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.

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.

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 National Anthem

Polski Hymn Narodowy

Poland is not yet lost:
We are still alive.
What the foreigners have taken from us,
We shall take back with the sword.

March, march Dąbrowski,
From Italy to Poland.
Under your leadership,
We shall unite the nation.

We shall cross the Vistula,
We shall cross the Warta,
We shall be Poles.

Bonaparte has set an example,
Of how we are to conquer.

March, march ...

Golden Freedom

[1654]

"Progress was defeated at each turn by the selfish interests of magnates who preached that they were acting thus to defend their Golden Freedom, and in a sense they were.

They were defending their freedom to neutralize the king; they were defending their freedom to keep the newly built towns subservient to their country areas; they were defending most strongly their freedom to keep their peasants in a state of perpetual serfdom as opposed to the liberties which were being grudgingly won in the western parts of Europe; and they were doing everything reactionary within their power to preserve the advantages they had against the legitimate aspirations of the growing gentry. The Golden Freedom which the magnates defended with every bit of chicanery and power they commanded was the freedom of the few to oppress the many, the freedom of a few grasping magnates to prevent a strong king from arising."

- Poland, James A. Michener

The Polish Immigrée's Phrasebook

Chapter One:
At the Paszport Biuro

Jak długo trzeba jeszcze czekać? – How long does one have to wait?
Jest zimno. – It's cold.
Trzeba czekać. – One must wait.
Nie trzeba się gniewać. – You shouldn't be angry.
O co chodzi? – What's the problem?
Trudno! – It can't be helped!
Co mam robić? – What am I supposed to do?
Tak źle i tak niedobrze. – It's bad whichever way you look at it.
To jest do niczego. – This is useless.
Zegarek nie nidzie. – My watch has stopped.
Wszystko strasznie. – Everything is terrible.
Nie chcą słuchać. – They don't want to listen.
To nic! – Forget it!
Mam dosyć tego. – I've had enough!
Co to ma być? – What is this supposed to be?
Gdzie idziemy? – Where are we going?
Widzę, że nie ma telefonu. - I see that there isn't a telephone.
Już nie wiem gdzie jestem. – I don't know where I am anymore.
Martwię się. – I'm worried.
Nie wierzę w Boga. – I don't believe in God.
To jest dla żony. – This is for my wife.

Recently Discovered Record Collection

(burlapgrain kitchen table included for much-needed perspective)


Boney M.




Tercet Egzotyczny




Janos Sarkozi - Gypsies Songs








P Ohio




Rodowicz - The Polish Madonna




The Ubiquitous Abba




Morton Downey, J ...
Dorin Anastasiu




Men Without Hats. Men Without Scarves. Men Without Black Stonewashed Jeans. Men Without Yellow Cardigan Sweaters. Men Without Hands Down Their Pants. Men Without ...




The Santa Maria, a claymation donkey, a Soviet-era cassette player, and Pana Kleksa - they're back from space
and they've brought down a record.




Smurfs








The Singular Grażyna Świtała,
whose name means something in Polish.
Caution: Diffident when veiled!




Creedence

Kamp Kielce

My apartment block looks like a camp, and not the Bible vacation kind.



They call it Barwinek, the Polish word for the vinca flower, whose name derives from the Latin vincire: to bind, fetter.

The apartments are grey, concrete compounds. The compounds are rectangles with five stories worth of square windows that, despite lacking any characteristics other than squareness, still manage to look sad. The Communists, the Nazis, whichever regime inflicted these prefab ruins upon the Poles, arranged the apartments three compounds to a block with only one end left open, either in mimicry of an Italian courtyard or to discourage escape.

All of the compounds are numbered in the Korean style, so you don't forget where you live. My compound is number five, but they go as high as 37. Numbers 25 through 37 are painted the same color as the deep end of a public pool. Numbers one through 25 are not painted at all, except by local graffiti artists. On the side of my compound, my translator tells me, they have sprayed "You will always have a place in my heart!" and "Hello!" Other compounds are less fortunate.

The apartment square is crisscrossed by cement paths. When the sun is up, tens of Poles can be seen traversing these paths in their own peculiar ways: with a buggy, with a cane, with a limp, with a whole lot of vegetables, swaggering drunk. Even if it is unusually crowded, probability dictates that no one path is ever likely to have more than one person walking it at any given time. This fact, in tandem with the new automatic check-out counters at the grocery store, grants almost total isolation to anyone who seeks it. On the grass islands between paths stand some battered playground structures, most frequently utilized by fierce-looking teenagers and napping drunks. There is a low, dissatisfied murmur in the air at all times. The apartment square has the feel of a prison exercise yard. But if you're young and spry with a spring in your step, as I sometimes am, you can walk these paths and pretend that you're the front-runner in some needlessly complex Olympic speed walking event.

There are dogs. Having lived only in societies where canines are kept under the nylon yoke of Man or cut up in His soup, I have never before experienced the pleasures of watching what dogs do when granted total emancipation: they act like humans. The Wild Dogs of Barwinek dart about with absent looks on their mugs, as though they are immersed in some unending task which demands 70% of their brains. They follow a scent with much enthusiasm for a few minutes at a time, then get bored and look for something else. They ignore humans like we are some minor species of rodent who sometimes gets in the way. They don't often sniff each other's rumps as you might expect: they tend to ignore other dogs, unless it's urgent. They do, however, lift their legs/squat and pee on all manner of phallic structures. You will sometimes see a dachshund and a much larger dog at play, the dachshund getting repeatedly tangled and smooshed under the larger dog's tires, the Poles gathering around to watch, the dachshund tumbling end-over-end like a fumbled football.

Along the southern fringe of the complex are some shops. There is a general store called Kolporter, a word that means "distributor" in Polish, no intended connection to the great Cole Albert Porter, American songsmith of Peru, Indiana. There is a lingerie shop, little more than a glazed window in a yellow shed, before whose sexy red UV lamp the hot matkas bask, babushkas tilted skyward.

The Barwinek vegetable monger is a cheat. The other day you eked out the word for "carrot" and he gave you some brownish dildo-shaped things. You handed him the money and he claimed the cash register was broken, or that he didn't have any change, or something, i.e. he was screwing you over and you both knew it. But as a chronic foreigner, you've learned which wars to wage and when to nod politely, bow, and say thanks, Pan Vegetable Monger, for the kick in the teeth. So you gathered your bruised mutant fruits and veggies, stuffed them into your inkstained messenger bag, and ducked out the door, forging into the cold, cruel headwind of an unkind exchange rate ...

False Friends

This evening, my boss gave me a ride home from school. He is a great man. He speaks the Queen's English and has one of those enormous Slavic heads I'd read about before but didn't believe existed until I saw his in its entirety. His past is a series of conflicts: conflicts with Russians, Germans, Czechs, Americans, conflicts with Polish radio executives, conflicts with technology. I suspect he had some prominent role in ridding Poland of the Soviets and installing the late Pope as Master of the Universe.

"And of course, szukać is the Polish verb for to search," he said as a gaggle of attractive Polish women bustled into the teachers' lounge. He lowered his voice, then stopped talking altogether. He bid everyone goodnight. I bowed, momentarily forgetting which continent I was on. The boss and I stepped outside, where it was, as it has been, as it shall remain: fucking cold.

"Sorry," he said, "I didn't want to give you a Czech lesson in front of all those young ladies. Where were we?"
"Szukać," I said.
"Yes, szukać," he said. "In Czech, szukać means to fuck!"
He was gesticulating into the wind like a drunken peasant from an old Russian novel.
"So, these poor Czechs, they come to Poland, they go to the grocery store, and the nice girl behind the vegetable counter says, 'Please wait one moment, I must go fuck the cucumbers!'"
I laughed.
"Would you like to go shopping?" he asked, indicating the big-ass hipermarket across the street. I didn't say no, so we crossed the street.

I figured I would be doing the shopping while the boss tagged along to recommend spiced goat cheeses and Ukrainian lagers and carrots. But he grabbed a cart and started loading it with kielbasa. So it was I who was tagging along.

"The Czechs are the greatest civilization the world has ever known," he said.
I shrugged.
"I say that because they have given to humanity two things for which we will forever remain in their debt." He found the goat cheese he was looking for and dropped two, no three, no four blocks into the cart. Then he turned to me and held up two huge Slavic fingers. "(1) Pilsner, from the city of Plzen, and (2) bramboráky, a savory snack to go with your pilsner."
The shopping cart was piled high with meats and cheeses and now we were coasting inexorably towards the beer aisle.
"Other cultures have contributed to the great body of human knowledge in the fields of science, art, philosophy," he grunted dismissively, "but all such things pale in comparison to this." He swept his arm across the wall of brown bottles before us. I opened my mouth to say something irrelevant, but just then he started shouting in Polish. It wasn't until he turned around that I saw the Bluetooth in his ear. In the meantime, I browsed.

"Original Budweiser. Czech imported lager, beer from Budweis," I murmured, taking a bottle down from the shelf. "No shit."
I squinted at the red label, the Masonic American beer conspiracy shattering all around me. Then, after he had duly owned whoever was on the other end of his ear, the boss started stocking the cart with long, dark bottles of Czech beer.

I waited on the other side for my boss to check out. Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I elbowed a passing Pole square in the face.

"Sorry," I shouted. "Er. Przepraszam. Er. Shit."

Skończył się dobry fart

So it's the last class of the day, twenty minutes to go, right? I'm dashing around the room trying to keep the deflated conversational beachball aloft. I learn all about Magdalena's dead hamster and the specifications of Piotr's washing machine. Then this smiling, blushing obese kid tells me to call him "Finger Boy" from now on. He is twirling a pencil between the fingers of his left hand.
"Because of that?" I ask.
"No," he says, "because of this."
He holds up his right hand to reveal a gnarled triple- or quadruple-jointed thumb that he proceeds to wrap around his wrist several times.
"Okay," I say, stifling a dry heave. I take out my attendance chart and mark it accordingly: "Finger Boy."

I start to sweat. There are ten minutes left and I can't make fun of Finger Boy for all ten of those minutes. I reach into my bag of shitty questions and ask if everyone likes the local soccer team, Korona Kielce.
"Um, yes." Shrugs, puzzled grunts.
"What other teams do we have here in Kielce?"
"Viva Kielce is handball team," volunteers Krzysztof.
"We have wallyball team," says Adam. "Fart Kielce."
I blink and clear my throat.
"Fart. Kielce."
"Yes," shrugs Adam, "Fart."
I take a deep breath and try to slow my galloping heart. Easy, Petit. These Poles have a way of clogging everything with consonants. Fart = Szfrzyrzt.
"How do you spell this Fart?" I ask, scrawling an "Sz" on the board.
"No, no," says Krzysztof. "F."
"Okay. Then what?"
"A," the class chimes.
"Yes, yes! And then?"
"R."
"And? And?" I bite my lower lip.
"T."

And I lose it. I spray a confetti of nostril fluid all over the whiteboard. I don't pee my pants but I'm not far off.
"What means fart?" Adam asks when I have regained verticality.
"Well," I sniffle, "when you eat too many pierogis – "
I draw a bent-over stick figure with a smoke cloud emanating from his behind. The class and I both dissolve into hysterics for five minutes. Finally, I summon enough of my voice to ask what "fart" means in Polish.
"Lucky," says Finger Boy.
Five more minutes of insane laughter. Then class is over.

I perform a Kramerian slide into the teacher's lounge and grab the first Pole I can find. I launch into my tale with the sort of mundane preface that is the meat and potatoes of the American work anecdote: "So it's the last class of the day, twenty minutes to go, right?"
"Yes," she says.
"And I ask the kids what sports there are in Kielce and – "
"Yes," she says, "I think the students are really like sport in Kielce, I think. They are like football and wallyball and tennis and handball."
"Right. Anyway, this kid tells me that there's a volleyball team – "
"Yes, wallyball is very popular in Poland," she says. "It is something like national sport."

She wanders off to make some tea. Defeated, I slump down into my chair at the formica table and wait for someone else to come, but no one else comes. The bell rings. I pick up some cheese slices on the way home. Later, I overcook myself a grilled cheese sandwich. Then, around 10 PM, I climb into in the bathtub with Noam Chomsky and we have ourselves a nice, long sulk.

One (1) Polish apartment (used)

Contains:

One (1) cactus
Several (6) dead plants
One (1) Soviet-era MИHCK 16 refrigerator, purrs when full
A lot (8) of poopstains left behind by previous tenant
One (1) plastic glow-in-the-dark Jesus, crucified, nailed into wall above garbage can
Two (2) bags of banana Cream of Wheat, one (1) box of instant rice, one (1) half-empty bag of sugar, two (2) boxes of Earl Grey tea, four (4) cryptic notes, also from previous tenant
One (1) skeleton key
Three (3) Agatha Christie novels, one (1) copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, one (1) Lassie novel, all in Polish, the most widely-spoken West Slavic language
One (1) Soviet-era Kahmama record player with CB radio capabilities
One (1) watercolor print in which guardian angel helps Polish boy in daisy dukes cross bridge from Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom
Seven or so (7) Russian nesting dolls, un- and re-nestable, useful for propping open balcony windows when pirating wireless internet
One (1) VHS cassette: Femme Fatale starring one (1) Antonio Banderas and one (1) Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, distributed by Polsat Films, rated R for strong sexuality, violence and language

2,500 Polish złotych OBO

2.01.08 - In Transit

2.11.08

I'm back in Poland, the land of my rebirth as a 19th century peasant. Now that I've found a stable internet connection (if I part the curtains and prop the window open with a row of Matryoshka dolls and hold my laptop out over the balcony into the westerly Russian wind at the risk of freezing all those precious, social-life-sustaining silicon innards) I'm sifting through my Moleskine notes to piece together exactly how I got here without being kalashnikoved to death by the blessed customs officials at Pope John Paul II International Airport.

* * *

2.01.08

Here in London Heathrow, my nervous system is hitting a shrill, delirious pitch. As last night's melatonin dot slushes through my bloodstream like a pillow, I'm looking more and more Eastern Bloc by the minute. The bags under my eyes are turning black, my teeth are sprouting hairs. At this, the midway point of my journey, it is best just to keep out of everyone's way, lest I be mowed down by a luggage cart or jostled aboard a flight to Kyrgyzstan. I'm hiding out in Zone 27, where all of London Heathrow's displaced peoples gather to chatter in rodentlike tongues, looking like they've been camped out for weeks in front of chronically vacant check-in counters, the airline logos stenciled in Cyrillic or worse. I'm huddled over an orange backpack on top of a black bag, chattering in a displaced sort of way to myself.

At 9 AM (3 AM CST), I enjoyed a Real Actual Guinness at a Real Actual plastic woodgrain table in the corner of a Real Actual Dublin airport pub. Later, in Heathrow, I ate Real Actual fish n' chips prepared by Real Actual Serbian short order cooks, and guzzled another Real Actual Guinness dumped artlessly into a glass by a Real Actual Polish girl named Magda. And she totally smiled at me, the first of hopefully several unprovoked smiles from Green Card-hungry Polish matkas. I can't wait! But I shall. Oh, how I shall wait.

It's just history repeating itself.

Radiohead's Hail to the Thief opens with a burst of static. Nigel Godrich says, "We're rolling." Thom Yorke remarks, "That's a nice way to start." A drum machine fires up, spits out four stuffy beats. Then Jonny Greenwood sweeps in with a wave of sinister arpeggios and the album begins in full. They are the tentative sounds of a band that has dissected itself to shreds and is nursing its wounds, sitting down to work with tempered expectations and tea. I imagine they drink tea.

It is upon similarly ginger footing that I make my return to TEFL, Teaching English as a Football League. To borrow a David Foster Wallaceism, Korea was a supposedly fun thing I should never have done again. But here I am, doing it again. How do you prepare yourself? By running wind sprints through train station corridors? By binge drinking Listerine? By slapping a strip of duct tape over your mouth and attempting to get your driver's license renewed at the DMV? There is no cross-training for TEFL, no preparation for the absurdity. It is a decathlon of narrowly missed trains, substance misuse, shady bureaucrats, gross miscommunication ... Coming off my five month sabbatical with Dora the Explorer bubble bath in the upstairs tub of my sub-suburban compound, I feel I am up to the task this time around, though no one is ever up to tasks such as these.

This time, it is Poland. I flirted with Peru, made eyes at Estonia, strung along Kyrgyzstan for four months before I caved in to the cat calls of Katolicka Polska. I will be teaching at an English academy called Global Village, in a middling town by the name of Kielce, infamous as the site of the Kielce pogrom, the 1946 slaughter of 37 Jews by a frothing mob of deranged Polish policemen, servicemen, and steelworkers. It is also sister cities with Flint, Michigan. We shall hope Kielce is not the ugly stepsister.

Kielce hovers an hour north of Krakow - where my British leching partners yet remain, lurking in the alleyways between cathedrals, umbrellas at the ready - and two hours south of Warszawa, a city whose name, like Omaha's, evokes a grey sludge in my mind. I find myself in a geographically familiar position, residing in an overlooked mountain town nestled between two metropolises, but I don't expect that Kielce will be as much of an eye- or lung-sore as Daegu. The train station is a flying saucer, enabling quick and easy transport to places like the Kuiper Belt and Flint, Michigan.

It is a five month gig. I will be teaching high schoolers. The contract calls for nineteen teaching hours per week, somewhat less than the forty-or-so I'd gotten used to. I can't imagine how Polish teenagers could possibly surpass the pampered seven-year-old sons of Korean bankers, but I am not placing any bets. According to my director, the thus-far charming Urszula, "we had to thank the teacher you'll be replacing after only 2 months as it appeared he had a drinking problem." How much do you have to drink to get fired in Poland? How many 9.2% Polish porters for breakfast? How much buffalo piss vodka at lunch? How is it possible to get fired without dying?

I am polishing up on my Polish. This language has seven cases. Six of them are beyond me. I suspect everything will be beyond me for a while. But I'm feeling good about Poland. In the event of a Huckabee, Romney, Clinton, Edwards, McCain, Giuliani, Paul, or Thompson victory come November, I will have no qualms about my candlelit loft above the barn, in my cabbage-shaped, cabbage-scented Cathotopia across the sea.

Global Hobos: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Effective Salesman(or woman)ship.

Krakow, Poland:
The Krakowian hobo scene thrives on the predominantly Catholic population's sympathy for the meek, ragged, leprous, etc. In Stare Miasto during peak hobo hours, you will find no fewer than eleven middle-aged hoboes spasming behind their aluminum walkers. Taped on the front of each of their walkers is the same laminated bilingual sign that reads (in 72-point Times New Roman font), "Please give me to the money" and "Szrzczrzczsz rzcz rzczrzczłić." These Polish hoboes are afflicted by a rare form of Parkinson's Disease, whose body-convulsing symptoms vanish the instant the hobo's palm nerves make contact with a fistful of loose złoty.

Chicago, Illinois:
Is it any wonder that this festering bastion of diversity is home to the most paradoxical hoboes in the world? Chicago plays host to the sort of hobo who makes you shine his shoes, who is a Boeing executive making 2.3 million a year, who will toss you a quarter for doing nothing.

Daegu, South Korea:
Like much of the local non-hobo population, the Daeguian hobo is an entrepreneur first, an alcoholic second, and a Level 32 Dwarf Priest in World of Warcraft. He coasts about downtown, lying chest-down on a four-wheeled wooden scooter, the kind you used for roller dodgeball in 3rd grade P.E. class. His lower half is swathed in a tarp of black rubber, mermaid-style. Whether or not there are legs underneath the tarp is a topic of some interest to Korean young adults aged 13 to 16 who are on their first dates. On his cart, each hobo carries a small boombox capable of blasting, at 120 decibels, the most sorrowful Korean waltzes you ever did hear. There are eight of these men downtown at any given time and one imagines they are equipped with GPS equipment so as to not infringe on another hobo's rolling grounds.

Minneapolis, Minnesota:
Notoriously picky hoboes. Whimsical. Eccentric. Capricious. They ask you for 37 cents and if you don't have exact change, they walk away.

Berlin, Germany:
The Berlin Hobo (German: der Berlinerhobo) is among the most enterprising and talented in the former Holy Russian Empire. An accordion virtuoso, a prolific caricaturist, a juggler of flaming crucifixes, and a public urinator extraordinaire, der Berlinerhobo often gets so wrapped up in his performance that he forgets to ask you for change. But he will find you some days later, even if you have since left the country or continent.

Omaha, Nebraska:
The Omahobo is Walt Whitman, Kofi Annan, and a wet paper bag full of cigarette butts and bottlecaps all rolled into one. He will tell you a woeful tale of marital estrangement and high seas hijinks on the River Mississippi; he will talk politics, at once impressing you as right-wing and left-wing without touching anywhere in between; he will perform a magic trick in which he spontaneously materializes some treasured artifact from your early childhood. And then, he will ask you if you've got a buck, "cause [he] wanna get laid out tonight and it already [nine] o'clock." As you walk away, the thing that impresses you most is his honesty, and his smell.

The next step

... which way should I go?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Robbed

I am back in Krakow, 120 pounds lighter. Some Scheisskopf in Berlin stole all my clothes and personal thoughts. So it goes.

My bag contained:

everything I wasn't wearing at the time
a tube of toothpaste
a toothbrush
some dental floss
a bottle of shampoo
a bar of soap
a bottle of one-a-day vitamins
four notebooks full of writing
Being and Time by Heidegger

I'm not sure what he's going to do with all of that junk. Sit around in my underwear reading Being and Time, probably. At least Scheisskopf won't be making any money. The only person in the world who would pay him for all that shit is me.

But I'm zen about it. It's a fresh start. I've bought some thrift store button-fly jeans that are too tight and an argyle sweater that is too big and a snowboarding t-shirt that I hate wearing. All and all, I look like a circa 1984 Krakowian snowboarding bureaucrat. I am undergoing Polefication. I brush my teeth with myrrh-flavored toothpaste and wash my hair in goat tallow. Maybe I'll even start going to church. When in Poland, do as the Roman Catholics do.

What is it good for?

Colon City

Lody, lody - am I glad I got out of there.

Now I'm in Darmstadt. I have spent the past 24 hours on trains or in train stations. All the while I have been lugging around my body weight in dirty underwear. I feel a bit like Sisyphus except I'm beginning to think that I am Sisyphus, I am the rock, and I am the hill.

The day before I left the States, I got a coffee in the Old Market. I read this quote on the wall while I was taking a crap on the coffee shop crapper:

"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."
-Franz Kafka

Alles in Ordnung.

The Fabric of the Cosmos will be the last spacey pop-physics book I read for a long time. I have spent the past year devouring one after another and it has been rewarding. But so many of these 500-page tomes reach the exhausting conclusion that we may never understand what the universe is made of, where it came from, or how it really works. By and large, I'm optimistic about it. We might never understand the universe, but I'm sure that computers will figure it out within our lifetimes. And if they're friendly computers, maybe they will do us the courtesy of explaining it in simple terms, like we're a classroom full of pre-intermediate Polish students.

An understanding of the fundamental structure of the universe is not something that is likely to reveal itself to me on some bleary random morning while I'm taking a dump. It's much more likely to reveal itself to some string theorist while he or she is taking a dump. And even if I did chance upon the fundamental structure of the universe easily explained and diagrammed in a little yellow leaflet handed to me as I passed through the Stare Miasto for a kebab, I would still have to live with myself, wouldn't I? I'd still have to clip my fingernails and tie my shoes and fumble with the keys every time I try to unlock a door. Cosmology collapses under the mundane weight of existential baggage. Tomorrow, I'm going to get on a train and curl up with some Kafka.

But on my field trip into the lonely realm of stoner physics, I have learned much about practical thermodynamics. Entropy is the way of the world. If you let things go to shit, to shit they will go. If you tear the binding off of your copy of The Brothers Karamazov and toss the pages up into the air, they will not land the way Dostoevsky would want them to, and never in a billion billion years would they sort themselves out. Fabric unravels, but it doesn't ravel. Likewise, eggs don't unbreak, people don't undie, and when you cheese off your British flatmates by leaving a festering bottle of grapefruit juice in the fridge for two weeks, they will not spontaneously start acknowledging your existence on the last day of your CELTA course. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall ...

"Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against nature ... the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worthwhile."
- Nathaniel West

They even want my chitterlings!

Provided I don't snap in my next lesson and start bellowing "Deutschland Über Alles" as I goosestep up and down the aisles, I will pass my CELTA course tomorrow and leave Krakow the day after. I'm anxious to get out of here. Krakow has been kind to me, but I am ready to step onto a train and go someplace else, to drink coffee and brood on my own for a few days without the company of a stumbling gaggle of British lechers.

Thursday morning, I am taking the train to Berlin. I might stay the night there. Over the weekend, I have a job interview in Darmstadt. It is possible that I will be living there. Then again, a lot of things are possible now that were just a daydream yesterday.