human tears. Or the
rakish amoeba, a charmingly nondescript blob that ambulates not with flagella
but with a cane, can doff its pseudopod and wink at you with its vacuole.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">
I even named one of my discoveries - unofficially the world's smallest bacteria
- after little Tattoo!</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"> <i><span style="background: white;">Mycoplasma tattooium,</span> </i><span style="background: white;">only <i>.</i>07 µm in length! I am told that
it is one of the most worthless microorganisms known to science. There remains
some small debate as to whether it is even alive. One unfortunate population of
laboratory rats injected with mini-Tattoos did succumb to a fatal illness some
hours later, but my colleague Dr. Lohman at the University of Rutgers has since
pointed out that those same rats had ransacked his lab assistant's Long
John Silver's</span>®<span style="background: white;"> Whitefish
Basket™ earlier in the afternoon. In any case, Tattoo did not share my
enthusiasm for his being immortalized in the Big Book of Linnaeus. He possesses
a modesty commensurate with the size of his island. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">One
species of bacteria in particular - whose proper name I am not at liberty to
disclose - seems to have attracted the attention of the people at The Pentagon.
It was found that even small intravenous doses of said bacteria, without fail,
triggered the rapid onset of a never-before-seen type of cancer: <i>carcicarcinoma, </i>or
"cancer of the cancer." One-hundred percent of the inoculated rats
developed tumors that developed tumors. Strangely, this did not kill them,
merely rendered them lumpy and irritable. Oncology is not my bag, so I will not
speculate as to the potential long-term benefits or consequences of
meta-metastasis, or as to whether our little unicellular friend will be used to
beneficent or nefarious ends. Suffice it to say that I do not expect to be
compensated in any way by the people at The Pentagon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">
Among the new avians: the sweet and sour chicken, which stands to revolutionize
the American food service industry.</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: inherit; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Among the new insects, a peculiar breed of fruit fly</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"> <i><span style="background: white;">(drosophila drosophoba)</span> </i><span style="background: white;">the fruit fly who is afraid of fruit. Healthy eating
is an acquired taste, but this puzzling creature, having acquired that taste
over the course of several billion years, managed to lose his appetite in a
matter of months - and having wallowed in the Sty of the Third World Man for
just over three years, I can't really say that I blame the guy.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">A Song Composed by the
Third World Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 5pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">"FRUIT
FLIES"</span></b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">♪ = 126</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Andante grazioso, con repugnanza</span></i></b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">(to the tune of "Blue Skies," comp. 1926 by Irving
Berlin, though the 1935 Benny Goodman arrangement is very much preferred)</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">fruit
flies<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">smilin'
at me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">nothin'
but fruit flies<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">do I see<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">Reflections on the Third
World Man</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Given his
remarkable Pigpen-like capacity for carrying his cloud of filth wherever he
went, even past the surly customs officials of the many countries he lived and
died in, it should not come as too surprising that many of the Third World
Man's documents predated his Peace Corps service. Parking tickets from his
rocky, civic duty-neglecting adolescence; principal's office summonses from the
prepubescent dark ages of his public education; love letters from girls who
still dotted their i's with hearts. But most revealing of all were the records
the Third World Man kept of his elementary school humiliations. The Third World
Child was indeed the father of the Third World Man. A prolific writer -
though a predictably illegible handwriter - the Third World Child, in
ever-narrowing notebook ruling, chronicled the development of the quirk that
was to become his lifelong bugaboo. (In the entries below, the "backwards
lowercase e" has been represented with an italicized uppercase <i>E</i>.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">2nd Grade - Miss</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">E<i>s </i>[sic] <i>Lovanos </i>[sic] <i>Class</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Today
Miss<i>E</i>s Lovano found the trash in my desk and got angry and kick<i>E</i>d
it over. It went all ov<i>E</i>r. Ev<i>E</i>ry body laugf<i>E</i>d [sic]. I cry<i>E</i>d
[sic]. She made me so I pick<i>E</i>d up the trash.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">3rd Grade - Mrs. Bigby's
Class</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Stu and
me were mixeing [sic] the glue with the blue ink from the pen when Mrs. Bigby
asked me what we were doing. I didnt [sic] say a thing and she saw my face is
red and then she saw in my desk and got angry and kicked it over. The trash
went all over the floor. Everybody laughed at me. I had to get on the floor to
pick up the trash and it took a very long time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">4th Grade </span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">- <i>Ms.
McDowell's Class</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Weird
thing happened today. But I guess it's kind of normal. I was sitting in the
back minding my own business when Ms. McDowell came up shreeking [sic] like
Godzilla and went crazy and told me to clean my desk. I looked into my desk and
I knew it would take a long time to clean. I said OK anyway and took out the
glue bottle and then a bunch of paper came out like a [sic] avelanche [sic] but
not all of it. So Ms. McDowell went even crazyer [sic] and kicked my desk over.
Trash went flying all over the place. Everyone laughed at me, even Stu. I got
down on the floor and picked up the pieces of my life and looked up to Heaven
and asked, Why me?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">5th Grade </span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">- <i>Mrs.
Lancaster's Class</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">For the
fifth time in as many weeks, havoc was reeked [sic] upon my desk by none other
than Mrs. L. It used to be like a running joke but now it is like a running
joke that has gotten tired of running. Paper balls rolling like tumbleweed all
over the floor. Something like six Elmer's Glue Bottles came flying out. I even
found a sock in there but I swear it isn't mine. Everyone turned around to
stare and my face turned bright red as usual and Mrs. L just waited and tapped
her foot and even Jeb Staple (the kid I told you about who asked the dentist
when he came for National Dental Hygene [sic] Month if you could die by choking
on your own tooth) was getting angry because I was "disrepressing him from
learnding." Anyway, Journal, I don't know why I brought this up. I guess I
just wanted to say that sometimes I feel like the universe is ploting [sic]
against me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">6th Grade - Miss Grud's
Class</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I'm not
exactly the tidiest kid on earth. I'll admit that. But I'm a good student. I do
my homework. I get straight A's, except for math, which I always get a B-plus
in, and handwriting, which I have never done better than a C-minus in, but
that's neither here or [sic] there. (Who needs handwriting anyway, am I write?
Ha ha ha.) Anyway, all I'm saying is that I'm a pretty good kid and I do my
work and I never talk in class. If I have a messy desk, so what? Who cares?
It's not a big deal. So I'm a little disorganized. But if you give me recess
time and a flashlight, I can find any piece of homework from the past six
months of school. And who else in class can say that? I don't see what the big
deal is. But to make a long story short: Miss "Crud" kicked my desk
over today, with her annoying high-heels (who is she trying to impress? her
boyfriend? ha ha ha) and all heck broke loose. D.J. Mothbach called me a sloppy
buttmunch (but nobody heard it except for me) and even The Omnivore and Beluga
Boy were laughing at me, which was embarassing [sic] to say the least. I don't
know why I do this to myself. Maybe I'll just get a maid one day. Or maybe
everyone should just eat my shorts. Ha ha ha.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Over
these five years, we observe a refinement in writing technique and a maturation
in abstract thought, but no approach whatsoever to the resolution of what seems
a rather basic problem: the messy desk; the messy life. Instead, like a bonzai
bush or an ingrown toenail, the Third World Child's blossoming intellect turned
inward and applied itself to the problem of <i>how best to ignore the
problem</i>. This neat trick was achieved in the usual Freudian ways: an
inferiority/superiority complex cocktail - blushing, scrabbling around on the
floor after scattered garbage, gracefully absorbing the opprobrium of his
teacher and classmates while acting the martyr in private - followed by
projection - first upon the divine and then, having outgrown God, upon the
universe and then, having accepted the universe as the ultimately unimpeachable
void that it is, upon society as a whole - and in the end, by the development
of a kind of pun-riddled humour about the problem that amounted to a flat-out
denial that there was a problem. It was not the Third World Child's problem,
after all, but his classmates' inability to comprehend "how he works"
that was the problem.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Alas, for as smart as he grew, and for as worldly as he became, it was this
childhood hangup - the inability to clean up after himself - that would
one day lead to his ignominious demise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
It is not my intention to oversimplify the Third World Man, or to spell out his
thought processes line by line like a BASIC program, but having slept in his
filth for over three years, I daresay that I understand him better than anyone
else ever will.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
Those acquainted with computer programming will be familiar with the idea
of <i>recursion: </i>the act of applying an equation or a program to
itself. If the initial output of a program is the number 12, then the number 12
is fed back into the program, which yields a second result, which is fed back
into the program, and so on, ad infinitum. It is not difficult to imagine why recursive
programs have a tendency of getting out of hand.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
The Third World Man was just such a program. While he was certainly a slob -
perhaps the greatest slob who has ever lived - he was also rather genteel. (He
wrote, in a 7th grade journal entry, that his English teacher had called him
"a gentile" during class; though the Third World Teen was very much a <i>goy</i>,
he had never been called one before, and it confused him deeply; what did it
matter that he wasn't Jewish? I believe it is safe to assume that the Third
World Teen looked up the wrong word in the dictionary.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
I invite you to imagine the genteel, delicate Third World Man, freshly arrived
in a new country and a new apartment, everything clean as a whistle. As will
happen in a chaotic universe, within a day or two, a bit of clutter would
accumulate. "I should clean this up," the Third World Man would think
to himself, "but I do so hate getting my hands dirty. Maybe
tomorrow." And so he would neglect cleaning, for the purpose of keeping
himself clean. Before long, after a week or two, his living quarters would have
become truly vile, borderline unlivable. But by then, the filth was several
orders of magnitude filthier, and thus much more disgusting to the genteel
Third World Man, and thus much less cleanable, and thus more worthy of being
put off until the next day, or week, or month. And so on exponentially. In this
way - and not out of sheer laziness - did the Third World Man die of squalor,
succumbing to his own desire for personal cleanliness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
There was, too, the matter of having people over. The more often he had people
over, the more often he would have to clean. Having people over was, perhaps,
the one means he had of tricking himself into cleaning. But the messier his
apartment grew, the less possible it was to clean, the less possible it was to
have people over, the less possible it was to get motivated to clean, and so
on. Past a certain threshold of sloppiness, he simply gave up on having people
over, which allowed the apartment to truly go to seed. Towards the end, he
never let anyone in at all. He received visitors in the hallway, with a harried
look on his face, as though there were a corpse rotting in the room just over
his shoulder, a suspicion that many of his companions entertained. When Tattoo
and I crashed his pad, I believe we were the first visitors he'd had in years -
and by then, the corpse was his own.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;">Parting Ways with the Third
World Man, and Autopsy</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">With our
work winding down, I began to piece together a lecture series while Tattoo
succumbed to distractions of a rather less pedagogical nature. I had known (or
rather, assumed beforehand) that he was addicted to gambling. I was unaware,
however, that he was not as shrewd as his islandmates, which is to say that he
was a very bad gambler. When gambling wasn't going well he resorted to drinking
and when drinking wasn't going well he resorted to whoring and when whoring
wasn't going well he resorted to fighting. And fighting, for poor little
Tattoo, never went well. Our departure, then, was accelerated, for reasons I
can only allude to. We had worn out our welcome on the mainland and our safety
in international waters was precarious at best - so we prepared for our return
to America. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Seven oil
tankers were retrofitted to carry the toxic archaeological waste that was our
express cargo. Flanked by two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, they set off on a
three-week journey over the ocean. The terminus of that voyage was the Patapsco
Terminal in Baltimore, Maryland.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">I
insisted, to Tattoo's undisguised annoyance, that the Third World Man was to be
kept on or near our persons until we were completely finished with him.
Fortunately, empurpled lips aside, his corpse was remarkably well-preserved and
exhibited very few signs of putrefaction: a minor forensic miracle that I
attribute to the high formaldehyde content of the potent liquors so beloved by
the people of the nation in which he so squalorously served out his final
years. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
We were able to smuggle the Third World Man aboard an Emirates Air flight to
Chicago, and none of our fellow passengers in coach were the wiser, though
Tattoo aired some misgivings about having to sit next to him for the duration.
My colleagues back home, upon learning of this escapade, made frequent
allusions to the classic American novella <i>Weekend at Bernie's</i>, but
I am not familiar with the text and, at my age, do not expect to find the time
or the patience necessary to become acquainted with it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">After
tossing down a few celebratory cocktails at the Chicago O'Hare VIP lounge, our
slightly necrotic charge was boxed and shipped out to the Public Archaeology
Laboratory in Pawtucket, Massachusetts, where a full forensic autopsy was
administered over the course of two years. Certain findings were surprising to
me, while others were not. I wasn't exactly gobsmacked to discover, for
instance, that the Third World Man had died of exposure in his apartment, or
that his diet had consisted almost exclusively of Pringles® brand potato
chips (of the Salt & Vinegar persuasion). It was, however, somewhat
flummoxing when the Third World Man's age was variously reported as
"twelve" (frontal cortex), "57" (amygdala, basal ganglia),
"239" (skin, nerve tissue), and a whopping "3.7 × <span style="background: white;">10<sup>12</sup></span>" (liver, lungs, genitals),
pending the results of a more conclusive round of radiocarbon dating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">As for
me, I yet remain among the living, 73 years old and fighting hard to preserve
that age - though I am not likely to indulge in the sort of liquid taxidermy
practiced by the self-medicating Third World Man. I am kept busy by my
research, by my students and my phone calls, by my graduate assistants and my
wife's biweekly meatloaf (dread it though I do) and my freshly minted third
grandchild (adore her as I must). I have not heard from Tattoo in a long time,
and feel somewhat guilty for not having kept in touch, but I must console
myself with a platitude of my own coinage: men of such stature are easily lost.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Having
exhausted my research, and having worn out my fascination, one month ago I
signed over the remains of the Third World Man - his corpse, his tomb, his
world - to the proper authorities: Waste Management®, Ltd., the Omaha, Nebraska
branch. I am not familiar with Nebraska and very much hope never to go there,
but I am given to understand that its Human Development Index has not been
impacted one way or the other by this sudden influx of existential detritus: I
am told that said Index remains very, very low, indeed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;">- J.E. Postfrock, 2012</span></i></div>
ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-21586251578327756612013-04-10T22:38:00.001+05:002013-04-11T00:29:46.230+05:00The Old Gray Mare (She Ain't What She Used To Be)<span style="font-family: inherit;">It ain't easy being the World's Oldest Woman. You die at least once a decade and just keep getting older. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In 1986, she shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 115. By 1993, she had passed on again, 117 years young, and in Pennsylvania of all places. As it stands, according to the people at Guinness, the World's Oldest Woman is forever 122, buried well deep in a graveyard somewhere in the French town where Van Gogh painted <i>Cafe Terrace at Night</i>, not long after her thirteenth birthday. She claimed to have met the guy. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But there remain a handful of hardscrabble Georgian villagers who would tell you that 122 is some weak shit, indeed. They come from a hard country. People die young there, and live even longer. They would have you know that the World's Oldest Woman was 132 years old when the almighty <i>tamada</i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> finally</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> summoned her to the great <i>supra </i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">in the sky</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> last September. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Her name was Antisa Khvichava, and I met her a couple of months before she died.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I was sitting on the couch with my host family
on a Tuesday night, watching the Georgian news, feeling like the World's Oldest Man. It had already been a long summer. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">All my old friends were off on vacation, my new friends yet to arrive, so there was mostly nothing to do, and nothing whatsoever to insulate me from my host mother. Neither of my bank accounts were functioning, so I also happened to be flat broke. Escape was not an option. I couldn't even afford to leave the house - or at least, if I did, there was nowhere but noplace to go. </span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It wasn't a total loss. I'd learned a lot of Georgian. I'd read a lot of books. And I'd taught </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">myself how to use my busted left hand again, mostly through having my ass handed to me by my host brother, playing a bootleg version of <i>Pro Evolution Soccer</i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> We played every night, on ye olde PC. And before long, I could type again. Other than that, all we had was potatoes, cucumbers, plenty of salt, and the Georgian news to keep us sustained and relatively sane. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I can't say from experience, but I suspect that the Georgian news is not fundamentally different from what North Koreans watch in North Korea. Plenty of portly bureaucrats inspecting things. Plenty of portly bureaucrats inspecting other things. We had spent several hours that Tuesday evening watching portly Georgian bureaucrats inspect things and other things when my host family suddenly sprang into animation. My host mom cranked up
the volume to bowel-releasing decibel levels. The kids and I were told to shut
up. And there on the television screen appeared not another portly bureaucrat, but a weatherbeaten scrap of splotchy brown skin
shrouded in bedsheets.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"What is that?" I asked.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"That," said my host mom, "is
the World's Oldest Woman."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Cool," I said. "How old is she?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"132."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I never got the hang of the
Georgian numeral system, nor did I ever put much faith in village
folklore – the same folklore that would have you wear a wet scarf to cure strep throat; the very same that would have you drink 120 proof </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">cha-cha </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">to cancel out a headache – so I was doubly unconvinced.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"World's Oldest Woman," I
murmured.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"She lives here, you know," said
my host mom.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"In Georgia?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Yes. In Sachino."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Sachino? We've been there before. That's five minutes away."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"It is," she said. "I was born
there."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Do you know her?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Of course I do. She was a hundred years old when I was born."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Is she really the World's
Oldest Woman?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Yes. There can be no doubt."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"I'd very much like to meet her."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"What are you doing Friday?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Meeting the World's Oldest
Woman," I said.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">My arrival in Sachino was as good an excuse as any for the villagers there to throw a </span><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">supra</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, so a </span><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">supra </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">was thrown. The first familiar person I bumped into was Lado, a tall, wiry dude with all the delicate mannerisms of a meth-head. I shook his shaky hand and he tugged me back into a garden shed. I figured he was going to get me drunk, or murder me, or perhaps first one and then the other.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Check this out," he said.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">He kicked back a door and there, in a bucket full of blood, was a severed cow head.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Interesting, no?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I nodded.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Very interesting, Lado."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">My host grandma found us in there, saw the cow head, saw the delicate foreigner, and shook a splotchy index finger at Lado.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"</span><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sadisti!</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">" she cried. "</span><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sadisti!</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Lado and I wandered back out to the front lawn and joined the oldsters who were gathered there, huddled around a table.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Do you know this game?" asked Lado.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Sitting around drinking and smoking?" </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"No. Backgammon."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"I don't know anything about it."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"But everybody in the world knows this game."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Not me."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Then I will teach you."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The first thing I had to learn was an alternate numeral system that Mingrelians only use when they're playing backgammon. I memorized the numbers and immediately forgot them. It didn't really matter anyway. The oldsters, watching me play, swiftly established that I had the cognitive capacity of a Svani goatherd and took over operations. I sat and watched them play against Lado.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Congratulations," said one of the oldsters, when I was already well past half-asleep, "you won."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Good game," said Lado, and shook my hand.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I was undefeated, and remain so.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">We got up and shook every palsied oldster hand held out to us. Then Lado tugged me over to the chicken coop. He had something else to show me. He plucked up one of the birds at random, threw it down on a tree stump, and sliced its head off with a bowie knife. </span><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sadisti</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, indeed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The adults were hard at work fixing dinner, so my host mom told me and my host brother to go down to the river and do kid stuff. The path took us through the village graveyard. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The modern Georgian tombstone is a sight to behold. You wouldn't want to order one for yourself. It is not clear to me how exactly the things are made, but they have the appearance of having been screen printed in a t-shirt shop. A photograph of the deceased, at his or her prime in life, no wart or nosehair omitted, everything chiseled into the stone much too precisely. I respect Georgians and I respect their dead, but "tacky" is the word that springs to mind when it comes to their tombstones. Nobody wants to be remembered the way they actually were. Or at least I don't. One such tombstone, belonging to my friend's host cousin, featured the poor guy jabbering into a </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">mid-90's</span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">first-edition Nokia cellphone that was roughly twice the size of his head. Sad. Embarrassing. Permanent. In any case, no reception wherever he's at.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There were pigs rooting around in the graveyard and a few of the more devout ones were trying to get into the church. My host brother punted them away and we went inside. We stood in the back and watched a poor old <i>babushka </i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">wail at the altar until the guilty itch of heathenism crept up my spine. I shuddered a bit and made instinctively for the door. My host brother looked at me and shrugged. We went down to the river.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We skipped stones, something my host brother is very good at, a skill I never mastered because the mucky Missouri of my youth was the sort of river where you were liable to peg a rotted corpse six times out of ten. My host brother got tired of trying to teach an old hobo new tricks, so we started gathering up great big boulders and chucking them willy-nilly into the river, reversing tens of thousands of years of geology in about five minutes, laughing and laughing and scaring the bejeezus out of the muddy mudskippers. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">That got old, too. And exhausting. I sat down on a rock and smoked a Pirveli and watched my host brother build a small boat out of a stray chunk of cardboard, some twigs and some threads of grass. This, I thought, was a pretty neat idea.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"We should write a message and stick it on the boat," I suggested. "Maybe someone will find it. Maybe we'll find it when we get back to Jgali."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I was the Hobbes to his Calvin. He, the Calvin to my Hobbes. He thought this was a dumb idea. My host brother had nothing of the sort in mind. He nudged the boat adrift and pummeled it with stones until it sunk to the bottom.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We walked upstream a bit until my host brother found a full bottle of water bobbing against the banks. He handed it to me and gestured for me to throw it at something. I tried to bounce it off a nearby pile of stones, to see what would happen. What happened was: the cap blew off and everything exploded in my face. And it wasn't water. It was pure <i>cha-cha</i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">. I nearly puked on the spot. I hadn't brought a change of clothes to Sachino, so I'd have to spend the next couple days smelling like I'd been on a weeklong bender.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Luckily, for most Georgian men, such is seldom far from the truth. So I'd blend right in. More or less. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Later that night, there was wine and there was toasting. Then there was a power outage, which made drinking more difficult than usual. In the darkness, I ran into a dude named Sachino who was born in Sachino. I told him that my name was Grand Forks, North Dakota. Not a bad evening. But I went to bed early. I had a date with the World's Oldest Woman the following afternoon and I couldn't afford to show up looking more haggard than she did.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The next day, I sat around in the living room (where my temporary bed happened to be) and read a book about Georgia's most recent war with Russia. I couldn't make much sense out of it. The war or the book. I put the book down and watched and waited. People kept popping in and out. They'd probably been watching me sleep. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">There were host cousins running rampant, host cousins I'd never met before, host cousins whose duty it was to give me semi-permanent cluster headaches. They were from Tbilisi, the big city, which meant that they possessed all sorts of things that my host siblings did not: smartphones, new clothes, good haircuts, snotty accents, decent English teachers, decent English. I got to witness the way my host sister's eyes glazed over the first time she held a smartphone in her hands, and it reminded me of the way the religious neighbor kids used to zone out when they came over to my house and saw that we had <i>Predator </i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">on VHS. Within an hour of touching the thing, she was begging me to sign her up for Facebook.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"The Face Book?" I said. "Never heard of it."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'd sooner set a kid up with a coke connect.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I decided to take a nap. Feeling mighty old, indeed. And I slept and I dreamt that I was trapped in a fundamentalist Christian concentration camp, but that I'd broken out of it by making a really good joke. My host sister woke me up before I could remember how it went.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"We are go to see old woman soon," my host sister said, "but we wait for our guide."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Guide?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Yes," said my host sister, giggling. "She is wery beautiful woman."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Is that a fact?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Wery beautiful. Wery, </span><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">wery </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">beautiful."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was impossible to unscramble the giggling. There was a slight chance - a </span><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">wery </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">slight chance - that our guide would turn out to be the one young, single, beautiful woman in the entire Mingrelian countryside, and that I'd need to take a quick shower and wash my clothes in a foamy bucket full of quantum anti-<i>cha-cha</i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and put on some deodorant before she arrived. But this did not strike me as especially likely, or even possible, so I decided that I would tempt fate and remain rurally grody.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">There was a knock at the living room door. It opened. And in walked a gender-neutral photocopy of Lado.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Do you think she is very beautiful?" giggled my host sister.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I wasn't at all sure what to say.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"You are confuse," said my host sister. "That because he is not girl and she is not boy."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Oh," I said. "I see."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"You have this in America?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Yes," I said. "We do have this in America."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"This Lado's sister," she said, "or brother. Nobody know."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">She giggled. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Grow up," I said to my host sister.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"My name is Eliso," said Eliso.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We shook hands.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Nice to meet you," I said.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"You too. The old woman is not ready yet. Let's go to the river."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We rounded up Nini - my five year old host cousin, she of the Hello Kitty smartphone - and we went walking along the river. Lado's intersex sibling had a destination in mind, but as often happened, I did not know the Georgian word for where we were going and nobody knew the English word for where we were going, and our game of charades only confused me further. So we kept walking. We plucked foul-smelling berries from the trees and ate them. My host sister taunted me with snails. Nini recited all the foul words she'd learned from my host brother, who had learned them from me. We'd been walking about an hour when we came upon a waterfall storming down from the mouth of a cave, like something out of <i>The Goonies</i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for generating fear responses in humans, and I am convinced that most Georgians do not have one. My host sister and Eliso kicked off their shoes. Eliso picked up Nini and sat the fragile, pretty, delicate little five year old girl on his or her shoulders. They began scaling the slick, twenty foot vertical wall up to the mouth of the cave. My host sister tried to get me to come with them, but I'd just gotten my cast removed. I'd sworn off acts of physical idiocy for the time being. In any case, I was far too chickenshit to do anything of the sort. I'd always been. Too chickenshit. I was too chickenshit to even watch them climb. That girl. If she fell. While they climbed, I lingered near the base of the waterfall. Just in case. But when they arrived at the top, I could hear their voices reverberating high up above, telling me how beautiful it was up there, telling me to climb up there myself. I wouldn't. I couldn't. I never would or could. I sat down on a rock and smoked a Pirveli. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Then we walked back into town. My host brother was waiting for us. And together we walked to the house of the World's Oldest Woman. Eliso opened the front gate and we followed. An old woman was working in the front lawn, drawing water from the well. She unstooped slightly when she saw us coming.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Hello!" called Eliso. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The old woman said nothing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"This is my foreign tourist friend," Eliso said, indicating yours truly. "He thinks your grandma is fascinating and wants to take some pictures with her."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I pieced together what was being said and cringed. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The word <i>turisti</i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> rubbed me the wrong way. </span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I hadn't come to gawk. A picture with the World's Oldest Woman was not what I had in mind. But what did I have in mind, exactly? What did I hope to accomplish by meeting someone over one hundred years my senior? </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Would I have even come in the first place if, say, she were merely 112? I began to feel suspicious of myself, and suspicious of my motives, and all and all, tremendously guilty in the residually Catholic way. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Can we come inside and see her?" asked Eliso.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"She is not feeling very well these days," said the old woman, "but I will see if it's okay."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Look," I said to Eliso, after the old woman had shuffled inside, "it's not important. We can go. We should go."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"But we're already here. You've traveled so far."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">An old man had come out onto the porch, hunching along on a cane. He looked us over and hobbled back inside.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Her son," said Eliso.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">After a while, the old woman came back outside.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"You can come in," she said.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was a dark, clammy room, faded photos hanging here and there, no furniture at all but a cot in the corner, pressed up against the wall. And lying in the cot was the World's Oldest Woman.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Eliso nudged me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Say something."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I stepped forward.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Hello," I said.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A pair of eyes emerged from the face, seemed to trace all over the room before they finally settled on me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"How are you?" I asked in Mingrelian.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">She said nothing, so I switched over to Georgian.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Hello," I said. "How are you?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">She watched me. We made eye contact. She said nothing. I felt like a sperm cell.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Well," I said, "I am from America. I am an English teacher. I teach English near Sachino, in a village called Jgali. It is very nice to meet you." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The room expanded with silence. My host brother was shifting around and staring at his shoes. Nobody said a word. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"We must go now," I said. "Long live you and your family."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I bowed slightly - a nervous holdover from my time in Asia - and turned around to leave. On the porch, the granddaughter of the World's Oldest Woman - no spring chicken herself - was waiting for us.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"She cannot understand. She has hearing problems," she explained to us, "and brain problems."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And that was it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We went back to the house. Most of the hungover men playing backgammon were in even worse shape than the World's Oldest Woman. They still wanted to drink with me. My host mom didn't think this would be a good idea and I, for once, agreed with her. We got into a car with a guy named Soso - every bit as mediocre as his name would suggest - who drove us the five minutes to Jgali and then tried to touch me for ten <i>lari</i>. Gas money, he said. Fortunately, I was still broke.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the end, all I could think of was how positively dumb it was for me to wish a long life upon the World's Oldest Woman.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs3ibbee7YEIkx4W1q-o8RK1pUckwt1NaSLDMdr16y-0K8B6omoHQC5VM47EJt00RBcEXLzOMNZAODB_cGfYeQSGKCWLlzHMqvgP7jhLUk96UPUAywuTmE7UiugY9SCjOsIbFWOQ/s1600/oldgraymare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs3ibbee7YEIkx4W1q-o8RK1pUckwt1NaSLDMdr16y-0K8B6omoHQC5VM47EJt00RBcEXLzOMNZAODB_cGfYeQSGKCWLlzHMqvgP7jhLUk96UPUAywuTmE7UiugY9SCjOsIbFWOQ/s320/oldgraymare.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not pictured: The Author, because he sometimes has respect for human dignity.<br />
(Photograph: David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It wasn't until I straightened out matters at the bank - which takes about as long as you might imagine in Georgia - that I was able to get near the internet again, and when I finally did, I sat down and did some cursory research. Yes, it was true that </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Antisa Khvichava</span> claimed to be 132 years old, and it was true that nobody could prove that she wasn't. But it was also true that nobody could prove that she was. She had grown up during an especially dicey epoch of Georgian history, and Georgia happens to be a country that has known very many dicey epochs, indeed.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">She claimed to have been born on July 8th, 1880, and had a Soviet passport testifying in her favor. If said Soviet passport is testifying truthfully, she would've been 23 when the Wright Brothers took to the skies, 52 when Hitler came to power, and would've just turned 89 when human beings first walked on the moon. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There are plenty of reasons for doubt. For one thing, no human being - save for Methuselah - has ever lived past the age of 122. 132 would seem to be quite a leap forward. For another, she would've had to have given birth to her son - the codgerly cane-supported fellow I met on her stoop - when she</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> was sixty years old. More likely than not, nobody will ever know how old Antisa Khvichava was when she died. But I'm reasonably certain that the World's Oldest Woman I met was not, in fact, the World's Oldest Woman.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But she lived a very, very, very long time. That much is beyond doubt. She lived through all manner of horrible, and perhaps occasionally wonderful, things that I will never even be able to begin to imagine. She will almost certainly remain the oldest person I will ever meet, however long I live, and I don't plan on sticking around for 132 years. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">She attributed her longevity to Georgian brandy - a substance that has killed many other Georgians well before their time, so perhaps it balances out somehow - and she was fairly independent, up until the very end. At her supposed age of 130, she could still do pretty much everything for herself. She only needed help getting to the family outhouse. Which was more than I could manage some nights in Georgia.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">All of this information was obtained by Western journalists, who visited her village, and interviewed her through Georgian interpreters, and photographed her, generally with birthday cakes involved. I wonder where the journalists went for lunch. Where they shacked up. What they did for amusement. I wonder what they thought of the place. I wonder whether they ever ventured north to Jgali, where I lived. I never did the work any of them did. That's not my job. I have no job. But for what it's worth, I was probably the last foreigner Antisa Khvichava ever saw. Meeting her certainly changed me. I doubt I left any impression upon her at all.</span>ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-92074063876205069742013-01-03T06:53:00.000+04:002013-04-03T13:57:01.852+05:00You Should See the Other Guy (Pt. 1)<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Get over here, you sassy bitch."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Irishman and I slopped our
arms around each other. It wasn't very convincing. You'd be surprised how
difficult it is to properly hug an Irishman in the backseat of a Georgian taxi
without violating certain boundaries of platonic friendship. He slipped me his
portion of the fare – I'd borrowed my half from The Irishman in the first place
– then he leaned on the door and fell out into the street and began his eight
kilometer stagger home.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The cabbie asked me for the
fourth or fifth time if I was really sure I wanted to go to Jgali. I met the
caves of his eyes in the rearview mirror, suspended as they were in the
reflected light of the full moon. I told him that yes, I lived in Jgali and
wanted very much to go there, and for a moment I wasn't sure if the beer breath
swarming around the cabin was the cabbie's or my own – but given the sort of
evening I'd had, I figured I could safely assume the latter. The cabbie grunted
and cranked the ignition and after a few shuddering whinnies, the car lurched
on down the road. Then I scooted to the far end of the backseat to avoid the
gaze of those dark and disembodied eyes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">From that angle, in the rearview
mirror, I was treated to a glimpse of my own wrecked visage: the nose gashed
and scraped and slightly off-kilter, a Hitlerstache of dried blood basted into my
beard, a black empty space where a front tooth used to be. Looking rough. But you
should see the other guy. Then again, my assailant had been an inanimate object
– a dilapidated flight of stairs – and aside from their dilapidation, I was
quite sure that they were looking far better than I was at the time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The night before, Halloween eve,
my expat comrades and I had judiciously elected to get tipsy and go prowling
around an abandoned tea factory well after midnight. </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is no such joy in the tavern as on the road thereto, </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">my
friend David "Weird Beard" Lawrence had quoted to me earlier in the evening,
and I can assure you that there is no more ominous way to kick off a night of
revelry than to quote </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Blood Meridian</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">.
Nevertheless, that initial sense of foreboding faded as the night progressed,
along with many another anxiety, along with many a rational thought, and by the
time we were scoping out the teaworks for stray dogs, hoboes, and Soviet-era
junkenirs, the lot of us were bellowing and yammering and ribbing each other
the way all young men do when abroad from mind and country.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">It would be tempting to blame
this one on drinking – and the drink, along with its resultant drunks, certainly
deserves a lot of blame for a lot of things – but anyone who knows me well
would tell you that I am among the world's most uncoordinated oafs even in the
best of mental states. I have always had a knack for injuring myself, more
often when I'm sober than when I'm not. This past spring, I slipped on a soccer
ball and snapped my wrist in half with my ass. And were you to dig further back
in the archives, you could put together an impressively long blooper reel of me
clonking myself in the head with doors of all sorts (screen doors, revolving
doors, refrigerator doors, garage doors), tumbling headfirst into shrubs,
falling backwards out first story windows, and generally "biting it" in any
number of physically improbable ways. Sober though we were not, I can tell you
that all of us were perfectly ambulatory, except for me, and that fact had
little or nothing to do with beer.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">As I tripped and fell </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">up </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">the stairs that night, in the split
second before impact, I knew it would be especially bad: less towards the
comical end and more towards the permanently disfiguring end of the injury spectrum. Swaggering
up that dark and crooked and craggy stairwell, my toe clunking against one step
and my foot failing to find the next one, the world panning and flipping, then
rushing up to greet me, I had time to think to myself: </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">this is going to fucking hurt.</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">But it didn't. Not at all, really.
Nevertheless, it was not a graceful landing. My face slammed into a wall of
stone and I seemed to slide diagonally across it. There was a chorus of
horrified grunts from the gentlemen standing on either side of me. I lay for a
moment at a truly weird angle, sprawled chest-down across no fewer than five
stairs. Then I got to my feet and said – very calmly, I'm told – "I have
destroyed my teeth."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The dudes recoiled from the man
saying this. I was bleeding generously from the mouth and there was one very
large gap in my teeth where once there had been several small and endearing
ones. But as I tongued around assessing the damage, I was pleased to discover
that I'd only knocked out one half of one of my front teeth. The good news was
that I still had 27 1/2 left. The next step, I thought, was simple: track down
the missing chunk, then have it glued back on. By a Georgian carpenter. Like my
host dad.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">We scoured the steps with our matching
government-issued Nokia cellphone flashlights and after only a minute or two, managed
to track down the amputated fang. I held it up to the light, turned it around
in my fingers, grinning proudly and gorily all the while, then slipped it in
the front pocket of my suitcoat, where it would remain for the next 24 hours.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The following evening –
Halloween proper – the Irishman met me in Zugdidi, the closest thing we had to
a city, and he shared with me a brief but cathartic sympathy drunk. Then,
before things got too unreasonable, we caught a shared taxi back to our
respective villages.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">So that's how I wound up where I
found myself. There in the backseat, I took the tooth out of my suitcoat pocket
and held it up to the moonlight. It was such a small, strange, brittle little
object. It had seemed so much bigger in my mouth. I noticed with some
perplexity how clean it was on the front side, and how tar-streaked and
secretly gross it was on the back. Must brush more thoroughly in the future, I
thought. Must start flossing. Or quit smoking. Or all three. I opened my mouth
and tried to fit the tooth into the space that it used to inhabit. Not too bad,
I thought. Shouldn't be too much trouble, not even for a Georgian dentist.
Hell, maybe I could even fix it myself. Georgian dentists, I assumed, were to
be avoided at all costs. Or even at no cost at all. Then I reflected on what I
was doing, and how truly insane it must appear to a Georgian cabbie who
probably hadn't even seen a foreigner before, nevermind a toothless one trying
to eat his own tooth, and I checked the rearview mirror to make sure he wasn't
watching me, and remembered that I'd scooted over earlier to the opposite end
of the backseat for exclusively that purpose, and in the mirror I once again
saw my beat up old face looking back at me, holding one chipped half of a tooth
up to meet its estranged other, and I swollenly grinned and was about to slip
the tooth back into my suitcoat pocket when I glanced out the windshield and
saw that we were headed – undeniably, unstoppably – and at fifty miles an hour
– off the road and into a ravine.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The cabbie cranked the wheel.
The car flipped over. We flew. I watched with mild fascination as the tooth – like
an astronaut being sucked out into deep space – shot out of my fingers, and as
all the crap in my pockets went drifting around the cabin in all sorts of
gravitationally interesting ways.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">What those fortunate survivors
of near death tend to say about these sorts of things seems to hold true, at
least in my very limited experience. Time slowed to a standstill. I realized,
clearly and calmly, that I was about to die. And with measured relief, I knew
that there were still a couple of seconds between me and that annihilating
moment, and that the brain being the beautiful and weird thing that it is, I
could stretch those seconds out as long as I wanted to, within reason. If I was
about to be done living, I wasn't quite done thinking.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">My thoughts came with the
clarity of stillframes cycling through a slide projector. How sad, I thought,
that this was the way I was going to go out. A car wreck in Georgia. One of
thousands. A statistic, if they even keep those statistics in Georgia. I
wondered if I'd make the Georgian news. I wondered if I'd make the American
news. I wondered if I'd get a blurb in the local newspaper, and how big a blurb
it would be. I wondered what they'd have to say about me, wondered what sort of
feelgood gloss they'd slather over the desultory path of my third and final decade
on earth. I wondered how my family would react, then I opted not to think about
that. I realized with some surprise that I had no major regrets, realized that
regret was, as I'd often suspected, pointless by its very nature because dead
people don't regret anything. All and all, I knew, I hadn't done such a bad job
with this life thing. Still, there was the thought that this wasn't the way I
wanted to go out – that I deserved, if not something better, at least something
more </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">unique </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">or more </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">distinguished</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> or more </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">dignified</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, or at any rate something more
</span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">appropriate</span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. A car wreck in Georgia. How
passé.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Who would come to the funeral, I
wondered. And where would all my possessions go, or to whom? Or did I even possess
any possessions? Anyhow, I figured, none of that really mattered anymore. I
wouldn't be around to worry about it. I'd be gone, and I knew full well where
people went when they got gone: they were just gone, gone the same way they
were gone before they'd existed. These were thoughts that had never distressed
me and they certainly didn't distress me then. That said, I wasn't exactly </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">at peace, </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">either – a fucking car wreck
in Georgia. Shit, I thought – I could do so much better. And the timing wasn't
quite ideal. There was still so much left to do. Death, I knew, was not to be
feared. But that didn't mean it shouldn't be avoided.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">I wondered about the cabbie and
whether these sorts of thoughts were coursing through his mind same as my own,
or whether the thoughts I was having were the product of a Western education
and a reading list steeped in French existentialism, or whether the cabbie had already
survived any number of near-fatal car wrecks and simply assumed he'd survive this
one like he'd survived all the ones in the past. Maybe he would survive the
wreck and I would die, or maybe I would survive and he would die, or maybe we both
would die, or neither of us. I wondered whether I'd sacrifice his life to keep my own,
and decided that I happily and remorselessly would, if only because I knew what
I knew about myself and the people I cared about, and knew absolutely nothing
about the cabbie, and to volunteer my own death and the suffering it would
visit upon the people I loved in order to spare the life of a stranger who, in
all likelihood, was just another mediocre Georgian taxi driver – this, I knew,
was somehow existentially false. Whatever happened to the cabbie, I wanted to
live.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">I wondered about the possibility
not of perfect survival or of perfect death, but of mortal injury, and wondered
what the cabbie would do to save me, or what I would do to save him, and in any
event what could possibly be done for either one of us in that black expanse of
countryside, at that hour of night, that far removed from people and cities and
hospitals. A sense of profound isolation swept over me. The whole known
universe, in that moment, was trapped within the confines of my skull, or at
best in the cabin of a 1997 Opel Corsa station wagon that was hurtling upside-down
through space, and there was no way of sharing my thoughts with anyone, no way
of transmitting them telepathically, no way of speaking them, no way of writing
them down for posterity. No blogging about this one. You're on your own now,
Petit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The moment, as I said, stretched
on forever. But having dabbled a bit in these sorts of states, I well knew that
the term "forever" was only a loose one; that however long the mind seemed to
shake the shackles of time, those shackles were inevitably clamped right back
on. By what? By time itself, I suppose. I thought about how strange that was,
that a moment should seem to stretch on forever, even as it is busy </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">becoming the next moment; how strange that the
thoughts that I was having then could arrive in a single flash of comprehension,
like a simple and indivisible word completely and instantly and nakedly understood,
and yet each realization stood alone and independent, clear and stark as the
stars on the stillest night of Mingrelian winter. Weird.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then the moment, as they all do,
passed. The car tumbled into the ravine. The sound, I thought, was like a shoddily
wrapped Christmas present rolling down a flight of stairs. My head slammed
against the ceiling. Why, I thought, that knock must've given me a concussion.
But in the rapidly cycling moments that followed, I realized that it hadn't. I
was lucid. I was alive. I was extremely pissed off. I began cursing. Cursing
the driver. Cursing my luck. Cursing the universe. Profanities abounded. The
car tumbled. I raged. Raged against the dying of the light, if you will. The
windshield exploded. A confetti of glass sprayed into my eyes. My head slammed
against the ceiling and the ceiling against the earth, each percussion more
terrifying than the last. The cabin of the car was being rapidly crushed, its
corners closing in on me. I raged. The pinprick bright stars and the gaping full
moon swirled past, framed by the busted window, the constellations in time lapse. I raged. Time was moving
now. Gone was the moment – all that was left was whatever happened next, the
inevitable. We tumbled down the hill. The world crashing all around. Then, a
terrible silence, a rush of gravity, and a heartstopping crunch. I was sitting
upside down, ass over head, legs to the ceiling. I was breathing. I breathed. Nothing
mattered. Nothing hurt. An instant of living, silent as its opposite. The full
moon watched me through the window.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">So. That could have been the
end. Now I suppose I'll take you back to the beginning.</span>ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-83923313439672518792013-01-03T12:59:00.000+04:002013-04-03T13:56:05.121+05:00Escape Button<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Somewhere in the bustling bowels beneath the Capitol building, sometime around noon, my trousers exploded and the button that had once so dutifully bundled my junk together suddenly shot off down the hall and went skittering betwixt the clickity-clacketing wingtips of </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">any number of our fair nation's elected officials. Then, as gravity would have it, my pants fell down. That was when I decided that I didn't have a future in politics. This cockamamie vaudevillian bullshit, I knew, would happen to me every day that I remained on The Hill. Or for as long as The Hill would have me. The Republicans would've been better off hiring Mr. Bean.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I was finished. Kaput. Less than a month in, it was time for me to retire. Still, my dong was hanging out in a very public place and for eminently prosecutable reasons, an escape had to be made. So I sequestered myself in the most secluded basement bathroom I could find and listened to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) filibust ass in the stall next to mine while I tried to MacGyver my pants back together with a broken keyring and half a tab of prechewed Dentyne chewing gum. Were there any emergency tailors lurking in the depths of D.C.'s Fraggle Rockian underground, I wondered. Certainly, I figured, I couldn't be the only man on Capitol Hill having trouble keeping his pants up </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> but that's what interns were for. And I, alas, was the intern.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My engineering efforts having failed colossally (and stickily), I sucked in my gut and adopted the Napoleon stance </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> i.e., the Untreated Ulcer Swagger </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> then I made my hunchbacked way out through several security checkpoints with one arm clenched around my waist and the opposite hand resolutely cupping my balls. This drew some looks, sure, but once I'd made it outside, out into D.C. proper, I was just one of a million other half-dressed derelicts cupping their balls: a privileged one in fact, with two whole pantlegs to his busted-ass pants and a Van Heusen</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">™</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> necktie to cover up the delicate bits.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I caught the subway home looking mighty glum, indeed. Nobody in the office knew that I was gone, or that I wasn't coming back. I had no idea what to tell them, or whether I should tell them anything at all. Maybe I should just steal away in the night. That had always worked for me in the past. Or maybe there was still time to fix things. Call in. Apologize. Say you got sick. Brush it off. Get some sleep. Put on a new pair of pants and turn up bright and early the next morning. But the button thing. Always a button, always an unzippable zipper, always a banana peel when you least expect it. That shit happens to me all the time. It doesn't happen to John Boehner or the thousands of Princeton grads lining up to puff on his metaphorical cigarette. Whatever Paul McCartney has to say on the matter, fools don't make it on The Hill. But what was to be done if I didn't make it? What in the ever-loving hell was to be done next? I'd thrown everything I had into D.C. and watched it spiral down into a black hole, like one of those plastic charity vortexes you see at the mall. Fuck me. I put my head in my hands and swallowed back a delicious flare of gastric acid. The train shudder-whooshed into a tunnel and I watched through my fingers the bright white sidelights streak by like flashes of a future that I </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> through idiocy? through laziness? through some sort of subconscious moral rectitude? </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> was now banishing to a dark and irretrievable past. All knowingly. All willingly. All because of a fucking button. I'd gained weight. I chewed the inside of my cheek and looked up. An old black fellow seated in the seat in front of me seemed to be reading my reverie. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Rough day?" he asked.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"Life kind of sucks at the moment," I said, "to be perfectly honest."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"It's never life that sucks," he said. "We always have the power to change things. It's all in your mind. It's all up to you. Remember that, son."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I told him I would. I thanked him and shook his hand. Then it was my stop, so I got up and clutched my balls and embraced my artificial ulcer and shuffled off the train like a sack of potatoes on stilts. Witnessing an exit like that, I'm thinking maybe the guy changed his mind.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">That afternoon, I tendered my resignation over the phone. And so my paid internship became an unpaid one. I'd fallen off The Hill.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It wasn't a wasted trip. I learned some things. I learned, for instance, that politicians very seldom (if ever) actually write their own material; speeches, press releases, op-eds; no, the writing is almost entirely left to staffers like me. On the other hand, I learned (and was pleasantly surprised to learn) that most representatives actually do take time to read the mail they receive from their constituents, so long as the letters are not written in shit. I learned that most members of the House cannot afford to live in Washington D.C.; when they are in town (which is not altogether all that often) not a few of them spend their nights on tiny little futons that fold out into their tiny little office closets. Quite a few politicians are hapless drunks </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> how they keep this under wraps media-wise is something I never did figure out. John Boehner's office is the one closest to the designated outdoor smoking zone. Can't say I blame the guy. The House chamber or the Senate chamber, or at any rate whichever chamber it is where the President of the United States makes his State of the Union Address </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> that chamber is an optical illusion. It belongs on the side of the Interstate, next to Carhenge and The World's Largest Ball of Aluminum Foil. I shit you not. The room puts on at least 15,000 square feet when seen on television. It is actually very, very small in real life. You couldn't host a Magic: The Gathering tournament in there. Also: there are gas masks and various paranoiac anti-terrorism prophylactics stashed in little tote bags tucked under the seats. House and Senate votes are cast via a machine that hasn't been upgraded since the late 1980's by my guesstimation. On the machine, there are three square plastic buttons </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> red, yellow, green </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> "Yea," "Nay," and "Meh" </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> and I imagine they flash excitedly and play the original Pac-Man theme when pressed. Voting also involves inserting a dusty gray plastic game cartridge into a warped wooden slot </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> not sure how that works, or whether it works at all. When you come right down to it, the overall aesthetic of our representational democracy lies somewhere between the original Atari, gas station slot machines, and a 1987 Plymouth station wagon tricked out with woodgrain everything. What else did I learn? Well. Come CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) season, the "Casual Encounters" section of the D.C. craigslist is clogged with anonymous personal ads soliciting all manner of clandestine conservative buttsex. I did not partake, but I can tell you it's legit. The bars in D.C. abide by all sorts of byzantine drinking rules </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> you can't stand up; you can't sit down; you can't wear two items of clothing that belong to two different colors starting with the same letter </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> and these rules make drinking very difficult. Just because I learned all this crap doesn't mean that I understand it. But perhaps most significantly (for me at least), I learned that I am very good at sitting down at a keyboard and cranking out mass amounts of bullshit in a very short time, bullshit that argues in favor of all manner of harebrained and horrific and hateful things </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">–</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> and most creepily of all, I learned that this aforementioned bullshit of mine, written without an iota of sincerity on my part, was effusively adored by certain circles of voters who (were they not a kind of dominant and well-funded minority in America) would almost certainly be institutionalized. But now I'm politicizing again. And like I told you: I've retired from all that.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Where were we? So. I left The Hill. I did not leave with my tail between my legs as you might expect, but with my tail wagging at the thought of going somewhere else. At the end of my month in D.C., I coughed up the rent and caught an Amtrak back to Omaha. Days later, I learned that I'd been accepted for a volunteer teaching gig in Georgia: The Country. I had no money, no other options, and no real desire to do much of anything else. A week later, I was in Georgia. And that is when shit got interesting. To say the least.</span></span>ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-49848581705490752172013-03-31T13:16:00.000+05:002013-04-03T13:03:14.162+05:00Iranian Rain DanceOne more Saturday night. One more Sunday morning. I was the last man standing. I was the last man sleeping. <br />
<br />
I woke up around noon and everyone was gone. I left the last of my money with the hostel <i>babushka</i>, gave the thoroughly pregnant hostel cat one last pat on the head. I walked back into town. Along the way, I realized that I was carrying a plastic bag full of everybody else's crap: Pringles tubes, empty packs of <i>Pirveli</i>s, half-full bottles of beer. There wasn't a trash can in sight, but there was a dumpster up ahead. Just to make sure nobody was living in there, I scaled up the side of it and stuck my head over the rim: inside, the usual Georgian refuse - Pringles tubes, empty packs of <i>Pirveli</i>s, half-full bottles of beer. With my good arm, I heaved the bag into the dumpster and heard it <i>chock </i>against the bottom. An instant later, I saw a big fat Georgian man come storming down the hill. <i>No! </i>he was shouting. <i>No no no no no! </i>I stood there like an oaf and waited for whatever was to happen next.<br />
<br />
Huffing and puffing, the man looked me over. He looked at me. He looked at my cast. He pointed at the dumpster and said, "Pick it up."<br />
"Excuse me?"<br />
"Your garbage. Pick it up."<br />
I held up my cast, shrugged my shoulders.<br />
"I don't care. Pick it up."<br />
<br />
I scaled up the side of the dumpster and reached for my bag of trash. It was unreachable from all angles. My wrist was smarting like hell. The Georgian dude got tired of watching me struggle and climbed into the dumpster himself, fetched my bag of trash, and climbed back out. I thought he was going to hand the bag back to me. Instead, he smacked me over the head with it. Then he handed it back to me.<br />
<br />
"Thanks," I said.<br />
<br />
It was my first premonition that things in Georgia were about to head south. And they would head very far south, indeed. But for the time being, the whole summer stretched between me and the tattered threads of my worn out welcome mat.<br />
<br />
I got my cast removed a couple weeks later.<br />
One of the nurses asked me if I was married.<br />
"No," I said.<br />
"That's good."<br />
"You're right," I said. "It <i>is</i> good."<br />
<br />
Everyone I knew had left Georgia on the Georgian government's tab. Weird Beard had flown to Spain. The Irishman had retired to his native Ireland. Jerry was back in Arkansas, soon to relocate to Korea for good. Laura was in Turkey, bound for Poland and The Ukraine. I couldn't for the life of me decide where to go, so I wound up staying in Georgia. I'd spend my weekdays reading in bed, reading on the porch, getting into mild-mannered mischief with my host brother, going on long walks by myself. On the weekends, funds permitting, I'd sneak off to Zugdidi and shack up at the hostel and get into some international mischief with the United Nations of Tourists. All sorts of people came through that summer. There were delightful Britons, and wonderful Czechs, and lovely Poles. I'd mention to the Poles that I'd once lived in Poland, and when I told them where, they would giggle uncontrollably for the remainder of the evening. Comedy comes very naturally when your whole life is a joke. There was an Israeli dude who objected to my smoking while he ate his dinner on the patio. I apologized profusely and retired to the dark corner where the pregnant cat hung out and I stroked her head and smoked my cigarette. When I returned to the patio, the Israeli dude was smoking a cigarette himself. I blinked.<br />
<br />
One morning, I woke up with the hostel all to myself. There was a strange squeaking noise issuing from under the bed. I rolled over just in time to see six kittens come tottering out. One by one, they clawed their way up into my bed and settled on my bare chest to knead my manbosom and nap. The hostel <i>babushka </i>found me sleeping that way later that afternoon. I could hear her talking to herself. She thought it was cute. I think I earned some points, there. But I was to lose them all before the summer was through. We were, all of us, to lose a lot of points before the year was through.<br />
<br />
Then, back to the village. More boredom. More books. Three square meals of potatoes and cucumbers. Plenty of Georgian television. Every once in a while, I'd hike into town to read an email from Weird Beard, who was washing dishes and slowly screwing his way across the Iberian peninsula, or from the Irishman, who was getting rich on the dole, smoking himself into a vortex and drinking twenty cups of tea per diem, or from Laura, who had managed to get her leg squashed by a boulder in a Turkish earthquake. Then I would hike back home and go to sleep at nine PM, or whenever the power crapped out, which was usually pretty early in those overheated days.<br />
<br />
When I received my pay at the end of July, I decided I'd blow it all in Batumi: the Black Hole on the Black Sea. I fell asleep on the marshrutka but woke up in time to read the overhead sign as we arrived in Batumi proper: "'In five years, Batumi will be the best city in the world.' - Donald Trump." I blinked.<br />
<br />
If you've been to Puerto Vallarta, you've been to Batumi. If you've been to Cancún, you've probably been to Batumi, too. In short, Batumi is the sort of place you might go with your gaggle of spring break girls, or your posse of spring break boys, but not the sort of place a single man should visit alone. That's mostly how I felt from the moment I got off the marshrutka: painfully, woefully, oafishly alone.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure how long Batumi has been around. "Not very long" would be my guess. Certainly, it didn't begin to exist the way it exists now until a couple of years ago, when a glut of oil money washed up along its shores. It's not a bad place to be if you happen to find yourself in Georgia with plenty of friends and a bunch of hard currency to blow. The weather is tolerable pretty much year round. There are beaches, though they are decidedly not the sorts of beaches you'd want to write home about, not unless your parents are geologists who happen to specialize in large, abrasive beach boulders. It costs five bucks to rent out a beach chair - something I found out the hard way - and the bars charge outrageous covers but still play Kenny G, same as anywhere else in Georgia. Still, Batumi was a much needed respite from the village life. There were foreigners everywhere, none of them Westerners, but foreigners nonetheless. And there was a certain Chinese weirdness to the place that I found appealing, if only because I lived in - and loathed - and actually kind of <i>missed </i>- China.<br />
<br />
Much of the city was under construction. Perhaps that's why it reminded me so much of the People's Republic. More to the point: the buildings were being built the same way they build them in China. Cheap stone, cheap labor, crummy scaffolding; it looked as though everything going up was about to collapse. The signage reminded me of China. There was a banner above a construction site that read, "APOLOGIZE FOR ALL TEMPORAL DISCOMFORT." I reached for my camera but remembered that my host sister had broken it months before. The sides of unfinished skyscrapers were draped over with massive plastic tapestries festooned with internet clipart of beachside resorts that in no way resembled the dilapidated concrete monstrosities under construction, photographs of pasty, pasty white couples sipping dirty martinis on pristine white patios. The American dream. If the Chinese can achieve it, why not the Georgians? I used to walk up and down the Batumi boardwalk along the Black Sea, ogling these architectural nightmares, darting furtive glances at the stroboscopic night clubs as I passed, thinking I'd maybe pay the cover if it meant a shot at dancing with a pretty girl from an exotic former Soviet republic, and then, catching a snippet of C+C Music Factory, I'd decide emphatically against it, and I'd walk along the boardwalk until the boardwalk came to an end, and then I'd walk all the way back to where I'd started and then I'd walk all the way back to the hotel and go to sleep.<br />
<br />
One evening on the boardwalk, this freakishly musclebound dude came jogging towards me at a very brisk pace. The moment I saw him, I knew he was an American - perhaps the first American I'd seen since I'd arrived in Batumi. The self-obsessed musculature, the backpack, the iPod, the earbuds, the revoltingly clingy Under Armour running shorts. I could barely suppress a sneer. He came to a stop right in front of me.<br />
<br />
"You speak English?" he said.<br />
"Yessir."<br />
"You can take picture of me?"<br />
"Sure."<br />
<br />
So he wasn't an American after all. I regrouped, tried to gauge the accent. German, maybe? He handed me his camera and got into position. I maneuvered myself such that the sun was setting over his right shoulder.<br />
<br />
"No no no," he said. "Not like that."<br />
"But the sunset, I - "<br />
"No sunset," he said. "I want you to take picture so that rays of sunshine are, yes, <i>glistening </i>off my body."<br />
<br />
An odd request. But to each his own. When in Georgia. I repositioned myself such that the achingly lovely sunset was in no way featured in the picture, only the rays of sunshine, yes, <i>glistening </i>off the dude's body. He struck a pose, flexed ever so slightly. Then he hustled over to see the finished product.<br />
<br />
"It is not bad," he said. "Two more photos please."<br />
<br />
Here was a man for whom there were only six wonders of the world, all of them conveniently located on the northbound happy trail that traversed his abdominals. We did two more shots.<br />
<br />
"Many thanks," he said. "Would you like to eat an apple with me?"<br />
"Sure," I said. "I like apples."<br />
<br />
We sat down on a nearby bench. He reached into his backpack and took out a plastic bag full of fruit. He and I noshed on a couple of apples. Georgian tourists were already slowing down to stare at us as they passed. One reads about animal odd couples on the internet, but what the hell would the Huffington Post make of this? Six foot five musclebound health freak with indiscernible accent befriends twiggy chainsmoking ginger bearded American oaf. Life is just the universe making jokes at our expense.<br />
<br />
"You are from?"<br />
"America," I said. "What about you?"<br />
"Iran," he said.<br />
<br />
Racking my brain, I realized that I'd never in all my travels met an actual Iranian before. This Iranian, in particular, did not line up at all with any of my Iranian stereotypes. It occurred to me that I had no idea how to talk to an Iranian. What was off limits? Was there anything that <i>wasn't </i>off limits? Perhaps most troubling of all: a half-naked bodybuilder had just offered to watch the sunset with me. And now we were eating apples together. Was I getting into something that my libido didn't want me getting into?<br />
<br />
Disarmament came swiftly and organically. He observed that President Ahmadinejad was a nutjob, something I agreed with. I observed that certain American military adventures in the Middle East were a mistake, something he agreed with. We both concurred that all religion was a farce, that Georgia was among the strangest countries on earth, and that <i>cha-cha </i>was pretty much the most vile substance ever imbibed by man. Fast friends.<br />
<br />
"I have proposition," he said. "Do you like cigarettes?"<br />
I nodded, smoking.<br />
"Do you like wine?"<br />
I nodded again, wanting a drink.<br />
"I propose we go to my hotel and smoke cigarettes and drink wine."<br />
<br />
This came as a surprise, seeing how he'd spent much of the past hour trumpeting the virtues of teetotalism and slagging off on the sad, fat state of the average Iranian man. But it was a welcome surprise. I saw no better way to spend an evening with an Iranian dude who could easily twist my head off in the crook of his index finger.<br />
<br />
Almost immediately, I recognized his hotel for the brothel that it was. There was mouth herpes everywhere. The lingua franca was Ukrainian. We were ogled as we entered. The Iranian - his name was Hamid - cracked open a door adjacent to the main lobby. Inside were about eight men, all of them fat, dancing rather close to each other to the tune of C+C Music Factory.<br />
<br />
"It is strange, no?"<br />
"Very."<br />
"They are all of them Iranian."<br />
"Do you know them?"<br />
"No," he said, "and I do not want to."<br />
He shut the door.<br />
"Where are the girls?" he cried, unable to hide his disgust. "To dance is very fun, but where are the girls?"<br />
<br />
We went upstairs to his room. In the hallway, an Asian-ish woman gave Hamid the eye. She gave me <i>an</i> eye, at least, if only in retrospect.<br />
<br />
"Prostitute," said Hamid. "All of them prostitutes."<br />
<br />
Hamid invited me to sit down and demanded that I eat several pears, apples, and oranges while he took a shower. In the fridge were a couple plastic bottles of Armenian wine, and he said I could help myself to those, too. He would prepare a dinner of canned fish when he got back out, but in the meantime, I was to take off my shoes and make myself at home. He waited around to make sure I took off my shoes. Then he hopped in the shower. I poured myself a Fanta. In the fridge was a XXL jug of protein powder, and a XXL jug of some nutritional supplement I'd never heard of. I ate a pear, then I ate an apple, then I ate an orange, just for something to do. When Hamid came back out, we ate canned fish, then we gathered up a couple bottles of Armenian wine and went out to the front porch.<br />
<br />
Almost immediately, it started to rain. Hamid was in hysterics.<br />
"Have you ever seen this?"<br />
"What?" I said. "Rain?"<br />
"Yes! Rain!"<br />
"Plenty of times."<br />
Hamid had gotten out his digital camera and was recording a video of the rain.<br />
"I have never seen the thing like this," he said. He turned the camera towards me. "Never in my fucking life! What do you think, Keith?"<br />
"It's a fuckton of rain," I said.<br />
"Yes," he agreed. "A fuckton of rain."<br />
<br />
It <i>was</i> a fuckton of rain, too. I hadn't seen anything like it, either. Not in Georgia, at least. We went back up to the room and sat out on the balcony, taking in the squall. Much thunder, much lightning. The streets were already starting to flood. Hamid's enthusiasm was not to be contained.<br />
<br />
"Rain! All the rain! All the rain in the fucking world!"<br />
<br />
He offered me one of his cigarettes, poured us both a glass of Armenian wine. We drank and smoked and watched it rain. On the next balcony over, the Asian-ish girl had appeared and was giving Hamid the eye.<br />
<br />
"Where you sexy boys are from?" she called. "American?"<br />
"He is American," said Hamid. "I am from Iran."<br />
"Me Tajikistan."<br />
<br />
This, apparently, meant that they both shared a little Persian in common. They got to talking. The long and short of it was that Hamid didn't want to sleep with her for five dollars, and neither did I. She eyed me with mild disbelief and went back inside.<br />
<br />
"It is okay for I said you didn't want?"<br />
"It is very okay, indeed, Hamid."<br />
"Good. You have taste. Five dollars? Jesus."<br />
<br />
Across the street, in the thick of the storm, a Georgian man had walked out onto his balcony, shirtless and wielding a broom.<br />
<br />
"What is this here?" asked Hamid. "What will Georgian man do?"<br />
<br />
The man reached up with the broomstick, trying to nudge a satellite dish mounted some fifteen feet above his head.<br />
<br />
"Bummer," I said. "He can't get the Saakashvili Hour."<br />
<br />
The man clambered up the banister, perched there. Poked around with his broomstick. He was seven stories high. Perched atop a narrow rail, an inch or two of rusted metal. I thought I might puke. He couldn't reach the satellite dish. Hamid busted out his camera, started recording.<br />
<br />
"Hello, Iran. Today Georgian man slide and fall to death."<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, down below, the streets had flooded completely and a remarkable scene was taking place. The eight Iranian dudes had poured out of the herpes lobby disco and out into the street and were now dancing like fools, fat and shirtless and joyous in a thunderstorm. They had never felt rain before. The flab was flying every which way.<br />
<br />
"My God," said Hamid. "This is pathetic. This is so bad. This is why I never want to return to Iran."<br />
<br />
Me, I thought the moment was passably sublime. Hamid recorded the whole thing. An Iranian rain dance. It went on for ten minutes and was very nearly escalating to a certain kind of transcendence until one of the guys puked and another one ducked into a cab with two Asian-ish prostitutes.<br />
<br />
"He is getting lucky. I speak to him earlier. It his birthday," said Hamid. "Happy birthday, you fat bastard."<br />
<br />
Plenty enough wine. Plenty enough cigarettes. I walked back to my hotel with a sweater pulled over my head and fell asleep watching the Olympics. The next afternoon, I got up and walked up and down the boardwalk again. I didn't run into Hamid as I'd hoped, but I came across a zoo, so I went to the zoo. They had one of those Japanese monkeys that tend to chill out in hot springs, except this one was sitting in a cage, wallowing in its own shit. There was a concession stand that sold hot dogs, so I ate a hot dog. Then I got bored and caught a marshrutka back to Zugdidi. I couldn't bear another night at the hostel, so I hitched a ride back to my village. I lost Hamid's email at some point along the way. So I never heard from him again. May the sun glisten photogenically off his six-pack, wherever it may roam.<br />
<br />
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<br />ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-70854049540800286782013-03-31T10:41:00.000+05:002013-03-31T15:01:55.387+05:00PseudosupraI realized much too late how weird my living situation was. Well before I first donned the <a href="http://expatriateact.blogspot.com/2013/03/racecar-is-no-longer-my-favorite.html">teal racecar t-shirt of Orthodox Georgian shame</a>, I'd invited a bunch of foreigners to my host household for an end-of-semester <i>supra</i>. Weird Beard, the Irishman, and a nice girl named Leslie - in a few short hours, they'd be caught up in the thick of it, surrounded by adoring villagers from a village not their own, drinking, drunk, drunken. Nobody in my host family had seen more than two non-Georgians in their lives. That night, they were to see four of them in action simultaneously.<br />
<br />
In Georgia, a <i>supra </i>is a nominally formal occasion in which the men drink homemade wine and homemade vodka to elephantine excess while the women set the table, cook a twelve-course meal, collect dirty dishes, wash them, drink a toast or two while remaining sober and clear-headed and servile, for they must constantly empty ashtrays and bring new ones, fix coffee, make dessert, mop up vomit ... The men are expected to drink. Is it ever exhausting to be a man.<br />
<br />
The men drink shots, shots of <i>cha-cha</i>, shots of wine. There is no savoring, no nursing, and there is no drinking alone. There is no drinking at all unless a toast is proposed, and all toasting runs through the <i>tamada: </i>essentially, the Stalin of the <i>supra</i>. He appoints the toaster and he nominates the toastees. You may politely ask the <i>tamada</i> for permission to stand up and propose a toast of your own, but you may never, ever, under any circumstances usurp the <i>tamada</i>'s toast. I had quite a notorious reputation for doing so without meaning to - particularly after that fateful tenth toast of the evening - and for that reason, I became known far and wide as The Rogue Tamada of Samegrelo Province, one of many nicknames I was to acquire during my ten months in Georgia.<br />
<br />
As the night escalates, shot glasses and wine glasses are put away and the horns come out. They are literal horns, the sort that cuckolds wear: hollowed-out cow horns, hollowed-out bull horns. These, usually, can be found dangling from the walls of any Georgian living room, regardless of whether there is drinking going on or not (and there usually is). The <i>tamada </i>starts with the small horns first, then moves up through his collection until, by the end of the night, you find yourself drinking out of a horn the size of your head, something that might well have belonged to a mythical or prehistoric beast. And you are expected to guzzle everything down at a single go. This is why I described the <i>supra </i>as a <i>nominally</i> formal occasion. Things always start out formally enough, but how would Emily Post have you projectile vomit all over someone else's living room floor?<br />
<br />
I could sense the electricity in the house when I woke up on <i>Supra </i>Bowl Sunday - it was the only electricity we'd had all week - and by noon I was nearly blinded by the mischievous gleam in my host dad's eyes. My liver ached preemptively. I paced the house while my host dad lugged around ominous-looking plastic jugs and my host mom dusted under our feet. I felt the need to coach my host parents, the way you might coach your actual parents before bringing over your girlfriend for the first time. But of course, there was no point in worrying about anything: the Georgians would be Georgian, the Westerners would be Western, and my host mom would be my host mom, and I would be horrifically embarrassed at some point, and the night would get out of hand in the weirdest of ways. This was all beyond my control. There was nothing to do but pace around and hope that everyone else got drunk enough at the <i>supra </i>for me to steer the morning-after narrative in my favor.<br />
<br />
Weird Beard was the first to show up, just shy of 4 PM. My host dad was already out on the piss somewhere else. The rest of the family gathered around on the porch to analyze (and psychoanalyze) Weird Beard in a language that neither he nor I quite understood.<br />
<br />
"He's so handsome," said my host sister. "His beard is much better than your beard."<br />
"Uh," said Weird Beard, "what did she say?"<br />
"She said that you're handsome, and that your beard is better than my beard."<br />
"Thanks," said Weird Beard.<br />
"We want you to live here, not Kiti."<br />
"They say that you should live here, not me."<br />
"I like my host family a lot," said Weird Beard, "but thanks."<br />
"Here," I said, tugging Weird Beard by the sleeve, "lemme show you my digs."<br />
"Dang," he said, "how'd your Georgian get so good?"<br />
"It's not," I said, "but if it is, it's because these people run my life."<br />
<br />
My room was much the same as any other Georgian room, but that's not what Weird Beard had come to see. He wanted to see the shirt. <br />
<br />
"Good God almighty. She makes you wear <i>that?</i>"<br />
"I know, right?"<br />
"So."<br />
"So?"<br />
"Put it on for me."<br />
"No."<br />
<br />
Host dad came swaggering back home and summoned us menfolk to the living room. A Big Beautiful Babushka named Nino had showed up. A bottle of high octane <i>cha-cha </i>had appeared. The night had begun. <br />
<br />
My host dad was <i>tamada</i> by default. He filled our shot glasses. He proposed a toast to mothers. I clinked glasses with him, with Weird Beard, with Nino. My host mom, meanwhile, was off scrubbing the toilet.<br />
<br />
"<i>Sheni deda, sheni deda, sheni deda,</i>" I said. "Your mother, your mother, your mother."<br />
<br />
Weird Beard nudged me in the ribs.<br />
<br />
"Dude," he said. "What the hell?"<br />
"Eh?"<br />
"Do you have any idea what you just said?"<br />
Nino's face had gone red. It looked like her eyes were about to pop out of her head and go flying across the living room. Finally, she could keep it in no longer. She busted up laughing.<br />
"Kiti," she crowed. "Oh, Kiti! <i>Sheni deda!</i>"<br />
She smacked the flat of her palm against the top of her balled-up fist, Georgian Sign Language for "fuck you."<br />
"Seriously? Is <i>that </i>what I said?"<br />
Weird Beard nodded.<br />
"Huh. I had no idea," I said, "but I guess that makes sense. Yo mama. Same in English, no?"<br />
We drank. Off to a good start.<br />
<br />
There was a toast to international friendship. <i>Obama, Saakashvili, megobrebi - gaumarjos! </i>A toast to family. <i>Ojakhis gaumarjos! </i>A toast to the deceased.<br />
<br />
"<i>Gaumarjos!</i>" I chimed.<br />
<br />
Weird Beard nudged me in the ribs. They were starting to hurt, the ribs were.<br />
<br />
"Dude," he said. "Think about what you just said."<br />
"What?"<br />
"Dead people. <i>Cheers!</i>"<br />
"Shit," I said.<br />
"Nicely done."<br />
"At this rate, I'm never going to get to be <i>tamada</i>."<br />
"Give it a couple more toasts. You'll go rogue. I just know you will."<br />
<br />
My host mom decided it was time for us to switch over to wine. So much the better, I figured. She snatched up the bottle of <i>cha-cha, </i>put it in a box and locked it away in a cupboard like it was the Lost Ark. My host dad left the room and returned with a couple Pepsi bottles full of wine. He filled our glasses. Then he proposed a toast to me. I raised my glass.<br />
<br />
"To me, I guess."<br />
"To Oaf Loaf," said Weird Beard.<br />
"Kitis <i>gaumarjos!</i>" cried host dad.<br />
We drank.<br />
I glanced over at Weird Beard.<br />
Weird Beard glanced over at me.<br />
We sat there in silence for a minute or two while host dad topped us off.<br />
"Hey," said Weird Beard. "Notice anything unusual about the wine?"<br />
"Yes. You?"<br />
"There isn't anything in it."<br />
"You're right."<br />
"It's grape juice."<br />
"It <i>is </i>grape juice."<br />
Panic.<br />
"You'd better call the Irishman," said Weird Beard.<br />
<br />
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<br />
"Yes, boyyyyy," said the Irishman. "What's the crack?"<br />
"You still coming over?"<br />
"Aye, reckon I'll be there in an <i>heur</i>, so I will."<br />
"You might want to bring some party supplies."<br />
"To a <i>supra? </i>Are ye mental?"<br />
"The wine," I said. "It's grape juice."<br />
"Aye, fer fook's sakes ... "<br />
<br />
Pounding shot after shot of bootleg Welch's. Livers growing bored. Kidneys failing. One by one, the neighbors came tromping in. A digital camera was produced. Videos were taken of Weird Beard and I sitting around, self-conscious as all get-out. The Irishman arrived with a mysterious black bag that he stashed in my room. He sat down and chugged grape juice with us. It was immediately clear that nobody liked the Irishman.<br />
<br />
My host sister pulled me aside.<br />
"The Irishman is very bad," she said. "Very bad. He have a very bad character."<br />
"He's been here ten minutes," I said.<br />
"He is stupid and very bad."<br />
"Fair enough."<br />
<br />
My host mom mocked the Irishman's English, made a chipmunk face and went <i>bwah-bwah-bwah-bwahhh</i>. Weird Beard shook his head.<br />
"Is your host mom making fun of the Irishman?"<br />
"I believe she is."<br />
"That's bullshit," he said. "Only <i>we're </i>allowed to make fun of the Irishman."<br />
<br />
The Irishman had broken out in a sweat. He is a man who knows when he is unwelcome. He tried to ingratiate himself with the family the only way he knew how: by speaking lousy Georgian to my two year old host cousin.<br />
<br />
"<i>Batara bichi! Modi, modi!</i>" he cooed. "Little boy! Come here!"<br />
My host cousin shook his head, no. He wasn't going anywhere.<br />
"<i>Batara bichi!</i>" scoffed my host mom later in the evening. "Your Irish friend is an idiot."<br />
<br />
Leslie arrived and could immediately sense that things had gotten weirder than planned. Everyone marveled at her red hair. She had stolen the show and I could tell she wanted badly to leave. To her credit, she stayed until the bitter end. We knocked back grape juice, took frequent bathroom breaks, snuck off to the mysterious black bag for a nip or two, reconvened in the interrogation chamber for up-close videos and personal questions and mild humiliations of all sorts. It was nine PM at a Georgian <i>supra</i> and the four of us were stone sober. Under much host familial pressure, I finally caved and did a miserable breakdance routine on the living room floor. Thank God they got <i>that</i> on video. When I returned to the couch, Weird Beard was shaking his head with disgust.<br />
<br />
"Enough is enough," he said. "Dinner's over. We've been polite. We've done our bit. Let's head into town and speak some English."<br />
"You think we can pull it off?"<br />
"I'll do the talking," he said. "Your host family actually <i>likes</i> me."<br />
We looked over at the Irishman, who lowered his head.<br />
<br />
Weird Beard got to work on my host dad, who was several sheets to the wind thanks to a secret stash that his best friend - a sixty year old geezer with the improbable name of Hooha - had smuggled in without sharing. My host dad agreed to summon a taxi. I went to my room, put on some cologne, took a little nip, ran into Weird Beard in the hallway.<br />
"We're good," he said. "I made your dad promise not to tell your mom."<br />
"Excellent."<br />
"Ten minutes. I'll give the signal."<br />
<br />
It was very nearly the perfect crime. A cab pulled up in front of my house. My host mom was next door. The four of us bid the village adieu and piled into the cab.<br />
<br />
"Tsalenjikha," said Weird Beard, "and step on it."<br />
The cabby wouldn't budge. He was looking at something in his rear view mirror. Objects are closer than they appear, et cetera.<br />
The back door shot open.<br />
"<i>Kiti!</i> Where are you going?"<br />
"Um," I said. "We. We are going. Going into town. Be back soon."<br />
"Why? What's in town?"<br />
"It was good," I said. "A good evening. Thank you for everything. But now. Together we will go. To town. Be back soon."<br />
"They can go," she said. "<i>You </i>cannot go."<br />
"But - "<br />
"<i>You </i>cannot go."<br />
"But - "<br />
"But what?"<br />
"But ... <i>me katsi var,</i>" I squeaked. <i>I am a man.</i><br />
"You are going nowhere."<br />
She grabbed my leg and started tugging.<br />
"What the hell," I said.<br />
"Drive," Weird Beard said to the cabby.<br />
"Don't drive!" I shouted.<br />
I was halfway out the door.<br />
"Just go," said Weird Beard. "Now."<br />
I could feel my shoe sliding off.<br />
"Man up," Weird Beard said to me. "Say something!"<br />
I could feel my leg sliding off.<br />
"Mom," I said. "Mom."<br />
She looked up.<br />
"I'm 29 years old," I said. "I'm going into town with my friends."<br />
"Okay," she said. "But you're in big trouble when you get back."<br />
She slammed the door, very nearly on my leg.<br />
"Are we ready?" asked the cabby. He was half-asleep by then.<br />
I looked around and nodded.<br />
"Yes. I do believe we're ready."<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, no official minutes were kept for the night that followed. Our minds lapsed into time lapse mode. Weird Beard caught a cab home at some point. Leslie lived just down the road. The Irishman and I hiked eight kilometers in pitch darkness back to my house, ogled the constellations and waxed metaphysical along the way, slipped on cow patties times beyond number, got lost twice before realizing we weren't lost at all, finally slipped past the guard dog, tiptoed past my host mom's lair, and bolted ourselves in my room. We had a good laugh about it all and went to sleep. I woke up at eight the next morning.<br />
<br />
"<i>Jee</i>sus," groaned the Irishman. "Where the fook am I?"<br />
"My house," I said. I threw on my suit coat.<br />
"What time is it?"<br />
"Eight."<br />
"What the fook are you doing?"<br />
"Going to work," I said.<br />
"How is that even fooking possible?"<br />
"It just is," I said. "Get some sleep. I'll be back in a couple of hours. Want me to lock the door?"<br />
The Irishman was already asleep.<br />
<br />
An hour or so later, my host mom broke into my room to do God knows what. She found a half-naked Irishman in my bed. A certain scene from <i>The Godfather </i>springs to mind. My only regret is not having been there to witness it. <br />
<br />
So there was that.<br />
<br />
At any rate. Looks like I'm the only <i>tamada</i> left. So I'd like to use this final paragraph to propose a toast, if you don't mind. Here's to Georgia. Here's to America. Here's to David Bowie. Here's to <i>The Wire</i>. Here's to friendship. And here's to host mothers. <i>Sheni dedas, gaumarjos!</i>ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-2013485853114743102013-03-23T11:58:00.001+04:002013-03-23T14:45:22.191+04:00Racecar is No Longer My Favorite Palindrome (or Is My Favorite Palindrome No Longer Racecar?)<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Happy host families are all alike; every unhappy host family is unhappy in its own way."<br />
<i>- Leo "Tolstoy" Garbleson (TLG Volunteer, Samegrelo Province, Class of 1972)</i><i><br /></i></blockquote>
My host mom came home one afternoon with a great big plastic bag full of crap. I was reading on the porch. She reached into the bag and pulled out a teal green t-shirt. She unfurled it in front of me. I saw that it had racecars on the front. The hounds of dread bayed from the very depths of my bowels.<br />
<br />
"So. What do you think?"<br />
"It's interesting."<br />
"Try it on."<br />
"But - "<br />
"But what?"<br />
<br />
I looked around, searching all of spacetime for a zippered pocket to climb out through.<br />
<br />
"Nothing," I said. "I'll go try it on."<br />
<br />
I went to my room and paced around its perimeter. The wood creaked and groaned under my Pumas. I launched into a soliloquy of sorts, the kind of monologue between internal and external where you gesticulate and mouth foul words to yourself without making so much as a sound. The t-shirt lay spread out across my bed. It was at least a double-XL, the size of a national flag. <i>Criminy</i>, I mouthed, <i>I'm not that fat!</i> <br />
<br />
I'm colorblind, so I've never fully experienced teal, but this shirt was the sort of color that violated even my stunted sense of sartorial taste. And like I said, there were fucking racecars on the front.<br />
<br />
Finally, after a moment of meditation, in which I sat at the edge of my bed with my fingers massaging my forehead and my palm shielding my eyes from the absurdity of the life I'd so freely chosen for myself, I unbuttoned the dress shirt I'd worn to work, navigating the sleeve somewhat skillfully over the bazooka of a cast entombing my left arm, and I put on the racecar shirt. Then I took my paisley patterned sling and slung it over my neck, stuck my busted arm through the sling. I walked over to the mirror. I wanted to beat the shit out of my own reflection. I looked like some sort of white trash time-traveling trainwreck. I saw that there was a price tag stuck to the front of the shirt. Fifteen <i>lari. </i>I wasn't sure whether that meant the shirt was a bargain or an egregious waste of money that would've been better spent on any salable object in the known universe. Pretty sure the latter, seeing how we'd all been eating cucumbers for a month. Either way, I thought I'd play it safe and leave the price tag on.<br />
<br />
I trudged out to the porch, shamefaced as a shaven dog. My host mom clapped her hands. My host sister nodded approvingly. My host brother sat motionless with his arms crossed; he knew the score. I did a little pirouette, then I went back to my room, removed the shirt, and locked myself in with Tolstoy for the remainder of the evening.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
You'd think that would've been the end of it, but the next morning, my host mom refused to let me go to school until I'd changed out of what I was wearing and put on the shirt. I contended that it was cold - and indeed it was - but in the end, I was badgered into wearing it as an undershirt. Later, in the teacher's lounge, my host mom got me to lift up my sweater so that seven fluorescent yellow racecars could come zooming out from my torso, and the old ladies applauded. What a good host mother you have, she buys you t-shirts with racecars on the front, et cetera.<br />
<br />
As the weeks walked by and the northern hemisphere warmed, it became harder and harder for me to find a convincing excuse to not be wearing the shirt at all times, short of coming out and telling my host mom directly that I hated it because it made me look like a child. In retrospect, that is precisely the tact I ought to have taken. Instead, I remained polite, lowered my head, hemmed and hawed and mumbled whenever the shirt came up. <i>Why aren't you wearing your shirt? </i>I wore it yesterday. <i>You wear the same thing every day all the time! </i>But it's not clean? <i>None of your clothes are clean! </i>I don't like racecars? <i>You watch auto racing every day with your brother! </i>(This latter was true, but only because, as far as Georgian satellite TV went, auto racing was marginally preferable to the Turkmenistani Comedy Hour.)<br />
<br />
Things finally came to a head towards the ass-end of my first semester. A friend of mine in the next town over was having her students put on a choral concert. It was something of a farewell concert, too, because she was leaving Georgia a couple weeks after. In short, it was a formal occasion. I put on a dress shirt, a tie, and my best suit coat (which also happens to be my worst suit coat). I'd ironed some slacks the night before by stacking a row of books across them and leaving them atop the Soviet-era upright piano. The next afternoon, on my way out the door, I bumped into my host mom coming home from school.<br />
<br />
"You are going to the concert?"<br />
"Yes, I'm going to the concert. See you later!"<br />
"Wait," she said. "Where's your shirt?"<br />
"Shirt?"<br />
I tugged at my collar.<br />
"No," she said, "your <i>shirt</i>."<br />
"I'm wearing two of them."<br />
A standoff, so it was.<br />
"You know the shirt," she said. "You know, <i>the shirt</i>."<br />
I nodded.<br />
"I know <i>the shirt.</i>"<br />
"So why aren't you wearing it?"<br />
I said nothing.<br />
"Go put it on," she said.<br />
"It's a concert," I said. "Suit. Tie. Pants."<br />
"<i>Shirt.</i>"<br />
"I'm already late. I've got to go."<br />
<br />
I dribbled forward and she boxed out the lane. Basketball fundamentals. I juked left. She mirror juked right. The shirt, the shirt, <i>the shirt</i>. This went on for an unbelievably long time. <br />
<br />
Imagine for a moment a 29 year old man showing up to a choir concert in a XXXL teal green t-shirt with racecars zipping across the front. I wasn't having it. And my host mom, all of 35, wasn't having it from her end, either. Like I said: it was a standoff, so it was. I would be inclined to say that I prevailed in the end, except that as I was making my way down the stairs, I realized that I had no idea what time the marshrutka into town came by. So I was thrust back into the role of the dependent, racecar-t-shirt-wearing host child.<br />
<br />
"Uh, hey, mom," I said over my shoulder. "When's the next marshrutka?"<br />
"3:30," she murmured.<br />
<br />
A glance at my watch: it was 2:30. The concert was at five. Determined not to show up a sweaty, bedraggled mess, I opted not to walk the eight kilometers into town and sat down instead with my host brother in the living room and watched auto racing for about a half hour.<br />
<br />
When I went out to the front lawn to catch the marshrutka, my host mom tagged along. 3:30 came and went. No marshrutka.<br />
<br />
"Say, Levani," she called to a neighbor. "When is the last marshrutka into town?"<br />
"Same as it ever was," said the neighbor. "2:30."<br />
"Oops," said my host mom. "You'd better start walking."<br />
<br />
Suffice it to say, I missed the concert.<br />
<br />
I don't mean to slag off on my Georgian host family more than I ought to. Really, I thought they were wonderful people. If nothing else, they kept me alive for ten months, despite my best efforts. But to quote Garbleson (1972), "every unhappy host family is unhappy in its own way." And there were times in which I was very unhappy, indeed.<br />
<br />
Tragically, I do not have any pictures of the t-shirt, or of myself wearing the t-shirt. If I recall correctly, I included the t-shirt in my outgoing trash the very night of the concert I missed. I was in a foul mood. Waste not, want not, I know; but also true: waste if you want not. More to the point: I don't have many pictures of anything from Georgia, because someone in my host family ransacked my room, found my camera, used it, destroyed it, and returned it to my desk drawer as though nothing had happened - and that was well before any of this had happened.<br />
<br />
So there was that.ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-78990498612815097232013-03-20T14:15:00.001+04:002013-03-20T18:21:04.883+04:00St. Michelin<i>For a long time I used to go to bed early ... </i>If nothing else, ten months in a Georgian village is a good way to catch up on one's reading, and one's sleep.<br />
<br />
I was lying in bed around nine PM, trying to read Proust. My host family was outside, being loud for the sake of being loud, on a warm-ish evening in early spring. It would be easy to say here, from the vantage point of The Reader, that I, as a cultural ambassador, should've been out there in the lawn being loud with the fam instead of locking myself away in my room with a book, but my days by then were a hyper-social grind, surrounded by humanoids at all times, contorting my face into a smile as my every little quirk (of which there are many) was dissected by people who otherwise knew nothing about me, all in a grammatically taxing backwoods Transcaucasian dialect, to boot. For sanity's sake, it was necessary to hide out in my room once in a while. It is true that for a long time I used to go to bed early.<br />
<br />
During the day, I did my job with patience and grace, I think. I taught my classes. I helped my host sister with her English and her German, even her Mandarin Chinese. I engineered bizarre third world assault weapons with my host brother and we tested them out on our host cousin, with satisfactory results. I complimented the hell out of my host mother's potato-and-cucumber cooking and watched the boob tube with host dad until my brainstuff came bleeding out both ears. But I always made sure that the nights were my own. Every moment I spent alone was sacred to me. And no matter how much sleep I got, sleep was sacred, too. I could dream there. I could've stayed in bed forever. I tried to.<br />
<br />
<i>For a long time ... for a long time ... </i>I read until my eyes crossed and the words on the page congealed into an ink-black clot. I didn't read very far. I put the book down, walked across the room to switch off the lights, and flopped down in bed. <i>... I used to go to bed early ... </i><br />
<br />
Ten minutes later, I was awakened by the pick-pock of pebbles pitched up against my window. Then, the familiar cry:<br />
<br />
<i>Kiti! Ki-ti! Ki-tiiiii!</i><br />
<br />
I had learned to shake off host parental summonses by feigning some sort of coma, but I knew game-theory-wise that on the night in question, the annoyance of confronting my host mom head-on would amount to marginally less net annoyance than lying awake while she threw pebbles at my window for the better part of an hour. In my boxers, then, I unbolted my window and, like a minor league pope, raised my arm in salutation and gave my host family my blessing.<br />
<br />
"Huh?" I said.<br />
"Kiti," host mom barked, "let's go!"<br />
"Where?"<br />
"Get down here! Let's go!"<br />
"Where are we going?"<br />
"Will you just get down here so we can go?"<br />
"But," I objected, "I don't know where we're going!"<br />
"We're going to see the <i>[Georgian word I was not familiar with at the time]</i>!"<br />
"What's a <i>[Georgian word]</i>?"<br />
"You'll see when we get there! Let's go!"<br />
"But I want to sleep and I don't have any clothes on and I don't know where we're going and I don't know what a <i>[GW] </i>is!"<br />
A host maternal snort.<br />
"Just come down here! You'll see!"<br />
<br />
There was a time, during my second of four puberties, when I full-throatedly embraced the Nietzschean philosophy of <i>yea-saying, </i>which I took rather too literally to mean that I should say <i>yea</i> to each and every odd little invitation thrown my way. It wasn't until my third of four puberties that I realized how unsustainable a principle this was when put into practice, both because it resulted in a lot of undeserved hangovers, and because, when living abroad, one receives a lot of invitations to do a lot of things, and saying yes to all of them leads to madness or, much worse, to abject boredom. By now, in the thick of my fourth puberty, I have abandoned Nietzschean <i>yea-saying </i>altogether<i>, </i>which doesn't at all make me a <i>nay-sayer: </i>I simply say "maybe" a lot, up until the point that someone with as many balls as my host mom finally badgers me into to mumbling a forlorn <i>yeah, I guess</i>.<br />
<br />
I put on my pants, hosed myself down with Axe® Body Spray. (Dark Temptation™, in case you're curious.) I returned to the window. It was impossible to tell, engaged in a tense trans-fenestral shouting match with my host mom, what exactly a <i>[GW] </i>could mean for my evening. In all likelihood, it would amount to another rusty link in a very long chain of underwhelming rural Georgian experiences. But there was a chance it could turn out to be one of the best nights of my life. That's how Georgia works, if it can be said to work at all. All or nothing, but more than likely, nothing at all.<br />
<br />
Not yet abandoning sleep, not yet abandoning Proust, I tried to paint my host mom into a linguistic corner.<br />
<br />
"What's a <i>[GW] </i>like? Is it big, small, good, bad, hot, cold?"<br />
"You'll see when we get there! But we have to go <i>now!</i>"<br />
<br />
I threw up my hands.<br />
<br />
"Okay. <i>Why </i>are we going to see the <i>[GW]</i>? Is there a why, at least?"<br />
"Because," she said, "it is a Georgian holiday!"<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I still had no idea what a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">[GW] </i>was, but it was at least a something imbued with some
kind of cultural significance, so it was the kind of something I was <i>obligated</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>to go see, something ceremonial and traditional and
uniquely Georgian, and therefore inescapable.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Alright, ma. One second," I said. "<i>Pisi minda.</i>"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I gotta pee.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I went to the bathroom to take a whiz and as I shook
everything out the nicotine patch on my right bicep slipped off and fell into
the toilet.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Shit," I said to myself. "No sense in saving that one."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I flushed it down.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then my phone blew up. I didn't even have to look at the damned thing to know that it was The Irishman.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Yes boyyyyy," he said. "What's the crack?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"I'm about to go do something underwhelming with my host family," I said. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Aye, what is it then?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"I have no idea. Just know that it's going to be underwhelming, probably."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Underwhelming, so it is? Aye, keep me posted, then."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"I know how you love that underwhelming shit."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Aye, it's Georgia, so it is. What else is there?" </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I
went downstairs and out to the lawn and my host mom and I – along with my two
host cousins and my host aunt – went sauntering off down the dark-ass gravel
road together. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Do you know who St. Mary is?" asked my host mom. <br />
"Mary? Host Mother of God?"<br />
"Do you
have her in America?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Yes," I said. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Tell me who she is, then."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"She had a baby."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Who was her baby?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"<i>Jesusi</i><i>,</i>" I guessed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Who's that?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"I don't know how to say 'Jesus' in Georgian."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Jew-sos?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Forget it."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The wonderfully-named Iago came ambling up the road
towards us. He and I shook hands.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Iago," I said. "How are you?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"I have a terrible hangover."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Shouldn't have drank so much without me," I said.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We exchanged a fistpound of sorts, then proceeded together towards the traditional Georgian whatever-it-was in the distance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The stench grew stronger and stronger. As we approached, I could make out a flickering, dancing light splashing up against a
graystone wall. My host mom grabbed me by the wrist – the one I'd broken – and poked me
in the ribs.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"See!" she cried. "See!"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"What is it?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I saw her eyes roll in the darkness.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"You don't know? It's a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">[GW]</i>! Idiot."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ah, yes. A <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fire</i>. I
nodded, mouthed the word to myself, repeated it, was surprised I hadn't learned
it before, decided I'd remember it. Could be useful. A fire.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As we drew nearer to the shallow blaze, I could make out the
slanted silhouettes of the village winos embossed by the flames
and then yes, what I'd perhaps known
it would be all along. It was a tire fire in a back alley. A bunch of crap thrown into the center of a tire. And that crap was set on fire. So it was. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"How beautiful!" cried my host mom. "Do you like it?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Yes," I said numbly, but did not elaborate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"This is Georgian tradition," she said. "Do you have this tradition in America?"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Some people do."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We watched the tire melt. I detached myself from my host mom, aligned myself with the winos, asked them how they were doing. Not surprisingly, they all had
hangovers. A wino asked me for a cigarette and I told him I didn't have any. This
surprised him. It surprised me. We stood there in a circle, mostly silently, watching the tire fire
die. Occasionally, a wino would rustle up the flames with a stick, or throw in
a stray branch. But the fire was done for. We'd just arrived; we'd be going
home soon. And then the little kids started throwing in plastic bags, candy
wrappers, anything inorganic they could find to keep the fire alive. And the melting plastic and the
smoldering rubber and the crunchy crap of the modern world twisted together into a nasty black snake and the wind kicked
up and blew it everywhere. And I turned away and shielded my face and,
for the first time in recent memory, I coughed a long, clean, healthy cough.</div>
<br />ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-25340816594924364632013-03-20T07:21:00.002+04:002013-03-20T07:51:34.575+04:00Ode to an Expired Expatlet me lose a tooth in Georgia<br />
let me lose a limb in Libya<br />
a finger here, a toenail there<br />
let me lose my hair in America<br />
<br />
let me lose my mind in China<br />
let me lose all my money at the bar<br />
let me lose my cat and have it come back<br />
let me forget I've lost anything at all<br />
<br />
let me lose my life somewhere or other<br />
the where or when or why doesn't matter<br />
but whenever I lose it, let them scatter<br />
my ashes all around everywhere<br />
<br />
to sink into the sea<br />
or seep into the soil<br />
to rise into the air<br />
in any case, to sleepExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-7361916126452100152013-02-16T11:31:00.000+04:002013-02-18T11:54:39.020+04:00Send Away the ClownsFirst day of school. March something-or-other. Walking through three feet of snow both ways is considerably less impressive to the old-ass hard-asses of the world when it only takes you five minutes both ways. Flanked on either side by a posse of host familial strangers much shorter than me: my host mom, my host sister, my host brother and my host cousin. My host mom is the music teacher. All the host youngins are my students. Yes, I thought to myself all along the short walk to school, and thought to myself once again all along the short walk back home: I can see how this might get a bit claustrophobic after a while.<br />
<br />
On my way down the hall for the very first time - tromping through the stunned hordes of children like a freakishly double-browed and red-bearded Godzilla - I spotted a bright yellow flyer on the wall and, at a glance, with equal parts fascination and terror, comprehended its significance.<br />
<br />
"Hey maw," I said, <i>"circusi."</i><br />
<br />
In the same way that one can bullshit one's way through Spanish by sticking the letter O at the end of every other word, rudimentary Georgian can sometimes be bullshitted by appending the letter I to the end of everything. <i>Circusi</i>. A circus was going down that afternoon. On the first day of school.<br />
<br />
"Yes," said host mom. "Later <i>circusi.</i> But now, <i>classi</i>."<br />
<br />
I was led upstairs to the teachers' lounge - a gray peeled-paint sort of room every bit as inviting as an interrogation chamber - where I was fawned over by the middle-aged women of the village. I swiftly became the center of their affection, and I would remain so for the ten months to follow. They asked me whether I liked Georgia and I said, sure. They asked me whether I liked Georgian food, and I lied yes. This garnered a small round of applause, and the pit of my elbow was squeezed until it hurt. My praises were sung, mostly by way of talking trash about the volunteer who came before me, a poor young Asian girl that I was given to understand had a weak stomach when it came to Georgian spices and Georgian culture to boot. Clearly, I was different. I was the chosen one. The golden boy. I wouldn't fuck off after three months like she did.<br />
<br />
They asked me if I had a wife and I was dense enough to say no. All eyes in the room spotlighted upon a dark-haired woman a couple years my junior who was sitting, shielding her face, blushing, busily sketching a feminine flank into a notebook. The art teacher. Much laughter all around. She did not look up. I looked down. Sighing inwardly, I wondered if I was the sort of dumbass who could be peer pressured into living in a Georgian village forever.<br />
<br />
I retreated to the window by way of exhuming myself from marriage. I enjoyed a smoke. Cigs are fifty cents a pack in Georgia. Too cheap to quit. Outside, beauty: green and white and cold, smoke drifting up from the chimneys, the thatched roofs of the village barns weighed low under last night's deluge of snow. The white-streaked crags of the Lower Caucasus bore down upon the village, impossible for me to tell how near or how distant; Midwesterners do not have a sense of perspective. The bell rang: an actual bell, rung every 45 minutes by way of a cord pulled by a student too short to reach it without help. The bell rang. All the teachers scuttled away to their classes. I had no schedule. It was my first day. Nobody had told me where to go or what to do, so I sat down in the teacher's lounge and did nothing. I think I read something. I forget what I was reading at the time. Probably something pretentious. Barthelme, maybe?<br />
<br />
After a while, the door shuddered open and an old woman entered. I greeted her in Georgian and she replied in the Queen's English. I put my book down and braced myself for an eccentric. While it is not always the case, in my limited experience, fluent non-native English speakers who happen to reside in the middle of nowhere tend to come with a suitably bizarre backstory.<br />
<br />
"How are you?" I asked.<br />
"As always," she said, "I am not so good."<br />
"I'm sorry to hear that. What's wrong?"<br />
"There is nothing to be done," she said and shrugged. "What is your name?"<br />
"Keith," I said. "Or <i>Kiti.</i>"<br />
One learns to transmogrify one's name in places like this.<br />
"<i>Kiti,</i>" she said. "Oh, that simply won't do. Don't you know what <i>kiti</i> means in Mingrelian?"<br />
"Do I want to know?"<br />
"It means, yes, <i>finger.</i>"<br />
<br />
I shook my head. My name has never traveled well. In Korea, it meant "kiss." In Mexico, it was synonymous with KITT, the talking car from <i>Knight Rider</i>. Not too bad. But then, in Poland, it meant AIDS.<br />
<br />
"We must give you, yes, a Georgian name."<br />
"As long as it's not AIDS," I said. "What are some good Georgian names?"<br />
"Levani," she said, counting her arthritic <i>kiti</i>s with an arthritic <i>kiti</i>, "Lasha, Luka ... Soso - "<br />
"I don't like Soso," I interjected. "Too mediocre."<br />
She jumped the pun.<br />
"... Shotiko, Zaza ... "<br />
I was about to express some fondness for Zaza when she raised a withered hand to stop me.<br />
"What about Giorgi?"<br />
<br />
A brief note on etymology at this point. Georgia's real, actual, in-country name for itself is <i>Sakartvelo</i>. And nobody in the world, so far as I am aware, calls the place <i>Sakartvelo</i>. Everywhere else on the planet calls this dinky little pancreas-shaped country "Georgia," or some variation thereupon. The origins of the name "Georgia" are unclear, but there are plenty of theories floating around, all of them more or less equally plausible. "Georgia" closely resembles the Greek γεωργός - meaning <i>tiller of the land </i>- which makes a great deal of sense, given Georgia's proximity to both Greece and the Fertile Crescent. St. George also happens to be Georgia's favorite saint, so it is possible that the country was nicknamed by association, the same way you'd call a dude Nickelback Douchebag if said douchebag showed up to work every day in a Nickelback t-shirt. There's a chance the name comes from ancient Persian, from whence the Russian exonym for Georgia - <i>Gruziya - </i>is derived, which makes sense given Georgia's proximity to Iran. My theory belongs to the St. George camp, but differs a bit: I am of the mind that early European explorers stumbled across this weird little bumfuck commune on the Black Sea, found it overrun with fat men profoundly drunk on their own homemade wine, all of them named Giorgi (after the saint, of course), and they accordingly labeled it Georgia: Land of Giorgis. This is a roundabout way of saying that Giorgi is the most generic of all possible Georgian names, and I certainly didn't want to adopt it as my own.<br />
<br />
"Giorgi sounds good," I said.<br />
"Excellent," she said. "Then I shall call you Giorgi."<br />
"I don't think I caught your name."<br />
"Zhuzhuna."<br />
"Zublubla?"<br />
"Yes," she said. "Zhuzhuna."<br />
<br />
The bell rang. Someone rang the bell. I had my first class to teach. My second and third, too. I don't remember them, nor do I seem to have taken any notes on the experience. But rest assured that by lunchtime, I knew full well that none of my co-teachers could speak English any better than my students could.<br />
<br />
My fourth class was preempted by a choral concert put on by the students. In my honor, apparently. I was ushered into a bench seat in the far back of a small, low-ceilinged auditorium, and watched for an hour with the sweetest, most paternal gaze I could muster as my host siblings and host cousins and host cousins twice or thrice removed filed out on stage and delivered their pieces to the tune of the detuned piano comp-work of my host mom. The teenagers in the auditorium were squirrely as fuck. Same is true of the teachers. Same is true of the janitors. Nobody seemed to be watching the performances. They were all staring back at me and giggling every time I blew my nose. The kids were shoving each other into me, trying to get a rise out of the 29 year old, red-bearded foreigner. I ignored them the best I could. I smiled sweetly and stared straight ahead or, when that failed, I busied myself sifting through all two pages of the concert program, squinting at the Georgian squiggles. It was a good show. My host brother was awkward and bashful. My host cousin performed admirably, I thought, but that's probably just because she's cute.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
Afterwards, I tried to walk back up to the teacher's lounge for a smoke, but Zhuzhuna caught me by the pit of the elbow and invited me out for some coffee.<br />
<br />
"Coffee," I said, perplexed and jonesing. "Where?"<br />
"Why, in the canteen, of course."<br />
<br />
She led me into another interrogation chamber downstairs where there was a wood stove in the corner and a wide, flat table arrayed with starchy Georgian goodies: greasy potato cakes, raspberry pastries, loaves of thoroughly leavened bread.<br />
<br />
<i>"</i><i>Erti khava,"</i> I squeaked, testing out the only Georgian I knew. I held up one finger. Then I glanced over, remembered Zhuzhuna. I held up two fingers. "Make it <i>ori</i>."<br />
<br />
The old lady behind the table smiled, flashed a gilded grill.<br />
<br />
"Your Georgian is very good," she crowed.<br />
"It's so-so," I said. <br />
No modesty involved. For the first time in my living-abroad life, I'd opted to show up totally nude. I hadn't bothered to learn anything of the language at all.<br />
<br />
There is no such thing as Georgian coffee, not unless you count Nescafé. Georgians drink Turkish coffee. It comes in little shot glasses, more sugar and foam and coffee grounds than caffeine. I drank mine in a gulp or two, was embarrassed to discover that Zhuzhuna was still savoring hers. So I ordered another round. Zhuzhuna paid for both of us and shuffled off to her next class. The bell rang. Someone rang the bell. I sat there like a dork at a table by myself, reading my Barthelme, until the babushka barista gestured for me to sit down next to the stove. I did so gladly. Even with three sweaters on, I was freezing my ass off.<br />
<br />
The bell rang and a man came swaggering in. I recognized him from somewhere. He was wearing a bootleg Phat Farm windbreaker. In his left hand was a twelve ounce Pepsi bottle filled to the brim with an ominously clear liquid. I stood up to shake his hand and he gave me a hug. I looked around for campus security. After a while, I was given to understand that this was the P.E. teacher.<br />
<br />
"You like <i>cha cha?" </i>he asked. He flicked an index finger at his esophagus.<br />
<br />
Liquor is very much a matter of personal preference, but I will go out on a limb here and say that nobody likes <i>cha cha</i>. Not even Georgians. I have written <a href="http://expatriateact.blogspot.com/2010/07/off-rickshaw-libertines-guide-to-living.html">extensively</a> about the vile intoxicants of the Far Eastern World, but few beverages (if any) could give Chinese <i>baijiu </i>a run for its money in terms of sheer vileness. Georgian <i>c</i><i>ha cha </i>is pretty much the worst drink in the world.<br />
<br />
"I like <i>cha cha,</i>" I said, out of well-learned politeness, "but now, no. I'm at work."<br />
"Fuck work. I'm at work, too. Just one," he said, reciting the refrain of the lonesome alcoholic. "Just one."<br />
I looked from the babushka barista to the P.E. teacher. She shook her head. I shook mine.<br />
"No," I said. "I don't want."<br />
"Of course you do," he said. "<i>Gogo, </i>two shot glasses!"<br />
<br />
The babushka barista did her job. The shot glasses appeared. He poured us a couple. I saw the clear liquid sitting there, gleaming in the grayness. I could smell it. Enough to make you puke by smell alone. It sat there shimmering like the desperate glint in a car salesman's eye. We were at school, fer chrissakes. I shook my head, no.<br />
<br />
"I don't want," I said in my crappy Georgian. Then, in English, more to myself than to anyone else, "Fucking A, I'd get my ass fired over this bullshit right here."<br />
<br />
He squinted at me like he didn't quite believe who I was. Then he pounded both shots and muttered something to himself in Georgian, probably something to the effect that I was a little bitch and not quite a man. Then he invited me upstairs to the exercise room, where he kicked my ass in ping-pong several times over. Afterwards, I shuffled on back down to the canteen, where I found my unfinished shot of Turkish coffee waiting for me. The canteen was pleasantly empty. I hadn't had a moment to myself since I'd arrived in the village.<br />
<br />
Aborting my reverie, an old man came in a moment later, studied the room, and ordered a coffee. He sat down across from me. He was a man much older than his years. His face was creased and blotched with the sort of age that doesn't come with aging alone. For all that, he appeared to be wearing makeup. I'd just learned that the village drunk was in fact the P.E. teacher, so I was ready to assume that this guy was the director of the school or something.<br />
<br />
"Nice to meet you," I said. "You a teacher here?"<br />
"No," he said. <i>"Me var clowni."</i><br />
<br />
Refer back to aforementioned append-the-I rule. I understood right away. <i>Me var clowni - </i>I am a clown.<i> </i>I'd missed the circus, somehow. This was the afterparty. Here, indeed, was my first Georgian clown.<br />
<br />
I reached out to shake his hand and, upon shaking it, realized that he didn't have any fingers. It was just a palm. I let go of his hand, stared at it unintentionally. It fell dead in my lap. He stuffed it back in his tri-colored jacket pocket. Sadness seemed to be chiseled into the contours of the clown's face. The sad clown. An anti-archetype, of sorts. And I, the narcissistic volunteer. Both of us inversions of what we were supposed to be. Both of us failures, in some sense. I wanted to ask him what it was like to be a clown, but my Georgian wasn't anywhere near good enough. So I just asked him how he was doing, and he said he was doing okay. We sat across from each other in silence, staring at the floor. A few minutes later, Zhuzhuna came in with another babushka or two. They sat down on either side of me, across from the clown. Ignoring the clown. They called for some more coffee. After a while, the clown left, leaving behind a fingerless fistful of change in his wake. I drank another coffee with the babushkas.<br />
<br />
They asked me if I liked Georgia. I said, sure. They asked me if I liked Georgian food and I lied yes. They asked me if I liked Georgian girls and giggled so much that their giggles obscured my answer. They ordered me a potato pastry and before I could refuse it, I found myself devouring it. After I'd finished it, I could feel my heart palpitating like a frog trapped in a brown paper bag. When we'd finished our coffee, the babushkas suggested that we move over and sit next to the stove. So we did. I sat there, the youngest person in the room by a couple decades, feeling very old, indeed. I ordered another coffee.<br />
<br />
"Do you drink much coffee, Giorgi?" asked Zhuzhuna.<br />
"Sure. Lots of coffee," I said.<br />
"I drink four or five cups a day," she said.<br />
"Turkish coffee?"<br />
"Yes."<br />
"We have much bigger coffee in America," I said. "I drink four or five cups of that."<br />
"That much coffee is bad for you, Giorgi," she said.<br />
"Probably."<br />
She ordered another round.<br />
<br />
We sat warming ourselves by the fire. When Georgians run out of kindling, they'll throw anything on the flames. Candy wrappers, white out, glue sticks. You wouldn't believe it. The fumes are enough to get you high, and not in the good way. The babushkas talked amongst themselves. I listened passively, trying to get a feel for the language, trying to decide whether it was more Slavic or more Middle Eastern or more Turkic or perhaps more of nothing of anything I was at all familiar with. And my mind wandered back to the clown, and I wondered how he'd lost all his fingers, whether that wasn't the reason he'd become a clown in the first place. I don't imagine one ever becomes a clown voluntarily. I wondered about the smokehound P.E. teacher, and I wondered about my students, and I wondered about my co-teachers and how they'd managed to teach English for so many years without learning a word of the damned language, and I wondered about myself, an English major, sitting there in a gulag coffee shop with a bunch of babushkas, wondered whether I could've ever imagined myself sitting here doing this sort of thing back when I was young and smart and full of vigor, wondered whether I'd gone off the rails at some point or whether I wasn't precisely where I was supposed to be: in a bumfuck Georgian village pretending to teach English, hanging out with fingerless Georgian clowns and drinking fake-ass coffee with a bunch of babushkas.<br />
<br />
"Georgi," said Zhuzhuna, and she gripped my wrist, "I must ask you."<br />
"Ask away."<br />
"What do you think of Rima?"<br />
"What's Rima?"<br />
"The art teacher," she said.<br />
"I don't know," I said. "I saw her earlier, but really - "<br />
"She's beautiful," said Zhuzhuna, "and very talented."<br />
"I like talented women," I said. "And I like beautiful women. That's true."<br />
"Think about it," said Zhuzhuna. "Think about it."<br />
<br />
I didn't think about it at all. I thought about going home and locking myself in my room and going to sleep. That's what I thought about. But in the early days anywhere, you tend to do what everyone else does. You tend to do what everyone else suggests. And short of marriage, I was cool with that. The babushkas finished their coffees and turned the shot glasses over on their dishes. I did the same. They laughed at me. Uproariously, as it were.<br />
<br />
"Oh, Giorgi," said Zhuzhuna, slapping me across the shoulder. "Giorgi!"<br />
"What the fuck did I do?"<br />
"You see, Giorgi," she said, "the coffee, this is Georgian tradition. Not for you. Do you believe in, yes, superstition?"<br />
"No," I said. "Not at all."<br />
"In Georgia, we believe in, yes, what it is, fortune telling."<br />
"Ah."<br />
"How do you say - the coffee grains?"<br />
"Yes."<br />
"We can read informations in the coffee grains."<br />
"What sorts of informations?"<br />
"Everything," she said, "but usually it is for women only."<br />
"Well," I said, "when in Rome."<br />
"Yes," she said, snagging my shot glass. "When in Rome."<br />
<br />
She tilted the little glass up to her eye, squinted at the streaky patterns therein. She giggled an old lady giggle.<br />
<br />
"Yes, this is very interesting, Giorgi."<br />
"What does it say?"<br />
"Well," she said, "do you have friends?"<br />
"Yes," I said, "some."<br />
"You are to have a very good weekend with friends," she said.<br />
"That's good."<br />
"Yes," she said, "but then you are to meet a man."<br />
Her face soured a bit. So did mine.<br />
"Is he a bad man?"<br />
"Yes," she said. She held the glass up to my face and pointed an untrimmed pinky-nail at a pair of boob-like white blobs therein. "He is a very bad man. He will lead you astray."<br />
"In which direction," I asked.<br />
But she was lost in the patterns of the coffee. She saw things in there that I had no interest in, things that meant nothing to me, things that meant everything to her and the babushkas sat around the table.<br />
"You are to meet," she said, "a bald-headed man. A man with a very large head. He will be wearing glasses, yes?"<br />
Checking her English. I nodded. Glasses.<br />
"You are to meet this man and it will have bad results," she said. "Very bad results."<br />
"But," I said, "this weekend with my friends. It's going to be good, no?"<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6RK2hp-gYRKknmmKeHsT6kvPWuua9AQnUzrctHqwQH6AdhQUBWpKGNCXyJcqwItB6Epq_MIhHPijO9QTA2CY1EpRTN29y90oz5gjuaT65NqW4IqpZD_diyES4NDrAiaF1l8fQRQ/s1600/hfgb4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
"Yes," she said. "The weekend will be good. But when you meet this man it will have very bad results. Very bad results."<br />
<br />
The bell rang. Someone rang the bell. We all got up to leave. I felt like hugging somebody. One does, after one's first full day in a strange, strange place. But me and the babushkas parted ways without fanfare. I walked home with my extended host family at the end of the day. Through three feet of snow. When I got home, I sat down by the stove and drank briefly with my host dad. Then I locked myself in my room and dicked around without the aid of the internet and fell asleep in three sweaters and dreamt dreams of amputated host clowns. I woke up in the middle of the night and snuck out to the patio for a smoke. Stared up at the sky for a good long while. You wouldn't believe how beautiful the stars are in this part of the world. Especially in winter. There's a scientific reason for that, but I'm too lazy to explain it. You stand there looking up at the stars and every second you just kind of know with some weird measure of comfort that your tiny little human eyes are drinking in the light of an immense beauty that knows nothing at all about you. Perhaps because it is part of you. Nobody knows. Hence the beauty of it. Or something like that.ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-33837043411970945082013-02-09T00:03:00.001+04:002013-02-09T00:27:50.260+04:00The Lay of the LandHere. Let me give you the tour.<br />
<br />
Ignoring for now the grim realities of actually driving a car in Georgia, I invite you to sit your virtual tookus down behind the wheel of a virtual 1977 Lada Niva. Your tookus and your Niva are parked somewhere in a town called Zugdidi, not too far away from my village of Jgali. Bear in mind that you're little more than a hawked loogey away from the De Facto Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, so it would be wise here to stop and ask a virtual local for directions –
and to listen very, very carefully.<br />
<br />
Driving northeastward, then, you'll find yourself winding your way up through the lowest of the Lower Caucasian foothills. Strange forests here. Tall trees tilted together like they were half-felled by an asteroid blast hundreds of years ago and kept on growing that way. There's a landslide section up ahead, but you're in a virtual car, so it's all good. Plenty of cows on the road. Plenty of cow shit on the road. No need to swerve. You'll pass villages with names like Kortskheli, Natsatu, Odishi, Chkaduashi, Chkhorotsku
–
names that are no less formidable when they are written in Georgian. More villages out here than people. No reason to stop. Nothing to see here. Most of these places are every bit as insubstantial as my native Jgali, some of them home to expats every bit as insubstantial as myself.<br />
<br />
Eventually, you'll arrive at a piddling little town called Tsalenjikha. For the better part of ten months, this was the closest thing I had to civilization. No reason to stop here, either, but you're free to snoop around a bit if you like. <br />
<br />
Something of a Wild West feel to the place. A sinkhole of a main drag lined with crumbling, leering storefronts. A couple barber shops. An internet café, if you want to call it that. A bar that is fresh out of beer. A café that is fresh out of coffee. A restaurant that's fresh out of everything on the menu, and fresh out of menus to boot. A supermarket that is markedly less than super. Slathered onto the rear end of Main Street is a swollen and bustling bazaar, a kind of mercantile tumor whose puddle-pocked alleyways are clogged with maneating pigeons and bellowing babushkas and bootlegged goods so laughably fake not even China could have produced them.<br />
<br />
This is Tsalenjikha. Where I used to go of an evening. To let it all hang out. If you will.<br />
<br />
On your way out of Tsalenjikha, you'll pass by a soccer stadium. I'm given to understand that Tsalenjikha has a pro team, but in all my time in Georgia I never saw a Georgian man run, so I'm not inclined to think that the team is terribly competitive. On the left, you'll notice a hospital (whose radiology department I owe no great favors). Turning right, then, and heading still further northeast, you will find yourself confronted with a landscape of immense and stultifying beauty
–
your first glimpse of the Caucasus mountains
–
but fear not: you'll get bored with it after a couple of months.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
This road
–
the road you're on now
–
I know better than any road on earth. It is about eight kilometers long and how comes I knows it so well is because I walked it up and down, in snow and in sweat, during the day and well after dark, cool and composed, half-crazed and consummately drunk
–
and you get to know a road pretty well when you get to see it that many ways.<br />
<br />
On the right, you'll pass a little copse of stunted trees bowing as if to drink from a water-filled ditch, and languishing in the ditch is the mossy skeleton of an old Soviet jalopy. The hills flatten into a steady plain for a click or two, columned with tall, proud oaks. On sunny afternoons, some of the less sickly looking free-range bulls like to come out here and kneel godlike in the close-cropped grass, in the shadows of the oaks. Up ahead, cords of thick black cable hang low over the road between a monstrous pair of electrical towers. If you roll the windows down, you can feel the buzzing in your skull. Glancing from left to right and left again, you'll see that the electrical towers go stomping like giant metal scarecrows up into the hills on the right, and up into the whitecapped mountains on the left. And if you're a guy like me, you'll find yourself kind of boggled and daunted and vaguely nauseated by the amount of effort that goes into this whole civilization thing.<br />
<br />
You'll pass a village on the left called Sachino. The World's Oldest Woman lives there. Or <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/antisa-khvichava-dead-dies-worlds-oldest-person-132-born-in-1880_n_1954921.html" target="_blank">used to</a>. There should be an asterisk involved somewhere around here.<br />
<br />
There's a fluorescent orange blob in the distance and as you get closer, the blob materializes into a backpack with legs, and as you come right up alongside it, the backpack with legs materializes into a lanky old bearded foreigner covered in sweat. That's me. Hey. Thanks for the ride.<br />
<br />
Yeah. You'll want to keep going straight. Up ahead there's a bridge. You mind stopping here? I gotta take a leak. And I want to show you something.<br />
<br />
This is our river, the Chanistsqali, which I'm told means "Red River," though it isn't particularly red or river-like at this juncture. Not so bad to look at, though.<br />
<br />
It flows down from a glacier just north of here, near a place called Squri. All year round, the river is the sort of cold that makes half-naked Georgian men half-grunt/half-ululate in the manner of Tim Allen. The water is so fresh that drinking it once will turn you into a water snob for life: what in the rest of the world passes for water is no longer water to you. It is dihydrogen monoxide and nothing more.<br />
<br />
The river is criss-crossed by nightmare bridges right out of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. I used to get vicariously nauseous watching my host brother go running across those bridges, and then I used to vicariously die watching him backflip into the river. He thought it was great fun.<br />
<br />
Lucky for us, the bridge we're driving over right now has no trouble supporting virtual cars. You'll see up ahead what looks like a gas station sign. From a gas station that time forgot. "Welcome to Jgali," says the rusted-out sign. But we're not quite in Jgali yet, even though we've passed the sign, because we still haven't left Tsalenjikha. A few hundred meters further along, there is a sign bearing the name "Tsalenjikha" with a red line through it
–
one of Georgia's more endearing highway mannerisms. Now we are in Jgali.<br />
<br />
I think we're in Jgali, anyway. None of the people I've talked to from this part of town seem to be aware that they live in Jgali. Jgali? Never heard of it. Jgali? No, it's up that way, up in the mountains. Most of them would tell you that they live in this or that village, villages I've never heard of, villages that may or may not exist. More villages than people out here.<br />
<br />
Check out these houses. Very Georgian. And I'm not talking Colonial.<br />
<br />
The word "wall" is open to interpretation in Georgia. The definition of a roof, too, is a matter of much hermeneutic speculation. Slanty roofs sometimes. Flat roofs mostly. Roofs of bark, roofs of rust. Aluminum roofs. Tin roofs. Hot tin roofs. Lukewarm tin roofs. Roofs that look like some fifty-foot bovine tromped through and took a massive crap on somebody's unfinished house. Tiled roofs ...<br />
<br />
All Georgian houses hide behind fences. Picket fences, barbed wire fences, chain link fences, rust-iron fences, fences with broken bottles and glass shards superglued across the top, Soviet holdover fences tagged with little license plates that bear the street name in Russian. I doubt the road we're on even has a name anymore.<br />
<br />
Most houses have water towers or wells in the front lawn. Water towers range from great big rusted-out vats that stand thirty feet in the air to padlocked wooden boxes a couple feet off the ground. Wells range from ornately siloed holes in the ground to, well, just regular old holes in the ground. We won't get into the toilet situation here. There's a chance we wouldn't get back out.<br />
<br />
There is one house that stands out from all the other houses in town. It, alone among the Georgian houses, is not a Georgian house. It belongs in the American suburbs. This is all very odd, because my host dad built it. Which is not to say that my host dad lives in it. No, the dude who lives there I've seen walking around in a suit, sporting an unusually full set of teeth. There are a couple of black BMWs parked out front. Slowing down as you pass, you'll of course wonder who the hell this guy killed to be able afford all this. I never did ask.<br />
<br />
There's a convenience store on the left. Keep driving. I owe that babushka five lari for the phone bill.<br />
<br />
On the right is a seven foot tall hobo who looks like a giant Bee Gee. Now we're in Jgali proper. The hobo's village sobriquet is "Palma," which is Georgian for "palm tree." But I call him Gibby. I didn't say stop. He'll steal our sunglasses.<br />
<br />
Up ahead is a wino passed out on the only known bench in the village. He's swaddled in a bootleg Phat Farm windbreaker. Naw. I told you, we only got one homeless guy in Jgali, and that's Palma. Phat Farm's the P.E. teacher.<br />
<br />
Slow up a bit. You're going to miss Jgali. Okay. On the right you've got the church. I'm told it is shaped like a cross from above, but I've never seen it from above. There are supposedly a bunch of human skulls and bones kept inside a display case inside the church, but I've never been inside. The church, I mean. Yeah, I guess you're right. I am pretty worthless.<br />
<br />
On the left is what used to be a disco. Currently a crater. I wonder if Palma used to go there. I know he goes there now.<br />
<br />
Up ahead is the school where I teach. Those used to be Roman columns, but now they're just kind of rusty metal cylinders that don't support anything. No, there aren't supposed to be pigs and feral dogs in the schoolyard. I'll have to talk to somebody about that.<br />
<br />
That's a hospital on the right. I'm pretty sure the doctor's dead.<br />
<br />
And that's where I live. Up here on the left. What? Go ahead. You're not going to hurt my feelings. It's not like I built the thing. Windows? What do you mean? We've got plenty of windows. Oh, you mean windows with <i>glass</i>. No, not too many of those. Oh shit. That would be my host mom. Don't make eye contact. Drive.<br />
<br />
That was close. Anyway. I don't really know the people who live in these houses over here.<br />
<br />
That? Oh. That's a septic tank. Nobody lives there anymore.<br />
<br />
What's that sign say up ahead? Ah. Jgali with a red line through it. Well. That's about all there is to it. We're in Squri now. You'll probably want to turn back at this point. We're relatively civil in Jgali, but I can't vouch for the glacier people. Hey. You mind giving me a lift into town since you're headed that way? I gotta, ah, um, diversify my portfolio.ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-81813665478217892252013-02-04T13:57:00.001+04:002013-02-04T15:24:51.694+04:00Field Jacket (Pt. 2)Older and wiser yet dumber somehow – the addition of years is in sum an act of subtraction – I have come to find myself in the middle seat of the middle bench of a <i>marshrutka</i> bound for the middle of nowhere. <br />
<br />
If the word <i>marshrutka</i> sounds Russian, that's because it ain't. Long, long ago – well before the invention of the hydraulic brake, apparently – the Russians borrowed and slightly transmogrified the German <i>Marschroute </i>(march route) and applied it to an inbred breed of four-wheeled irregular rectangle that, true to its etymology, amounts to the public transportation equivalent of a forced march at Nazi gunpoint through inner Siberia. <br />
<br />
A lot has changed in Georgia since the advent of the macro-minibus. World War II bombed itself to death. The Cold War chilled the fuck out. Slowly and dubiously, some tyrant-friendly form of representative democracy trickled its way down into the Lower Caucasus. But the Russo-Germanic loanword <i>ma</i><i>rshrutka</i>, for better and overwhelmingly for worse, remains part of the modern Georgian lexicon.<br />
<br />
This particular marshrutka isn't so bad, as marshrutkas go. It is slightly curved in the front for ostensibly aerodynamic reasons, and its hull bears a lower-than-average number of battle scars and barnacle welts relative to the standard street-tested Georgian automobile. The driver is not visibly drunk; the cabin is full beyond capacity but no further. Things are good, all things considered. Still, I can't help but feel ill at ease, like I forgot something at the airport bar three layovers ago.<br />
<br />
And I probably did. But there are any number of more existentially pressing reasons why I should feel ill at ease about this: my latest venture into the netherworlds of the world. I'm 29, for one thing, and as I whiplash my way across Georgia's midsection in the middle seat of the middle bench of a marshrutka, it is no longer at all obvious to me why the hell I should be doing that sort of thing at this age, nevermind where I'm headed: the border between Georgia and Whatever Lurks Northwest of Georgia, a border that was once – and yet remains – a very disputed border, indeed.<br />
<br />
Moreso than most trips, there is the sense that I have volunteered for my own demise this time around. At no point in Georgia have I felt safe in my own skin. Tbilisi did not woo me during my two weeks there. Plenty of black-jacketed, lobotomized-looking Georgian thugs; hordes of unibrowed Armenian pimps; gypsies galore, hungry hands extended; woeful nights kicking it in the kinds of clubs where you order a rufie and hope to god somebody slips you a drink. And now, a marshrutka. Christ. The marshrutkateer swerves us into oncoming traffic. Death is very palpable, indeed. We barrel past four other marshrutkas, juke out of the path of an onrushing marshrutka, swerve off the road momentarily and skitter back up onto it just in the nick. Palpable, nay: death is inevitable. Outside, the sky is the color of a tombstone, the crabbed winter earth all brown and dead, the houses we pass crumbling and moss-eaten like tombstones. Flooring it into oncoming traffic, the driver lets go of the wheel so he can jaw into his cellphone and cross himself –
down, left, right, up; down, left, right, up –
as we whoosh past a roadside Georgian graveyard. One wonders how the man can even see a graveyard at light speed. One wonders, too, how many fresh tombstones are planted every day on account of Georgian Orthodox marshrutka drivers genuflecting orthodoxically as they pass Orthodox Georgian graveyards. I'm too old to be doing this shit.<br />
<br />
But then, I am too young to be doing a lot of other, more boring shit. At the very least, I am no longer working for the Republicans. I have crawled out from under a desk, hurdled the cubicle walls, etc. No, I signed up for this misadventure, so I might as well enjoy it. And I am enjoying it, in a way. There is something fundamentally liberating about confronting vehicular manslaughter head-on. I'll be getting somewhere delightfully weird, assuming I ever get there. All horrors aside, I am quite enjoying the sensation of being marshrutka-ed –
or I am quite enjoying the sensation in general, I should say. There are other secondary and tertiary sensations that I am not enjoying nearly as much.<br />
<br />
Secondary and tertiary sensations I am not enjoying, in the order that they occur to me:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1) That of the tightly clamped Georgian buttoxen on either side of me, and that of their compressing my own buttocks into a state of very tight clampedness, in the middle seat of the middle bench of aforementioned marshrutka bound for the middle of nowhere.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2) The odor of aforementioned buttoxen.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3) That of knowing with absolute certainty that every single onrushing marshrutka will slam head-on into my own marshrutka, annihilating myself, marshrutka, and this blog post well before any of them have reached their final destinations.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
4) That of having to pee. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
5) That of having ingested four slices of Georgian <i>khachapuri</i> at the last rest stop because I screwed up the order, and having ingested two more slices after that because someone else screwed up the order same as me, and having ingested one more slice after that because someone else screwed up the order same as everyone else, and then having to carry three leftover slices of so-called Georgian pizza (only the grease-to-bread ratio is comparable to actual pizza), absurdly, in the palm of my hand for the remainder of the second leg of what is proving to be a buttoxen-numbingly long marshrutka ride, indeed. None of this is digestively or sensorily enjoyable.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
6) That of feeling that I have forgotten something.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
7) That of feeling that I have forgotten something, but also that I have forgotten what I have forgotten.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
8) That of feeling that I am once again lapsing into unhealthy amounts of metacognition. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
9) That of having to pee (aforementioned).</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
10) That of the onrushing marshrutkas, etc. ... (aforementioned).</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
11) That of having to pee (thrice aforementioned).</blockquote>
And so on.<br />
<br />
Five of my fellow volunteers are marshrutka-ing along with me. But we aren't really in any position to talk. Our handlers saw fit to distribute us evenly about the cramped and aromatic cabin. We can exchange amorous glances but only few words. We are surrounded on all sides by our school directors and host parental guardians, and by craggy-faced Georgian babushkas who cluck their tongues, bow their heads and genuflect orthodoxically at the satanic sounds of English. Down, left, right, up.<br />
<br />
I know where I'm headed, which is to say that I know the name of my final destination. This is not to say that I know anything about the place. My home for the next four months is a mountain village named Jgali, stashed way up in the northwest corner of a far-flung northwestern province the Georgians call Samegrelo. Last night's Google search yielded some gruesome amputation porn, but no information whatsoever as to why so many of Jgali's 300-odd inhabitants have been amputated. The village is precariously close to a Russian puppet state, so that could be one explanation. Samegrelo is also downwind from Chernobyl – that might be another.<br />
<br />
I know that I have a host family waiting for me and that my host family consists of a mother, a father, a sister and a brother. I know their ages. I do not know their names. None of them are on the marshrutka. They did not come to pick me up. I have not met them or spoken to them or corresponded with them in any way. I know that they don't care if I smoke. I'm trying to quit but I don't quite believe that I will. I know that they have the internet, running water, and a western toilet. I don't quite believe that they will have any of those things.<br />
<br />
We pass through Kutaisi, Georgia's second city. Some odd English graffiti here. "I love plant." Fair enough. Something I've noticed about the license plates in this country: it's always three letters followed by three digits, a formula that has spawned a surprising proliferation of accidental vanity plates. TIT 690, to name one I've spotted. LOL 420, to name another. It is doubtful that KKK 666 is as bad a guy as you'd think. BMW 389 is the proud owner of a 1972 Lada Niva.<br />
<br />
I stash the rotten <i>khachapuri </i>under the seat. The sun goes down. A babushka asks the driver if we can stop to take a whiz and the driver says no. It becomes clear that the last rest stop was indeed the <i>last</i> rest stop. We are nearing Zugdidi, which is close to our villages but not close to anything else in particular, other than the Abkhazian border. From here on out, we go native. I think about the other five volunteers marshrutka-ing along with me. Perhaps we'll find ourselves stranded in neighboring villages, will burn those villages to the ground in the months to come. Or perhaps this is it: a last hurrah by way of clammy handshake at a connecting marshrutka stop in the middle of nowhere. Not even a goodbye at the end of our contracts. Who knows? Who knew?<br />
<br />
The weather has taken a turn. For the better part of seven hours, we have blasted through barren, rust-fenced plains stillborn somewhere between winter and spring. Now, as we climb up into the mountains, snow starts to fall. Further up and further along, it comes tumbling down in huge white bowtie-shaped tufts. When the marshrutka finally shudders to a stop in Zugdidi, it is pitch black out but for the snow catching the snarky sidelong glare of the piss-yellow streetlights.<br />
<br />
Turns out there isn't even time for a handshake. Once I've finally gotten all my shit out of the back of the marshrutka, Irish Michael and British Tom and Oregonian David and What's-Her-Name-From-Wherever-She's-From are gone, have already been spirited away by their handlers. Only L.A. Tommy and Nebraska-Ass Me remain. We are not spirited away, but prodded and nudged by our handlers towards a cigar-shaped and practically cigar-sized Lada 1600 snoozing up against the curb. The car sags ominously as we load our bags in the trunk, and sags even more ominously when we duck into the back seat.<br />
<br />
There is a portly old fellow behind the wheel and a boy sitting shotgun. A Lynchian touch: the kid is holding in his lap a bathroom mirror, complete with overhead lights (though they are not lit (a decidedly non-Lynchian touch)), and the mirror all but blocks out our view out the front windshield, replaces it with a reflection of Tommy and I huddled in the backseat, looking greasy, disoriented, and somewhat terrified. A full-on blizzard is raging outside. The lowly Lada doesn't even seem to have one-wheel drive. How the hell are we going to get where we're supposed to go and what the hell is going to happen to us when we get there?<br />
<br />
After a couple rumbleshot miles of broken Russian, it emerges that these two dudes are Tommy's host dad and host brother, respectively. Handshakes are exchanged, but not with me. I sit there mostly mute. It is communicated to me that I am to be dropped off first. And here is where my night turns into <i>Are You My Mother? </i>We sally forth into the darkness, the black two-laner painted dimly by the flickering headlights, all else all snow and nothing else. We stop, exchange words with a shrouded figure in the gloom. Is this my host mother? No, it is some stranger I will never see again. Or it is some stranger who has been expecting us and knows where we're going. Or it is some stranger who helps scrape the ice off our windshield while shivering cigarettes are smoked all around. And meanwhile, there is this mirror blocking the windshield, and me looking back at myself, sleep deprived as hell and getting tired of my own beard, thinking I'll maybe shave it whenever I get home, wherever that is.<br />
<br />
We drift into a snowdrift along the side of the road, and only after we stay there a while do I realize that it was a deliberate maneuver on the part of my chauffeur. A couple minutes later, a pair of headlights flip on and off across the way.<br />
<br />
"You," says the driver, "hello director."<br />
<br />
I get out of the car, or try to. So bushed am I and so atrophied are my legs that my backpack nearly throws me ass-over-head into the snow. The contents of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s canvas gift bag – two bottles of Georgian wine, a box of chocolates, an out-of-season Season's Greetings card – are sent flying all over.<br />
<br />
"Dude," says Tommy, "you're a mess."<br />
<br />
I do not disagree.<br />
<br />
A shadowy figure in the distance is approaching me, so I decide I may as well approach the shadowy figure in the distance. We shake hands.<br />
<br />
"<i>Sprechen Sie Deutsch</i><i>,</i><i>"</i> she says, halfway between a question and a statement.<br />
<br />
<i>"</i><i>Jawohl</i>,<i>"</i> I reply, very unsure of myself. <i>"</i><i>Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch."</i><br />
<br />
Hello, director. She'd been reading my resume on the way over. I load my shit into the trunk of her Georgian Geo Metro and we shuttle off through the snow.<br />
<br />
The drive takes about an hour, though the Russo-Georgian street signs tell me that we only cover five kilometers. My director is none too good at driving, and her car is none too good at same. We have to stop so she can scrape the ice off the windshield with an ABBA mix CD reserved for said purpose. We have to stop so she can let the engine rebuild itself, so she can wait for the snow to clear just enough to reestablish where the road is.<br />
<br />
We slide up in front of my host family's house. It's straight out of <i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind.</i> Darkness all around. Four alien figures, corona-lit by the porch lights, shuffling their way through the snow. The director doesn't even get out of the car. Here you are. You're on your own. Here is your mother.<br />
<br />
Only after we've shaken hands and said hello – only on the walk towards the house, when my host mom nudges me, shrugs her shoulders, grips at her collar, and tilts her head by way of posing a question does it hit me. I <i>did</i> forget something, though not at the airport bar three layovers ago. I forgot it in the damned marshrutka. I have forgotten my beloved field jacket. Fuck me. You'd think I'd have noticed when I started freezing my balls off four hours ago.<br />
<br />
The whole rest of the night, I'm not really there. I sit down with my host mom and my host dad, my host uncle and my host aunt. They introduce themselves but I forget their names instantly. The neighbors show up and before long I can't even remember who's in my host family and who isn't. We crack open Misha's wine. Me and the host dad knock it back, shot after shot, shooting it from cow horns hollowed out for said purpose. But at no point do I feel drunk. Toasts are made on my behalf. I make toasts on the host family's behalf. Is there a patron saint of lost jackets? I'm not really there. I left part of my brain in the back of that marshrutka. It's like I've been amputated, or lobotomized, or worse. A snail deshelled. My field jacket is gone.<br />
<br />
Who knows what sort of post-adolescent, punkish impulse led me to adopt the orphaned jacket in the first place. It was my mom's, for one thing. But adopt it I did. It traveled the world with me. Europe and Asia. Latin America, too. I'd lived in it, slept in it, puked all over it. I'd even lost it several times, most notably in Berlin, only to have it return to me, every time, and most notably on a bleary New Year's Eve in Omaha.<br />
<br />
"That's a bad-ass jacket," I'd said to my good friend/ex-Berliner roommate Ben Pham. "Where'd you get it?"<br />
<br />
He shifted around in his Chuck Taylors.<br />
<br />
"Well, er," he said. "Um."<br />
<br />
Then it clicked: Ben Pham looked so good in that jacket it that it reminded me of another fellow who looked nowhere near as good in it.<br />
<br />
"Fuck me," I said. "That's <i>my</i> jacket."<br />
<br />
I'd left it behind in Berlin a year or so before. It was by a weird whim that Ben Pham had noticed it in his roommate's closet and adopted it as his own. And he'd brought it back to me. But this time, I know it's gone. I've lost it. I'll never see that field jacket again. And I'm not ashamed to say that I downed my last shot of wine and went straight to my brand new host bedroom and cried about that shit. The blankets are thin and so are the walls. I've since put on three sweaters. It's colder in here than it is out there. I'll write and shiver and write my ass to sleep. It's going to be a long-ass, cold-ass winter.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://expatriateact.blogspot.com/2009/11/field-jacket.html">Field Jacket (Pt. 1)</a>ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-6636559486025002592013-01-25T14:06:00.001+04:002013-01-25T18:04:52.728+04:00Brothers"When's he going to get here?"<br />
"Soon."<br />
"What's he going to be like?"<br />
"I don't know."<br />
"Why don't you know?"<br />
"I don't know."<br />
"How do you know you don't know?"<br />
"I – "<br />
<i>"Everybody shut the fuck up!"</i><br />
<br />
Host Dad is watching The News.<br />
<br />
Host Mom resumes doing dishes. Host Sister resumes studying English. Girl Host Cousin just sits there looking all cute. Boy Host Cousin resumes eating his own hand. Host Brother resumes reverse engineering his childhood toys, transforming them into mildly aggravating and somewhat deadly projectile weapons.<br />
<br />
"Does he smoke like dad does?"<br />
"Yes."<br />
"Does he drink like dad does?"<br />
"I think so, yes."<br />
<i>"Shut the fuck up,"</i> bellows Host Dad.<br />
<br />
Host Brother is momentarily shutted the fuck up. Host Sister memorizes fifteen English words. Host Mom puts on a pot of tea. In anticipation. It is 10:30 PM.<br />
<br />
"This is boring," says Host Brother, glaring at the television, amplifying his slingshot.<br />
Host Dad says nothing, is watching The News.<br />
"I don't care about The News," says Host Brother.<br />
Host Dad blinks vigorously, is profoundly hungover, is watching The News.<br />
"When's he going to get here?" asks Host Brother, and nobody says anything.<br />
<br />
There is a plastic basketball hoop hammered into the hardwood wall above the door to the living room, and Host Brother has a small foam ball with which to play basketball against himself. He shoots some hoops. He clunks a shot against the backboard. The ball sneaks between his legs, ricochets against the fold-out futon, falls into Host Sister's hands. She takes a shot, misses. Host Mom scolds her for doing so. Smacks her once, <i>smack,</i> one proper smack across the cheek. That's a boy's game. Don't do that. Host Brother gets the rebound. He misses a layup. Nothing else is said. All is boring. Host Dad is watching The News.<br />
<br />
Outside, it is snowing. The snow falls and falls, and it's something obvious and ordinary to the Host Family in the living room. Host Mom tongs another log into the fire. The sparks flit out of the oven like the last of the fireflies. They blacken and fall to the floor. To be swept up later.<br />
<br />
"When's he going to get here?"<br />
<i>"</i><i>Ssu!</i><i>"</i><br />
(Georgian Mother for "shut the fuck up.")<br />
<br />
It's creeping up on 11 PM. The snow is devouring everything. My arrival ever more unlikely. It's possible, Host Brother thinks, that I won't show up at all. It's possible that I never existed in the first place. He plays basketball with himself as obnoxiously as he can until he wears himself out. Host Dad is still watching The News. Host Brother gives up. He sits down on the futon next to his mom until she threatens to kiss him on the cheek, then he runs to his and his sister's room and locks the door behind him and hides out there for the remainder of the night.<br />
<br />
Round about midnight, a profoundly bearded American shows up at the doorstep with two bags of luggage. That's me. Me and Host Dad get wine drunk together. Nobody has to work the next day. But everybody has to work the next day. Because everybody has to work every day in Georgia.
Because every day in Georgia is a piece of work.
Host Brother in the next room listens to us talking through the wall and wonders what I'm going to be like. Neither of us have ever had a brother before.ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-3978404591630167062012-07-23T22:40:00.001+05:002012-07-24T19:42:44.846+05:00Death by CucumberDear Reader(ship),<br />
<br />
The Author, having vowed in an earlier post to update Expatriate Act (hereafter: Ye Olde Blogue) on a regular basis – and ideally, drawing material from his (The Author's) daily Moleskine<b>® </b>journal entries dating from late February through mid-July of 2012 – after months of deliberation and not much updation, has finally thrown up his hands and said (direct quote), "Nuts to all that."<br />
<br />
The plan did not work out as planned. Very few of The Author's plans seem to work out as planned. The problem he encountered this time around (and it perhaps should not have surprised The Author as much as it did) was thus: that the writings he found himself revamping for publication were written at more or less the same time in which the events he was writing about in fact occurred, i.e. several months ago, and The Author, like many an Author much better than himself, grows violently ill when forced to sit down and read anything of his that happens to originate from any time before the moment in which he is writing it, i.e. everything that he has ever written, except the words you are currently reading, which he is now currently writing.<br />
<br />
The Author, as you will read in Ye Olde Blogue post attached below, has lost an impossible amount of weight over the past four months on account of a rare and potentially (albeit boringly) lethal condition that he deems "Death by Cucumber” – and for his own health, and perhaps for the very health of his Reader(ship), The Author has judiciously elected not to add <i>bulimia nervosa</i> (via vomiting induced by the reading and rereading of his old work) to his preexisting collection of externally imposed eating disorders. <br />
<br />
"Nuts to chronological order," says The Author. "Nuts to gastronomical disorders."<br />
<br />
And nuts, I suppose, to the project he and I once had in mind. What he will do instead is perhaps of a more postmodern bent – insofar as postmodernism is associated with atemporal narrative arrangements – but The Editor would like to step in here to suggest that The Author's current tact is not postmodern at all, but rather more traditionalist in nature: more akin to Ye Olde Sailor's Yarn than anything one might expect to find in the writings of Barthelme, Barth, Barthes, et al. (As I type this, The Author is giggling into his hands, presumably because all of the aforementioned surnames sound like the word "barf," which The Author still finds funny, apparently. – ed.)<br />
<br />
In the proud (but more often than not, deeply ashamed) tradition of the blathering senior citizen raconteur, The Author would like to share with you anecdotes of his time in Georgia: The Country, but not arranged in any particular order whatsoever. Not arranged in any chronological order, I should say, but certainly arranged in the order that they occur to the scrambled and desultory mind of Ye Olde Sailor, i.e. the aforementioned Author, who, at his young age, is already showing signs of lapsing prematurely into the temporospatial vacuum of a man almost seventy years his senior.<br />
<br />
This authorial shift on the part of The Author will necessarily entail a number of readerly adjustments that I, The Editor, feel editorially obliged to prepare you for.<br />
<br />
Entries will not begin as prophesied with a dateline – e.g. 4/21/2012 – ala a travel journal, but will more often than not open with a kitschy title followed by the sort of narrative pick-up line your least favorite uncle might deploy when he's tucked well into his fourth whiskey sour of the night, e.g. <i>I ever tell you about the time</i> ... <i>Y'ever hear about</i> … and <i>I remember it like it was yesterday </i>–<i> it was jest a couple days ago. Y'ever hear about</i> …<br />
<br />
The Author will also be avoiding the narrative present tense – e.g. <i>The Author steps off the train. A stranger's baby hawks a loogey onto his shoe</i>, etc. – because, in rereading a number of his older posts from Ye Olde Blogue, The Author grew violently ill – especially violently ill, I should add – re: how pretentious the narrative present tense sounds, esp. when used to describe situations in which nothing much happens to the narrator at all, neither physically nor spiritually, neither momentarily nor in a broader existential sense. The narrative present tense, The Author will have you know, is a crutch certain no-talent hacks (himself included, he will have you know) use to project momentum and excitement onto a scene when (direct quote) "there jest ain't none to be had."<br />
<br />
The Author also expressed his desire to avoid gimmicky meta-narrative devices in the future, such as posting faux-legalistic memos from fictitious personae (e.g. The Editor, The Reader, perhaps even The Author himself) by way of distracting The Reader from The Author's negligence re: The Author's stated purpose, which was to fucking write about Georgia: The Country, etc.<br />
<br />
As The Author's Editor, I obviously do not have the final say re: what The Author chooses to do with his free time, how he elects to conduct Ye Olde Blogue going forward, or what tense he finally decides to deploy in his postings whenever he finally gets around to posting them. But The Author's end goal and my own are one and the same: to get some shit written and edited and posted on Ye Olde Blogue, so that you, The Reader, can have something to read before/while/even as you go to sleep, and so that he, The Author, can stop feeling s'damned guilty all the time – and especially so that he, The Author, can go to bed feeling well-fed and nourished and contented, nevertheless knowing (direct quote) "full well that he ain't."<br />
<br />
Happy reading.<br />
<br />
Yours,<br />
- The Editor<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
~*<u><i><b>DEATH BY CUCUMBER</b></i></u>*~ </div>
<br />
For as long as I can remember, I have always been a skinny fuck. True: I was born a ten pound, nine ounce blob – according to sources parental, I once held the record for Fattest Baby Ever Successfully Delivered in the Long and Illustrious History of Grand Forks A.F.B. Hospital – but I can't really remember that. And at any rate, I thinned out over the years as I added height to my girth, and seldom tipped the scales much beyond my original ten pounds, nine ounces until quite recently. Until my last detour through America.<br />
<br />
I arrived home from China in skeletal condition, the end result of two years of Mao-style starvation, i.e. by grossly mismanaging my volunteer stipend for the better part of those two years. But in China, when I was able to eat, I ate well. I ate plenty when I had the money, and I ate healthily whether I wanted to or not. In America, it is nigh impossible to eat healthily whether one wants to or not, and many people do not want to. Looking back, I should've known that I was doomed to fatness from the get-go. Fresh from the land of rice and tofu, stranded indefinitely in the American suburbs, anchored to the rest of civilization by a motorized vehicle, walled-in by meat and cheese: it should have come as no surprise to me that, after six months of cheddar-carnivorous living, I'd blimp out a bit.<br />
<br />
And that is precisely what surprised me about blimping out a bit: it <i>surprised</i> me. Blimping out sneaks up on you. Silent as a blimp, as it were. It sneaks up on you. Blimpishly, if you will. <br />
<br />
I don't have much experience with being fat, or with becoming fat. This was my first time. Looking back, I'm sure there were moments around Thanksgiving or so where I may have noticed in passing that certain favorite pairs of hipster jeans weren't fitting anymore, or that certain pairs of long-neglected off-brand Jnco jeans had started fitting like hipster jeans. I may or may not have noticed around Christmastime having to hike those old Jnco jeans up Urkelwise to keep the crotch from exploding in public or, after Christmas dinner, having to loosen my belt to the ominous and unprecedented Third Notch from the End. But those observations didn't really sink in, either because I preferred not to think about them, or because I didn't really think of them as semi-permanent physiological changes but as passing gastrointestinal phenomena – a change in the weather but not climate change. A beer belly, I reckoned; indigestion and nothing more.<br />
<br />
Then, not quite all at once, but pretty much all at once, I came to realize that others perceived me as fat, and from that moment on I began to think of myself as fat, too. There were the brotherly belly-swats at the bar. (Before, dudes used to politely smack me on the ass.) Women, whilst snuggling me, would call me their big fuzzy teddy bear rather than their lazy little tree sloth – or whatever they used to call me when I was skinny, if they called me anything at all back then. When I went out sporting a beard, strangers on the street thought I was Zach Galifianakis and hustled over for autographs. (This last I actually found quite flattering, which no doubt kept me fat a great deal longer than I would've liked to have been otherwise.)<br />
<br />
Perhaps the most humiliating and certainly the most tense moment of my fatness came when I went in for my somewhat regular medical checkup. My family physician – some young kid I'd never seen in my life – went through his cursory examinations of all the major orifices and found nothing amiss, but he seemed distracted. There was an elephant in the room. Which is to say: I was the elephant. He couldn't get his mind off my medical records. Last time we saw the kid, he weighed 145 – now he's creeping up on 200? Jesus God. <br />
<br />
Humans are walking denial machines and I'd fess up to being one myself if I weren't s'damned good at denying it. The doc asked me if I'd observed any, uh, significant, er, changes in my, hmm, <i>lifestyle</i> since my last visit. I waffled and told him that I hadn't smoked in a month (which was true), and that I was aware smoking cessation triggered rapid weight gain. He nodded dubiously. Instead of waffling, I should've just told him about the waffles. <br />
<br />
Or if I'd had the balls to be truly honest with the guy, I would've told him that I'd fallen out of a solid exercise regime and let myself sink into a sedentary little troth of minor depression, and I coped with my boredom and disillusionment and frustration by devouring as many trans-fatty acids as I could get my greasy fingers on, by imbibing as many gallons of high fructose corn syrup as my kidneys could absorb without bursting. Disgusting, but true. I knew then, as I'd known all along, that something had to be done – I didn't want to remain fat, and certainly didn't consider myself <i>permanently</i> fat – but I was more than content to wait, in the proud American way, for something disastrous to happen to me first, before I changed any single fucking about the way I was living.<br />
<br />
Then I woke up one fat and bloated morning in D.C. and decided I'd do Georgia: The Country – a decision that had more to do with D.C. than it did with The Fatness. A couple weeks later, I was in Georgia: The Country. The surplus chub served me well at first. Fat does in fact make men (and alas, only men) slightly funnier than they would be otherwise. Girls in my volunteer training group kept telling me I looked familiar. They'd squint at me a bit and turn their heads from side to side until their eyes came to a rest on my gut. "Oh, yeah! That guy from <i>The Hangover!</i>" They'd request a picture with me, then they'd laugh at my jokes. It wasn't all bad. I even began – not deliberately, I swear – to talk like Zach G, to absorb some of his mannerisms, to bust out my corduroy suit coat far more than usual.<br />
<br />
I arrived in the village. If I was fat to Americans, I was a regular late-stage Orson Welles to rural Georgians. They called me <i>Zonzoro</i> – which is just the Georgian word for "fat," but would be an excellent name for a grotesquely obese superhero if anyone at D.C. Comics is reading this.<br />
<br />
Zonzoro this, zonzoro that. It was insulting in a new and exotic and demoralizing way, in a way that I was completely unfamiliar with. I was always the guy who used to wince when ignorant locals called my fat friends fat. Now I was wincing for myself, with no one to wince on my behalf, because the ignorant locals in my own house were calling me fat. <br />
<br />
<i>Kiti fat, Kiti fat, Kiti fat</i>. My host brother was singing this to me one day in spring, showing off his new favorite English word: fat. After the sixth or seventh chorus, I snapped. I went to my room, changed for the first time into my bootleg Nike running ensemble, and started jogging in place on the patio.<br />
<br />
"What the fuck?" my host brother chirped – another one of his favorites.<br />
"I'm going running," I said.<br />
"Me too!"<br />
<br />
So he and I ran a solid five miles into the Georgian bush, up into the mountains a bit. It felt astoundingly good, and the miles passed with remarkable ease given my now-chalky lungs and the trio of Michelin tires plonked around my waist. On the way back, I asked my host brother if he wanted to swing by the school and do some pull-ups. He said sure. That felt good, too. Then I played soccer with the villagers for five hours. Then I slipped and fell on my ass and broke my wrist somehow. So much for getting in shape after that – after that, I was pretty much preoccupied with <i>remaining </i>a shape.<br />
<br />
But a funny thing happened while I was sitting around in the village waiting for my arm to repair itself. Perhaps my host mom started slacking off on her cooking, or maybe I was burnt out on Georgian food altogether by then. Or perhaps there was just a bumper crop of cucumbers this past spring. But I can remember a time – weeks, a whole month perhaps – where I ate almost nothing but salted cucumber slices, three meals a day, seven days a week. At first, I was delighted by the mere presence of vegetables – they hadn't existed in the winter – but after a week or two, it got to where I couldn't choke down more than two or three cucumber slices in a sitting. One of the most natural things on earth – a green, watery, organically grown vegetable – made me sicker than a 24 pack of Colt 45.<br />
<br />
I began to lose weight. Lots of weight. My host mother – worried, perhaps, about her host motherly reputation with an emaciated American host son prowling around the village – began to change up her dishes a bit. Cucumber salad. Cucumber surprise. Cucumbers and <i>tomatoes</i>! Unpasteurized-cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches. But it was no use. The variety only made the cucumbers more disgusting, and rendered everything else revolting by association. Try as I might, I could no longer eat – not much, at any rate – and there was nothing to do but let myself wither for a time, and hope that I'd manage to escape Georgia: The Country for a more fattening land beyond the horizon before my very being dissolved into its constituent molecules. <br />
<br />
As I write this, I have only a vague idea of how much I weigh. I don't really want to know. When I got here, I clocked in at something like 190 pounds: a personal best of a kind, I suppose. But at the moment, my belt is strapped in to the highest and tightest possible notch, the little hole I had to chisel into it with a pocketknife when I was at my absolute scrawniest in China. Were it not for that notch, my pants would fall down.<br />
<br />
If I had to guess, I'd guess that I weigh something like 140 pounds. Another personal best. Of a kind. I suppose. Which is to say: I'm a fucking fleabag. Hell, I imagine there are literal bags of fleas off in a government laboratory somewhere that weigh more than I do.<br />
<br />
I can't tell whether any of this is at all positive or not. Certainly, starvation is not the best way to go when it comes to – well, anything other than hunger striking, really. But at the same time, it's an imposed starvation rather than a self-imposed one: a starvation born not of confidence issues or image problems, but of moderate poverty and extreme culinary boredom. Let me loose in America and I'll get fat again. Condemn me to China with a decent salary and I'll be my usual lanky self. Set me up with a host family in Georgia and I will be awfully scrawny, indeed. It's nice not being fat anymore. But really, as happy as I am to be skinny again, I'd much rather be eating.<br />
<br />
At night, I often dream of the girl of my dreams. I suppose that makes sense. They're very vivid, these dreams. The girl has a familiar face, but she's nobody I've ever seen before. I never find out her name or where she comes from or what bands she likes. We don't talk about anything of substance. All I ever learn from these dreams is that the girl of my dreams loves yours truly, as truly as anyone can love anyone else, dreamt of or fictitious or otherwise. And in the dream, at least, the feeling is very much mutual. I wake up comforted, then pissed off and bitter, then comforted again – in that order.<br />
<br />
I don't have those dreams anymore. Not these days. These days, I dream about burritos with plenty of green sauce. I dream about radioactive buffalo wings, about doner kebabs, and about that Korean rotten tofu stew that smells like a diaper but tastes so good going down it's like you'd smoked pot beforehand. And in the dreams I can never track down the burrito place or the kebab stand or the Korean joint, or I write down the address but can't read it later, or when I'm walking there I fall into a pit of quicksand and get devoured by fluorescent green sharks, or when I finally get there it's a mirage – as elusive as any girl in any dream I've ever had. As elusive as any of the girls in reality, really.<br />
<br />
The beast in me says: forget about reproducing; let's see about surviving. <br />
<br />
The nacho cheese wet dreams I have these days are interrupted (inevitably) by a pounding on my bedroom door. <i>Kiti! Modi! Djame!</i> I stumble out in a deep fog to the living room, and it's not until I've sat down at the table in front of the TV and changed the channel to Al Jazeera International that it sinks in: I am still in Georgia. I know this because there is a plate of cucumber slices waiting there – glistening, lukewarm, heavily salted, waiting just for me. Cucumbers are in season, I suppose. I'll eat two or three slices and then I'll tell my host mom that I'm full. She'll cluck her tongue and shout at me to eat. (In the background, Syria explodes.) I'll shake my head, a bit sadly the second time around, and tell her that I'm still full. And I am. Full to the brim. So full I could burst. And if I did, it'd be like somebody (Gallagher, presumably) smashing a giant cucumber with a sledgehammer.<br />
<br />
In my idle moments, I sometimes plonk my newfound ribs like the keys of a marimba and think of how truly odd it is to live inside a body.ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-8456277982477291292012-05-18T14:05:00.000+05:002012-05-18T16:27:53.978+05:00Neither East Nor West<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><strong></strong></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dear Reader(ship),</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To quote the now late Christopher Hitchens, who himself was quoting the very late Mark Twain: reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It wasn't my intention to kill off Expatriate Act <span lang="EN-US">with some drunkenly transcribed Dylan lyrics, but they were all I could muster at the time. I'd long since run out of good things to say about China; it was a mutual breakup, but certainly not an amicable one. To have wrapped things up in a neat and nostalgic little prose package would've been untrue and anyhow, I wasn't in the mood for writing by then. I was in the mood to get the hell out of China and to never again set foot in the developing world so long as I lived.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So much for that.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sometime in January, I may have mentioned to you that I was bound for Georgia. Perusing my inbox four months later, it seems that I failed more often than not to specify exactly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">which </i>Georgia. At any rate, I did mention to most of you that I'd be writing about my travels again, which must have led to at least some speculation that I would be kicking off my very own Atlanta Falcons fanblog.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But to quote my own late ass: reports of my resurrection were a wee bit premature. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When first I arrived in Georgia, I had every intention of picking up where I'd left off writing-wise, making sure to skip over the nasty in-between parts re: leaving China, re: attempting to survive in America, and especially re: my short-lived speechwriting career on The Hill. The plan was to write about life in Georgia: The Country. The trouble with that, you see, was the part where I actually had to write about life in Georgia: The Country whilst living in Georgia: The Country.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Firstly (and most horrifyingly, my brothers), I live in a village of some 300 souls, most of whom share the same last name, none of whom have access to the internet. If you are reading this in America, or Bolivia, or Djibouti, or pretty much anywhere that isn't rural Georgia, there is probably quite literally more internet going on in your pants pocket than there is within a five mile radius of where I live. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Exiled from interconnectedness, whatever I write these days feels somehow stripped of immediacy. I have been writing without the electric momentum/slight panic one experiences knowing that one's writing can and eventually will be published instantaneously. Things get half-written, then sit on the shelf waiting for a time in the distant future when maybe, just maybe, I will be near enough to a semi-functional computer with a dial-up modem and not too much human semen between the home row keys and perhaps, just perhaps ... But once something I've written has been collecting dust that long, and after I've jumped through that many hoops to post it, a gloomy sense of what's-the-fucking-point descends upon me and I decide not to post anything at all.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is also not an easy country in which to write. Or at least: I have not found my situation terribly conducive to writing. I live with a host family, and Georgian families tend to be very familiar. The Western notion of "alone time" strikes Georgians as conspicuously fruity and new age as a concept, and morally perverse when enjoyed in moderation. It is exceeding rare that I can lock myself in my room long enough to eke out a paragraph. At half-hourly intervals, my host mom comes pounding at the door, clamoring for me to eat. Or my host brother comes pounding at the door, clamoring for me to play indoor basketball with him. Or my host sister comes pounding at the door, clamoring in general. And I'm usually too nice to keep myself to myself. On the odd occasion that I really put my foot down and bolt the door shut, I start to feel like a hermit, or a pervert, or a pretentious hermit pervert asshat. So being alone – something I enjoy – winds up making me feel shittier than being surrounded by droves of noisy people – something I hate. This is what happens when collectivism and Catholic guilt collide.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Georgia, I have found myself increasingly estranged from my primary muse: capital-A German <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angst</i>. I was able to write regularly in China because I had no shortage of things to be pissed off about; I could list them here, but that's what I spent the past two years doing. Georgia is almost tranquil to a fault. The scenery, at least in the countryside, is indescribably lovely – though describe it I will in due time. The villagers are, as you might expect, down to earth and omnipleasant. And for what it's worth, I am comfortable, underworked, overpaid, and overfed. I even have access to free health care, something that has also figured into my inability to write.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">About a month ago, I broke my left wrist. I won't tell that story now, but will save it for later, for a time when my writerly bowels have regained some semblance of bullshit regularity. Suffice it to say that typing blog posts one-handed isn't something I've attempted since I was 14 and owned a LiveJournal account. Even now, having finally regained the ability to flip a flaccid bird and a feeble thumbs-up, typing is a chore, one that, when combined with the aforementioned lack of privacy/lack of Angst/lack of internet trifecta, makes the what's-the-fucking-point variable very, very hard to divide and conquer. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I've made it this far. And if I can get the provincial cigarette distributor to give my gimp ass a lift into town this weekend, I will have made my triumphant return to the blogosphere. What a crummy word that is. Blogosphere.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So what will happen next is this: we will engage in an act of not-very-exciting time travel. I will go back and spit shine what I have written about my first two-odd months in Georgia, then regurgitate it at weekly intervals as though it is occurring in the present tense: what happens next week will have happened my first week, and so on. Then, if all goes well, figuring in my current level of sloth, the past will eventually catch us up with the present, and then we can proceed into the future as if nothing ever happened. Until my host mom finagles a way of mounting a wi-fi hotspot to the family cow, this is how things will have to go for a while. Her name is Jurga, by the way. The cow, I mean.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Warm regards,</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">- Petit</span></span></div>ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-76111199056775052272011-06-14T22:36:00.000+05:002011-06-14T22:37:58.502+05:00(Yet Another) Restless FarewellOh all the money that in my whole life I did spend<br />Be it mine right or wrongfully<br />I let it slip gladly past the hands of my friends<br />To tie up the time most forcefully<br />But the bottles are done<br />We’ve killed each one<br />And the table’s full and overflowed<br />And the corner sign<br />Says it’s closing time<br />So I’ll bid farewell and be down the road<br /><br />Oh ev’ry girl that ever I’ve touched<br />I did not do it harmfully<br />And ev’ry girl that ever I’ve hurt<br />I did not do it knowin’ly<br />But to remain as friends<br />And make amends<br />You need the time and stay behind<br />And since my feet are now fast<br />And point away from the past<br />I’ll bid farewell and be down the line<br /><br />Oh ev’ry foe that ever I faced<br />The cause was there before we came<br />And ev’ry cause that ever I fought<br />I fought it full without regret or shame<br />But the dark does die<br />As the curtain is drawn and somebody’s eyes<br />Must meet the dawn<br />And if I see the day<br />I’d only have to stay<br />So I’ll bid farewell in the night and be gone<br /><br />Oh, ev’ry thought that’s strung a knot in my mind<br />I might go insane if it couldn’t be sprung<br />But it’s not to stand naked under unknowin’ eyes<br />It’s for myself and my friends my stories are sung<br />But the time ain’t tall, yet on time you depend<br />And no word is possessed by no special friend<br />And though the line is cut<br />It ain’t quite the end<br />I’ll just bid farewell till we meet again<br /><br />Oh a false clock tries to tick out my time<br />To disgrace, distract, and bother me<br />And the dirt of gossip blows into my face<br />And the dust of rumors covers me<br />But if the arrow is straight<br />And the point is slick<br />It can pierce through dust no matter how thick<br />So I’ll make my stand<br />And remain as I am<br />And bid farewell and not give a damnExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-76466595622877661172011-04-07T01:40:00.007+05:002011-04-07T03:27:50.937+05:00Off The Rickshaw: A Libertine's Guide to Living a Healthy Life of Debauchery in the People's Republic of China - Volume 2<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0M7iX1Yv5u-kzLZdBL7doST1i6voqBKKUeGgOnK5pVa9RZXeTgl-TdOzU59nXu2XglXT7Dg72j7s4fSrRp5rRnK0dqghU2z9MvgQUfyhmoIjQdgC_Zd7PqOBt2OLIXI2438KLA/s1600/trickydickshitfaced.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 215px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD0M7iX1Yv5u-kzLZdBL7doST1i6voqBKKUeGgOnK5pVa9RZXeTgl-TdOzU59nXu2XglXT7Dg72j7s4fSrRp5rRnK0dqghU2z9MvgQUfyhmoIjQdgC_Zd7PqOBt2OLIXI2438KLA/s320/trickydickshitfaced.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5592575181098002098" /></a><br /><br /><i>This is the second installment of Keith Petit's two-part <a href="http://expatriateact.blogspot.com/2010/07/off-rickshaw-libertines-guide-to-living.html"></i>Off The Rickshaw<i></a> series. The first volume, "On Smoking," was published in July of 2010 and has since appeared in </i>Vibe<i>, </i>Men's Health<i>, and </i>Better Homes and Gardens<i>. This, his second volume, "On Drinking," is likely to be the final installment of the series. The author, quite frankly, doesn't want to get into any of his other vices, and sincerely doubts that his readers would care to hear about them. <br /><br /></i><b>About the Author</b><i>: Keith Petit does not currently drink or smoke, and has never drinked nor smoked in his entire life. He is an active member of the Nanchong Women's League of Teetotalers and Contract Bridge Players, as well as his local Joy Luck Club, JLC Lodge No. 451. He does not recommend smoking or drinking to his readership, however badly his writing may drive them to swallow the contents of the nearest open container within reach of the keyboard.<br /><br />If at the end of this article you remain curious about the infinitely hued and shaded spectrum of human depravity, the author suggests that you check out </i>Tropic of Cancer<i> by Henry Miller from your local public library, making sure to avert the steely, menopausal glare of your local public librarian.</i><br /><br /><br /><i>Volume 2: On Drinking</i><br /><br /><b>~*A TWOPARTITE, TWO-PART FUGUE IN TWO PARTS*~</b><br /><br />When I pause to consider the vast, beer-bellied body of literature about alcohol - and all of the great literature written by alcoholics - I figure that I really ought to be quoting Ernest Hemingway or Malcolm Lowry or Christopher Hitchens at the top of the page. But to my mind, no one has put it more succinctly than Homer Simpson. <br /><br /><i>"Beer: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."</i><br /><br />By that infallible Simpsonian logic, I cannot advocate drinking any more than I can recommend abstaining from it. In China, there are certain social predicaments (called banquets) that alcohol will enhance significantly. But there remain other, more important facets of your life (your job, your reputation, your liver) that alcohol will not enhance at all. So in general, and in China in particular, the author recommends that you enjoy alcohol in moderation - and when your boss won't let you, at least enjoy it in abundance. <br /><br /><br /><i>On the Varieties of Chinese Liquor</i><br /><br />The many nerve tonics of China can be metabolized and broken down into three families of liquor, somewhat akin to their alcoholic cousins in the West. There is <i>beer</i>, there is <i>wine</i>, and there is <i>alcohol</i>. <br /><br />But already, in this early stage of classification, things have gotten more complicated than they really ought to be. <br /><br />Due either to a flawed translation, or a deliberate obfuscation intended to get everyone shamefully sloshed very early in the night, what the Chinese call "wine" is often, in fact, hard liquor. <i>Baijiu</i> – literally "white alcohol" – is among the most potent substances known to non-Russian man, but its name is rendered in English as "white wine," something, clearly, it is not. <br /><br />On the flip side (and here, the brewing companies are probably the culprit), what the Chinese call "beer" is what we in the West would call "pisswater." <br /><br />I will address these confusing misappropriations in further detail as the night progresses. Which reminds me, I gotta go to the shop real quick. But bear in mind that when you accept a glass of wine in China, you will more than likely find yourself staring down the barrel of a shot glass. And after you've put away a Chinese beer, or five, or ten, you will suffer all of the urinary distress of drinking an equivalent amount of Western brewskis, with none of the more pleasant side-effects. In China, nothing you drink is quite what it seems. Remember that. Beer is water. Wine is vodka. Ignorance is strength. <br /><br /><br /><i>The Five-Second Plan</i><br /><br />The Chinese are far better at making five-year plans than they are at making plans for the evening. Hopefully, on an unsuspecting Tuesday night, getting completely trashed isn't anywhere on your agenda. But then, This Is China: your agenda doesn't matter. On an unsuspecting Tuesday night, around 9:30 in the PM, you will receive a phone call from a friend, a stranger, or (in all likelihood) your employer. He will invite you out for some "white wine." Sounds good. When? This weekend? No, your boss says. Now. I am waiting for you. Outside. You part the blinds and see that, yes indeed, a black Lexus is parked there, idling just outside your window. From here on out, the narrative of your unsuspecting Tuesday night collapses into a totally fatalistic <i>Choose Your Own Adventure</i> book in which the choices have been blacked out from the text. You can make decisions, but they don't mean anything. You can run, but you can't hide. You can hem and haw, you can turn down the invitation outright, you can terminate the call and toss your phone under the bed like a live grenade. You can even mention to your employer that you have to work in the morning. So do I, he'll say. Whatever you do, short of suicide, your prolonged existence in China amounts to your accepting the invitation. And your accepting the invitation amounts to your consuming more alcohol than you really ought to on a school night. At the behest of your boss, no less. Well. Hell. At least he's buying.<br /><br /><br /><i>Toastmasters International</i><br /><br />The Chinese love to propose toasts. Or, I don't know - I'm not really sure whether they love it or not. Do songbirds love singing? Do crickets love chirping? Duz lolcats luvz cheezburgerz? Who knows? Who cares? It's what they <i>do</i>. <br /><br />Whereas most American nights on the town are merely kicked off with a toast, Chinese benders live and die by the toast. A toast in America is a one-time thing: the brittle clinking of fork to glass, or a "let's get down to business" pregame huddle. <br /><br />In China, the toast is a recurring nightmare. It is a tender one-on-one moment that serves two purposes that I am aware of. A: It establishes rapport (thus, a connection) with a valuable social contact. And B: It ensures that said valuable social contact is at least as drunk as you are. <br /><br />Everyone is expected to toast everyone else at least once. If there are ten people at table, you must toast nine of them. (You wouldn't toast yourself because that would be weird.) And all nine of the people at table must toast you in return. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I would imagine that toasting nine people and nine people toasting you adds up to an astronomical, disastrous number of toasts. Either that, or it's just eighteen. Please do let me know.<br /><br />During a toast, you must look your toasting partner in the eye and express (in Chinese or in Chinglish) your hopes and aspirations for your shared future as drinking buddies and business associates. A useful expression to know is <i>tian tian kuai le</i>, which translates into Chinglish as "happy every day!" If Chinese isn't your strong suit, the Chinglish version will also suffice. You might want to mention how overjoyed you are to be toasting the person you are toasting, whether you know who they are or not. It is, after all, entirely likely that you met them five minutes ago but completely forgot who they were after that oh-so-memorable 27th toast with Vice Principal Liu. Either way, you must act as though you are ecstatically happy to meet so-and-so and in full possession of all of your senses. It is important not to appear drunk, however drunk you may be, however drunk everyone else assuredly is. Saving face is everything. Which invites the question: what does face have to do with anything when everyone is shitfaced? My dear reader, I have not the foggiest fucking idea.<br /><br /><br /><i>The Social Lubricant Network</i><br /><br />The Chinese do not drink their beers straight from the bottle for public health reasons, and they do not drink their beers in pint glasses, for logistical reasons. They drink their beers from shot glasses. This helps out the lightweights of the banquet scene, who can carefully mete out their drinking and abstain from shots as their field of vision starts to blur. Likewise, it benefits the boozers, who can rapidly put away beerstuff by hooking up with other boozers via the toasting system described above. <i>Vice Principal Liu! You again? Happy every day, man!</i> Clink. It's like Facebook for alcoholics.<br /><br />There are two kinds of toasts in China. There is the <i>gan bei</i> toast. <i>Gan bei</i> translates to "dry the glass," and when someone proposes a <i>gan bei</i> toast, you are obligated to man up and "chug" or "pound" the booze. Then there is the <i>xiao he</i> toast. The <i>xiao he</i>, or "little drink," involves a ginger sip of the glass from both parties. To mix up the two toasts - to take a shot when the other person is just sipping - is a minor <i>faux pas</i> that can be glossed over easily enough by making a few extra toasts on the side. But what cannot be forgiven is drinking independently. If the party starts to get slow, and it will, you are not allowed to pour yourself a beer and drink it. Should you grow weary of the company, and you will, you cannot abscond to a dark corner and drink by your lonesome. To botch a toast is a slight but forgivable gaffe. To quit drinking before everyone else is a mere act of wussiness. But to drink while others are not drinking is a deadly sin. <br /><br />When the Chinese go out drinking, they drink as a unit. They drink together, they giggle together, and they puke together. They have a system. They pace their drinking as a means of separating the men from the boys. Or the women from the boys, for that matter. When everyone at the table is drinking at the exact same rate, the lightweights are the first ones to be TKO'ed, while the heavyweights are free to remain in the ring until there is blood all over the mat. A kind of intramural drinking hierarchy unfolds: Dean Wang can't hold his liquor; Vice President Liu can't even hold his chopsticks at this point; Mr. Pan, however, seems to possess a liver of titanium alloy. <br /><br />Drinking in China is almost always competitive, and the Chinese have a system, the sheer organization of which puts March Madness to shame. If everyone were to start drinking independently of the toasting system, it would inject chaos into the all-important ranking schema and we'd have another Bowl Championship Shitshow on our hands. <br /><br />To be a heavyweight in China is a great honor, and you will gain much face in this country by drinking everyone else under the table. If you grew up in America and cut your teeth on all the fine high-gravity lagers that your neighborhood Conoco station had to offer, you will almost certainly be considered a heavyweight in China. As a Westerner, drinking among the Chinese is almost too easy, like playing a video game with cheat codes activated. Over the course of the evening, you will successfully tuck away an uncountable number of watered-down Chinese lagers. By 10 PM, everyone else will be stumbling around like defective marionettes, flinging sauteed eggplant all over the floor. And by the end of the night, you will have beaten the game, i.e. everyone else will be vomiting in the squatter toilets while you sit there at the banquet table, alone, bored off your ass, noshing on cold cucumbers and feeling more sober than when you arrived.<br /><br />I should add that the above paragraph applies only to beer nights. <i>Baijiu</i> nights are different. When it comes to Sino-American drinking relations, <i>baijiu</i> is, alas, the great equalizer. <br /><br /><br /><i>The Translucent Scourge of the Far East</i><br /><br />As a rule, the Chinese cannot handle their beer, but I have seen them perform incredible feats of <i>baijiu</i> absorption. <br /><br /><i>Baijiu</i> is somewhat analogous to vodka, insofar as it is a clear liquid that is more alcohol than anything else. But it is also far worse than vodka. It is far worse than any fluid - bodily or otherwise - ever concocted by man or beast. I can't physically stomach <i>baijiu</i>. Most Westerners cannot. Regardless of the loss of face involved, I will always refuse <i>baijiu</i> at banquets, both because I can't bear the agony of drinking it, and because I don't want to wind up passing out overnight in a construction site. For chemical reasons that can't be entirely related to alcohol content, <i>baijiu</i> will (in the parlance of our times) "fuck you up" in the sort of way that, believe me, you do not want to be fucked up. <br /><br />Richard Nixon had the dubious pleasure of sampling the Cadillac of <i>baijiu</i>s, <i>Maotai</i>, when he graced Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai with his jowly, hemorrhoidal presence back in 1972. A man with a strong genetic predisposition for Bitter Beer Face, it remains hard to tell from the photographs just how disgusted Nixon was after his first Chinese <i>gan bei</i>. But the banquet, in the end, was a rollicking success, leading Nixon to proclaim, "If we drink enough <i>Moutai</i>, we can solve anything." It is my hope, for the rest of the world's sake, that the Sino-American policy of <i>Maotai</i> diplomacy has long since been discontinued. <br /><br /><b>~*TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO OF THIS TWOPARTITE, TWO-PART FUGUE WHICH IS POSSESSED OF TWO PARTS*~</b>ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-26245516088563039412011-03-30T23:23:00.008+05:002011-03-31T01:49:58.187+05:00Here Be Dragons<blockquote>The Borgia Map (circa 1430 AD) states, over a dragon-like figure in Asia ... "Here, indeed, are men who have large horns of the length of four feet, and there are even serpents so large, that they could eat an ox whole."<br /><br />-Wikipedia</blockquote><br /><br />When I took my first good long gander at a modern political map of China, I was pretty bummed out to find that it was nowhere demarcated with a "Here Be Dragons" no-fly zone. The map was, in fact, nauseatingly detailed: a great big black-and-green inkblot clogged with unpronounceable megalopoli from one end to the other. There did not appear to be any unexplored, potentially dragon-infested regions of the Middle Kingdom. Indeed, there did not appear to be anywhere at all that wasn't crawling with people. <br /><br />What struck me next was mainland China's resemblance to a chicken. Minus the legs and feet - I imagine the omnivores of Guangzhou Province devoured them centuries ago. With a side of pickled monkey brains. Still, the likeness is uncanny. China is a chicken. If you take Heilongjiang Province to be the beak - and how could you not? just <i>look</i> at it! - it's a graceful anatomical swoop south through the neck of Hubei, on down along the coastline, which swells into a fulsome, savory breast, upholstered by the luscious tenderloin of Anhui and Jiangxi Provinces. <br /><br />My fellow volunteers and I live out in drumstick country. The wastelands to our immediate north I would liken to the gizzard or gall bladder of the Chinese chicken. Westward ho, and lo: China blossoms into the thunder thighs of Tibet, and Xinjiang Province, which is something like the tail of the chicken, a delicacy so rare and precious that you need a special government clearance just to eat it.<br /><br />And lest this all seem a bit too glib and cheeky of me, I have received corroboration from many Chinese citizens from all walks of life and they, too, will proudly acknowledge that their country looks like a chicken. What of it? they ask me. I shrug. Just sayin', is all.<br /><br />Something I noticed much later, long after I had, with the aid of an electron microscope, finally located my adoptive Chinese hometown on the map: there indeed be dragons in China, or at least dragons of the Google Earth variety. If we return to the east coast and scroll slowly downward from the beak until we arrive at the cleft where neck meets breast - the cleavage of China, if you will - off the coast of Tianjin, you will notice the unmistakable profile of a fire-breathing dragon, facing westward, laying to waste all of Shandong Province with its sulphurous loogeys. The illusion, I am told, is formed by the Bohai Sea, whose name does not mean "Dragon-ish Looking Sea" as you and I might hope. But then, I don't suppose the people who named it had access to Google Earth at the time. Rather unhelpfully, my Chinese-English dictionary tells me that the name "Bohai Sea" means "Bohai Sea."<br /><br />But anyway, it looks like a dragon. So, Here Be Dragons, on a technicality. Still, from experience I am inclined to believe that the Chinese mainland is just teeming with dragons, and not the big red twelve-man stretch limo dragons you see snaking around the streets of Chinatown in Chicago on Chinese New Year's. Come to think of it, I've never seen a single fucking one of those in China. Then again, I've never seen fortune cookies or egg rolls here, either.<br /><br />I'm lucky. Most Peace Corps volunteers are cast into the legitimate dragonlands. The phrase "in the bush" takes on a deeper meaning, I imagine, to someone serving in a Zambian village than it currently holds for me, a hack of an English professor in an unsung, overpopulated Chinese megalopolis of seven million strong. The volunteer in Zambia faces dragons of a more literal sort; he resides in a part of the world that, fifty or a hundred years ago, might as well have been labeled "Here Be Dragons." The volunteer in China has it much easier from a cartographic standpoint. I can Mapquest my way around Nanchong, fer chrissakes. But we nevertheless face dragons of a sort. They may only be dragons of the metaphorical variety, but they are no less frightening, imposing, or annoying for all that. <br /><br />The fact remains that China - all of it, from beak to brisket - eludes the West, has always eluded the West, and looks likely to elude the West for as long as there is a West, and for as long as there is a China. It isn't just cultural misunderstanding or any of that mushy Obamanian glop, though it is also that. The differences between China and the West are fundamental differences. As in, irreconcilable differences. China, by and large, does not want to become more like the West. It wants the opposite of that. Japan and South Korea were similarly opposed to Western influence, once upon a time. But one way or another, they have come to embrace Western values along with Western commerce - not without some hand-wringing along the way, of course. The Chinese have adopted Western commerce while remaining extremely wary of Western values. And that wariness shows no signs of diminishing. Not from my very limited viewpoint, at any rate.<br /><br />What surprised me most on my first visit to China, some three-odd years ago, was the absolute dearth of English. My first night in downtown Hangzhou - nicknamed the Silicon Valley of China - I desperately needed to use a telephone. I swung by an information booth just off the main square. <br /><br />"<i>Qing wen</i>," I read from my Lonely Planet. "<i>You meiyou yi ge ...</i> um ... telephone?"<br />The girl behind the Plexiglas went into conniptions of misunderstanding. <br />"Telephone," I said. "Te-le-phone."<br />"<I>TE-LE-HUA?!</i>"<br />I talked into my hand. I took out my wallet and talked into that, too. Telephone, I said. Telephone. By then, she was looking at me like she was about to telephone the padded rickshaw to come take me away.<br /><br />I was still a traveling greenhorn at the time, but not really all that much of one. I had lived in Poland, with its spotty English, and South Korea, with its even spottier Konglish. I was well aware that the English language hadn't yet conquered the world. In my travels, I had always made a point of learning more of the local language than I needed, so as to appear as dignified and untouristic as possible. But in desperate times, in all my travels, I had always been able to unearth an English speaker. Not so in the Silicon Valley of China. I forget how many people I asked that night on the laser-lit streets of Hangzhou. Telephone? Telephone? Telephone? Nobody knew what the fuck a telephone was. Here was China's most affluent upper crust, and nobody knew the English word "telephone," which has to be among the top ten most widely known words worldwide. Even in your Zambian village, I imagine the kids know what the word "telephone" means, or understand what a white dude talking into his wallet means. <br /><br />That was my first impression of China, and it is an impression that has stuck with me long after I left Hangzhou, long after I retreated to the relative Sichuanese bush for two years. In the relative Sichuanese bush, it is even worse. Out here, if you don't speak a lick of Chinese - and many foreigners do not - I bid you good luck. The Chinese study English, even in the relative Sichuanese bush. In fact, they study their asses off. But very few Chinese seem in any way inclined to actually <i>learn</i> English. When you come right down to it, English just isn't very Chinese.<br /><br />This is neither a positive nor a negative attribute of the Chinese mindset. I see very few reasons - and of those, only practical ones - why the average Chinese <i>needs</i> to learn English. The absence of English makes life hell for tourists, sure. But on the plus side, for me at least, the absence of English makes learning Chinese a helluva lot easier. <br /><br />It's only when I really dwell on it that the absence of English disturbs me. Clumsy old, sloppy old English has become the world's lingua franca. English has become not only the language of business, not simply a means of communicating with lost tourists - for better or worse, English, wherever you live, has become pretty much the only means of interacting with people from the outside world. <br /><br />For as much as China has opened itself to the outside world, and for as quickly as it has adopted an appreciation for Western commerce and Western luxuries, the average educated Chinese adult has no command of basic English and is not terribly interested in matters un-Chinese. He resides permanently in a Chinese bubble. The same, of course, could be said for a great many Americans. But we are lucky in that regard, because there is no real American bubble. Not anymore, not unless you're from Nebraska. And even then. Because the American bubble includes microbubbles: Mexican bubbles, African bubbles, Native American bubbles, Chinese bubbles and Japanese bubbles and Korean bubbles. Even the most isolated, most ignorant American is at least peripherally aware of those other bubbles. But the Chinese bubble is all China, all the time. <br /><br />I don't claim to be an authority on China. Who can? But there is a palpable swagger here. I see it mostly in the young people. It's a swagger that says, we are Chinese and we don't need to be anything else. The rest of the world has wronged us for centuries - for millennia, even. What do we owe the rest of the world? I respect that swagger to a point. I respect that much of the national pride swirling around here has been earned through the sort of hard work that Americans shudder to think about. We shrink away from the sort of pride the Chinese have, because we sense - guiltily and probably correctly - that we are no longer worthy of it. <br /><br />But outside of China, most of us are slowly learning a lesson that we will all have to learn eventually: that our bubble no longer exists. Or perhaps it's just the opposite. Perhaps our bubble has swollen up so huge as to swallow up all the other bubbles. The definition of an American is a human being with an American passport. The same could be said for most nations on earth. So to be an American is to be everyone, or to be no one at all, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it is a claustrophobic and at the same time isolating sensation. Above all else, it is an uncomfortable sensation. But it is one that must be lived with. That, in the end, will be the direction of things.<br /><br />The Chinese are a long way away from that realization. Their bubble may have been opened to McDonald's and Apple and General Electric, but very little else has been allowed in. Exports are flying out of the bubble, but very little else is allowed out. My fear is that the more Chinese the Chinese become, the less they will feel the need to contribute to the conversation the rest of the world is having. And for better or worse, that conversation is happening in English. So perhaps my job is important, after all. But my students have never been expected to learn English. They have been mandated to memorize it. And it is my fear that the conversation the rest of the world is having - wherever that conversation takes us - is going to be misinterpreted, misunderstood, or ignored by the Chinese. By the young, China-loving college students - my students - who will inherit this country. I often worry about them. I often worry that I let them slip through my fingers. But then I pour myself a cold one and think, no: those kids slipped through a lot of fingers before they got to you.ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-44137767527461665552011-03-28T19:53:00.000+05:002011-03-28T19:58:15.498+05:00Wander-ThirstBeyond the east the sunrise; Beyond the west the sea<br />And East and West the Wander-Thirst that will not let me be;<br />It works in me like madness to bid me say goodbye,<br />For the seas call, and the stars call, and oh! The call of the sky!<br /><br />I know not where the white road runs, nor what the blue hills are,<br />But a man can have the sun for friend, and for his guide, a star;<br />And there's no end to voyaging when once the voice is heard,<br />For the rivers call, and the road calls, and oh! The call of a bird!<br /><br />Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night and day<br />The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away<br />And come I may, but go I must, and if men ask you why,<br />You may put the blame on the stars and the sun,<br />And the white road and the sky.<br /><br /><i>- Gerald Gould</i>ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-92099145809429207362011-03-26T17:27:00.003+04:002011-03-26T18:48:15.711+04:00Narcissus, Reflecting<blockquote>gonna forget about myself for a while<br />gonna go out and see what others need <br />-Bob Dylan</blockquote><br /><br />The other day I walked into class and found an unusual word written on the blackboard in the impeccable cursive penmanship of a Chinese English teacher. The word was "Narcissus."<br /><br />"Who knows what this word means?" I asked the class.<br />Nobody knew. <br />"Well, it's pronounced like this," I said. "Nar-sis-us."<br /><br />A low murmuring: <i>narcississississississ</i> ...<br /><br />"Not bad," I said. <br /><br />"What is Narcissississississ?" asked one of the suck-ups in the front row.<br />"Narcissus is a person," I said. "He is a famous character in Western mythology. He might have been Greek. Or Roman. I'll have to Wikipedia that."<br />"For what is he famous?"<br />"Narcissus is famous for loving himself. And only himself."<br />Much giggling from the peanut gallery.<br />"Seriously," I said. "He saw his own reflection in a pond or some shit and he fell in love with himself."<br />More giggling. I whirled around to the board.<br />"And we call people who fall in love with themselves ... " I wrote the word in the gnarly mixed caps of a native speaker. "We call them 'narcissists.'"<br /><br />More murmuring: <i>narcississississississ ...</i><br /><br />A hand shot up in the back row, the back row that persistently avoids kissing my ass.<br />"Mr. Panda," asked the hand, "are you a narciss ... iss ... iss ... isst?"<br /><br />I grinned and tugged at my necktie. Then I dodged the question and fished out my lesson plan for the evening - unexpectedly, it was the best class I have ever taught in my life. But more on that later. In the meantime, let's talk about me.<br /><br /><i>Mr. Panda, are you a narciss ... iss ... iss ... isst?</i> The question unsettled me more than I'd like to admit. Am I a narcissist? Frankly, I'm not sure. I'm not Greek, if that helps any. I don't have a mirror in my apartment and the tap water is too grimy to reflect much of anything, so my living arrangements grant me very few opportunities to fall in love with my gruff, red-bearded visage. So, at the very least, I am not Narcissus incarnate. But when I think about my writing and what I write about, and when I think about this blog in particular - lo, I have to admit to the very self I love and cherish so much: you and me, my friend, we are narcissists.<br /><br />It's hard not to be a narcissist if you happen to be a foreigner in China. As a foreigner, you are the center of China's attention. Everywhere you go, you are special. Harassed, yes. Cheated, certainly. Worshiped, occasionally. But whatever which way the Chinese treat you, the treatment is always special. <br /><br />And then, after spending the day at the center of China's attention, you return home to your crummy apartment, where you are the center of your own attention. The narcissist joins the Peace Corps seeking to annihilate his narcissism. But in China, you find yourself wherever you go.<br /><br />Some degree of narcissism is unavoidable. But why, when it comes time to write, does the narcissistic expat continue to write about himself instead of, say, geopolitics or cultural differences or the Chinese education system or the rest of the world outside his own nappy-headed noggin? From a practical standpoint, I suppose I'm not really allowed to write about those things very much. But even if I could, the thing is, China continues to elude me. After two years, I know more about the place than I did when I arrived, but I feel less and less qualified to write about it. China is too complex. Too many variables. I, myself, am relatively simple by comparison. So when I sit down to write, I cling to the most solid Cartesian rock I can find - myself - and I go from there. Sometimes I brush up against China. Sometimes I bump into China. Sometimes China runs me over with a moped. But China is always the agonist and I, for better or worse, am the protagonist. <br /><br />Protagonism is a habit I would like to get out of. I'm tired of being the center of attention. I long to dissolve into the obscurity of the Chicago O'Hare arrivals terminal. I long to be ignored and neglected. I long to be belittled by sassy Starbucks baristas. I'm tired of finding myself. Nobody ever finds themselves. Or I don't know. Maybe they do. But what would that entail, anyhow? You find yourself and then what? Then you have to live with yourself. <br /><br />No, at this point, I would like nothing more than to go back home and eat a baby-sized Chipotle burrito and be good to the people who have been so very good to me over the years. I suppose, at the risk of sounding like Eckhart Tolle or some shit, I suppose that one finds oneself only to the extent that one forgets about oneself. A narcissist I am, indeed. But it is a temporary narcissism, a narcissism born of necessity. <i>Necess-iss-iss-iss-iss ... </i> Narcissism is my way of remaining sane in China, the self-grooming of a cat that has been left out in the rain. I look forward to going home and forgetting about myself for a while. Maybe I'll get myself a warehouse job. Maybe I'll take the GRE. Maybe I'll volunteer someplace. But that's all in the future. I never plan for the future. I think about my present to an unhealthy degree, and I dwell on my past. Also to an unhealthy degree. But the future? What's the sense in worrying about that?ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-80055355093522137302011-03-19T22:26:00.018+04:002011-03-20T01:03:33.171+04:00Ocean GhostI haunted my old apartment all that summer, just waiting around for the new volunteer to show up. I watched <i>The Wire</i> all the way through for the fourth time. Then I watched <i>Six Feet Under</i>. Not a bad show; a bit too morbid for my liking. I even got so bored that I watched the first two seasons of <i>Lost</i>. Then I watched them again. What a stupid show. Why can't I stop watching it? I was brooding on that when the door flew open and the new volunteer came in. She dropped all her luggage and naturally, she screamed. I was almost inclined to scream, myself. But I pulled it together, counted to five, and floated over to shake her hand. <br /><br />"Keith Petit," I said. "China 15."<br />"You're ... dead."<br />"No," I chuckled. "Not dead. It's a long story. Have a seat."<br /><br />I indicated the plastic leather sofa. She didn't so much sit there as much as she passed out and faceplanted there. I floated off to the kitchen to fix up some coffee. <br /><br />When the new volunteer finally came to, I asked her if there was anything she wanted to know about Nanchong.<br /><br />"Thanks, but I don't drink coffee," she said. "If you're not dead, why are you a ghost?"<br />"I've been trying to figure that out myself," I said. "I don't even believe in ghosts."<br />"Me neither."<br />"But my best guess is, well - you know how if you sit on a couch for long enough, you leave behind a more or less permanent ass groove?"<br /><br />She glanced over at the ass groove seated beside her. My ass groove.<br /><br />"You might say I was a bit of a slob in my day," I said. "So my best guess is that I left behind a more or less permanent imprint of myself. In your apartment. Sorry about that."<br />"It looks pretty clean now," she said.<br />I laughed. Then I laughed some more.<br />"Yeah," I said. "It's clean now."<br /><br />"So, can you leave the apartment at all?"<br />"Nope," I said. "I've tried a few times. I'm pretty much stuck here. I can float through the front door, but I've only ever gotten as far as the 3rd floor stairwell. Then I disintegrate and reappear right here on my sofa. Your sofa."<br />"Can people see you?"<br />"You can see me, can't you?"<br />"I mean, can other people see you? Can Chinese people see you?"<br />"If I hover in front of the window for a long time, sure. They point and shout <i>yang gui-zi</i>."<br />"What does that mean?"<br />"'Ocean ghost', if you want to be all literal about it," I said, "but 'foreign devil' is probably more to the point."<br /><br />She coughed. I took out a pack of Shuangxis.<br /><br />"Do you mind if I - "<br />"No. Go ahead."<br />I lit a cigarette.<br />"C'mon. Let me give you the tour," I said. <br /><br />I floated across the living room and she followed me into the study. <br /><br />"I left behind a lot of books for you," I said. "I wanted to keep them all for myself. But there was only so much room in my satchel."<br />"Um, thanks." She took a book down from the shelf. "<i>Eat, Pray, Love</i>?"<br />"Oh," I blushed. "That's not mine. I found it when I got here."<br />"Huh," she said.<br />"This here is the air conditioning unit," I said. "As you can see, most of the paint on the wall has chipped off. That's because the AC leaks like a motherfucker. If you leave it on, it leaks down through the floor and your downstairs neighbors will give you no end of grief about it. So try not to use the AC at all."<br />"But what do I do if it gets hot? It's al<i>ready</i> hot."<br />"I'm not sure," I said. "I never figured that out."<br /><br />I floated into the kitchen.<br /><br />"You cook at all?" I asked.<br />"Yeah, I do."<br />"I don't," I said. "I almost never came in here, come to think of it."<br />She started looking through the cupboards.<br />"Isn't there supposed to be, like, silverware and stuff?"<br />"There is."<br />"Where did it go?"<br />"I'm not sure," I said. "You lose track of things sometimes, you know?"<br />"Right," she said.<br /><br />I floated into the bedroom.<br /><br />"This here is the bed. If you can manage it, I recommend sleeping somewhere else."<br />"Somewhere else? Why? Where else would I sleep?"<br />"Sleeping in this bed," I said, shaking my head. "Sleeping in this bed is like sleeping on a plank of wood. But at least you can brag about sleeping on a plank of wood. You can't really brag about sleeping in an uncomfortable bed."<br />"The paint's coming off this wall, too."<br />"Correct," I said. "So you should probably avoid using this AC unit as well."<br />"Shouldn't you have gotten all this fixed?"<br />"I should have," I said.<br /><br />I floated into the bathroom.<br /><br />"And the last stop on our little reality tour," I said. "The grand finale. The shitter."<br />"Um," she said.<br />"Except if you've gotta go number two, I recommend going somewhere else."<br />"Somewhere else? But - "<br />"Like a restaurant or something. It's a crap shoot, so to speak," I said. "It's Russian roulette with this toilet. Most of the time, everything goes down easy. But sister, you don't wanna be around when the shit hits the fan. I'll just leave it at that."<br />"Yeah. Thanks."<br />"Let's see. What's next? Oh, right. The shower. They cut off the water for no apparent reason every couple days or so. And the hot water is pretty much cold water. And the water pressure comes and goes. Most showers, it just feels like an old man is drooling on your scalp. But it could be worse, right?"<br />"I guess it could be."<br /> <br />I hovered over to the couch and sipped my coffee.<br /> <br />"I'm sorry," said the new volunteer, "but that's really disgusting."<br />"What?"<br />"You. When you drink that coffee. I mean, I can see it just - "<br />"Then don't look," I snapped.<br /><br />It got quiet. <br /><br />"Sorry. I'm just touchy about certain things, is all," I said. "I'm new at this ghost thing. Anyhow. Is there anything you'd like to know about our fair city of Nanchong?"<br />"What is there to know?" <br />"Not much," I shrugged. <br />"I'm sorry," she said, "but I get the impression that you're pretty worthless."<br />"I get that impression sometimes, too," I said. "Of course it doesn't help that I'm an insubstantial blob of ectoplasm."<br />"Like, how long do you plan on haunting me? I didn't exactly count on having a roommate."<br />"I'm not sure," I said. "Maybe another ten minutes, maybe another month or two. It really depends on how big of an ass groove I left behind."<br /><br />Again, her eyes lingered upon the ass groove on my sofa. Her sofa. She smacked it with her palm. She smacked it with both palms. Then, shrieking like a rabid lemur, she picked up the cushion and punched it in the face repeatedly. She threw it back down. The cushion was smooth for a moment. Then, slowly, audibly, the plastic leather snarled into a familiar pair of basins. My ass groove.<br /><br />"I might be here a while," I sighed.<br />"Wonderful."<br />"Believe me, sister, I'm every bit as happy about it as you are. You think I want to hang out in this dingy apartment watching <i>Lost</i> all day?" I huffed. "I just want to go home."<br />"But you won't go home, will you? You're a ghost. You'll just ... disappear one day."<br />"I'm not so sure," I said. "But you're probably right. There's already another one of me out there. A real me. He's back in Nebraska right now, working for a temp agency or something. Now there's a spectral existence for you."<br /><br />There was a knock at the door. The new volunteer looked at me.<br /><br />"Isn't this where you're supposed to float away and hide yourself in the closet or something?"<br />"Naw," I said. "It's cool."<br /><br />She grunted and stomped off to get the door. It was my old boss.<br /><br />"Good afternoon, Jennifer. Your apartment is okay, yes?"<br />The new volunteer - Jennifer, I guess - glanced back at me for a moment. <br />"Yeah. Everything's fine."<br />"That is good. You must be tired. You had better have a rest. But tomorrow the English department will invite you to a banquet. Will you go?"<br />"That sounds great."<br />"I will call your telephone tomorrow. You had better pick it up."<br />My old boss gave me a definite look.<br />"Great. See you tomorrow."<br /><br />Jennifer shut the door and turned around to face me. <br />"I thought you said people could see you," she said.<br />"They can. Some people just choose to ignore me."<br /><br />If they were a long two years for Jennifer, they were an even longer two years for me. At least she was able to get out of the house every now and then. She got homesick a couple months in and stayed that way for a while. Then, the following spring, she hooked up with another volunteer, this guy Jared. Pretty alright dude. After that, nothing really seemed to faze her. Young love. Jared came over to visit sometimes and I'd have to hide out in one of the kitchen cupboards the whole time and stuff my ears with Kleenex at night. <br /><br />Jennifer kept the place impeccably clean, no thanks to me, but most of the time we got along okay. After a while, though, she decided to ignore me, too. It was easier that way, I guess. When she was out of the house, I'd re-watch <i>The Wire</i> or re-watch <i>Six Feet Under</i>. I even re-watched the first two seasons of <i>Lost</i>. I still don't know if they ever get off the island, and I don't really care to find out. And I still don't know why I keep watching that stupid show. <br /><br />Jennifer returned to America this past July. I heard that somewhere along the way Jared proposed to her and she said yes. So I'm happy for them, of course. I hope everything works out okay. She took most of my DVDs home with her and a lot of my books, too. I started reading <i>Eat, Pray, Love</i> and when I finished it I found myself weeping uncontrollably all over my sofa. My ghost tears pooled up in the twin basins of my ass groove. Then they evaporated. The AC's broke again.<br /><br />In the evenings, I hover in front of the window and watch the construction going on outside. I can't tell if they're building something or tearing something down. After four years, I can barely even recognize the place. Everything has changed so quickly, and so much. It's only a matter of time before they tear down my apartment complex. And then where will I go? <br /><br />The new volunteer doesn't show up for another two weeks. I hope she is cool. Or that he is cool. I hope, whoever it is, they bring plenty of books. I'm tired of re-reading the ones I have. I'm tired of re-reading <i>Eat, Pray, Love</i>. <br /><br />Nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to do. No one to talk to. These days, I just float around the apartment, looking for old junk in the desk drawers, behind the bookshelf, under the sofa cushions. There isn't much of anything left. Jennifer cleaned this place like a woman possessed. But I did find a little scrap the other day when I was rummaging around under the bed, a sliver of faded canary yellow paper, a crumpled-up scribble that read: <i>I can't wait to get the fuck out of here.</i> Well, Keith. Neither can I.ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-70749505502463371262011-03-10T19:26:00.007+04:002011-03-10T22:24:39.408+04:00Dash 7<blockquote>the wind blew me back<br />via Chicago<br />in the middle of the night<br />-Wilco</blockquote><br /><br />I remember well the last time I came home via Chicago. But I cannot remember where exactly I was coming home from. Perhaps Mexico, which would go a long way towards explaining why I found myself smoking a Delicado in a t-shirt and cargo shorts just outside of Terminal B, shivering so violently that the ash scattered everywhere and blended neatly into the night's snowy deluge. <br /><br />An older gent joined me outside for a smoke. He asked me if I was cold. Yes, I said, I am. Then he launched into his life story. I couldn't follow most of it - I am not that well-versed in racial slurs - but his story ended happily, I think. He was waiting for a connecting flight to JFK, then he was off to The Philippines to meet his mail-order bride for the first time. Aren't mail-order brides supposed to come in the mail, I asked. I mean, isn't that the whole point of mail-order brides? <br /><br />"Whelp," he said, "I just thought I'd save her the trouble. The exchange rate ain't so kind over there. Kinda want to give the ol' girl a test drive anyway."<br /><br />The twelve-hour overnight layover at O'Hare looked much less gruesome on the itinerary. I slept on the floor of Terminal B that night with my backpack for a pillow. They had benches in Terminal B, but they were short ones, and artsy ones. So I'd wake up with my legs dangling out into space and a rustic sliver of sharpened tin jabbing me in the kidney. The floor, alas, was my best bet, and it wasn't a very good bet at all. The soothing whir of the floor buffers did little to alleviate the train wreck going on in my spinal column. I would wake up in the middle of the night and gaze up at the multi-billion dollar ceiling of Terminal B, and I'd think to myself, this might just be the nicest house I ever fall asleep in.<br /><br />Dawn arrived and I was the first person in line. We boarded the learjet, or the turboprop, or the Dash 7 or whatever it was. I wasn't afraid of flying at the time, so I just kind of sat there in my assigned window seat and eavesdropped. The guy seated behind me started jawing to his neighbor about a party he went to in Phoenix.<br /><br />"Y'ever heard of Usher?" he asked. Silence. "No? <i>No?</i> Where you been, man? Living under a <i>rock?</i> Heh heh."<br /><br />This was in 2009, when I last came home via Chicago. I can no longer remember the last time Usher was big. <br /><br />The guy seated behind me took out his laptop and within seconds, all of us seated in coach were listening to Usher's "Yeah" on laptop speakers that were the hip-hop equivalent of a black hole. <br /><br />"This," said the guy, "is Usher."<br /><br />I turned around to make sure of what I already knew: that the guy seated behind me was not young or black, that he was in fact a salt-of-the-earth Nebraskan in his early forties, wearing a brutally folded and sweatstained Poulan Weed Eater baseball cap. A bevy of Nebraskans had gathered in the aisle to watch the music video, and their bovine faces were blank with the sort of silent trepidation known only to people who move to Nebraska later in life. About two minutes into the video, the stewardess came by to tell the guy seated behind me to turn off his laptop. The guy grudgingly complied and the Nebraskans, relieved, returned to their seats.<br /><br />The guy seated behind me, however, was not done. He had a story to tell, a real humdinger that he would lavish upon his neighbor whether his neighbor liked it or not. <br /><br />"We went to a <i>party</i> with this guy," said the guy seated behind me. "Usher, I mean. The party was at Usher's <i>house.</i>"<br /><br />The House of Usher, I thought, thoroughly amused with myself and my English degree.<br /><br />"Well, I mean, Usher has like, a million houses, I'm sure," said the guy. "But this was one of them."<br />"Oh. Yeah?" grunted his neighbor.<br />"Yeah. Me and my buddies were on the guest list and everything. Unfortunately, the line was too long. You shoulda <i>seen</i> it, man. I mean, a line out the gosh-danged <i>door</i>. So we never got in," said the guy. "But we were still partyin' in the street. I tell you what: that Usher knows how to throw a party."<br /><br />We lifted off. Nobody spoke for a while, least of all the businessman seated next to the guy seated behind me. I imagine he popped a fistful of Unisoms and strapped on his sleep visor ASAP. But the guy seated behind me was not yet sated conversationally. So he reached across the aisle, so to speak.<br /><br />Two Nebraskans: A Dialogue. Their conversation kicked off, predictably, with high school football. I listened, was familiar with all of the shitkicker towns and most of the mascots. I even knew some of the players. Or their older brothers, perhaps. Then the conversation shifted, somewhat less predictably, to Native American heritage.<br /><br />"Yeap. I got some redman blood in me. I'm about 1/8th Winnebago, 1/16th Pawnee. Yourself?"<br />"Welp. About 1/16th Nemaha, 1/32nd Omaha, 1/128th Yamaha ... "<br /><br />I listened but kept silent. Considering my own negligible Irish ancestry, I figured I was probably the least Nebraskan Nebraskan on board.<br /><br />The stewardess came by and tossed me a bag of pretzels. I've never liked pretzels as much as everyone else on earth seems to, so I gave them to my neighbor. My neighbor was a college girl, blonde and homely in the rural Nebraskan way, and we talked for a bit in the rural Nebraskan way. We talked about high school football. Out the window, miles below, the weird agricultural circuitry of the American Midwest scrolled lazily past.<br /><br />The stewardess came back around to pick up our empty bags of pretzels. I thought about asking her for a Bud Light, but everyone on board was palpably Mormon or worse. Then I asked her for one anyway. But we were already starting our descent. The flight home from Chicago never takes very long. It's a line drive. A puddle jumper, if there were any puddles to jump. But it's all refurbished desert down below. The front lawn of America. Irrigation circles, buzzcut farmland, straightedge roads to nowhere - long and gray and deserted except for a tiny twinkle of metal, a Ford F-150 pickup, perhaps, zipping along with a frantic slowness to the intersection of nowhere and nowhere in particular.<br /><br />The seatbelt lights came on. Always a sepulchral moment for some reason, the descent. I buckled my safety belt and wrapped up my conversation with the girl next to me. Even the guy seated behind me fell silent. What else was there to talk about? We'd be landing soon. Though everyone on the plane was probably related somehow, we'd never see each other again. We were descending. We'd hover past the used car lots of Council Bluffs, hurdle the muddy Missouri, and the tires would kiss the runway. Home at last. We'd taxi to the only terminal Omaha has to its name. Is there even a departures wing? I wonder sometimes. And then the seatbelt light would blink to black. And summarily, as a herd, we would remove our masks of polite airplane formality and apply our masks of polite Nebraskan formality. And that's just what we did.<br /><br />But as I reached up for the overhead bin, as a panicked afterthought, the girl next to me asked for my phone number.<br />"I don't have one," I said. It took me a moment to realize that was true.ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23757477.post-39692462715040781142011-03-10T13:53:00.002+04:002011-03-10T20:08:49.968+04:00Via Chicago<blockquote>I've found <br />the way those engines sound<br />will make you kiss the ground<br />when you touch down<br />-Wilco</blockquote><br /><br />Three months left in China and I'm sputtering towards the finish line. Shuddering my way through black plumes of industrial backwash, muttering my way through ribbon after ribbon of red tape, stuttering my way through Oral English 101. Sputtering my way through Chinese airspace like a battered old Sopwith Camel, fuselage peppered with artillery wounds, professorial elbow patches sewn into my wings, the whole thing jerry rigged together with dental floss and Chinese finger traps, faltering and fluttering, stammering and stuttering but still, still sputtering through the People's secondhand smoke towards a drive-thru McMirage on the distant horizon. <br /><br />Rest assured, when I return home, via Chicago, I will return in one piece, but it will be a piece so shoddily taped together as to inspire some metaphysical debate.<br /><br />China has been rough on me, as I imagine it is rough on just about anyone who isn't Chinese. As I imagine it is rough on many people who are Chinese. Here is no country for old men. Here is no country for young men. Here is no country for middle-aged divorcées, or bright-eyed college graduates. Here is no country for peasants, or priests, or philosophers, or poets, or the sad lot of soft-hearted daydreamers who submit themselves daily to the process of being hammered and screwed into bright yellow star-shaped pigeonholes. It must be a country for some particular demographic of people. But I'm pretty sure by now that, wherever else I belong, I do not belong to that demographic.<br /><br />So I am sputtering. Here is no country for pandas. I haven't cleaned my apartment in months. The Maginot Line between my living room and the garbage dump outside has been reduced to a matter of geopolitical nitpickery. I sleep when the sun comes up. I rise just before it sets. My routine has grown so erratic that the erratic has become routine. The pitching rotation of my wardrobe - through theft, loss, and washing machine mishaps - has been thinned down to a single middle reliever, a colorblind knuckleballer thrust unexpectedly into the Major League limelight - and he starts more games these days than I am comfortable admitting.<br /><br />I am sputtering, but I have not yet crashed. And I'm not likely to, not at this point. Because I'm so close to the finish line. Because however much my personal hygiene has suffered, my life out of doors has gotten that much better. A wonderful sort of existential callus has formed around my person. I no longer notice the traffic noise, the construction, the esophageal explosions that rage in the streets, not unless they are pointed out to me, not unless I consciously decide to think about them by way of reminding myself of just how numb I have become to the sensorial circus of my surroundings. It matters very little to me what I have for lunch or dinner. Let's do Chinese, I figure. These days, I teach with the part of my brain that reptiles use when they are snoozing on rocks. Which is not to say that I have grown lazy, or that I care little for my work. But it is to say that I no longer panic, or worry, or even think about teaching. It is something I do, almost instinctively, rather than something I get my panties in a bunch about. Not even my hecklers can get my goat these days. <i>Foreigner, foreigner!</i> Chinese person, Chinese person. I am mindful of the fact that every heckle is one heckle closer to the last heckle, which will occur on an eastbound flight from Beijing to San Francisco. And then, for that one heckler at least, the tables will turn, indeed. Have fun on Haight Street, asshole.<br /><br />Sputtering though I am, I have turned a corner. Sichuanese winter died in its sleep last week. The westerly winds have ushered in days of warmth, days of something resembling sunshine: a dusty orange tennis ball dangling down from the aluminum-tinged sky. I am in a consistently better mood when there is something resembling sunshine to wake up to. The days will be warmer from here on out, I know, and the sun won't be the stranger that it was. Things will be easier from here on out. It's as though, after rowing against the waves for the past 21 months, I have finally settled into a warm and easy current. It is only a matter of time before I am sighted by the Peace Corps rescue chopper and hoisted aboard with fistpounds and manhugs and bottles of champagne to be uncorked and splooged about the cabin.<br /><br />I have turned a corner. I have already lived far more days in China than I have left. The next time I clean my apartment will be the last time I clean my apartment. The next time I step on a fresh baby turd on the sidewalk will be the last time I step on a fresh baby turd on the sidewalk. There remains a daunting amount of Peace Corps paperwork left to be done, but I will fill it out with the same giddiness as a middle schooler cleaning out his locker, or a high schooler returning his books, or a frat boy foiling the crusty dean one last time. <br /><br />Back when I was still grappling with the enormity of two years abroad, I used to measure the time on my late night jogs. I would run for 24 minutes - two years - and if I had already spent six months in China, I knew those 18 remaining minutes were what I had left ahead of me. Two months ago - my 19th month - my right achilles tendon had an unfortunate run-in with the front tire of a moped. I walked it off and thought nothing of the encounter. Until last week - the start of my 21st month - when my right achilles tendon started talking to me and, on a mid-afternoon cigarette run, audibly popped. No more running. I can barely even walk. But late at night, after the eleven o'clock curfew has sent all my hecklers to bed, I go out for a hobble, if you will. Every step is a bitch, as every day in China has been a bitch. The walk (the hobble) takes about half an hour, but for my purposes I round it down to 24 minutes. And those last three minutes back home, when my achilles tendon feels about ready to snap in two like a Chinese condom - well, I say to myself, that's where I'm at. I'm so close to home, and every tedious, tentative step brings me closer. I really have nothing left to do but keep hobbling, and keep an eye out for mopeds.ExpatriateActhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623811575155151896noreply@blogger.com1