Send Away the Clowns

First day of school. March something-or-other. Walking through three feet of snow both ways is considerably less impressive to the old-ass hard-asses of the world when it only takes you five minutes both ways. Flanked on either side by a posse of host familial strangers much shorter than me: my host mom, my host sister, my host brother and my host cousin. My host mom is the music teacher. All the host youngins are my students. Yes, I thought to myself all along the short walk to school, and thought to myself once again all along the short walk back home: I can see how this might get a bit claustrophobic after a while.

On my way down the hall for the very first time - tromping through the stunned hordes of children like a freakishly double-browed and red-bearded Godzilla - I spotted a bright yellow flyer on the wall and, at a glance, with equal parts fascination and terror, comprehended its significance.

"Hey maw," I said, "circusi."

In the same way that one can bullshit one's way through Spanish by sticking the letter O at the end of every other word, rudimentary Georgian can sometimes be bullshitted by appending the letter I to the end of everything. Circusi. A circus was going down that afternoon. On the first day of school.

"Yes," said host mom. "Later circusi. But now, classi."

I was led upstairs to the teachers' lounge - a gray peeled-paint sort of room every bit as inviting as an interrogation chamber - where I was fawned over by the middle-aged women of the village. I swiftly became the center of their affection, and I would remain so for the ten months to follow. They asked me whether I liked Georgia and I said, sure. They asked me whether I liked Georgian food, and I lied yes. This garnered a small round of applause, and the pit of my elbow was squeezed until it hurt. My praises were sung, mostly by way of talking trash about the volunteer who came before me, a poor young Asian girl that I was given to understand had a weak stomach when it came to Georgian spices and Georgian culture to boot. Clearly, I was different. I was the chosen one. The golden boy. I wouldn't fuck off after three months like she did.

They asked me if I had a wife and I was dense enough to say no. All eyes in the room spotlighted upon a dark-haired woman a couple years my junior who was sitting, shielding her face, blushing, busily sketching a feminine flank into a notebook. The art teacher. Much laughter all around. She did not look up. I looked down. Sighing inwardly, I wondered if I was the sort of dumbass who could be peer pressured into living in a Georgian village forever.

I retreated to the window by way of exhuming myself from marriage. I enjoyed a smoke. Cigs are fifty cents a pack in Georgia. Too cheap to quit. Outside, beauty: green and white and cold, smoke drifting up from the chimneys, the thatched roofs of the village barns weighed low under last night's deluge of snow. The white-streaked crags of the Lower Caucasus bore down upon the village, impossible for me to tell how near or how distant; Midwesterners do not have a sense of perspective. The bell rang: an actual bell, rung every 45 minutes by way of a cord pulled by a student too short to reach it without help. The bell rang. All the teachers scuttled away to their classes. I had no schedule. It was my first day. Nobody had told me where to go or what to do, so I sat down in the teacher's lounge and did nothing. I think I read something. I forget what I was reading at the time. Probably something pretentious. Barthelme, maybe?

After a while, the door shuddered open and an old woman entered. I greeted her in Georgian and she replied in the Queen's English. I put my book down and braced myself for an eccentric. While it is not always the case, in my limited experience, fluent non-native English speakers who happen to reside in the middle of nowhere tend to come with a suitably bizarre backstory.

"How are you?" I asked.
"As always," she said, "I am not so good."
"I'm sorry to hear that. What's wrong?"
"There is nothing to be done," she said and shrugged. "What is your name?"
"Keith," I said. "Or Kiti."
One learns to transmogrify one's name in places like this.
"Kiti," she said. "Oh, that simply won't do. Don't you know what kiti means in Mingrelian?"
"Do I want to know?"
"It means, yes, finger."

I shook my head. My name has never traveled well. In Korea, it meant "kiss." In Mexico, it was synonymous with KITT, the talking car from Knight Rider. Not too bad. But then, in Poland, it meant AIDS.

"We must give you, yes, a Georgian name."
"As long as it's not AIDS," I said. "What are some good Georgian names?"
"Levani," she said, counting her arthritic kitis with an arthritic kiti, "Lasha, Luka ... Soso - "
"I don't like Soso," I interjected. "Too mediocre."
She jumped the pun.
"... Shotiko, Zaza ... "
I was about to express some fondness for Zaza when she raised a withered hand to stop me.
"What about Giorgi?"

A brief note on etymology at this point. Georgia's real, actual, in-country name for itself is Sakartvelo. And nobody in the world, so far as I am aware, calls the place Sakartvelo. Everywhere else on the planet calls this dinky little pancreas-shaped country "Georgia," or some variation thereupon. The origins of the name "Georgia" are unclear, but there are plenty of theories floating around, all of them more or less equally plausible. "Georgia" closely resembles the Greek γεωργός - meaning tiller of the land - which makes a great deal of sense, given Georgia's proximity to both Greece and the Fertile Crescent. St. George also happens to be Georgia's favorite saint, so it is possible that the country was nicknamed by association, the same way you'd call a dude Nickelback Douchebag if said douchebag showed up to work every day in a Nickelback t-shirt. There's a chance the name comes from ancient Persian, from whence the Russian exonym for Georgia - Gruziya - is derived, which makes sense given Georgia's proximity to Iran. My theory belongs to the St. George camp, but differs a bit: I am of the mind that early European explorers stumbled across this weird little bumfuck commune on the Black Sea, found it overrun with fat men profoundly drunk on their own homemade wine, all of them named Giorgi (after the saint, of course), and they accordingly labeled it Georgia: Land of Giorgis. This is a roundabout way of saying that Giorgi is the most generic of all possible Georgian names, and I certainly didn't want to adopt it as my own.

"Giorgi sounds good," I said.
"Excellent," she said. "Then I shall call you Giorgi."
"I don't think I caught your name."
"Zhuzhuna."
"Zublubla?"
"Yes," she said. "Zhuzhuna."

The bell rang. Someone rang the bell. I had my first class to teach. My second and third, too. I don't remember them, nor do I seem to have taken any notes on the experience. But rest assured that by lunchtime, I knew full well that none of my co-teachers could speak English any better than my students could.

My fourth class was preempted by a choral concert put on by the students. In my honor, apparently. I was ushered into a bench seat in the far back of a small, low-ceilinged auditorium, and watched for an hour with the sweetest, most paternal gaze I could muster as my host siblings and host cousins and host cousins twice or thrice removed filed out on stage and delivered their pieces to the tune of the detuned piano comp-work of my host mom. The teenagers in the auditorium were squirrely as fuck. Same is true of the teachers. Same is true of the janitors. Nobody seemed to be watching the performances. They were all staring back at me and giggling every time I blew my nose. The kids were shoving each other into me, trying to get a rise out of the 29 year old, red-bearded foreigner. I ignored them the best I could. I smiled sweetly and stared straight ahead or, when that failed, I busied myself sifting through all two pages of the concert program, squinting at the Georgian squiggles. It was a good show. My host brother was awkward and bashful. My host cousin performed admirably, I thought, but that's probably just because she's cute.

Afterwards, I tried to walk back up to the teacher's lounge for a smoke, but Zhuzhuna caught me by the pit of the elbow and invited me out for some coffee.

"Coffee," I said, perplexed and jonesing. "Where?"
"Why, in the canteen, of course."

She led me into another interrogation chamber downstairs where there was a wood stove in the corner and a wide, flat table arrayed with starchy Georgian goodies: greasy potato cakes, raspberry pastries, loaves of thoroughly leavened bread.

"Erti khava," I squeaked, testing out the only Georgian I knew. I held up one finger. Then I glanced over, remembered Zhuzhuna. I held up two fingers. "Make it ori."

The old lady behind the table smiled, flashed a gilded grill.

"Your Georgian is very good," she crowed.
"It's so-so," I said.
No modesty involved. For the first time in my living-abroad life, I'd opted to show up totally nude. I hadn't bothered to learn anything of the language at all.

There is no such thing as Georgian coffee, not unless you count Nescafé. Georgians drink Turkish coffee. It comes in little shot glasses, more sugar and foam and coffee grounds than caffeine. I drank mine in a gulp or two, was embarrassed to discover that Zhuzhuna was still savoring hers. So I ordered another round. Zhuzhuna paid for both of us and shuffled off to her next class. The bell rang. Someone rang the bell. I sat there like a dork at a table by myself, reading my Barthelme, until the babushka barista gestured for me to sit down next to the stove. I did so gladly. Even with three sweaters on, I was freezing my ass off.

The bell rang and a man came swaggering in. I recognized him from somewhere. He was wearing a bootleg Phat Farm windbreaker. In his left hand was a twelve ounce Pepsi bottle filled to the brim with an ominously clear liquid. I stood up to shake his hand and he gave me a hug. I looked around for campus security. After a while, I was given to understand that this was the P.E. teacher.

"You like cha cha?" he asked. He flicked an index finger at his esophagus.

Liquor is very much a matter of personal preference, but I will go out on a limb here and say that nobody likes cha cha. Not even Georgians. I have written extensively about the vile intoxicants of the Far Eastern World, but few beverages (if any) could give Chinese baijiu a run for its money in terms of sheer vileness. Georgian cha cha is pretty much the worst drink in the world.

"I like cha cha," I said, out of well-learned politeness, "but now, no. I'm at work."
"Fuck work. I'm at work, too. Just one," he said, reciting the refrain of the lonesome alcoholic. "Just one."
I looked from the babushka barista to the P.E. teacher. She shook her head. I shook mine.
"No," I said. "I don't want."
"Of course you do," he said. "Gogo, two shot glasses!"

The babushka barista did her job. The shot glasses appeared. He poured us a couple. I saw the clear liquid sitting there, gleaming in the grayness. I could smell it. Enough to make you puke by smell alone. It sat there shimmering like the desperate glint in a car salesman's eye. We were at school, fer chrissakes. I shook my head, no.

"I don't want," I said in my crappy Georgian. Then, in English, more to myself than to anyone else, "Fucking A, I'd get my ass fired over this bullshit right here."

He squinted at me like he didn't quite believe who I was. Then he pounded both shots and muttered something to himself in Georgian, probably something to the effect that I was a little bitch and not quite a man. Then he invited me upstairs to the exercise room, where he kicked my ass in ping-pong several times over. Afterwards, I shuffled on back down to the canteen, where I found my unfinished shot of Turkish coffee waiting for me. The canteen was pleasantly empty. I hadn't had a moment to myself since I'd arrived in the village.

Aborting my reverie, an old man came in a moment later, studied the room, and ordered a coffee. He sat down across from me. He was a man much older than his years. His face was creased and blotched with the sort of age that doesn't come with aging alone. For all that, he appeared to be wearing makeup. I'd just learned that the village drunk was in fact the P.E. teacher, so I was ready to assume that this guy was the director of the school or something.

"Nice to meet you," I said. "You a teacher here?"
"No," he said. "Me var clowni."

Refer back to aforementioned append-the-I rule. I understood right away. Me var clowni - I am a clown. I'd missed the circus, somehow. This was the afterparty. Here, indeed, was my first Georgian clown.

I reached out to shake his hand and, upon shaking it, realized that he didn't have any fingers. It was just a palm. I let go of his hand, stared at it unintentionally. It fell dead in my lap. He stuffed it back in his tri-colored jacket pocket. Sadness seemed to be chiseled into the contours of the clown's face. The sad clown. An anti-archetype, of sorts. And I, the narcissistic volunteer. Both of us inversions of what we were supposed to be. Both of us failures, in some sense. I wanted to ask him what it was like to be a clown, but my Georgian wasn't anywhere near good enough. So I just asked him how he was doing, and he said he was doing okay. We sat across from each other in silence, staring at the floor. A few minutes later, Zhuzhuna came in with another babushka or two. They sat down on either side of me, across from the clown. Ignoring the clown. They called for some more coffee. After a while, the clown left, leaving behind a fingerless fistful of change in his wake. I drank another coffee with the babushkas.

They asked me if I liked Georgia. I said, sure. They asked me if I liked Georgian food and I lied yes. They asked me if I liked Georgian girls and giggled so much that their giggles obscured my answer. They ordered me a potato pastry and before I could refuse it, I found myself devouring it. After I'd finished it, I could feel my heart palpitating like a frog trapped in a brown paper bag. When we'd finished our coffee, the babushkas suggested that we move over and sit next to the stove. So we did. I sat there, the youngest person in the room by a couple decades, feeling very old, indeed. I ordered another coffee.

"Do you drink much coffee, Giorgi?" asked Zhuzhuna.
"Sure. Lots of coffee," I said.
"I drink four or five cups a day," she said.
"Turkish coffee?"
"Yes."
"We have much bigger coffee in America," I said. "I drink four or five cups of that."
"That much coffee is bad for you, Giorgi," she said.
"Probably."
She ordered another round.

We sat warming ourselves by the fire. When Georgians run out of kindling, they'll throw anything on the flames. Candy wrappers, white out, glue sticks. You wouldn't believe it. The fumes are enough to get you high, and not in the good way. The babushkas talked amongst themselves. I listened passively, trying to get a feel for the language, trying to decide whether it was more Slavic or more Middle Eastern or more Turkic or perhaps more of nothing of anything I was at all familiar with. And my mind wandered back to the clown, and I wondered how he'd lost all his fingers, whether that wasn't the reason he'd become a clown in the first place. I don't imagine one ever becomes a clown voluntarily. I wondered about the smokehound P.E. teacher, and I wondered about my students, and I wondered about my co-teachers and how they'd managed to teach English for so many years without learning a word of the damned language, and I wondered about myself, an English major, sitting there in a gulag coffee shop with a bunch of babushkas, wondered whether I could've ever imagined myself sitting here doing this sort of thing back when I was young and smart and full of vigor, wondered whether I'd gone off the rails at some point or whether I wasn't precisely where I was supposed to be: in a bumfuck Georgian village pretending to teach English, hanging out with fingerless Georgian clowns and drinking fake-ass coffee with a bunch of babushkas.

"Georgi," said Zhuzhuna, and she gripped my wrist, "I must ask you."
"Ask away."
"What do you think of Rima?"
"What's Rima?"
"The art teacher," she said.
"I don't know," I said. "I saw her earlier, but really - "
"She's beautiful," said Zhuzhuna, "and very talented."
"I like talented women," I said. "And I like beautiful women. That's true."
"Think about it," said Zhuzhuna. "Think about it."

I didn't think about it at all. I thought about going home and locking myself in my room and going to sleep. That's what I thought about. But in the early days anywhere, you tend to do what everyone else does. You tend to do what everyone else suggests. And short of marriage, I was cool with that. The babushkas finished their coffees and turned the shot glasses over on their dishes. I did the same. They laughed at me. Uproariously, as it were.

"Oh, Giorgi," said Zhuzhuna, slapping me across the shoulder. "Giorgi!"
"What the fuck did I do?"
"You see, Giorgi," she said, "the coffee, this is Georgian tradition. Not for you. Do you believe in, yes, superstition?"
"No," I said. "Not at all."
"In Georgia, we believe in, yes, what it is, fortune telling."
"Ah."
"How do you say - the coffee grains?"
"Yes."
"We can read informations in the coffee grains."
"What sorts of informations?"
"Everything," she said, "but usually it is for women only."
"Well," I said, "when in Rome."
"Yes," she said, snagging my shot glass. "When in Rome."

She tilted the little glass up to her eye, squinted at the streaky patterns therein. She giggled an old lady giggle.

"Yes, this is very interesting, Giorgi."
"What does it say?"
"Well," she said, "do you have friends?"
"Yes," I said, "some."
"You are to have a very good weekend with friends," she said.
"That's good."
"Yes," she said, "but then you are to meet a man."
Her face soured a bit. So did mine.
"Is he a bad man?"
"Yes," she said. She held the glass up to my face and pointed an untrimmed pinky-nail at a pair of boob-like white blobs therein. "He is a very bad man. He will lead you astray."
"In which direction," I asked.
But she was lost in the patterns of the coffee. She saw things in there that I had no interest in, things that meant nothing to me, things that meant everything to her and the babushkas sat around the table.
"You are to meet," she said, "a bald-headed man. A man with a very large head. He will be wearing glasses, yes?"
Checking her English. I nodded. Glasses.
"You are to meet this man and it will have bad results," she said. "Very bad results."
"But," I said, "this weekend with my friends. It's going to be good, no?"
"Yes," she said. "The weekend will be good. But when you meet this man it will have very bad results. Very bad results."

The bell rang. Someone rang the bell. We all got up to leave. I felt like hugging somebody. One does, after one's first full day in a strange, strange place. But me and the babushkas parted ways without fanfare. I walked home with my extended host family at the end of the day. Through three feet of snow. When I got home, I sat down by the stove and drank briefly with my host dad. Then I locked myself in my room and dicked around without the aid of the internet and fell asleep in three sweaters and dreamt dreams of amputated host clowns. I woke up in the middle of the night and snuck out to the patio for a smoke. Stared up at the sky for a good long while. You wouldn't believe how beautiful the stars are in this part of the world. Especially in winter. There's a scientific reason for that, but I'm too lazy to explain it. You stand there looking up at the stars and every second you just kind of know with some weird measure of comfort that your tiny little human eyes are drinking in the light of an immense beauty that knows nothing at all about you. Perhaps because it is part of you. Nobody knows. Hence the beauty of it. Or something like that.

The Lay of the Land

Here. Let me give you the tour.

Ignoring for now the grim realities of actually driving a car in Georgia, I invite you to sit your virtual tookus down behind the wheel of a virtual 1977 Lada Niva. Your tookus and your Niva are parked somewhere in a town called Zugdidi, not too far away from my village of Jgali. Bear in mind that you're little more than a hawked loogey away from the De Facto Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, so it would be wise here to stop and ask a virtual local for directions – and to listen very, very carefully.

Driving northeastward, then, you'll find yourself winding your way up through the lowest of the Lower Caucasian foothills. Strange forests here. Tall trees tilted together like they were half-felled by an asteroid blast hundreds of years ago and kept on growing that way. There's a landslide section up ahead, but you're in a virtual car, so it's all good. Plenty of cows on the road. Plenty of cow shit on the road. No need to swerve. You'll pass villages with names like Kortskheli, Natsatu, Odishi, Chkaduashi, Chkhorotsku  – names that are no less formidable when they are written in Georgian. More villages out here than people. No reason to stop. Nothing to see here. Most of these places are every bit as insubstantial as my native Jgali, some of them home to expats every bit as insubstantial as myself.

Eventually, you'll arrive at a piddling little town called Tsalenjikha. For the better part of ten months, this was the closest thing I had to civilization. No reason to stop here, either, but you're free to snoop around a bit if you like.

Something of a Wild West feel to the place. A sinkhole of a main drag lined with crumbling, leering storefronts. A couple barber shops. An internet café, if you want to call it that. A bar that is fresh out of beer. A café that is fresh out of coffee. A restaurant that's fresh out of everything on the menu, and fresh out of menus to boot. A supermarket that is markedly less than super. Slathered onto the rear end of Main Street is a swollen and bustling bazaar, a kind of mercantile tumor whose puddle-pocked alleyways are clogged with maneating pigeons and bellowing babushkas and bootlegged goods so laughably fake not even China could have produced them.

This is Tsalenjikha. Where I used to go of an evening. To let it all hang out. If you will.

On your way out of Tsalenjikha, you'll pass by a soccer stadium. I'm given to understand that Tsalenjikha has a pro team, but in all my time in Georgia I never saw a Georgian man run, so I'm not inclined to think that the team is terribly competitive. On the left, you'll notice a hospital (whose radiology department I owe no great favors). Turning right, then, and heading still further northeast, you will find yourself confronted with a landscape of immense and stultifying beauty – your first glimpse of the Caucasus mountains –  but fear not: you'll get bored with it after a couple of months.

This road – the road you're on now – I know better than any road on earth. It is about eight kilometers long and how comes I knows it so well is because I walked it up and down, in snow and in sweat, during the day and well after dark, cool and composed, half-crazed and consummately drunk  – and you get to know a road pretty well when you get to see it that many ways.

On the right, you'll pass a little copse of stunted trees bowing as if to drink from a water-filled ditch, and languishing in the ditch is the mossy skeleton of an old Soviet jalopy. The hills flatten into a steady plain for a click or two, columned with tall, proud oaks. On sunny afternoons, some of the less sickly looking free-range bulls like to come out here and kneel godlike in the close-cropped grass, in the shadows of the oaks. Up ahead, cords of thick black cable hang low over the road between a monstrous pair of electrical towers. If you roll the windows down, you can feel the buzzing in your skull. Glancing from left to right and left again, you'll see that the electrical towers go stomping like giant metal scarecrows up into the hills on the right, and up into the whitecapped mountains on the left. And if you're a guy like me, you'll find yourself kind of boggled and daunted and vaguely nauseated by the amount of effort that goes into this whole civilization thing.

You'll pass a village on the left called Sachino. The World's Oldest Woman lives there. Or used to. There should be an asterisk involved somewhere around here.

There's a fluorescent orange blob in the distance and as you get closer, the blob materializes into a backpack with legs, and as you come right up alongside it, the backpack with legs materializes into a lanky old bearded foreigner covered in sweat. That's me. Hey. Thanks for the ride.

Yeah. You'll want to keep going straight. Up ahead there's a bridge. You mind stopping here? I gotta take a leak. And I want to show you something.

This is our river, the Chanistsqali, which I'm told means "Red River," though it isn't particularly red or river-like at this juncture. Not so bad to look at, though.

It flows down from a glacier just north of here, near a place called Squri. All year round, the river is the sort of cold that makes half-naked Georgian men half-grunt/half-ululate in the manner of Tim Allen. The water is so fresh that drinking it once will turn you into a water snob for life: what in the rest of the world passes for water is no longer water to you. It is dihydrogen monoxide and nothing more.

The river is criss-crossed by nightmare bridges right out of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. I used to get vicariously nauseous watching my host brother go running across those bridges, and then I used to vicariously die watching him backflip into the river. He thought it was great fun.

Lucky for us, the bridge we're driving over right now has no trouble supporting virtual cars. You'll see up ahead what looks like a gas station sign. From a gas station that time forgot. "Welcome to Jgali," says the rusted-out sign. But we're not quite in Jgali yet, even though we've passed the sign, because we still haven't left Tsalenjikha. A few hundred meters further along, there is a sign bearing the name "Tsalenjikha" with a red line through it  – one of Georgia's more endearing highway mannerisms. Now we are in Jgali.

I think we're in Jgali, anyway. None of the people I've talked to from this part of town seem to be aware that they live in Jgali. Jgali? Never heard of it. Jgali? No, it's up that way, up in the mountains. Most of them would tell you that they live in this or that village, villages I've never heard of, villages that may or may not exist. More villages than people out here.

Check out these houses. Very Georgian. And I'm not talking Colonial.

The word "wall" is open to interpretation in Georgia. The definition of a roof, too, is a matter of much hermeneutic speculation. Slanty roofs sometimes. Flat roofs mostly. Roofs of bark, roofs of rust. Aluminum roofs. Tin roofs. Hot tin roofs. Lukewarm tin roofs. Roofs that look like some fifty-foot bovine tromped through and took a massive crap on somebody's unfinished house. Tiled roofs ...

All Georgian houses hide behind fences. Picket fences, barbed wire fences, chain link fences, rust-iron fences, fences with broken bottles and glass shards superglued across the top, Soviet holdover fences tagged with little license plates that bear the street name in Russian. I doubt the road we're on even has a name anymore.

Most houses have water towers or wells in the front lawn. Water towers range from great big rusted-out vats that stand thirty feet in the air to padlocked wooden boxes a couple feet off the ground. Wells range from ornately siloed holes in the ground to, well, just regular old holes in the ground. We won't get into the toilet situation here. There's a chance we wouldn't get back out.

There is one house that stands out from all the other houses in town. It, alone among the Georgian houses, is not a Georgian house. It belongs in the American suburbs. This is all very odd, because my host dad built it. Which is not to say that my host dad lives in it. No, the dude who lives there I've seen walking around in a suit, sporting an unusually full set of teeth. There are a couple of black BMWs parked out front. Slowing down as you pass, you'll of course wonder who the hell this guy killed to be able afford all this. I never did ask.

There's a convenience store on the left. Keep driving. I owe that babushka five lari for the phone bill.

On the right is a seven foot tall hobo who looks like a giant Bee Gee. Now we're in Jgali proper. The hobo's village sobriquet is "Palma," which is Georgian for "palm tree." But I call him Gibby. I didn't say stop. He'll steal our sunglasses.

Up ahead is a wino passed out on the only known bench in the village. He's swaddled in a bootleg Phat Farm windbreaker. Naw. I told you, we only got one homeless guy in Jgali, and that's Palma. Phat Farm's the P.E. teacher.

Slow up a bit. You're going to miss Jgali. Okay. On the right you've got the church. I'm told it is shaped like a cross from above, but I've never seen it from above. There are supposedly a bunch of human skulls and bones kept inside a display case inside the church, but I've never been inside. The church, I mean. Yeah, I guess you're right. I am pretty worthless.

On the left is what used to be a disco. Currently a crater. I wonder if Palma used to go there. I know he goes there now.

Up ahead is the school where I teach. Those used to be Roman columns, but now they're just kind of rusty metal cylinders that don't support anything. No, there aren't supposed to be pigs and feral dogs in the schoolyard. I'll have to talk to somebody about that.

That's a hospital on the right. I'm pretty sure the doctor's dead.

And that's where I live. Up here on the left. What? Go ahead. You're not going to hurt my feelings. It's not like I built the thing. Windows? What do you mean? We've got plenty of windows. Oh, you mean windows with glass. No, not too many of those. Oh shit. That would be my host mom. Don't make eye contact. Drive.

That was close. Anyway. I don't really know the people who live in these houses over here.

That? Oh. That's a septic tank. Nobody lives there anymore.

What's that sign say up ahead? Ah. Jgali with a red line through it. Well. That's about all there is to it. We're in Squri now. You'll probably want to turn back at this point. We're relatively civil in Jgali, but I can't vouch for the glacier people. Hey. You mind giving me a lift into town since you're headed that way? I gotta, ah, um, diversify my portfolio.

Field Jacket (Pt. 2)

Older and wiser yet dumber somehow – the addition of years is in sum an act of subtraction – I have come to find myself in the middle seat of the middle bench of a marshrutka bound for the middle of nowhere.

If the word marshrutka sounds Russian, that's because it ain't. Long, long ago – well before the invention of the hydraulic brake, apparently – the Russians borrowed and slightly transmogrified the German Marschroute (march route) and applied it to an inbred breed of four-wheeled irregular rectangle that, true to its etymology, amounts to the public transportation equivalent of a forced march at Nazi gunpoint through inner Siberia.

A lot has changed in Georgia since the advent of the macro-minibus. World War II bombed itself to death. The Cold War chilled the fuck out. Slowly and dubiously, some tyrant-friendly form of representative democracy trickled its way down into the Lower Caucasus. But the Russo-Germanic loanword marshrutka, for better and overwhelmingly for worse, remains part of the modern Georgian lexicon.

This particular marshrutka isn't so bad, as marshrutkas go. It is slightly curved in the front for ostensibly aerodynamic reasons, and its hull bears a lower-than-average number of battle scars and barnacle welts relative to the standard street-tested Georgian automobile. The driver is not visibly drunk; the cabin is full beyond capacity but no further. Things are good, all things considered. Still, I can't help but feel ill at ease, like I forgot something at the airport bar three layovers ago.

And I probably did. But there are any number of more existentially pressing reasons why I should feel ill at ease about this: my latest venture into the netherworlds of the world. I'm 29, for one thing, and as I whiplash my way across Georgia's midsection in the middle seat of the middle bench of a marshrutka, it is no longer at all obvious to me why the hell I should be doing that sort of thing at this age, nevermind where I'm headed: the border between Georgia and Whatever Lurks Northwest of Georgia, a border that was once – and yet remains – a very disputed border, indeed.

Moreso than most trips, there is the sense that I have volunteered for my own demise this time around. At no point in Georgia have I felt safe in my own skin. Tbilisi did not woo me during my two weeks there. Plenty of black-jacketed, lobotomized-looking Georgian thugs; hordes of unibrowed Armenian pimps; gypsies galore, hungry hands extended; woeful nights kicking it in the kinds of clubs where you order a rufie and hope to god somebody slips you a drink. And now, a marshrutka. Christ. The marshrutkateer swerves us into oncoming traffic. Death is very palpable, indeed. We barrel past four other marshrutkas, juke out of the path of an onrushing marshrutka, swerve off the road momentarily and skitter back up onto it just in the nick. Palpable, nay: death is inevitable. Outside, the sky is the color of a tombstone, the crabbed winter earth all brown and dead, the houses we pass crumbling and moss-eaten like tombstones. Flooring it into oncoming traffic, the driver lets go of the wheel so he can jaw into his cellphone and cross himself – down, left, right, up; down, left, right, up – as we whoosh past a roadside Georgian graveyard. One wonders how the man can even see a graveyard at light speed. One wonders, too, how many fresh tombstones are planted every day on account of Georgian Orthodox marshrutka drivers genuflecting orthodoxically as they pass Orthodox Georgian graveyards. I'm too old to be doing this shit.

But then, I am too young to be doing a lot of other, more boring shit. At the very least, I am no longer working for the Republicans. I have crawled out from under a desk, hurdled the cubicle walls, etc. No, I signed up for this misadventure, so I might as well enjoy it. And I am enjoying it, in a way. There is something fundamentally liberating about confronting vehicular manslaughter head-on. I'll be getting somewhere delightfully weird, assuming I ever get there. All horrors aside, I am quite enjoying the sensation of being marshrutka-ed – or I am quite enjoying the sensation in general, I should say. There are other secondary and tertiary sensations that I am not enjoying nearly as much.

Secondary and tertiary sensations I am not enjoying, in the order that they occur to me:

1) That of the tightly clamped Georgian buttoxen on either side of me, and that of their compressing my own buttocks into a state of very tight clampedness, in the middle seat of the middle bench of aforementioned marshrutka bound for the middle of nowhere.

2) The odor of aforementioned buttoxen.

3) That of knowing with absolute certainty that every single onrushing marshrutka will slam head-on into my own marshrutka, annihilating myself, marshrutka, and this blog post well before any of them have reached their final destinations.

4) That of having to pee.

5) That of having ingested four slices of Georgian khachapuri at the last rest stop because I screwed up the order, and having ingested two more slices after that because someone else screwed up the order same as me, and having ingested one more slice after that because someone else screwed up the order same as everyone else, and then having to carry three leftover slices of so-called Georgian pizza (only the grease-to-bread ratio is comparable to actual pizza), absurdly, in the palm of my hand for the remainder of the second leg of what is proving to be a buttoxen-numbingly long marshrutka ride, indeed. None of this is digestively or sensorily enjoyable.

6) That of feeling that I have forgotten something.

7) That of feeling that I have forgotten something, but also that I have forgotten what I have forgotten.

8) That of feeling that I am once again lapsing into unhealthy amounts of metacognition. 

9) That of having to pee (aforementioned).

10) That of the onrushing marshrutkas, etc. ... (aforementioned).

11) That of having to pee (thrice aforementioned).

And so on.

Five of my fellow volunteers are marshrutka-ing along with me. But we aren't really in any position to talk. Our handlers saw fit to distribute us evenly about the cramped and aromatic cabin. We can exchange amorous glances but only few words. We are surrounded on all sides by our school directors and host parental guardians, and by craggy-faced Georgian babushkas who cluck their tongues, bow their heads and genuflect orthodoxically at the satanic sounds of English. Down, left, right, up.

I know where I'm headed, which is to say that I know the name of my final destination. This is not to say that I know anything about the place. My home for the next four months is a mountain village named Jgali, stashed way up in the northwest corner of a far-flung northwestern province the Georgians call Samegrelo. Last night's Google search yielded some gruesome amputation porn, but no information whatsoever as to why so many of Jgali's 300-odd inhabitants have been amputated. The village is precariously close to a Russian puppet state, so that could be one explanation. Samegrelo is also downwind from Chernobyl – that might be another.

I know that I have a host family waiting for me and that my host family consists of a mother, a father, a sister and a brother. I know their ages. I do not know their names. None of them are on the marshrutka. They did not come to pick me up. I have not met them or spoken to them or corresponded with them in any way. I know that they don't care if I smoke. I'm trying to quit but I don't quite believe that I will. I know that they have the internet, running water, and a western toilet. I don't quite believe that they will have any of those things.

We pass through Kutaisi, Georgia's second city. Some odd English graffiti here. "I love plant." Fair enough. Something I've noticed about the license plates in this country: it's always three letters followed by three digits, a formula that has spawned a surprising proliferation of accidental vanity plates. TIT 690, to name one I've spotted. LOL 420, to name another. It is doubtful that KKK 666 is as bad a guy as you'd think. BMW 389 is the proud owner of a 1972 Lada Niva.

I stash the rotten khachapuri under the seat. The sun goes down. A babushka asks the driver if we can stop to take a whiz and the driver says no. It becomes clear that the last rest stop was indeed the last rest stop. We are nearing Zugdidi, which is close to our villages but not close to anything else in particular, other than the Abkhazian border. From here on out, we go native. I think about the other five volunteers marshrutka-ing along with me. Perhaps we'll find ourselves stranded in neighboring villages, will burn those villages to the ground in the months to come. Or perhaps this is it: a last hurrah by way of clammy handshake at a connecting marshrutka stop in the middle of nowhere. Not even a goodbye at the end of our contracts. Who knows? Who knew?

The weather has taken a turn. For the better part of seven hours, we have blasted through barren, rust-fenced plains stillborn somewhere between winter and spring. Now, as we climb up into the mountains, snow starts to fall. Further up and further along, it comes tumbling down in huge white bowtie-shaped tufts. When the marshrutka finally shudders to a stop in Zugdidi, it is pitch black out but for the snow catching the snarky sidelong glare of the piss-yellow streetlights.

Turns out there isn't even time for a handshake. Once I've finally gotten all my shit out of the back of the marshrutka, Irish Michael and British Tom and Oregonian David and What's-Her-Name-From-Wherever-She's-From are gone, have already been spirited away by their handlers. Only L.A. Tommy and Nebraska-Ass Me remain. We are not spirited away, but prodded and nudged by our handlers towards a cigar-shaped and practically cigar-sized Lada 1600 snoozing up against the curb. The car sags ominously as we load our bags in the trunk, and sags even more ominously when we duck into the back seat.

There is a portly old fellow behind the wheel and a boy sitting shotgun. A Lynchian touch: the kid is holding in his lap a bathroom mirror, complete with overhead lights (though they are not lit (a decidedly non-Lynchian touch)), and the mirror all but blocks out our view out the front windshield, replaces it with a reflection of Tommy and I huddled in the backseat, looking greasy, disoriented, and somewhat terrified. A full-on blizzard is raging outside. The lowly Lada doesn't even seem to have one-wheel drive. How the hell are we going to get where we're supposed to go and what the hell is going to happen to us when we get there?

After a couple rumbleshot miles of broken Russian, it emerges that these two dudes are Tommy's host dad and host brother, respectively. Handshakes are exchanged, but not with me. I sit there mostly mute. It is communicated to me that I am to be dropped off first. And here is where my night turns into Are You My Mother? We sally forth into the darkness, the black two-laner painted dimly by the flickering headlights, all else all snow and nothing else. We stop, exchange words with a shrouded figure in the gloom. Is this my host mother? No, it is some stranger I will never see again. Or it is some stranger who has been expecting us and knows where we're going. Or it is some stranger who helps scrape the ice off our windshield while shivering cigarettes are smoked all around. And meanwhile, there is this mirror blocking the windshield, and me looking back at myself, sleep deprived as hell and getting tired of my own beard, thinking I'll maybe shave it whenever I get home, wherever that is.

We drift into a snowdrift along the side of the road, and only after we stay there a while do I realize that it was a deliberate maneuver on the part of my chauffeur. A couple minutes later, a pair of headlights flip on and off across the way.

"You," says the driver, "hello director."

I get out of the car, or try to. So bushed am I and so atrophied are my legs that my backpack nearly throws me ass-over-head into the snow. The contents of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s canvas gift bag – two bottles of Georgian wine, a box of chocolates, an out-of-season Season's Greetings card – are sent flying all over.

"Dude," says Tommy, "you're a mess."

I do not disagree.

A shadowy figure in the distance is approaching me, so I decide I may as well approach the shadowy figure in the distance. We shake hands.

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch," she says, halfway between a question and a statement.

"Jawohl," I reply, very unsure of myself. "Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch."

Hello, director. She'd been reading my resume on the way over. I load my shit into the trunk of her Georgian Geo Metro and we shuttle off through the snow.

The drive takes about an hour, though the Russo-Georgian street signs tell me that we only cover five kilometers. My director is none too good at driving, and her car is none too good at same. We have to stop so she can scrape the ice off the windshield with an ABBA mix CD reserved for said purpose. We have to stop so she can let the engine rebuild itself, so she can wait for the snow to clear just enough to reestablish where the road is.

We slide up in front of my host family's house. It's straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Darkness all around. Four alien figures, corona-lit by the porch lights, shuffling their way through the snow. The director doesn't even get out of the car. Here you are. You're on your own. Here is your mother.

Only after we've shaken hands and said hello – only on the walk towards the house, when my host mom nudges me, shrugs her shoulders, grips at her collar, and tilts her head by way of posing a question does it hit me. I did forget something, though not at the airport bar three layovers ago. I forgot it in the damned marshrutka. I have forgotten my beloved field jacket. Fuck me. You'd think I'd have noticed when I started freezing my balls off four hours ago.

The whole rest of the night, I'm not really there. I sit down with my host mom and my host dad, my host uncle and my host aunt. They introduce themselves but I forget their names instantly. The neighbors show up and before long I can't even remember who's in my host family and who isn't. We crack open Misha's wine. Me and the host dad knock it back, shot after shot, shooting it from cow horns hollowed out for said purpose. But at no point do I feel drunk. Toasts are made on my behalf. I make toasts on the host family's behalf. Is there a patron saint of lost jackets? I'm not really there. I left part of my brain in the back of that marshrutka. It's like I've been amputated, or lobotomized, or worse. A snail deshelled. My field jacket is gone.

Who knows what sort of post-adolescent, punkish impulse led me to adopt the orphaned jacket in the first place. It was my mom's, for one thing. But adopt it I did. It traveled the world with me. Europe and Asia. Latin America, too. I'd lived in it, slept in it, puked all over it. I'd even lost it several times, most notably in Berlin, only to have it return to me, every time, and most notably on a bleary New Year's Eve in Omaha.

"That's a bad-ass jacket," I'd said to my good friend/ex-Berliner roommate Ben Pham. "Where'd you get it?"

He shifted around in his Chuck Taylors.

"Well, er," he said. "Um."

Then it clicked: Ben Pham looked so good in that jacket it that it reminded me of another fellow who looked nowhere near as good in it.

"Fuck me," I said. "That's my jacket."

I'd left it behind in Berlin a year or so before. It was by a weird whim that Ben Pham had noticed it in his roommate's closet and adopted it as his own. And he'd brought it back to me. But this time, I know it's gone. I've lost it. I'll never see that field jacket again. And I'm not ashamed to say that I downed my last shot of wine and went straight to my brand new host bedroom and cried about that shit. The blankets are thin and so are the walls. I've since put on three sweaters. It's colder in here than it is out there. I'll write and shiver and write my ass to sleep. It's going to be a long-ass, cold-ass winter.

Field Jacket (Pt. 1)

Brothers

"When's he going to get here?"
"Soon."
"What's he going to be like?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you know?"
"I don't know."
"How do you know you don't know?"
"I  – "
"Everybody shut the fuck up!"

Host Dad is watching The News.

Host Mom resumes doing dishes. Host Sister resumes studying English. Girl Host Cousin just sits there looking all cute. Boy Host Cousin resumes eating his own hand. Host Brother resumes reverse engineering his childhood toys, transforming them into mildly aggravating and somewhat deadly projectile weapons.

"Does he smoke like dad does?"
"Yes."
"Does he drink like dad does?"
"I think so, yes."
"Shut the fuck up," bellows Host Dad.

Host Brother is momentarily shutted the fuck up. Host Sister memorizes fifteen English words. Host Mom puts on a pot of tea. In anticipation. It is 10:30 PM.

"This is boring," says Host Brother, glaring at the television, amplifying his slingshot.
Host Dad says nothing, is watching The News.
"I don't care about The News," says Host Brother.
Host Dad blinks vigorously, is profoundly hungover, is watching The News.
"When's he going to get here?" asks Host Brother, and nobody says anything.

There is a plastic basketball hoop hammered into the hardwood wall above the door to the living room, and Host Brother has a small foam ball with which to play basketball against himself. He shoots some hoops. He clunks a shot against the backboard. The ball sneaks between his legs, ricochets against the fold-out futon, falls into Host Sister's hands. She takes a shot, misses. Host Mom scolds her for doing so. Smacks her once, smack, one proper smack across the cheek. That's a boy's game. Don't do that. Host Brother gets the rebound. He misses a layup. Nothing else is said. All is boring. Host Dad is watching The News.

Outside, it is snowing. The snow falls and falls, and it's something obvious and ordinary to the Host Family in the living room. Host Mom tongs another log into the fire. The sparks flit out of the oven like the last of the fireflies. They blacken and fall to the floor. To be swept up later.

"When's he going to get here?"
"Ssu!"
(Georgian Mother for "shut the fuck up.")

It's creeping up on 11 PM. The snow is devouring everything. My arrival ever more unlikely. It's possible, Host Brother thinks, that I won't show up at all. It's possible that I never existed in the first place. He plays basketball with himself as obnoxiously as he can until he wears himself out. Host Dad is still watching The News. Host Brother gives up. He sits down on the futon next to his mom until she threatens to kiss him on the cheek, then he runs to his and his sister's room and locks the door behind him and hides out there for the remainder of the night.

Round about midnight, a profoundly bearded American shows up at the doorstep with two bags of luggage. That's me. Me and Host Dad get wine drunk together. Nobody has to work the next day. But everybody has to work the next day. Because everybody has to work every day in Georgia. Because every day in Georgia is a piece of work. Host Brother in the next room listens to us talking through the wall and wonders what I'm going to be like. Neither of us have ever had a brother before.

Escape Button

Somewhere in the bustling bowels beneath the Capitol building, sometime around noon, my trousers exploded and the button that had once so dutifully bundled my junk together suddenly shot off down the hall and went skittering betwixt the clickity-clacketing wingtips of any number of our fair nation's elected officials. Then, as gravity would have it, my pants fell down. That was when I decided that I didn't have a future in politics. This cockamamie vaudevillian bullshit, I knew, would happen to me every day that I remained on The Hill. Or for as long as The Hill would have me. The Republicans would've been better off hiring Mr. Bean.

I was finished. Kaput. Less than a month in, it was time for me to retire. Still, my dong was hanging out in a very public place and for eminently prosecutable reasons, an escape had to be made. So I sequestered myself in the most secluded basement bathroom I could find and listened to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) filibust ass in the stall next to mine while I tried to MacGyver my pants back together with a broken keyring and half a tab of prechewed Dentyne chewing gum. Were there any emergency tailors lurking in the depths of D.C.'s Fraggle Rockian underground, I wondered. Certainly, I figured, I couldn't be the only man on Capitol Hill having trouble keeping his pants up – but that's what interns were for. And I, alas, was the intern.

My engineering efforts having failed colossally (and stickily), I sucked in my gut and adopted the Napoleon stance – i.e., the Untreated Ulcer Swagger – then I made my hunchbacked way out through several security checkpoints with one arm clenched around my waist and the opposite hand resolutely cupping my balls. This drew some looks, sure, but once I'd made it outside, out into D.C. proper, I was just one of a million other half-dressed derelicts cupping their balls: a privileged one in fact, with two whole pantlegs to his busted-ass pants and a Van Heusen™ necktie to cover up the delicate bits.

I caught the subway home looking mighty glum, indeed. Nobody in the office knew that I was gone, or that I wasn't coming back. I had no idea what to tell them, or whether I should tell them anything at all. Maybe I should just steal away in the night. That had always worked for me in the past. Or maybe there was still time to fix things. Call in. Apologize. Say you got sick. Brush it off. Get some sleep. Put on a new pair of pants and turn up bright and early the next morning. But the button thing. Always a button, always an unzippable zipper, always a banana peel when you least expect it. That shit happens to me all the time. It doesn't happen to John Boehner or the thousands of Princeton grads lining up to puff on his metaphorical cigarette. Whatever Paul McCartney has to say on the matter, fools don't make it on The Hill. But what was to be done if I didn't make it? What in the ever-loving hell was to be done next? I'd thrown everything I had into D.C. and watched it spiral down into a black hole, like one of those plastic charity vortexes you see at the mall. Fuck me. I put my head in my hands and swallowed back a delicious flare of gastric acid. The train shudder-whooshed into a tunnel and I watched through my fingers the bright white sidelights streak by like flashes of a future that I – through idiocy? through laziness? through some sort of subconscious moral rectitude? – was now banishing to a dark and irretrievable past. All knowingly. All willingly. All because of a fucking button. I'd gained weight. I chewed the inside of my cheek and looked up. An old black fellow seated in the seat in front of me seemed to be reading my reverie. 

"Rough day?" he asked.
"Life kind of sucks at the moment," I said, "to be perfectly honest."
"It's never life that sucks," he said. "We always have the power to change things. It's all in your mind. It's all up to you. Remember that, son."

I told him I would. I thanked him and shook his hand. Then it was my stop, so I got up and clutched my balls and embraced my artificial ulcer and shuffled off the train like a sack of potatoes on stilts. Witnessing an exit like that, I'm thinking maybe the guy changed his mind.

That afternoon, I tendered my resignation over the phone. And so my paid internship became an unpaid one. I'd fallen off The Hill.

It wasn't a wasted trip. I learned some things. I learned, for instance, that politicians very seldom (if ever) actually write their own material; speeches, press releases, op-eds; no, the writing is almost entirely left to staffers like me. On the other hand, I learned (and was pleasantly surprised to learn) that most representatives actually do take time to read the mail they receive from their constituents, so long as the letters are not written in shit. I learned that most members of the House cannot afford to live in Washington D.C.; when they are in town (which is not altogether all that often) not a few of them spend their nights on tiny little futons that fold out into their tiny little office closets. Quite a few politicians are hapless drunks – how they keep this under wraps media-wise is something I never did figure out. John Boehner's office is the one closest to the designated outdoor smoking zone. Can't say I blame the guy. The House chamber or the Senate chamber, or at any rate whichever chamber it is where the President of the United States makes his State of the Union Address – that chamber is an optical illusion. It belongs on the side of the Interstate, next to Carhenge and The World's Largest Ball of Aluminum Foil. I shit you not. The room puts on at least 15,000 square feet when seen on television. It is actually very, very small in real life. You couldn't host a Magic: The Gathering tournament in there. Also: there are gas masks and various paranoiac anti-terrorism prophylactics stashed in little tote bags tucked under the seats. House and Senate votes are cast via a machine that hasn't been upgraded since the late 1980's by my guesstimation. On the machine, there are three square plastic buttons – red, yellow, green – "Yea," "Nay," and "Meh" – and I imagine they flash excitedly and play the original Pac-Man theme when pressed. Voting also involves inserting a dusty gray plastic game cartridge into a warped wooden slot – not sure how that works, or whether it works at all. When you come right down to it, the overall aesthetic of our representational democracy lies somewhere between the original Atari, gas station slot machines, and a 1987 Plymouth station wagon tricked out with woodgrain everything. What else did I learn? Well. Come CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) season, the "Casual Encounters" section of the D.C. craigslist is clogged with anonymous personal ads soliciting all manner of clandestine conservative buttsex. I did not partake, but I can tell you it's legit. The bars in D.C. abide by all sorts of byzantine drinking rules – you can't stand up; you can't sit down; you can't wear two items of clothing that belong to two different colors starting with the same letter – and these rules make drinking very difficult. Just because I learned all this crap doesn't mean that I understand it. But perhaps most significantly (for me at least), I learned that I am very good at sitting down at a keyboard and cranking out mass amounts of bullshit in a very short time, bullshit that argues in favor of all manner of harebrained and horrific and hateful things – and most creepily of all, I learned that this aforementioned bullshit of mine, written without an iota of sincerity on my part, was effusively adored by certain circles of voters who (were they not a kind of dominant and well-funded minority in America) would almost certainly be institutionalized. But now I'm politicizing again. And like I told you: I've retired from all that.

Where were we? So. I left The Hill. I did not leave with my tail between my legs as you might expect, but with my tail wagging at the thought of going somewhere else. At the end of my month in D.C., I coughed up the rent and caught an Amtrak back to Omaha. Days later, I learned that I'd been accepted for a volunteer teaching gig in Georgia: The Country. I had no money, no other options, and no real desire to do much of anything else. A week later, I was in Georgia. And that is when shit got interesting. To say the least.

You Should See the Other Guy (Pt. 1)

"Get over here, you sassy bitch."

The Irishman and I slopped our arms around each other. It wasn't very convincing. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to properly hug an Irishman in the backseat of a Georgian taxi without violating certain boundaries of platonic friendship. He slipped me his portion of the fare – I'd borrowed my half from The Irishman in the first place – then he leaned on the door and fell out into the street and began his eight kilometer stagger home.

The cabbie asked me for the fourth or fifth time if I was really sure I wanted to go to Jgali. I met the caves of his eyes in the rearview mirror, suspended as they were in the reflected light of the full moon. I told him that yes, I lived in Jgali and wanted very much to go there, and for a moment I wasn't sure if the beer breath swarming around the cabin was the cabbie's or my own – but given the sort of evening I'd had, I figured I could safely assume the latter. The cabbie grunted and cranked the ignition and after a few shuddering whinnies, the car lurched on down the road. Then I scooted to the far end of the backseat to avoid the gaze of those dark and disembodied eyes.

From that angle, in the rearview mirror, I was treated to a glimpse of my own wrecked visage: the nose gashed and scraped and slightly off-kilter, a Hitlerstache of dried blood basted into my beard, a black empty space where a front tooth used to be. Looking rough. But you should see the other guy. Then again, my assailant had been an inanimate object – a dilapidated flight of stairs – and aside from their dilapidation, I was quite sure that they were looking far better than I was at the time.

The night before, Halloween eve, my expat comrades and I had judiciously elected to get tipsy and go prowling around an abandoned tea factory well after midnight. There is no such joy in the tavern as on the road thereto, my friend David "Weird Beard" Lawrence had quoted to me earlier in the evening, and I can assure you that there is no more ominous way to kick off a night of revelry than to quote Blood Meridian. Nevertheless, that initial sense of foreboding faded as the night progressed, along with many another anxiety, along with many a rational thought, and by the time we were scoping out the teaworks for stray dogs, hoboes, and Soviet-era junkenirs, the lot of us were bellowing and yammering and ribbing each other the way all young men do when abroad from mind and country.

It would be tempting to blame this one on drinking – and the drink, along with its resultant drunks, certainly deserves a lot of blame for a lot of things – but anyone who knows me well would tell you that I am among the world's most uncoordinated oafs even in the best of mental states. I have always had a knack for injuring myself, more often when I'm sober than when I'm not. This past spring, I slipped on a soccer ball and snapped my wrist in half with my ass. And were you to dig further back in the archives, you could put together an impressively long blooper reel of me clonking myself in the head with doors of all sorts (screen doors, revolving doors, refrigerator doors, garage doors), tumbling headfirst into shrubs, falling backwards out first story windows, and generally "biting it" in any number of physically improbable ways. Sober though we were not, I can tell you that all of us were perfectly ambulatory, except for me, and that fact had little or nothing to do with beer.

As I tripped and fell up the stairs that night, in the split second before impact, I knew it would be especially bad: less towards the comical end and more towards the permanently disfiguring end of the injury spectrum. Swaggering up that dark and crooked and craggy stairwell, my toe clunking against one step and my foot failing to find the next one, the world panning and flipping, then rushing up to greet me, I had time to think to myself: this is going to fucking hurt.

But it didn't. Not at all, really. Nevertheless, it was not a graceful landing. My face slammed into a wall of stone and I seemed to slide diagonally across it. There was a chorus of horrified grunts from the gentlemen standing on either side of me. I lay for a moment at a truly weird angle, sprawled chest-down across no fewer than five stairs. Then I got to my feet and said – very calmly, I'm told – "I have destroyed my teeth."

The dudes recoiled from the man saying this. I was bleeding generously from the mouth and there was one very large gap in my teeth where once there had been several small and endearing ones. But as I tongued around assessing the damage, I was pleased to discover that I'd only knocked out one half of one of my front teeth. The good news was that I still had 27 1/2 left. The next step, I thought, was simple: track down the missing chunk, then have it glued back on. By a Georgian carpenter. Like my host dad.

We scoured the steps with our matching government-issued Nokia cellphone flashlights and after only a minute or two, managed to track down the amputated fang. I held it up to the light, turned it around in my fingers, grinning proudly and gorily all the while, then slipped it in the front pocket of my suitcoat, where it would remain for the next 24 hours.

The following evening – Halloween proper – the Irishman met me in Zugdidi, the closest thing we had to a city, and he shared with me a brief but cathartic sympathy drunk. Then, before things got too unreasonable, we caught a shared taxi back to our respective villages.

So that's how I wound up where I found myself. There in the backseat, I took the tooth out of my suitcoat pocket and held it up to the moonlight. It was such a small, strange, brittle little object. It had seemed so much bigger in my mouth. I noticed with some perplexity how clean it was on the front side, and how tar-streaked and secretly gross it was on the back. Must brush more thoroughly in the future, I thought. Must start flossing. Or quit smoking. Or all three. I opened my mouth and tried to fit the tooth into the space that it used to inhabit. Not too bad, I thought. Shouldn't be too much trouble, not even for a Georgian dentist. Hell, maybe I could even fix it myself. Georgian dentists, I assumed, were to be avoided at all costs. Or even at no cost at all. Then I reflected on what I was doing, and how truly insane it must appear to a Georgian cabbie who probably hadn't even seen a foreigner before, nevermind a toothless one trying to eat his own tooth, and I checked the rearview mirror to make sure he wasn't watching me, and remembered that I'd scooted over earlier to the opposite end of the backseat for exclusively that purpose, and in the mirror I once again saw my beat up old face looking back at me, holding one chipped half of a tooth up to meet its estranged other, and I swollenly grinned and was about to slip the tooth back into my suitcoat pocket when I glanced out the windshield and saw that we were headed – undeniably, unstoppably – and at fifty miles an hour – off the road and into a ravine.

The cabbie cranked the wheel. The car flipped over. We flew. I watched with mild fascination as the tooth – like an astronaut being sucked out into deep space – shot out of my fingers, and as all the crap in my pockets went drifting around the cabin in all sorts of gravitationally interesting ways.

What those fortunate survivors of near death tend to say about these sorts of things seems to hold true, at least in my very limited experience. Time slowed to a standstill. I realized, clearly and calmly, that I was about to die. And with measured relief, I knew that there were still a couple of seconds between me and that annihilating moment, and that the brain being the beautiful and weird thing that it is, I could stretch those seconds out as long as I wanted to, within reason. If I was about to be done living, I wasn't quite done thinking.

My thoughts came with the clarity of stillframes cycling through a slide projector. How sad, I thought, that this was the way I was going to go out. A car wreck in Georgia. One of thousands. A statistic, if they even keep those statistics in Georgia. I wondered if I'd make the Georgian news. I wondered if I'd make the American news. I wondered if I'd get a blurb in the local newspaper, and how big a blurb it would be. I wondered what they'd have to say about me, wondered what sort of feelgood gloss they'd slather over the desultory path of my third and final decade on earth. I wondered how my family would react, then I opted not to think about that. I realized with some surprise that I had no major regrets, realized that regret was, as I'd often suspected, pointless by its very nature because dead people don't regret anything. All and all, I knew, I hadn't done such a bad job with this life thing. Still, there was the thought that this wasn't the way I wanted to go out – that I deserved, if not something better, at least something more unique or more distinguished or more dignified, or at any rate something more appropriate. A car wreck in Georgia. How passé.

Who would come to the funeral, I wondered. And where would all my possessions go, or to whom? Or did I even possess any possessions? Anyhow, I figured, none of that really mattered anymore. I wouldn't be around to worry about it. I'd be gone, and I knew full well where people went when they got gone: they were just gone, gone the same way they were gone before they'd existed. These were thoughts that had never distressed me and they certainly didn't distress me then. That said, I wasn't exactly at peace, either – a fucking car wreck in Georgia. Shit, I thought – I could do so much better. And the timing wasn't quite ideal. There was still so much left to do. Death, I knew, was not to be feared. But that didn't mean it shouldn't be avoided.

I wondered about the cabbie and whether these sorts of thoughts were coursing through his mind same as my own, or whether the thoughts I was having were the product of a Western education and a reading list steeped in French existentialism, or whether the cabbie had already survived any number of near-fatal car wrecks and simply assumed he'd survive this one like he'd survived all the ones in the past. Maybe he would survive the wreck and I would die, or maybe I would survive and he would die, or maybe we both would die, or neither of us. I wondered whether I'd sacrifice his life to keep my own, and decided that I happily and remorselessly would, if only because I knew what I knew about myself and the people I cared about, and knew absolutely nothing about the cabbie, and to volunteer my own death and the suffering it would visit upon the people I loved in order to spare the life of a stranger who, in all likelihood, was just another mediocre Georgian taxi driver – this, I knew, was somehow existentially false. Whatever happened to the cabbie, I wanted to live.

I wondered about the possibility not of perfect survival or of perfect death, but of mortal injury, and wondered what the cabbie would do to save me, or what I would do to save him, and in any event what could possibly be done for either one of us in that black expanse of countryside, at that hour of night, that far removed from people and cities and hospitals. A sense of profound isolation swept over me. The whole known universe, in that moment, was trapped within the confines of my skull, or at best in the cabin of a 1997 Opel Corsa station wagon that was hurtling upside-down through space, and there was no way of sharing my thoughts with anyone, no way of transmitting them telepathically, no way of speaking them, no way of writing them down for posterity. No blogging about this one. You're on your own now, Petit.

The moment, as I said, stretched on forever. But having dabbled a bit in these sorts of states, I well knew that the term "forever" was only a loose one; that however long the mind seemed to shake the shackles of time, those shackles were inevitably clamped right back on. By what? By time itself, I suppose. I thought about how strange that was, that a moment should seem to stretch on forever, even as it is busy becoming the next moment; how strange that the thoughts that I was having then could arrive in a single flash of comprehension, like a simple and indivisible word completely and instantly and nakedly understood, and yet each realization stood alone and independent, clear and stark as the stars on the stillest night of Mingrelian winter. Weird.

Then the moment, as they all do, passed. The car tumbled into the ravine. The sound, I thought, was like a shoddily wrapped Christmas present rolling down a flight of stairs. My head slammed against the ceiling. Why, I thought, that knock must've given me a concussion. But in the rapidly cycling moments that followed, I realized that it hadn't. I was lucid. I was alive. I was extremely pissed off. I began cursing. Cursing the driver. Cursing my luck. Cursing the universe. Profanities abounded. The car tumbled. I raged. Raged against the dying of the light, if you will. The windshield exploded. A confetti of glass sprayed into my eyes. My head slammed against the ceiling and the ceiling against the earth, each percussion more terrifying than the last. The cabin of the car was being rapidly crushed, its corners closing in on me. I raged. The pinprick bright stars and the gaping full moon swirled past, framed by the busted window, the constellations in time lapse. I raged. Time was moving now. Gone was the moment – all that was left was whatever happened next, the inevitable. We tumbled down the hill. The world crashing all around. Then, a terrible silence, a rush of gravity, and a heartstopping crunch. I was sitting upside down, ass over head, legs to the ceiling. I was breathing. I breathed. Nothing mattered. Nothing hurt. An instant of living, silent as its opposite. The full moon watched me through the window.

So. That could have been the end. Now I suppose I'll take you back to the beginning.

Death by Cucumber

Dear Reader(ship),

The Author, having vowed in an earlier post to update Expatriate Act (hereafter: Ye Olde Blogue) on a regular basis – and ideally, drawing material from his (The Author's) daily Moleskine® journal entries dating from late February through mid-July of 2012 – after months of deliberation and not much updation, has finally thrown up his hands and said (direct quote), "Nuts to all that."

The plan did not work out as planned. Very few of The Author's plans seem to work out as planned. The problem he encountered this time around (and it perhaps should not have surprised The Author as much as it did) was thus: that the writings he found himself revamping for publication were written at more or less the same time in which the events he was writing about in fact occurred, i.e. several months ago, and The Author, like many an Author much better than himself, grows violently ill when forced to sit down and read anything of his that happens to originate from any time before the moment in which he is writing it, i.e. everything that he has ever written, except the words you are currently reading, which he is now currently writing.

The Author, as you will read in Ye Olde Blogue post attached below, has lost an impossible amount of weight over the past four months on account of a rare and potentially (albeit boringly) lethal condition that he deems "Death by Cucumber” – and for his own health, and perhaps for the very health of his Reader(ship), The Author has judiciously elected not to add bulimia nervosa (via vomiting induced by the reading and rereading of his old work) to his preexisting collection of externally imposed eating disorders.

"Nuts to chronological order," says The Author. "Nuts to gastronomical disorders."

And nuts, I suppose, to the project he and I once had in mind. What he will do instead is perhaps of a more postmodern bent – insofar as postmodernism is associated with atemporal narrative arrangements – but The Editor would like to step in here to suggest that The Author's current tact is not postmodern at all, but rather more traditionalist in nature: more akin to Ye Olde Sailor's Yarn than anything one might expect to find in the writings of Barthelme, Barth, Barthes, et al. (As I type this, The Author is giggling into his hands, presumably because all of the aforementioned surnames sound like the word "barf," which The Author still finds funny, apparently. – ed.)

In the proud (but more often than not, deeply ashamed) tradition of the blathering senior citizen raconteur, The Author would like to share with you anecdotes of his time in Georgia: The Country, but not arranged in any particular order whatsoever. Not arranged in any chronological order, I should say, but certainly arranged in the order that they occur to the scrambled and desultory mind of Ye Olde Sailor, i.e. the aforementioned Author, who, at his young age, is already showing signs of lapsing prematurely into the temporospatial vacuum of a man almost seventy years his senior.

This authorial shift on the part of The Author will necessarily entail a number of readerly adjustments that I, The Editor, feel editorially obliged to prepare you for.

Entries will not begin as prophesied with a dateline – e.g. 4/21/2012 – ala a travel journal, but will more often than not open with a kitschy title followed by the sort of narrative pick-up line your least favorite uncle might deploy when he's tucked well into his fourth whiskey sour of the night, e.g. I ever tell you about the time ... Y'ever hear about … and I remember it like it was yesterday – it was jest a couple days ago. Y'ever hear about …

The Author will also be avoiding the narrative present tense – e.g. The Author steps off the train. A stranger's baby hawks a loogey onto his shoe, etc. – because, in rereading a number of his older posts from Ye Olde Blogue, The Author grew violently ill – especially violently ill, I should add – re: how pretentious the narrative present tense sounds, esp. when used to describe situations in which nothing much happens to the narrator at all, neither physically nor spiritually, neither momentarily nor in a broader existential sense. The narrative present tense, The Author will have you know, is a crutch certain no-talent hacks (himself included, he will have you know) use to project momentum and excitement onto a scene when (direct quote) "there jest ain't none to be had."

The Author also expressed his desire to avoid gimmicky meta-narrative devices in the future, such as posting faux-legalistic memos from fictitious personae (e.g. The Editor, The Reader, perhaps even The Author himself) by way of distracting The Reader from The Author's negligence re: The Author's stated purpose, which was to fucking write about Georgia: The Country, etc.

As The Author's Editor, I obviously do not have the final say re: what The Author chooses to do with his free time, how he elects to conduct Ye Olde Blogue going forward, or what tense he finally decides to deploy in his postings whenever he finally gets around to posting them. But The Author's end goal and my own are one and the same: to get some shit written and edited and posted on Ye Olde Blogue, so that you, The Reader, can have something to read before/while/even as you go to sleep, and so that he, The Author, can stop feeling s'damned guilty all the time – and especially so that he, The Author, can go to bed feeling well-fed and nourished and contented, nevertheless knowing (direct quote) "full well that he ain't."

                    Happy reading.

                    Yours,
                                -    The Editor

~*DEATH BY CUCUMBER*~

   
For as long as I can remember, I have always been a skinny fuck. True: I was born a ten pound, nine ounce blob – according to sources parental, I once held the record for Fattest Baby Ever Successfully Delivered in the Long and Illustrious History of Grand Forks A.F.B. Hospital – but I can't really remember that. And at any rate, I thinned out over the years as I added height to my girth, and seldom tipped the scales much beyond my original ten pounds, nine ounces until quite recently. Until my last detour through America.

I arrived home from China in skeletal condition, the end result of two years of Mao-style starvation, i.e. by grossly mismanaging my volunteer stipend for the better part of those two years. But in China, when I was able to eat, I ate well. I ate plenty when I had the money, and I ate healthily whether I wanted to or not. In America, it is nigh impossible to eat healthily whether one wants to or not, and many people do not want to. Looking back, I should've known that I was doomed to fatness from the get-go. Fresh from the land of rice and tofu, stranded indefinitely in the American suburbs, anchored to the rest of civilization by a motorized vehicle, walled-in by meat and cheese: it should have come as no surprise to me that, after six months of cheddar-carnivorous living, I'd blimp out a bit.

And that is precisely what surprised me about blimping out a bit: it surprised me. Blimping out sneaks up on you. Silent as a blimp, as it were. It sneaks up on you. Blimpishly, if you will.

I don't have much experience with being fat, or with becoming fat. This was my first time. Looking back, I'm sure there were moments around Thanksgiving or so where I may have noticed in passing that certain favorite pairs of hipster jeans weren't fitting anymore, or that certain pairs of long-neglected off-brand Jnco jeans had started fitting like hipster jeans. I may or may not have noticed around Christmastime having to hike those old Jnco jeans up Urkelwise to keep the crotch from exploding in public or, after Christmas dinner, having to loosen my belt to the ominous and unprecedented Third Notch from the End. But those observations didn't really sink in, either because I preferred not to think about them, or because I didn't really think of them as semi-permanent physiological changes but as passing gastrointestinal phenomena – a change in the weather but not climate change. A beer belly, I reckoned; indigestion and nothing more.

Then, not quite all at once, but pretty much all at once, I came to realize that others perceived me as fat, and from that moment on I began to think of myself as fat, too. There were the brotherly belly-swats at the bar. (Before, dudes used to politely smack me on the ass.) Women, whilst snuggling me, would call me their big fuzzy teddy bear rather than their lazy little tree sloth – or whatever they used to call me when I was skinny, if they called me anything at all back then. When I went out sporting a beard, strangers on the street thought I was Zach Galifianakis and hustled over for autographs. (This last I actually found quite flattering, which no doubt kept me fat a great deal longer than I would've liked to have been otherwise.)

Perhaps the most humiliating and certainly the most tense moment of my fatness came when I went in for my somewhat regular medical checkup. My family physician – some young kid I'd never seen in my life – went through his cursory examinations of all the major orifices and found nothing amiss, but he seemed distracted. There was an elephant in the room. Which is to say: I was the elephant. He couldn't get his mind off my medical records. Last time we saw the kid, he weighed 145 – now he's creeping up on 200? Jesus God.

Humans are walking denial machines and I'd fess up to being one myself if I weren't s'damned good at denying it. The doc asked me if I'd observed any, uh, significant, er, changes in my, hmm, lifestyle since my last visit. I waffled and told him that I hadn't smoked in a month (which was true), and that I was aware smoking cessation triggered rapid weight gain. He nodded dubiously. Instead of waffling, I should've just told him about the waffles.

Or if I'd had the balls to be truly honest with the guy, I would've told him that I'd fallen out of a solid exercise regime and let myself sink into a sedentary little troth of minor depression, and I coped with my boredom and disillusionment and frustration by devouring as many trans-fatty acids as I could get my greasy fingers on, by imbibing as many gallons of high fructose corn syrup as my kidneys could absorb without bursting. Disgusting, but true. I knew then, as I'd known all along, that something had to be done – I didn't want to remain fat, and certainly didn't consider myself permanently fat – but I was more than content to wait, in the proud American way, for something disastrous to happen to me first, before I changed any single fucking about the way I was living.

Then I woke up one fat and bloated morning in D.C. and decided I'd do Georgia: The Country – a decision that had more to do with D.C. than it did with The Fatness. A couple weeks later, I was in Georgia: The Country. The surplus chub served me well at first. Fat does in fact make men (and alas, only men) slightly funnier than they would be otherwise. Girls in my volunteer training group kept telling me I looked familiar. They'd squint at me a bit and turn their heads from side to side until their eyes came to a rest on my gut. "Oh, yeah! That guy from The Hangover!"  They'd request a picture with me, then they'd laugh at my jokes. It wasn't all bad. I even began – not deliberately, I swear – to talk like Zach G, to absorb some of his mannerisms, to bust out my corduroy suit coat far more than usual.

I arrived in the village. If I was fat to Americans, I was a regular late-stage Orson Welles to rural Georgians. They called me Zonzoro – which is just the Georgian word for "fat," but would be an excellent name for a grotesquely obese superhero if anyone at D.C. Comics is reading this.

Zonzoro this, zonzoro that. It was insulting in a new and exotic and demoralizing way, in a way that I was completely unfamiliar with. I was always the guy who used to wince when ignorant locals called my fat friends fat. Now I was wincing for myself, with no one to wince on my behalf, because the ignorant locals in my own house were calling me fat.

Kiti fat, Kiti fat, Kiti fat. My host brother was singing this to me one day in spring, showing off his new favorite English word: fat. After the sixth or seventh chorus, I snapped. I went to my room, changed for the first time into my bootleg Nike running ensemble, and started jogging in place on the patio.

"What the fuck?" my host brother chirped – another one of his favorites.
"I'm going running," I said.
"Me too!"

So he and I ran a solid five miles into the Georgian bush, up into the mountains a bit. It felt astoundingly good, and the miles passed with remarkable ease given my now-chalky lungs and the trio of Michelin tires plonked around my waist. On the way back, I asked my host brother if he wanted to swing by the school and do some pull-ups. He said sure. That felt good, too. Then I played soccer with the villagers for five hours. Then I slipped and fell on my ass and broke my wrist somehow. So much for getting in shape after that – after that, I was pretty much preoccupied with remaining a shape.

But a funny thing happened while I was sitting around in the village waiting for my arm to repair itself. Perhaps my host mom started slacking off on her cooking, or maybe I was burnt out on Georgian food altogether by then. Or perhaps there was just a bumper crop of cucumbers this past spring. But I can remember a time – weeks, a whole month perhaps – where I ate almost nothing but salted cucumber slices, three meals a day, seven days a week. At first, I was delighted by the mere presence of vegetables – they hadn't existed in the winter – but after a week or two, it got to where I couldn't choke down more than two or three cucumber slices in a sitting. One of the most natural things on earth – a green, watery, organically grown vegetable – made me sicker than a 24 pack of Colt 45.

I began to lose weight. Lots of weight. My host mother – worried, perhaps, about her host motherly reputation with an emaciated American host son prowling around the village – began to change up her dishes a bit. Cucumber salad. Cucumber surprise. Cucumbers and tomatoes! Unpasteurized-cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches. But it was no use. The variety only made the cucumbers more disgusting, and rendered everything else revolting by association. Try as I might, I could no longer eat – not much, at any rate – and there was nothing to do but let myself wither for a time, and hope that I'd manage to escape Georgia: The Country for a more fattening land beyond the horizon before my very being dissolved into its constituent molecules.

As I write this, I have only a vague idea of how much I weigh. I don't really want to know. When I got here, I clocked in at something like 190 pounds: a personal best of a kind, I suppose. But at the moment, my belt is strapped in to the highest and tightest possible notch, the little hole I had to chisel into it with a pocketknife when I was at my absolute scrawniest in China. Were it not for that notch, my pants would fall down.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that I weigh something like 140 pounds. Another personal best. Of a kind. I suppose. Which is to say: I'm a fucking fleabag. Hell, I imagine there are literal bags of fleas off in a government laboratory somewhere that weigh more than I do.

I can't tell whether any of this is at all positive or not. Certainly, starvation is not the best way to go when it comes to – well, anything other than hunger striking, really. But at the same time, it's an imposed starvation rather than a self-imposed one: a starvation born not of confidence issues or image problems, but of moderate poverty and extreme culinary boredom. Let me loose in America and I'll get fat again. Condemn me to China with a decent salary and I'll be my usual lanky self. Set me up with a host family in Georgia and I will be awfully scrawny, indeed. It's nice not being fat anymore. But really, as happy as I am to be skinny again, I'd much rather be eating.

At night, I often dream of the girl of my dreams. I suppose that makes sense. They're very vivid, these dreams. The girl has a familiar face, but she's nobody I've ever seen before. I never find out her name or where she comes from or what bands she likes. We don't talk about anything of substance. All I ever learn from these dreams is that the girl of my dreams loves yours truly, as truly as anyone can love anyone else, dreamt of or fictitious or otherwise. And in the dream, at least, the feeling is very much mutual. I wake up comforted, then pissed off and bitter, then comforted again – in that order.

I don't have those dreams anymore. Not these days. These days, I dream about burritos with plenty of green sauce. I dream about radioactive buffalo wings, about doner kebabs, and about that Korean rotten tofu stew that smells like a diaper but tastes so good going down it's like you'd smoked pot beforehand. And in the dreams I can never track down the burrito place or the kebab stand or the Korean joint, or I write down the address but can't read it later, or when I'm walking there I fall into a pit of quicksand and get devoured by fluorescent green sharks, or when I finally get there it's a mirage – as elusive as any girl in any dream I've ever had. As elusive as any of the girls in reality, really.

The beast in me says: forget about reproducing; let's see about surviving.

The nacho cheese wet dreams I have these days are interrupted (inevitably) by a pounding on my bedroom door. Kiti! Modi! Djame! I stumble out in a deep fog to the living room, and it's not until I've sat down at the table in front of the TV and changed the channel to Al Jazeera International that it sinks in: I am still in Georgia. I know this because there is a plate of cucumber slices waiting there – glistening, lukewarm, heavily salted, waiting just for me. Cucumbers are in season, I suppose. I'll eat two or three slices and then I'll tell my host mom that I'm full. She'll cluck her tongue and shout at me to eat. (In the background, Syria explodes.) I'll shake my head, a bit sadly the second time around, and tell her that I'm still full. And I am. Full to the brim. So full I could burst. And if I did, it'd be like somebody (Gallagher, presumably) smashing a giant cucumber with a sledgehammer.

In my idle moments, I sometimes plonk my newfound ribs like the keys of a marimba and think of how truly odd it is to live inside a body.