ANT Logistics

A Friday afternoon at Nanchong Jialing Bus Terminal. There I stood at the front of the line for the three o'clock bus to Chengdu. But when three gave way to 3:30 and still no bus arrived, the line swelled into a crowd, then a horde, and finally a mob. Almost imperceptibly, I was shunted to the rear, along with the bang bang man who had waited with me for an hour. Angrily, uselessly, he tried to jostle his way back to the front. Then he gave up, set his cargo down and bitched angrily, uselessly. Nobody could understand his dialect, and anyway, nobody cared. The man's dust-streaked dress shirt was unbuttoned all the way down; his ribs stuck out like piano keys. His cargo must've weighed in the neighborhood of 200 pounds. They say an ant can lift 50 times its own weight.

Bang bang men are the soul of Sichuan. They are scrawny men, often shirtless men, who keep the scales of labor balanced on either end of a bamboo rod that they wear across their shoulders like a portable stockade. Bang bang men will carry anything anywhere. In a city like Chongqing, where the hills are homicidal and the heat is murderous, there are so many bang bang men out and about that they are rightfully called the bang bang army. They wait outside twelve hours a day, can be found on every street corner, and will perform astounding feats of powerlifting and marathon walking for about two dollars U.S.

For as much as I admire the bang bang men, their profession ranks only a couple of notches higher than prostitution on the Chinese chain of command. So, although China is, ostensibly, a country that respects its elderly, and although this particular bang bang man was old enough to be Mao's grandpa, it wasn't all that surprising to me that both he and the resident laowai were the first people to be excreted by the great bowel movement that is the Chinese queuing system. The question was: could we still make the three o'clock bus to Chengdu, now that it was coasting into its stable at 4 PM?

I polished my elbows. I balled my fists. Well, Petit, I said to myself, I know you don't like doing this, but if you and your bang bang man are going to get on the 3:00 bus at 4 PM, you're going to have to stoop to everyone else's level. I imagined myself blocking for the bang bang man. He would juke and plunge through the gap like Emmitt Smith. Yes, I told myself, for the bang bang man's sake, for your sake, you're gonna have to buck up, suck it up, bite the bullet, nip it in the bud and ... - but I was not prepared for what happened next. The security guards unlatched the stanchions. A salaryman socked me in the breadbasket. A baby kicked me in the neck. Somebody's grandma slide tackled me. I'd been watching too much soccer. My first instinct was to flop to the floor and grab my ankle, roll back and forth wearing an Argentinian mask of anguish until one of the security guards gave China a red card. But all I could muster was the single American English word douchebags! as the people muscled past. The stampeding herd spun the bang bang man around like a top and jostled me forward and to the left until I flew wide of the turnstile like a Steve Christie field goal. I tried to hurdle the aluminum barricades, but by then, droves of people were grabbing their luggage hot out of the x-ray scanner and charging full steam ahead, having waited all of three seconds for the bus that me and the bang bang man so rightfully deserved. In the end, we were left out in the cold. The security guards hitched the stanchions back in place. The bang bang man and I had missed the bus. The good news was: we were back in the front of the line. The bad news was: that meant absolutely nothing.

As luck would have it, when 5 PM rolled around, the bang bang man and I squeaked through the turnstile at the last possible second and caught the four o'clock bus. But about ten miles out of Nanchong, we came up against a long line of cars that stretched all the way to Chengdu, some 200 kilometers away. It took us six hours to get to Chengdu. It's only supposed to take two.

But now that I'm here, I've set myself up in an undisclosed location, perhaps the swankiest undisclosed location in all of Chengdu. I'm reclined in a wicker chaise lounge, sitting outside at 9 AM on an 8th floor balcony with my feet up on the railing. My friends are at work. I have the morning to myself and there is absolutely nothing to stop me from drinking up every last ground of real, actual coffee this undisclosed location has to offer.

In Chengdu, at this elevation, most of the clouds are beneath me. At this height, I am invisible for the first time in months. The smog is my veil. I can see the people below, but they can't see me. This morning, I have decided to sit outside in my boxer shorts, because when you're invisible, you can be as much of an exhibitionist as you want. I am chaise lounging, lounging chaisely, purposefully overdosing on coffee. And I am people watching, something I haven't dared to do since I arrived, because in this country, the people are always watching me.

The funny thing about people watching is that the further away you get, the less human the people are. If you're sitting in a coffee shop watching the crowds stream past your window, you pick up facial expressions, gestures, snippets of conversation ... You can still see the individual at that range. But from eight floors up, the people start to seem less like people and more like - ants.

Eight floors up. Here is behavior without emotion, routine stripped of intent. From this height, you don't see people. All you see is civilization. You can't see the anxious faces of the human beings at the bus stop. All you know is that they're waiting for the bus. In two minutes, they will be replaced by more people just like them, waiting for the bus, same as the ones who came before.

So many people. Every second, thousands of them pass by, thousands of people I will never really see or know anything about. If you are a solipsist, you might regard the nameless, faceless masses as thoughtless cyborgs programmed to deceive you. But nobody I know is a solipsist. Or if anyone is, I can only assume they are solipsistic cyborgs programmed to deceive me. It is a leap of faith of sorts. We tend to regard the nameless, faceless masses as conscious entities every bit as awake and alive as we are, possessed by dreams and hopes and idiosyncrasies the same as we are, and so on. At this point, I'm not sure which of the two ideas is more frightening.

A bus passes. There go fifty people. The light changes. Fifty cars streak across the intersection. Another hundred people. An airplane lofts overhead, invisible as it rockets through one of Chengdu's outer orbits of smog. Another 200 people. The people on the streets. Another hundred. The people in the apartments around me. Another 500, easy. A thousand people in my field of view at any given second. And that's just for one second. The people change, circulate like skin cells, and whether they belong to anything like an organism is a question too big for me to answer.

Fifteen identical cargo trucks rumble by. Another thirty people. The trucks are bright yellow and the blue letters on the trailers read ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... I have seen these trucks before, always in Chengdu, always in caravans of ten or more. I used to amuse myself contemplating the services rendered by ANT Logistics, imagining the kind of help ants might need with logistics, of all things. Flow charts. Pie charts. Bar graphs. Efficiency assessments. Drone-to-worker ratios. Banquet halls infested with ants, Chinese ant consultants leading their clients via long trails of sugar to the appropriate conclusions.

But a couple days ago, I learned that ANT Logistics is simply a conglomeration of bang bang men. That's all it is. Stick men for hire. A moving company, if you like. In Chongqing, because of the hills, bang bang men can work freelance. But in Chengdu, where there are no hills, there is little work for the enterprising stick soldier. There are, however, thousands of affluent families moving from the cheap and smoggy city to the ever more unaffordable frontier. So trucks are necessary. Trucks and sticks.

So you call ANT Logistics and ten bright yellow cargo trucks pull up in front of your apartment complex. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... Thirty men who are well past retirement age pile out of the trucks and start squawking at you in accents that are more music than language. They spit on your floor, blow smoke in your baby's face, do unspeakable, unimaginable things to your squat toilet - but they are not rude people, understand. These are the lao bai xing, the Old Hundred Names, the Joe Smiths and John Taylors and Jim Carpenters of China. Nobody knows it, but China belongs to them, even though they are laughed at, mocked, derided; even though they are regarded more and more as the unwelcome scum that floats atop the bubbling Sichuanese hot pot.

The Old Hundred Names work at a breakneck pace. They are also the laziest men you have ever seen in your life. Half of the men are on permanent smoke breaks. One of them is sleeping, or dead on the sidewalk outside. The smell of rice liquor makes your eyes burn. And yet your house has been picked clean in ten minutes. A horde of Mongols couldn't have done it faster. Your heirloom piano is dangling off the back of an ANT Logistics truck, suspendered in by what looks to be a shoelace. You gesture at the piano but the chief ANT Logician just belches and waves you off. It's no use. These men have loaded up all your worldly possessions, have piled them into their trucks like the Beverly Hillbillies, and with impeccable Chinese skill, or luck, or magic, they will have everything safely installed in your new $1.3 million dollar apartment across town, without so much as a scratch or a cigarette burn.

Coffee. More coffee. Here come another ten trucks. ANT Logistics, ANT Logistics, ANT ... The cabbies across the highway are taking a siesta. A mahjongg table materializes. Even from way up here I can hear the tiles shuffling. An old man in a wifebeater is exercising in the courtyard below. He situates himself in the exact center of the courtyard and stands looking over a manmade waterfall. From where he's standing, the apartment complex splits into two identical and perfectly symmetrical halves. He performs an exercise in which he smacks his thighs, smacks his manboobs, then shakes his hands in the air as though he's flicking water off the tips of his fingers. He does about forty reps, then sits down on a bench to read a newspaper.

Just on the other side of the highway is a river, coasting along way below the speed limit. It can't seem to make up its mind which way it wants to go, and its brown surface is a confusing interference pattern of crests and troths. One stream headed East, the other headed West. Conflicted river. Jostling itself to get on the bus. There is a sunbather sprawled out on the shore next to a pile of aluminum cans, but she's wearing pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and is hiding under two umbrellas thrust down into the mud. And anyway, there is no sun.

All along the river: apartment complex after apartment complex after apartment complex, all of them identical, like the man in charge just clicked copy-paste copy-paste until he ran into the horizon. It's like standing between two mirrors. Apartment complexes, on and on forever. And in the foreground stands a four-tiered pagoda - impossible to tell at this distance whether it is as old as history or younger than the apartments that surround it - and the pagoda stands there with the river in front and the city all around, and it looks scared. Like it knows something is bound to devour it sooner or later. The apartments, probably. Or the river. The warped and leaning pagoda knows. It knows that one day, that muddled brown river is bound to get its shit together. One day the river will march single file, overflowing its banks, and it will inundate the world in its uniform earthtone, reflecting itself and itself and itself, on and on forever, and it will wash all the dirt away like a glass of lemonade spilled onto an anthill.

My Life Among The Oldsters

I once attempted to describe the American hipster to my students, which proved to be no small feat. The up-and-coming Chinese youth are about as anti-retro as you can get. Anything that predates Lady Gaga is unhip. Cellphones that do not come equipped with an MP3 player and a 26-watt tazer are obsolete. So when I explained to them that the cool kids in America listen to old music on something called a "record player," that they wear old pants, old suitcoats, and old man hats, the response was unanimous:

"American hipsters are Chinese old people!"

Not quite. But I am inclined to say that old Chinese folk are indeed hipsters.

As wary as I am of Chinese younguns, as put off as I am by the hard-drinking fortysomething nouveau riche, I am completely smitten by the elderly Chinese. But at the moment, I am only a distant admirer. I have yet to break into the oldster scene. They have better things to do than hang out with me. They congregate in the park downtown, in tea houses, or around little streetside poker tables. Legally or otherwise, they gamble - mahjongg, dice games, card games, you name it. They enjoy a violent brand of checkers that involves enormous red and black discs, and when the players make their moves, they slam the discs onto the table - whap! - to the approval or outrage of the throng of oldsters that surrounds them.

The men smoke tobacco from long, metal pipes that resemble Irish tin whistles. The women are stooped from decades of sweeping. Together they walk along the river with their hands folded behind their backs. The elderly will say nothing when they first see you, nothing as you pass them, and nothing when you're fifteen feet away from them. Perhaps some distance later, the old woman will say to the old man, "That was a laowai back there, wasn't it?" to which he'll respond with a soft, rising "O".

This is one of the more puzzling aspects of Chinese society. The younguns, who grew up on Hollywood and KFC, who can sing The Fame Monster front-to-back from memory, are the ones who heckle and fetishize foreigners. Meanwhile, the oldsters, who grew up fearing Westerners, who in seventy years have probably never seen an American live and in the flesh, treat us no differently from anyone else. I write more about hecklers than about oldsters because hecklers are an inescapable part of my day-to-day existence. And because it would be cheesy for me to write something like, "My soul takes flight every time I pass the chainsmoking geriatric shopkeeper on the way to work, because he waves at me and smiles and then pedals off on his bicycle without a word," even though something like that sentiment is pretty close to the truth. I adore the Chinese elderly and I want, someday, to become one of them.

When I first arrived in China, I lived with a host family, and my host parents were hip to the Chengdu oldster scene. My host dad looked like a Chinese Harrison Ford, while my mom bore a slight resemblance to Angelica Huston. Their 27-year-old son, my host brother, could've passed for an alien. The day I moved in, when I asked my host dad what kind of work he did, he said, "I'm retired!" and looked at me funny. When I asked my host mom what she did for a living, she said, "I'm retired, too!" and looked at me even funnier. My host brother, meanwhile, insisted that he was a "worker," though in the two months that I lived there, he left the apartment exactly twice.


Fig 32.7: Pan Da with Host Family

My host parents were up every morning at dawn. Mama would cook breakfast while baba pruned the hedges. Then mama would hustle me off to language class. When I came back home for my Chinese siesta, baba would be cooking lunch. After we'd eaten, mama would scold me to tie my shoes, then she'd hand me an umbrella and boot me out the door again. When I returned in the evening, a six-course meal would already be spread out on the table, and baba would go pound on my host brother's door to wake him up.

More often than not, host dad would break out the baijiu, or some plum wine that he'd made himself. We'd sit at the dining room table for hours, discussing politics in very general terms - Ao-ba-ma is the zongtong of America - and I would nod, scribbling the word down in my notebook. Zongtong, zongtong, zongtong. Host brother never talked to me directly, but he would sometimes linger jealously at the table while host dad and I shot the bull, whining and dining while his father wined and dined me. Host dad would grab a bottle of beer and pour its contents into host brother's rice bowl, which never failed to send the manchild into a tizzy. Baba, bu yao, bu yaoooo!

I'd often find host mom playing mahjongg with the Chengdu Red Hat Society, in a garage across from the apartment. I'd wave and say mama, ni hao! and the old ladies would giggle. I'd ask if she was winning and she'd shake her head and say, "I'm no good at this game!" - though there was a sizable heap of RMB on her end of the table. Then, when she got home, we would go for a walk together along the lake - without host brother, of course. Host dad walked slowly with his hands folded behind his back, and would every so often reach up to pluck a leaf from a low-hanging tree limb. Host mom twirled her umbrella and sang to herself. We didn't talk much in those early days because I was unable to, but we had a pleasant rapport that consisted entirely of lazy sighs and exhausted grunts.

After a couple weeks, I realized that I didn't even know my host parents' names. The words baba and mama were becoming a bit too precious to use in public, so one night, after one too many rounds of rice wine roulette, I asked them.

"Yi Yin Yue," said host mom.
I did my best to repeat her name, but what came out of my mouth, in Chinese, meant Yi Yin Fish.

Host mom covered her mouth and laughed.
"Yi Yin Fish! Pan Daaaaa!" she giggled. "Oh, Pan Daaaaa!"

Red-faced, I turned to host dad.
"My name is Liu Lou," he said in his Sichuanese drawl.
"Niu Rou," I said - the Chinese word for beef. Host mom fell off the couch.

"Yes, my name is 'beef,'" said host dad, grinning.
"Pan Daaaaa! Oh, Pan Daaaaa!"

Mr. Beef hoisted his glass.
"He jiu!" he said. "Drink!"


The Corps kept me busy in those days - language lessons, safety seminars, Friday night bull sessions that carried over into Saturday. On the weekend, I wanted nothing more than to sleep, so sleep I did. One Sunday morning, around eleven, there came an unusually insistent knocking at my bedroom door. It was host mom.

"Pan Da!" she shouted. "Pan Daaaaa!"

I slogged out to the dining room and there was host dad sitting at the dinner table with two glasses of rice wine set out in front of him.

"Pan Da," he said. "It's time to eat. It's time to drink."
"Thanks," I said, "but it isn't noon yet and I don't like to - "
"Eat! Drink!"

So we ate, and we drank - far more on both counts than is recommended by Surgeon General Tso. By noon, a high-pitched frequency was buzzing through my brain, and I was only slightly better off than host dad, who kept dropping chicken feet on the floor. After a while, we both began to drift off to sleep.

"Song Min-Tao!" host dad shouted all of a sudden.
"Song Min-Tao?"
"Yes, your friend Song Min-Tao. What is he doing right now?"
"Um, he's probably asleep," I fibbed, "or studying."
"Call him up!" ordered host dad. "Bring him over. Together we will eat - and drink!"

Through one of those fortuitous coincidences that have lately befallen me in spades - like being christened Pan Da - my good friend Vijay (Song Min-Tao) happened to live right next door. His host family and mine were old friends, or old nemeses - it was hard to tell which - so we often went out for hot pot together, though Vijay's host brother - like my own - seldom joined us, for fear of the sun.

"Call him up!"
"I really think he might be studying," I said.
"That's okay," said host dad. "We'll study Mandarin - together."

The official language of the Liu household was Sichuanese, so I knew a Mandarin study session was unlikely. But host dad insisted, so I sent Vijay a short and diffident text message and, at host dad's behest, downed another shot of baijiu.

A couple minutes later, host dad belched and checked his watch.

"Ai-ya, where is Song Min-Tao? What's keeping him?"
"I bet he's studying. He studies very hard on the weekends and - "
"Give me the phone. Let me talk to him."
"I - well, see - the thing is - he's very busy these days and - "
Host dad snatched the phone from my hand and within seconds, he had our neighbors on the line.

"Yes. Hao, hao. Let me speak to Mr. Song," he said. "It's important."

I began to laugh uncontrollably: Mr. Song! This was happening. It was inevitable. And I could in no way be held to account. It was all host dad at this point.

"Mr. Song? Song Min-Tao? Yes, hello. It's me, Mr. Beef, Pan Da's baba." Host dad turned and shot me the slightest grin. "Have you eaten? Yes? No matter. I would like to invite you over for lunch. Your friend Pan Da and I are studying Mandarin and drinking - green tea."

I clapped my hands together and collapsed on the table laughing.

"Yes, it's very important that you come. We have already cooked a little something for you," he said. "Yes, yes. That's right. We're just over here studying Mandarin and drinking - green tea."

He handed the phone back to me. I wanted to high-five the man, but though he was grinning ever so slightly, he didn't seem to find the situation as funny as I did. He sat back down across from me and we silently awaited the arrival of Mr. Song.

A knock at the door. Host mom got up to open it. In came Vijay, half-asleep in sandals and jogging shorts, a wrinkly gray t-shirt. In a glance, he took in the scene - the chicken feet on the floor, the empty bottles, red-faced host dad, a greasy-haired and grinning Pan Da. He smirked.

"Sup, y'all?" he said. "What's going on?"
I giggled. "Nooooothin'."

We exchanged a fist pound.

"Please sit," said host dad, and Vijay sat. Host dad started pouring him a shot.
"Oh, actually, I don't - "

Too late. I gave Vijay the international "take one for the team" look and he nodded. Host dad hoisted his glass. He jiu!


Little by little, my Sichuanese improved and so did our dinner table talks. I asked host dad where he'd traveled in China and he said, let me show you. He fetched a photo album from behind a case of beer and spread it out on the dining room table.

And there they were, mama and baba at the Great Wall. I laughed. Host dad was a hipster! He looked pretty damn cool back in the 70's, with a swoop of hair scooped across his forehead and the slightest hint of a goatee. And host mom was gorgeous - and still was, I was careful to add, which set mama a-gigglin'.

"Beijing," said host dad, and turned the page.

Baba with his hipster bros in the Forbidden City. It looked like an album cover - goatees, kitschy suitcoats, the smirking visage of Chairman Mao in the background.

Baba turned the page. Host brother was born. As a kid, he didn't look nearly so bratty or so alienlike. He even had complexion back then. But I noted that his outfit hadn't changed in twenty years: a green and white striped polo tucked into drawstring shorts, sandals with socks.

We sat reminiscing for a while. Then host mom went to bed and so did host brother - separately, I assume - and we, the menfolk, stayed up to burn the midnight oil together. I had just become acquainted with the Mandarin past tense, and I was eager to put it to use.

"So, what kind of work did you do before?" I asked host dad. He hoisted his glass. We drank. Host dad filled our glasses again, then sat quietly for a moment.
"I worked," he said, "in a factory."
"What kind of factory?"
"Just a factory," he said. "We made things."

I could see him teetering on the edge of going further, then he sat back in his chair and fell silent.
"Very xinku," he said finally, "Very bitter work."

Was he sweating or crying? I could see that this was a dangerous discovery, this past tense of mine. I changed the subject and talked instead about the future.

"So, what's for lunch tomorrow?"


By the end of the two months, all the volunteers were itching to leave Chengdu, to move on to our own apartments and our own separate lives. We had been adopted, and in a real sense, our host families were like family to us. But in some ways, the experience was a bizarre regression to childhood and - watching my host brother as he pouted and slurped grape juice from his sippy cup - it was a regression I was more than ready to move on from.

But like most long-awaited transitions, it came too quickly. Before we knew it, we found ourselves standing on the side of the road with our luggage lined up along the curb, all our host families chatting with one another, family pets with names like Wang Wang and Kuai Kuai and Deng Deng scurrying all over the place, play fighting, furtively humping each other in the bushes.

We took a couple group pictures with our families, then a bus pulled up and we threw our luggage aboard.

China is not Latin America. The people here don't hug often, and they aren't much for crying, either. But our host parents hugged us goodbye, and many of them were bawling. I hugged Ms. Fish and Mr. Beef. Host brother, of course, was nowhere to be found. Then I got on the bus. Hell, I felt like bawling, myself. There were seventeen volunteers and more than 50 seats on the bus, so we all sat apart from each other until the waterworks ran dry. The bus started and we waved out the window as we passed.

But Ms. Fish and Mr. Beef had already started off down the road, Ms. Fish twirling her umbrella and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, Mr. Beef with his hands folded behind his back, reaching up to pluck a leaf from a low-hanging branch.

Year of the Cat

I got a hot shave and a haircut on the way to the bus station. As the razor skimmed my cheek, it shot a ginger stream of hair follicles into the barber's face.

"Fuck," he shouted in Chinese, "I'm choking on your beard!"

He wanted to know about the American Breast.
"There are big ones and small ones," I said.
What about the American Ass? It comes in many different sizes, I said. America is a very diverse country, I explained.

He took me into the back room for a scalp massage.
"How big is your pepper?" he wanted to know.
"That's a secret," I said.
"Secrets don't make friends. Tell me. It'll be our little secret."
"Um," I said.
"Okay, Mr. Laowai. Next time you come in, you can tell me how big your pepper is."
"Deal."
A hot shave and a haircut, a shampoo and a scalp massage, a lesson in Sichuanese: one U.S. dollar.

There were no buses left - it was already 7 PM - so I caught a communal minivan and we shuttled through the mist towards Chengdu. Already the drunk dials were pouring in. Seventy-five Americans with volunteer stipends to blow, gallivanting up and down the alleys of that big dusty construction site 180 kilometers to the west. I leaned forward in my seat to speed the minivan along. I was running four hours late. But, I thought, glancing at my reflection in the window, tussling my bouffant and palming the powdery baby-ass of my cheek, I was looking pretty damned good.

We pulled up to a gas station just outside of Chengdu and the driver seemed content to wait in line for two hours to refill his tank. I paid my fare, hopped out of the van, and flagged down a cab. I checked into the Kehuayuan Hotel around ten and on my way up to the room, someone snagged me by the elbow and the montage began. Such is memory. All the anxiety and nausea and shifting silences are erased. What remains is this montage, six minutes and 35 seconds long, to the tune of Al Stewart's Year of the Cat.

Pulsating neon, hot blue blowtorch blasts, jackhammers and bulldozers, dust and trampled cigarettes, motorbikes and vacant taxis. I think I'd better stay in tonight. Well, maybe just one drink. Up the stairs to a pleather wrap-around sofa in the corner. Tapping your toe against the brass footrail beneath the bar. Frosted steins and sinister shot glasses. A cloud of Rastafarians by the door and the ponytailed Frenchmen around the billiards table. The Chinese girls in their Groucho Marx specs. You asked the bartender if he had any Cure and he did. The married couples danced like they were merely dating. One more and we'll go home. You sent Dave out for another pack of Pandas. Pulling a five-kuai prayer from the depths of your corduroys, the bartender said it was alright and slid a shot of Jack your way. Amplifiers and instrument cases. Broken conversations in line for the men's room. You got Boston Joe to do a JFK impression. Levi did the national jig of Ethiopia while the Ripleys went Costa Rican on the dancefloor. You stole some Irish girl's drink and her man held you hostage until you'd given him the last of Dave's cigarettes. Strobe lights, camera flashes, tobacco hieroglyphics, the stubborn, unrelenting beat. The paternal warmth of watching two young kids make out for the first time, drunken bodies pressed against the Samsung AC Unit in the corner and you across the room wondering how you got so relatively old. What time is it, anyhow? One more and we'll go home. You ask the bartender if he has any Steely Dan and he does. A beer and a shot. Peanuts and sunflower seeds. The Sharpie graffiti on the bathroom walls. One more and we'll go home ...

And then the music fades out like the 1970's and you find yourself at the train station, bidding short-term farewells to people you will never see again. And then the long train ride back home, the countryside all rotting cement and flooded fields in the rain, a formaldehyde hangover squeezing vinegar out of your eyes, and you sitting there with a barfbag close at hand, wishing you'd never gotten so damned attached.