Expatriate Act is Dead (Long Live Expatriate Act)

"Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."
- Gustave Flaubert

To the four readers I have left (hi mom), Expatriate Act is not dead. But it will be soon enough. If you listen closely, you can hear the death knells ringing down from the Sichuanese hills. They - the knells, I mean - sound something like 600 million Chinese men launching double barrel snot rockets in unison. And what that sounds like, I leave you to imagine. Rest assured, I can imagine it well enough.

Sometime in April, this blog will turn five years old. And three months after that, it will die. Of that I am certain. Because as of July, I will be traveling no longer. As of July, I will be an expatriate no more. As of July, consider my ass retired.

In July, I will return to my native Omaha. And I intend to stay there for a while. I also intend to keep writing. So I could, of course, prolong the inevitable. I could rechristen this blog "Repatriated Act" or "Ex-Expatriate Act." I could write about the outside world from my foreign correspondent's desk in Omaha. Or I could write about Omaha; no doubt my native Nebraska will be as foreign to me as China once was. But I started this blog as a first-time traveler, and I intend to close it out as a retired traveler. Frankly, I am exhausted. I sense that my work here is done. And anyway, five years seems like a good number to go out on. So at this juncture, I will graciously bow out and pass on the torch. Let the laowais write for the laowais, I figure.

I started this blog in April of 2006. I turn 28 this Friday, but I was 23 back then. Imagine that. Time gets away from us.

At 23, I had successfully graduated from college with a degree in creative writing. For the better part of a year, I worked as a copywriter until I realized what I had known all along: that the encubicled life was not for me. So that fateful April, I set off for Poland to earn a teaching certificate of sorts. I started a blog. I called it Expatriate Act. I got the teaching certificate, but all my luggage was stolen in Berlin. Broke and half-naked, I returned to the States to buy some new clothes from the Salvation Army. Shortly thereafter, I landed a fairly lucrative gig teaching children in South Korea. I lived in South Korea for one year. Then I vacationed for a month on the east coast of China, where unmentionable things happened. Then I spent two weeks in The Netherlands, where even less mentionable things happened. I returned to the States and squandered my life savings on beer and women and Taco Bell. A good couple months they were. Then I taught English for six months in a coal mining town in Poland. The women were many, but I couldn't bring myself to stay there, so I tried to put together a life in Berlin. I failed. I returned to the States. I got a teaching job in Mexico. I lived there for six happy months while the country tumbled into civil war. Somewhere along the way, I was accepted into the Peace Corps fold. In the summer of 2009, the Peace Corps shipped me off to China. I have spent the past two years in Nanchong, Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China.

This is the trajectory of the past five years of my life. At the outset, when I first left America, I couldn't have anticipated, or guessed, or dreamed that I would be gone for so long. And now that my adventure is drawing to a close, I'm surprised at how quickly the time has passed.

Vague intentions begat vague writing. I didn't know what I was looking for when I first left America, so I wasn't sure what to write about when I started this blog, the blog I dubbed Expatriate Act. After five years of writing, I am still not sure what I am writing about. I cannot say that I have gotten any closer to figuring out who I am. I cannot say that I understand China, or Mexico, or Poland, or Korea any better than I did before I lived in those places. Writing, and the process of writing, eludes me even more than it did when I first started writing.

I cannot say that I have ever consciously worked on Expatriate Act. If anything, Expatriate Act has worked on me. If anything, the presence of Expatriate Act has dogged me and pestered me, has compelled me to write more than I otherwise would have. For better and for worse, Expatriate Act has injected me with a neurotic compulsion to write, even when there is positively nothing worth writing about.

That said, the most wonderful times of my life - namely, the six months I spent in Mexico - are almost totally absent from this blog. I wrote nothing about Mexico. I was too busy being happy. Conversely, the most tedious, most miserable times of my life - the time I have spent in Asia - have been written about ad nauseam. This isn't terribly mysterious. Or at least, it shouldn't be. The natural habitat of the writer is misery. In the absence of misery, what else is there to write about? Perhaps that is why I couldn't stay in Mexico. I had nothing to write about in Mexico. I was too happy. But in the end, I am not just a writer. I am also a person. And like most people, I tend to avoid misery when I can. And that is why I cannot stay in China.

I don't know why I started writing Expatriate Act. And I'm not sure why I continued writing it. I never attracted an audience in the beginning, and I only just barely have an audience now, five years later. A cult following, you might say. But at no point have I written for the sake of attracting an audience. I am too selfish and not quite conniving enough for that. I write to get things off my chest. And more than that, I write to amuse the people I hold dear. As I write, I am forever wondering and worrying - would so-and-so find this funny? Getting things off my chest is a necessity, but it only affords relief. It brings me no pleasure. What affords me the most pleasure are the emails, comments, compliments, criticisms, and assorted contributions from the people who read what I write. So I thank you all for that. Very little in life makes me happier than the knowledge that other people are made happier by what I write. I mean that. The fact that other people read what I write flatters me to no end, and is pretty much the only thing that inspires me to keep writing. This all sounds very cheesy and Oscarspeechworthy, but I wouldn't have written for five years if so many people hadn't encouraged me along the way. I thank you again.

I have learned a lot about myself through writing, and through writing, I have learned much about the cultures that have allowed me to cavort - drunk and disheveled all the while - in their midst. But above all else, it has been a real pleasure to write: the process itself has been indescribably rewarding. I have always been a writer, but I have never enjoyed writing so much. Expatriate Act was an experiment, and I consider the experiment a marvelous failure. In five years of writing, I never once put things exactly the way I wanted to. But that goes with the territory. Dancing bears and cracked kettles and what not. So - fuck it, I say. If my hypercaffeinated, hyperinebriated crotch-scratching labors have inspired a single bout of unfalsifiable laughter, then my work here is done.

But my work here isn't done. Not quite yet. I still have four months left to go. I still have many classes left to teach, countless hecklers left to ignore, and yes, many things left to write about. Expatriate Act is not yet dead. I'm just letting you know that it will be soon enough. This is not to say that Expatriate Act will disappear completely. I imagine I will leave it up for posterity, in all its unabridged, unedited glory. As a time capsule. As a tombstone. As a cautionary note to the up and coming generations of college graduates. Listen: here are all the mistakes you can make during your mid to late twenties. And listen: here is why they are worth repeating.

Illegal Raëlian

He came to Earth on a Tuesday. Pedro found him and brought him to class for show and tell.

I remember it was a Tuesday because Pedro only came to class on Tuesdays. He was a busy man, Pedro. Head accountant at the one and only luxury hotel in Zamora de Hidalgo, Mexico - not exactly a lightweight. He was away on business half the time, and on the verge of being fired the other half. So who could blame him if he only came to class once a week, and thirty minutes late at that? I certainly didn't.

Around 8:00 in the PM, there would come a knocking at the wood-plastic door and Pedro would peek his head in. Teacher, can I come een? No matter how late he was, Pedro always had a seat saved at the head of the table, like he'd phoned in beforehand to make a reservation. On the way to his rightful throne, he exchanged fistpounds with everyone in class. Very-very sorry, teacher. I just have the meeting with the fok-hink boss!

Pedro was in his late 40's when I taught him, and is probably in his mid 30's by now. The very portrait of youth, Pedro, but almost comically bald, with more hair to his felt-tip mustache and bushy black eyebrows than he had up top. A pair of yellowish buck teeth gave him a rodentlike but charmingly boyish appearance. He wore his pastel dress shirts unbuttoned low enough that you could infer his nipples. And nestled amongst plenty of old-growth chest hair was a solid gold crucifix. Pedro, like most Zamoranos, was a devout Catholic, though clearly not of the superstitious set. He grinned during his in-class sermons. Teacher, I just give all the thanks to my God - here, he would point and gaze up towards the yellow-stained Styrofoam ceiling tiles - for give me strength to not be fire from best fok-hink hotel in Zamora, okay? And in the next breath, he was lamenting his estranged ex-wife, who had hooked up with some pinche Sancho from Guadalajara. Then he was regaling us with tales of nudist gringo bacchanalia at Hotel Casa Velas in Puerto Vallarta. Then he was speculating on the potency of his teacher's seed, and the global distribution thereof.

"I know you have the childrens, teacher," he would say, with the same perverse grin he wore when kissing his crucifix. "All over the fok-hink world. America, Canada, een pinche China, too. Everywhere, they are callink for you. They are waitink for you, teacher! Waitink for you with open arms! Waitink - for the rest of their fok-hink life!"

Like all the other TEFL academies I've worked for, the academy in Mexico warned me about getting tight with my students. You are their teacher and not their friend - this was school policy. But I've never been very good at making the distinction between student and potential drinking buddy, and seeing how the teenagers I taught in the afternoon reviled me as their mortal enemy, I had no qualms about making friends with my adult night class. Anyway, I had no say in the matter. They befriended me first. As soon as the bell rang, Luis was nudging me and tipping back an invisible bottle of Indio, or Pedro was escorting me out to his Cadillac Escalade for an all-expense-paid tour of the little-known ritzy side of Zamora.

My adult students were well beyond their language-learning years. Poor Alejandro in the back literally could not speak a word of English, said sí for yes and a heavily accented no for no. Pedro, a Chivas fan, called soccer "football-soccer" and I corrected him every Tuesday for four months, in vain.

"Pedro, my man," I would say. "It's either football or soccer. You have to choose one. It can't be both."
"Okay, teacher. We watch the Chivas football-soccer after class, okay?"

But futile as my efforts sometimes were, my oldsters took notes, asked me good questions, even did their homework - and they learned English the way all languages should be learned: through off-color remarks about their teacher's virility. Awash in a sea of spoiled adolescents, my adult class was the lone bright spot of my teaching day. All that semester, my high school students called me a maricon behind my back and eventually to my face. They egged my house on three separate occasions, always during my afternoon siesta. But at the end of the day, when I slumped into my night class like a burlap sack full of hurt feelings, my non-traditional English learners would give me fist pounds, compliment me on my relatively youthful looks, and ask me about my girlfriends. But what cheered me up most of all were those rare Tuesdays when I found Pedro there, on time for once, seated at the head of the table, leaning over his yellow legal pad, bearing a nauseating amount of man-cleve, and as I set down my books and took my place at the whiteboard, he would say, grinning perversely, "We have been waitink for you, teacher. Waitink for you with open arms. We will wait for you for the rest of our fok-hink life."

Enter the Raëlian. It was a Tuesday, around 8 in the PM. Pedro was absent, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Over the weekend, I had taught myself the four English past tenses, how to distinguish them, and how to teach them, so I was very excited to share this newfound knowledge with my adult class. I sketched Pedro's balding visage on the board.

"So, let's say Pedro is watching football-soccer. Suddenly, his estranged ex-wife calls from Guadalajara. This is the past continuous, followed by the simple past: Pedro was watching football-soccer when ... "

I was teaching the past continuous when the Raëlian arrived. There was a knock at the door. Pedro peeked his head in.

"Very-very sorry, teacher. Can I come een?"

But this time, Pedro was not alone. He exchanged fist-pounds with his classmates and me and assumed his usual place at the head of the table. And behind him came an emaciated man of a greenish hue who smirked at me as he passed. The stranger did not exchange fist-pounds with anyone, but kept his arms crossed over his chest and his hands tucked into his armpits. He slid a chair to the far right corner of the room and there he sat, smirking at me.

Pedro took out his legal pad, put on his bifocals, and began copying down what I had written on the board.

"What will you show us today, teacher? I mean, what will we see today?" He squinted at my Pedro cartoon. "Teacher, that ees me?"

I, meanwhile, was squinting at the stranger in my classroom. That smirk. Those eyes. His zombie complexion. If you've seen David Lynch's Lost Highway, this guy was the splitting Latino image of The Mystery Man.

"Pedro, aren't you going to introduce me to your ... friend?"
"Oh. Hmph." Pedro snorted. "He ees not from our planet, teacher. He from space."
Pedro pointed up at the ceiling tiles and resumed writing.
"From space?"
"Yes, teacher. You don't want to know thees man," he said, scribbling irritably. "Thees man have very-very strange ideas."
"Well, that's okay. I'm interested in strange ideas."
Pedro set down his pen and removed his glasses.
"Por ejemplo, teacher. You know I believe in my God, my Lord and Savior Jesucristo," he turned toward The Mystery Man, who was watching me. "Thees man believe in - he believe in other God. Cómo se dice lagarto? Yes. Yes. He believe in leezard God!"

My students had stopped taking notes and were looking back and forth between Pedro and The Mystery Man. I glanced anxiously at the whiteboard. The past continuous had become the past simple. Finished. The arrival of Pedro's lizard-worshiping friend had catapulted us into an unexpected and unpredictable future tense. But my curiosity was far too piqued. I couldn't help but ask.

"Maybe you can tell me a little bit about your lizard beliefs, Mr. - "
He got to his feet.
"Name is Jose," said the man. "I am Raëliano."

It took me a moment to translate the word, but only a moment. No shit. A real live Raëlian. In my classroom. It was as though I'd hogtied a unicorn, or boobytrapped Bigfoot. I had met Scientologists before, Hare Krishnas, even Episcopalians - but this was something new. My very first Raëlian. Mentally, I marked off another square on my Sinister Cults Bingo card.

Then, I played dumb. Because I was interested.
"Raëliano?" I asked. "What's that?"

A radioactive glow spread over the classroom as the Raëlian spoke. His English was impeccable, but stripped of all tone and color. He did not mention lizards, but he did reference UFOs, alien overlords, a French auto racing messiah, and a whole host of other divine beings that you might find in the National Enquirer Year in Review issue. Patricia was glaring at the Raëlian and praying to herself. Alejandro had no idea what was going on. Alejandro 2, a 16 year-old boy who had been placed among the adults for some reason, and who was more mature than any of them, looked positively terrified. Pedro snorted and rolled his eyes.

"Teacher, do not listen thees man. I will wait for my God with open arms and one day very-very soon he will come," said Pedro, "but thees man, he will wait for the rest of his fok-hink life and still, the leezard will not come. Okay? Time for school. What will you show us today, teacher? What will we see today?"

The Raëlian sat back down and was silent for the rest of class, but he watched me with a laserbeam intensity that gave me the shakes and rendered my own words foreign to me. I was relieved when the bell rang. Pedro and the Raëlian got up to leave. Pedro gave me a fistpound. The Raëlian just smirked. I would never learn just how they were acquainted, or why Pedro had brought him to class in the first place. And I still don't know anything about the Raëlian belief structure, whether it involves lizards or aliens or Israelites or race cars or what. I plan to remain happily ignorant in that regard. I'd rather not know. It's like looking into a vortex. You keep at it long enough and before you know it you've got spirals in your eyes.

As Navidad approached, my adult students proposed an end-of-semester Secret Santa gift exchange. I set the bar at twenty pesos maximum, though I knew Pedro would hurdle it. Then, a strange thing happened. Two weeks before the gift exchange and the final exam, everyone dropped the class. Luis, Alberto, Patricia, both Alejandros and a pair of Lupitas. All gone. Everyone had vanished except me and Pedro, and Pedro only showed up on Tuesdays. The week before the final exam, just for something to do, I spent my 7:30 class tutoring a bratty little ten year-old soccer phenom who wanted to improve his grammar, but wasn't much for conversation. No sense of humor, this kid. Then, he disappeared, too. So I would walk into class, find the classroom empty, shut the door behind me and start doodling little Pedros on the whiteboard, blue Pedros, black Pedros, red ones, green ones ...

Then, the day before the final exam, the night of the gift exchange, there came a knock on the door. I erased the whiteboard as fast as I could. The door squeaked open and there was Pedro.

"Teacher, can I come een? Where ees every-bady?"

There was no one to fistpound but me. Pedro took his seat at the head of the table, unpacked his legal pad and glasses.

"What will you show us today, teacher? What are we going to see today?"
"Well, Pedro, my man. We should probably review a little bit. The final exam is tomorrow."
"Ayyy, no! Teacher, I have the meeting with the fok-hink boss in the tomorrow night! I will be late to take part een the exam!"
"How late is late?"
He glanced at his Rolex.
"The eight and thirty!"
"Well, then, Pedro," I said. "I will wait for you. Here. With open arms. For the rest of my life."
"No, teacher," corrected Pedro. "For the rest of your fok-hink life."

That night, Pedro drove me in his Escalade to a place called La Cucaracha. I had told my roommate Nicole to meet us there for the gift exchange, having already hyped up this Pedro character to lizard godly proportions. We found her sitting in the back of the bar with the rest of my adult class. There they were, waiting for me. With open arms, as it were.

I gave them all fistpounds. Then, half-irked, half-delighted, shouting over the intoxicating ruckus of jukebox banda, I asked, "Where have you all been? The final exam is tomorrow!"

"We have been waitink for you," said 16 year-old Alejandro 2, flashing a grin across the table at his bald, mustachioed mentor. "We will wait for you for the rest of our fok-hink life."

But not for the rest of the semester, apparently. The next day, Pedro was the only student to take the final exam. Everyone else failed the class. Pedro passed by a mustache whisker. But the gift exchange was a success. I gave Alejandro 2 an English dictionary, the fruitcake of ESL gifts, but he was delighted with it and wore a brace-toothed smile for the rest of the evening. And Pedro gave me a wallet. I spotted the pricetag: 200 pesos. I blushed. Later that night, I transferred everything over to Pedro's wallet - my cards, what centavos I had left, and an Emiliano Zapato trading card that Eduardo, the only teenager in Zamora who didn't hate me, had given me back in February. I slid the trading card behind the transparent flap where your driver's license is supposed to go and now, whenever I fumble around for some loose Chinese RMB, there is Emiliano Zapato peering up at me with his furious superhero eyes, wearing a sombrero so big that it doesn't even fit in the frame, a mustache like a charred Vienna sausage, a red scarf knotted around his neck, two sashes of ammunition crisscrossed over his chest, and under his portrait, the words "EL APOSTÓL DEL AGRARISMO." And then, at the very bottom of the card, the handwritten words "Thanks Kiwi. Seeya man. -Eduardo" Ah, yes. They used to call me Kiwi back then. I remember now. KIWI: EL APOSTÓL DE INGLÉS.

pimwarts5943682.doc

I have managed to keep Expatriate Act aloft for just over four years now. Free Expatriate Act beer koozies for all, etc. But if you were to start from my very first post and read all the way through to this one, you would not, for the life of you, be able to find anything in the way of a narrative. There is no overarching plot here. There are very few recurring characters and even the narrator remains a vague (but hopefully likable) vagrant fop on the horizon. There are no themes or symbols in my story, or if there are, I am unaware of them. There is, naturally, no setting to speak of. One day our protagonist is in Krakow. The next he's back in Omaha. Then he's off to South Korea all of a sudden. Thanks for letting us know, Mr. Foppish Narrator. Much later, we learn that he's in Omaha again, by way of Poland and Mexico, though in neither country did he bother to write about much of anything other than the contents of his stomach. And now he's in China, apparently for a much longer spell than is usual for him. He is writing somewhat regularly these days, though what he writes isn't much different from what he wrote while serving puberty in the American Midwest. Disillusionment, social discomfort, moral ambiguity. Is that all there is to the world? You begin to wonder whether he ever left the country in the first place, whether he might not be hiding out in his parents' basement after all, drinking Miller High Life on the sly and siphoning his ideas from 4 AM reruns of M.A.S.H.

If I am evasive, I swear it isn't deliberate. Really, I wish I could be one of those super personable bloggers who updates four times a day with pictures of himself snorkeling, pictures of himself mounting a camel, pictures of himself mounting a snorkeling camel. But I've never been one to take a whole helluva lot of pictures. I tend to rely on my brain camera. And I wish I could've weaved this blog into a cohesive whole, but it's a bit late for that now, isn't it? I would've very much liked to have explained the trajectory of my life more clearly along the way, but the problem is this: I am chronically unable to come through in the writing clutch. I am the Bill Buckner of the written blog. Let me explain.

Whenever something momentous happens to me, I seem to lose all inspiration to write about it the moment I set pen to Moleskine. I never wrote about my trip to North Korea and wrote only sparingly about my time in Mexico, perhaps the happiest six months of my life. Here in China, I waited so long to write about the Kunming Dwarf Kingdom that Matt Lauer and those muckraking Today Show hacks broke the story before I could. And I will make them pay, believe me. But for whatever reason, I just can't write when the plot is spelled out for me beforehand. It's like I'm doing algebra instead of writing. I have to sort out all these predefined narrative variables and figure them into a story, when what sticks out in my mind, the things that are really interesting to me, are mere trifles: the lispy, contemptuous way the North Korean passport officials spit out the word Yesss when I greeted them in their native tongue, the Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam, my long walks into the Świętokrzyskie woods with Walden as my guide, the late night burrito van on Calle Uruguay, the spectacle of piling out of a Toyotavan in downtown Kunming with three Caucasians and six midgets ... These trifles I could weave into prose poems, but the stories that go with them are beyond my ability as a writer. It's as though the moment I try to capture any experience that most people would consider significant, the story acquires a plotline that won't bend, characters that won't budge, and the whole damn thing gets as big and blocky and cold as a Frigidaire.

I don't have that problem when I write about my absurd day-to-day existence. That world is more of a connect-the-dots game for my brain. I sit down with an empty page and nothing to go on but the children peeing in the street and the old men hawking laserbeam loogeys, the ever-present threat of death by trishaw and the sauna-grey skies of Sichuan in summer. This is background radiation. These are Chinese cliches. These are things I have written about tens of hundreds of times already. But amidst that overwritten backdrop, some minor spot of bother acts as the grain of sand that gets the whole snowball rolling. Everything adds up; the semicolons align. One hour later, when the sooty ol' snowball has finally come to a rest at the bottom of the slagheap hill, I've gone places I hadn't planned to, made connections between any number of things that were unrelated in my mind until the moment I wrote about them - and yet the end result is something manageable, something I can sculpt and polish between my proofreading mittens before flinging it at the internet to watch it splatter into oblivion.

So that is one hangup of mine. Another one is this: I happen to be the worst breed of packrat, hoardicus dishevelicus, the packrat who keeps everything while simultaneously losing it all. I am both archivist and book burner. I keep everything I have ever done, but I wouldn't know where to begin finding any of it. If worse came to worst and I had to clean my apartment for some reason, before the rent-a-maid arrived, I would hire a private investigator to sift through the rubble for any writing I may have done over the past year. When I say I didn't write about North Korea or the Dwarf Kingdom, that isn't quite true. I wrote about them, and probably on several occasions, but the ideas never clicked, so I gave up and ripped the pages out of my notebook, dropped them on the floor, spilled coffee on them, ashed my cigarettes onto them, slept on them, walked over them for several months, and eventually kicked them under the bed and forgot they even existed.

Even with the aid of technology, I am no less a packrat, and no less a slob. I save all of my incomplete writing - even the stuff I am proud of - under titles like skoobfob.doc and gompbar.doc and pimwarts5943682.doc. Months later, when I go looking for those writings, I am shocked and outraged that I cannot find them. And yet I continue saving them with Seussian titles. And I write a lot. For several years, my harddrive was little more than a vault of stories I'd meant to write but didn't, blog posts that weren't, the aborted fetuses of novels, snippets of dialogue, quotes from Hemingway and Borges and Dostoevsky, all of them saved as jabberwocky.doc. Then, sometime last winter, my computer suffered a major stroke. What happened was this: Windows shut down, as it often does, but when it came back up, my computer was a blank slate. Generic pastoral background, no non-Windows programs, no non-Windows files, no non-Windows nothing. Just me and Bill Gates. I didn't believe it at first, but when I searched the harddrive for "Radiohead" and turned up nothing, I knew something was amiss.

After that, my computer started to run much faster. But I had lost everything I had ever written. Good, I told myself, perhaps you will start to run faster, too! Ha ha ha. But really, I was devastated. I had always meant to make something out of all those Keith Petit b-sides, elusive and incorrigible as they were, just as I had always meant to make something out of all the crumpled, coffee-stained, cigarette-burned Moleskine pages under my bed. I wanted people, eventually, to read those stories. Those trifles. The Hermit Kingdom and the Midget Kingdom. Burritos and The Brothers Lounge. But lo, the rent-a-maid had come before the private investigator and now, all was lost. Clean, but lost.

Then, this past Sunday, when my internet started running so slowly that it took me a full two hours to download a Ramones album, I finally decided once and for all to purge the harddrive of spyware - a heaping Chinese tumor that, apparently, did not reside in the non-Windows hemisphere of my computer's brain that had been wiped clean in the great stroke of '09. I fired up some virus-infected antivirus software and as I watched my doddering machine psychoanalyze itself, I began to notice an unusual number of blorgdash.docs and sloopbunk.docs. I did some half-ass hackery and discovered that all of my writing, all of my b-sides, had been neatly saved away in a gibberish directory that my computer, perhaps mimicking his master, had cooked up in his last fading seconds of continence: /ZSKGZ7MVCBKET/

Stifling a dry heave, I delved into my writing of yesteryear. Some of it wasn't half bad. Most of it wasn't half good, either. But much of it was worth rewriting, if I can wrap my head around the task. So I think I'll do that. I'm on vacation for the next week. Seven days of voluntary volunteer leave. Then I go to Beijing. Then to Dazhou, wherever that is. I hope that I will be able to write about those places before I crumple up the memories and kick them under the bed. But for these next seven days, I'd like to delve into the nostalgic hemisphere of my brain that hasn't been wiped clean by the asbestos in my room, the lead in my tapwater, or the formaldehyde in my nightcaps. I'd like to revive a few of these amputated tales and chopped-up yarns. They are old stories, broken ones. But we can rebuild them. We have the technology. So, tomorrow, I shall begin with a story I call The Illegal Raëlian.

Revivencias

In Mexico, the gringa and I had the good fortune of befriending Anna Paula and Flavio, who had a car. So on Saturday morning, a yellow Volkswagen Bug would pull up in front of the house, we'd throw our things in the back and hit the carretera for destinations more scenic than Zamora. We took several of these trips, but I am unable to separate one from another. It may as well have been a single month-long road bender.

I loved Mexico for how Mexican it was. We'd roll through some indigenous town late at night, pass slowly alongside the square - little more than a readymade gazebo and some mariachis - see the expressionless old men in panchos and sombreros staring out from doorways, the fat little kids with popsicles frozen to their tongues. Flavio would roll down the window and bark at the locals and they would make the sign of the cross. Then we'd find the carretera again and I would lie awake with my face pressed to the window, watching the oncoming headlights and wincing with every whoosh.

We went to Morelia a week after the bombings, walked around the square and the cordoned-off area where the blasts took place, now a shrine to the departed. A tour guide gave us the history of the cathedral. I remember feeling more bored than I've ever felt in my life. I kept shifting from foot to foot and looking for a way out. Then, suddenly, the urge to vomit: I tapped Anna Paula on the shoulder and said, "Necesito ... agua." When I came to, a doctor with a little black bag was kneeled over me.

"Do you suffer from epilepsy?" he asked.
"No, Señor Doctor," I said.
"Do you suffer from depression?"
"No."
"Have you been drinking?"
"Not much."
"Are you on any drugs or medication?"
"Not that I know of."

The doctor shrugged and Flavio helped me to my feet. I stared up at the cathedral and the Virgen de Guadalupe watched me as I staggered away. After all these years, was I still Catholic? Was it a vision that I'd had? I once read that Freud always passed out when The Pyramids came up. No, I decided, it wasn't the mysterium tremendum; I just needed a Coke.

We stayed with some guitar jocks in the heavily graffitied part of town. They played Paranoid Android. I sat google-eyed and entranced. They wanted me, el gringo del amor, to play something for them, but it was three hours and several shots of tequila before I served up a sloppy rendition of People Are Strange by The Doors. There weren't enough beds, so we jockeyed for floor space. And in the morning, making use of the markerboard that was propped up against the wall, the gringa and I taught an ad hoc class of English for Perverts. Our students were eager to put the new material to use.

"So, this 'taint' is ... cómo se dice ... entre ... be-tuín the ... and the ... "

We went to Tangancicuaro for Día de la Independencia. We were going to see something they called The Castle. I've always been an inattentive tourist, so when a crowd started gathering in the square around midnight, I wandered off and made merry with the locals until Anna Paula grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back into the thick of it all. "You need to see this," she said.

And I'm glad I did. The Castle was a three-story building made of fireworks. After several unsuccessful attempts at lighting the fuse, there was suddenly a trail of sparks and a delicious hissing sound. The crowd hooted and aieeeeee-ed. What happened next is too complex to describe, but a network of pulleys and levers and whirling pinwheels conveyed the flame slowly upward until, finally, inexplicably, impossibly, a little spaceship at the very top lit up and went warbling off into the night. I stood there agape.

"See, cabron!" shouted Anna Paula, slugging me in the breadbasket. "You were going to miss it!"

En route to Zirahuén, we stopped at a gas station. I stretched my legs and jumped around in place. A woman and her son were sitting out on the curb with a golden retriever between them. I approached with my hand outstretched.

"Don't touch him," said the woman. "He is evil."
"Aww, but he's ..."
I took another step and the dog transformed, bore its fangs, growled, and made a flying leap for my crotch. I whirled to the side just in the nick and the beast took a healthy bite out of my thigh. Amidst much screaming and barking, I hightailed it in the opposite direction. The Mexicans were wailing, "Guero, guero, ay no, guero!" I found refuge in the bathroom, closing and locking the stall behind me while the dog's meaty paws thundered against the door. Somewhere outside, I could hear Flavio laughing himself to exhaustion.

At the risk of sounding wishy-washy and existentialist, most of the Mexican adventure takes place on the carretera itself: passing the roadside shrines, the crucifixes and Virgens planted in the rockpiles, the burnt-out husks of abandoned cars; stopping while a herd of wild cattle washes over the road, weaving around a dam of tree limbs lain down as an offering of protest by the indigenous poor, a warning of some imminent catastrophe that can't get at you because you are in the back of a yellow Volkswagen Bug with Radiohead's Amnesiac on the stereo, and Flavio is laughing and barking like a maniac, and Anna Paula is feeding you cigarettes, and the lot of you are splitting a road beer, eager to get where you're headed but quietly hopeful that you will never arrive.

Jorge of the Jungle

As I mentioned six months ago, my neighborhood has a nightwatchman (Petit, 2008). He was not hired to protect Casa de Gringos. He was hired to protect our neighbors, who are either the Montagues or Capulets of Zamora. The nightwatchman's shift starts at sundown and concludes at sunrise the next morning. He keeps his possessions in a small cardboard box that he lodges in the branches of a tree and every so often, he fetches the box down with a large stick that he keeps for that purpose. His possessions include a blue denim jacket, a half-full bottle of tequila, and the aforementioned stick that he uses to fetch his possessions down from the tree. He occupies his night hours pacing back and forth between stacks of milkcrates that he has stationed at intervals along the sidewalk, taking long sits on those stacks of milkcrates, drinking from the half-full bottle of tequila until it is half-empty, and whistling the same descending glissando once every fifteen minutes until the sun comes up. Every so often when I go out at night, I find him asleep, seated amongst the roots of a tree, or sleeping upright, half-tangled in the tree's lower branches. Because of his affinity for trees, and because 73.6% of the males I have met in this town are named Jorge, I have taken to calling him Jorge of the Jungle. During the afternoon, he works as a security guard at Plaza las Palomas (Plaza of the Pigeons), so I suspect he might work 24 hours a day. He is the only security guard I have seen who has not been entrusted with a weapon of some sort. Considering that all other Mexican security guards wield a billy club and even petty mall cops are equipped with pistols, this must be something of a slight to his manhood. I pass by Jorge at least five times a day and he has been watching my neighborhood for as long as I have been here. During those six months, the only things he has ever said to me are as follows: "Hello!" "Aren't you cold?" and "Are you going jogging?" Either he is completely dense or he thinks that I am completely dense. At night, through my bedroom window, I can see him sitting on his milkcrates in the driveway across the street, and he can probably see me. Last night around 12 AM, I was sitting out on the balcony and he shouted up at me, asking if I was cold. I had to shoosh him long-distance. He has only missed one night shift as far as I'm aware. His replacement was a teenager in a plaid hunter's cap. I tossed and turned all night in the absence of Jorge's whistled glissando. But Jorge returned the next night, said hello, asked me if I wasn't cold. He once scared the bejeezus out of me by suddenly manifesting himself at the foot of a tree while I was walking home with the groceries. Hello, he said, and my bowels nearly dropped out, a box of granola bars fell to the sidewalk. Aren't you cold? he asked.

Mañana in México

The mañana in Mexico is a veritable breakfast burrito of aesthetic delights. I imagine the scene unfolding to the tune of Bolero, but perhaps some off-key mariachi would be more apropos. There's an abuelita sweeping fallen branches off the sidewalk with a tree limb. The dueño of the carnicería is hosing off the front of his crumbling establishment and a pack of chihuahuas are lined up along the curb, lapping up the soapy water. The morning's first narcotráfico detail cruises by at five miles an hour, the truck bed full of soldiers flashing silver smiles at the gringo as he walks to work, automatic weapons dangling from their hips like some oversized genitalia they've lost interest in. A yellow dog of indeterminate breed trots down the sidewalk with a prickly pear fruit in its mouth. The hospital morgue incinerator fires up and shrills, emitting a ghastly gray steam, and somehow it's neither out of place nor unpleasant at 7:30 AM. A hungover mariachi band swaggers down the middle of the road, the accordion wheezes. The horse-clopping of the taco vendor chopping chorizo, the low flatulence of cheap motorbikes, the chik-chik-chik of the girl at the tienda stacking coins. I'm not sure whether it's the morning in Mexico or if it's mornings in general that do it for me. Prior to Mexico, I never got up before noon.

Nebraskano: Ilegal

Oh, yes. Here in Mexico we have something that we simply did not have in Korea or Poland: danger. Peligro. Korea is a sexually frustrated antfarm. Poland is colder than a welldigger's ass. But Mexico.

Yesterday, one of my teenagers gave me a plastic spoonful of congealed caramel wrapped in a plastic baggie. I brought it home and left it on the kitchen counter, where it will remain for the duration of my contract. Today, the same kid reached into his backpack to hand me another caramel spoon and instead produced a big ol' orange-green bag of pot. I did what any English teacher would do: I whipped my head the other way and started scribbling phrasal verbs on the whiteboard. When I turned back around, the baggie was gone and nobody seemed to have noticed it. I'm not sure how the boss would have reacted if my First Certificate class had successfully hotboxed Room 4, but a career in beachside burrito vending would probably have been in my near future.

I joined the gym this afternoon and was walking downtown after work to give the place a whirl. I made it a couple of blocks before I noticed an unusual number of machine gun wielding soldiers. A few blocks later, I saw the canopied truck they were spilling out of, seeming to spontaneously generate like Pac-Man ghosts. Within minutes, the streets were flooded with troops. It was all I could do to avoid catching a Kalashnikov in the crotch. I slowed to a stop, stood very still for a moment, then turned and walked the other way. Whatever sense it is that warns us about impending gunshot wounds recommended in no uncertain terms that I go home, so that's just what I did.

The nickname for my neighborhood wasn't hard to come up with: I live in the Green Zone. In addition to the public hospital where at midnight throngs of exhausted people wait with blank expressions in a queue that winds halfway around the block, my street hosts six heavily fortified compounds where Zamora's rich and foreign hide from the indigenous poor. Stationed at forty-foot intervals on the sidewalk are several contracted security guards. They all cut the same Hitchcockian figure. I doubt any of them could chase down a Frisbee. The one across the street works a 14-hour shift and sneaks frequent pulls from the grenade-shaped bottles he keeps stashed in the front basket of his bicycle.

Tonight I went out with the roommates and we ate six tacos each for $1.20 a person. The taco stand was situated on the curb, so we sat on plastic stools in the right lane of oncoming traffic, making crunchy noises as screaming Chinese motorcycles whipped the wrinkles out of our shirtbacks. Jaded isn't really the right word, because I’m hypersensitive to my surroundings and I am often frightened by them. Denial is closer to the target: the danger is so palpable that I deny the danger altogether. But that isn't quite it, either. What is the word I’m looking for? Ah. Estúpido. Soy estúpido. Si, es correcto.

The Lazy Mexican

Today, as I was leaving school for siesta, I heard the word "Kimchi" screamed in my direction. It was one of my teenage students, smoking a butt on a park bench. I just started teaching two days ago; no doubt this nickname will spread. I asked him what he was up to. He and his friend were just smoking some dope before class, he explained. I nodded. I've never understood why my students are this cozy with me, but they always are. They spill their guts to me, tell me about their sex romps and drug regimens. It is my greatest asset as a teacher and it is my Achilles heel. In a profession where bonding with one's students on anything but the most platonic subject-verb-object level is strongly discouraged, I somehow wind up playing guidance counselor and wizened sage for people only slightly younger than I am. It's frightening and reassuring.

In Spanish class, my teacher turned around and searched the coffee shop for a la object. She couldn't find any. Everything in the room was male. (She finally found (and later devoured) a tarta.) While the rest of the class moved on to ser and estar, I couldn't get my mind off it: a room full of el objects, of masculine nouns. One could work with this. One could arrange one's rooms in a German gender-based feng shui. You could bring your MENSA friends over and have them guess the motif. "Wrong, Blaise. Everything in this room is neuter in Slovakian, not in Serbocroat." Would there be a palpable difference in aura? In a room of der objects, would a game of poker break out? In a room of die objects, would everyone start ovulating at once? My curiosity knows no bounds.

The lazy Mexican is a myth. True: for two hours in mid-afternoon – the standard hours of Nordic productivity – the Mexicans loosen their ties and lay around in the shade drinking and smoking and sleeping. But that just means that they get up earlier in the morning and work later at night. Mañana exists, but it only applies to social engagements: my friends show up an hour later than they say they will. Hell, I do that in America. But work-wise, mañana doesn't apply to me, or the taco vendors, or the bankers, or the clerks at the supermarket. It might be different with Mexicans in the States. I'm not sure. But after someone has made a mad dash across hundreds of miles of desert at the risk of death by gunshot, starvation, thirst, or combinations thereof; after they have lived in a sublet closet and spent months scrapping around for work before finally earning the privilege of disemboweling pig carcasses for twelve hours a day at minimum wage; after they have sent the last of their paycheck back home so their children, parents, and grandparents can scrape by in rural Michoacán; after all that, how anyone can call the Mexicans lazy – I must admit, it is beyond me. But then, so are many things.

Dia Luna, Dia Pena

And so here I am living in a walled-off compound across from the public hospital in Zamora de Hidalgo, Mexico. The view from my balcony is of the hospital junkyard: dumpsters overflowing with colostomy bags, bloated rubber gloves lying in puddles of gasoline, a fluorescent orange BIOLOGICAL WASTE sign, etc. It seems to rain every day at 3:37 PM sharp, or not at all. Last night a mariachi band played inside the hospital, which must have lent a Lynchian touch to any medical emergencies going on at the time.

The balcony is where I sit and listen to Radio Michocán. The plan is to learn Spanish by immersion. I absorb Mexican public radio for hours on end, then I walk down to the kitchen and fry my ham-and-parmesan tacos, waiting for it all to click.

I sit and watch the painters work. They have spent three days painting our vacant carport. When they smile, it's all gold and empty spaces. They are 53 year-old identical twins. For a while I thought it was one extremely diligent man, but instead it is two slow twins. One of the twins whistles verses and the other sings the choruses. When it is siesta time, they squat on the sidewalk drinking Pepsi and smoking Delicados. Yesterday one of the twins gave me his business card. "We are painters," he said, "and we don't drink beer." The question arises: would I rather be down there singing and painting walls, or am I happy where I am, perched on a balcony, binge drinking instant coffee and sweating about the four classes I'm about to teach? The answer is not clear. Probably there isn't one. Teaching suits my mental and physical build, but is there any way around all this white collar nausea?

Hats off to Spoon for composing the best hipster couplet of all time:

I spent the night in the map room
I humanized the vacuum

Peace Corpse

The plan, barring total failure:

Mexico 'til May.
Mongolia by June.
Then prison.
Then the madhouse.
Then the grave.

More updates to follow, as I understand a great many of you are concerned as to the whereabouts of me and my sanity.