Have Fun

For exactly one month I lived in Xiaoshan, China with my friend and fellow hobo, Jared. It was an arrangement I settled into with a sense of permanence even though its fleetingness was dictated by a return ticket to South Korea. I slept in something we called the Hamster Bed: a heap of comforters, sheets, pillows, and bedding accessories piled on the floor across from the washing machine. During the day, I took Mandarin lessons with a girl named Koko who I paid in KFC value meals. Jared and I spent our evenings at a club frequented by the glam-bohemian sons and daughters of the Communist Party, and we would drink watered-down Johnny Walker Black until it got light out. There wasn't much to do while Jared and Koko were at work. I was deathly afraid of the group taxis to Hangzhou, coffee was expensive and the beer caused migraines, so I spent most of my afternoons leaning against buildings and watching the traffic. And this was how I met Lennet.

He rolled up to me on a bike. He told me he wanted to learn English and that if he could speak English perfectly, he would jump around a lot. He invited me to go with him to the West Lake and take pictures. It was an innocuous invitation from an innocuous-looking guy: prematurely bald and bespectacled, sporting a General Electric polo shirt with a laminated ID card clipped to the right breast. I agreed to meet him, gave him my phone number, and beaming, Lennet rolled away on his bike.

He called me eight times before the next morning's sun came up on Hamster Bed. When I called him back, he sounded peevish but eager as hell to see me. Jared had the day off and insisted on meeting my new buddy. We met him at the same wall I had been leaning against the day before and he was wearing the same GE polo shirt. Jared interrogated him in Mandarin and as Lennet spoke, I thought I saw a wave of sadistic glee pass over Jared's face. Stifling a cough, or laughter, Jared turned to me and said, "Have fun."

Lennet and I took the bus to Hangzhou and chatted for ten minutes before a deep mutual boredom set in. He started singing to himself and I fell asleep. I was jostled awake by an elbow to my breadbasket. Lennet was poised to jump out of the bus. I parachuted after him and Lennet surged ahead of me. For several blocks, it was all I could do to keep up with him. Then he stopped suddenly. He told me to strike a pose next to a lamppost. Unsure of whether I was supposed to straddle the pole or what, I draped an arm around it and stood there looking constipated while Lennet snapped photo after photo. Then he was off again, gesturing frantically for me to follow. A few yards away, he made me pose in front of a garbage can. Snap, snap, snap. And on we went.

When I am in a strange place, I tend to assume that the individuals I encounter are not insane, but enmeshed in a vast net of cultural norms and values that are insane. But as Lennet and I orbited the West Lake and the photographs grew more dadaistic - me in front of a stray dog, me in front of an information booth, me in front of a pay phone - I noticed that even the Chinese tourists were staring at Lennet, that for once they weren't staring at me. He began accosting strangers to take our picture together. We posed on opposite sides of a recycling bin, a mailbox, a stack of watermelons. I began to suspect that I wasn't dealing with a photo-happy Asian stereotype, but with a lunatic, or a Caucasian-Voyeur-Porn monger.

This went on for three hours. It was a cloudy day and the lake stretched out alongside us, black and rippled like a pit full of garbage bags, the city of Hangzhou glowering in the distance. I'd sunk into a mood and I was about to say something curt and girlish - "Lennet, take me home." - when I noticed a sign by the pier that put me in better spirits. The sign was large and white with two imposing lines of Mandarin followed by the words "HAVE FUN." I stopped and fumbled for my camera, but Lennet was already forging ahead: he had spied an intriguing steam pipe on the horizon.

"Hey Lennet," I said, indicating the sign. "I want to get a picture of this."
"But that?" Lennet asked, incredulous. "That is only sign!"
And he was off again.

I could only take solace in something Jared had once told me: that no Chinese man in his right mind would ever let a foreigner pay for dinner. We walked to a dingy restaurant sufficiently removed from the lake to be somewhat cheap. I sat across from Lennet and waited for him to finish snapping pictures of the menus, of me holding a menu, of me looking thoughtfully at the menu. Then he asked me how much money I had.
"125 RMB," I told him.
I watched as Lennet combed through the menu and found five dishes which, combined, cost exactly 125 RMB. He let me pick up the tab.

Lennet wanted to go to the bookstore, so we went. A Chinese bookstore can be an astoundingly dull place when you only know the words for "big" and "small." I watched him shop for an hour. Then, having purchased nothing, Lennet led us out to the taxi rank and it seemed like the end of our night was finally coming into view. But when we arrived in Xiaoshan, Lennet followed me home. He wanted me to come over to his apartment to see the 274 photographs he'd taken of me that afternoon. I told him several mutually contradictory things: that I had class in the morning, that I needed to sleep in, that I was going to Beijing, that I wanted to spend time with my girlfriend. He would not be dissuaded and tailed me for several blocks on his bike. It was dark and the whores were out. I panicked. When I came to the STD clinic on the home stretch, I started into a trot, then I ran. I darted through side streets and alleyways, dashed out into traffic, and finally lost Lennet by throwing myself into the back of a trishaw and telling the driver to step on it, which he did by pedaling vigorously.

For the next several days, the phone buzzed and buzzed. I buried it in the depths of Hamster Bed, but still it mocked me like a deathwatch. A week passed before the calls began to drop off. Eight a day, four a day, two a day, until finally the phone lay dead, smothered under three feet of cotton.

I suppose the tragedy in all this is that, in cutting ties with Lennet, I lost 274 photographs of me looking constipated next to every inanimate object in the vicinity of Hangzhou's West Lake. I could have printed them out and bound them into a flip book, one in which an afroed white guy's expression sours and turns to rage, forehead veins bulging, bloodshot eyes burning into the camera lens, slowly drawing a knife from his pocket. Less tragic (but also tragic) is that I didn't get a picture of the "Have Fun" sign, though I recently found it in the Chinglish book my mother got me for my birthday.



A week later, I was sitting out in a public park, reading Nietzsche's Ecce Homo. An older gent took a seat next to me on the bench. I was relieved to see it wasn't Lennet. The man offered me a cigarette and I did the Chinese thing and accepted it. Amateur smoker that I was, I ended up getting ash all over myself. The man began brushing it off. Looking up from my book, I saw that the ash was long gone but the man's fingers were still combing my armhair, lost in the mystery of it. Then he moved in close enough that I could smell the rice wine on his breath. Suddenly the book caught his eye. He took it from me and stared at the cover illustration for a long time. I blushed: the illustration showed a merry throng of nymphs and nymphets, nude, dancing with streamers around a maypole. He handed the book back to me, gave me a thumbs up, and smiled broadly, toothlessly. I read for a while longer, though it was difficult to focus on Nietzsche with my admirer picking at the lint on my shirt, tracing circles along my wrist, breathing mustard gas into my ear. I thought about pulling out my phrasebook, opening it to the Night Life section and pointing - "Let's just stay friends" - but I sensed that the old man was about to neck me and time was of the essence. I got up and ran away. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that he was waving, so I waved back, ran, waved, ran ...

As I was being frisked at the Hangzhou Airport security checkpoint, Jared bid me farewell and said, "Don't take shit from anybody." It was one of those moments as an introverted pacifist where you think, "Maybe, from now on, I won't." But my demeanor has not changed since then. If a Chinese stalker were to kidnap me today and take me to the zoo, I would pose for all 247 of his photographs and buy him dinner afterward. And I would probably still read twenty pages of Nietzsche with some vulture breathing sweet Mandarin nothings in my ear. I have this capacity for shit absorption, you see. I'm beginning to think it is a superpower.

A Formal Response to MC Ben Hunter, Esq.'s Request for a Rap Battle

I will have to find a stunt rapper to perform this live while I nurse a Mickey's bigmouth backstage:

I don't mean to brag
but the evidence is empirical
that I'm a certified genius
of the sort that is lyrical
when I'm spittin' on the mic
The Pope says it's a miracle
and the hos in the front rows
be gettin' all hysteeerical

My heart don't beat
it plays drum solos
check the EKG sheet
and you see my logo
more famous than Nike
cuz there ain't nobody like me
I'm a backdoor man
cuz nobody invites me

A backdoor pass
Like Stockton to Malone
I'm a Dutch Boy in the Paint
talkin' on the phone
to my mom, boxin' out like Rodman
blacked out like Compton
when I'm on the vocoder
I come alive like Peter Frampton

Say [vocoder] I wanna fuck you [/vocoder]
and the club catches fire
y'all try to run
but you're surrounded by amplifiers
on all sides, don't try to hide
because I got the kind of rhymes
that are guided, like heat seeking missiles
when you receive my epistle
you'll rue the wo'ful day
you fucked with P-Dizzil - damn.

Meet Me at 696.9 LUV

The public library, like the elevator and the airplane, is a sexually charged environment. Perhaps because it's so quiet. Or maybe it's the allure of all those neglected and poorly lit nonfiction grottoes. I won't pretend to understand it, but I can't deny the library's erotic appeal and neither can you. Who among us wouldn't want to clear that microfiche machine off the table and get down to business?

Part of my job involves scouring the aisles, closets, and bathrooms at closing time and forcibly nagging anyone who might have ambitions of getting busy while the library's sleeping. I've never witnessed anything dubious on my watch. I suppose the library's intrigue isn't just limited to sexual escapades. One suspects the public library is home to all sorts of shady subterranean affairs: briefcase exchanges, D&D meet-and-greets, Illuminati conspiracies, Elk Lodge assemblies, and so on. Which is part of the reason why I flip through and vigorously shake every book I put away, in the hope of finding some compromising scrap of paper alluding to the backdoor goings-on that I just know are going on. If a treasure map were to suddenly drop to the floor, I would clock out and commandeer a skiff immediately.

But mostly I find No Frills receipts, condom wrappers, religious bookmarks, Post It notes covered with Dewey decimal numbers scrawled in the childlike penmanship of a Large Print reader, and even these are few and far between. So you can imagine my excitement when today I found, nestled up against a row of Sue Grafton murder mysteries, a love note, which I will reproduce here:

[Boy's handwriting]: Hurry before Chris gets here.
[Girl's handwriting]: I'm from Norway
No talking!
When u leaves will u write me?
u grind
I went to a diff HS in 1 yr
Do you have a "print phone?"
West then Westside - had to live w/my aunt
Email: wormstogo@______.com
overseagirl@______.com
my dad raised bait earthworms

Notes are cruel. You read each line with mounting excitement and then ... and then? Now I am left to wonder what will happen when this Norse Queen and the heir of a suburban earthworm empire collide. And meanwhile, the women come and go, talking of Paulo Coehlo.

The Last Man Shuffle

My Intro to Philosophy professor described Nietzsche's Last Man as "an appetitive creature, roaming from sports bar to sports bar." Either he made this speech several times or he unveiled it only once with the lights dimmed, the curtains drawn, and a thunderstorm raging outside. The image of the Last Man nursing a Bud Light down at TGI Friday's has stuck with me well into my decadent twenties and it haunts me as I find myself roaming from sports bar to sports bar, from coffee shop to coffee shop, doing the Last Man Shuffle, as it were.

The Last Man Shuffle is an exhausting dance. I've caught myself performing it on several continents, so it isn't necessarily endemic to America, though it might be endemic to Americans. Step One: Set aside an afternoon to pursue an artistic venture of your choice. Step Two: Choose one of your three favorite bars or coffee shops as a venue in which to write, sketch, or photocollage. Step Three: Wiggle your ass in a stiff-backed chair for thirty minutes until the urge to leave becomes unbearable. Step Four: Having accomplished nothing, get into your early-90's sedan and either zip off to another coffee shop or bar (where you will encounter the same discomfort) or just head home to twist one off, take a nap, and call it a day. Now you're doing the Last Man Shuffle.

The worst part is that the Last Man, unremarkable though he is, is plagued by artistic delusions. He works a dull job and has ample time to think about what he'd rather be doing, and what he'd rather be doing is creating a work of art so staggeringly brilliant that all of the kids who picked on him in middle school would rip out their own hair and mail him reparation checks for the rest of their miserable lives. The daydream gets him through work. But the moment he punches out, he finds that he'd rather be at home twisting one off. And so the days pass and all that is achieved is a marginal reduction in the Last Man's sexual tension.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes a French torture device called le malconfort, or the little-ease. It wasn't terribly inventive, but I imagine it worked. The little-ease was a small prison cell that was neither long enough for the inmate to lay down, nor tall enough for the inmate to stand up. So it must have been very uncomfortable. Life in a society that is rich in Old Chicagos is probably preferable to le malconfort, but there is the same kind of restriction on one's range of movement. You feel as though you can't stand up and do something truly remarkable - because that could involve failure and financial ruin - but to lie down, twist one off, and call it a day would be a waste of life. And so you drift from sports bar to sports bar, from coffee shop to coffee shop, doing the Last Man Shuffle, and one day you'll write that novel that will bring western civilization to its knees. In the meantime ...

Omaha Gravity

I arrived in Omaha sometime in January, rattled by a white-knuckle out of Guadalajara and half-mad after two days and three nights of shepherding a three-legged kitten through Puerto Vallarta's barrio de crackheads. I slept for a couple weeks and when I awoke, I'd landed a job shelving books at the local library. I bought a gym membership and lost ten pounds I didn't have on me at the time. And life has coasted along in the Nebraska suburbs at a Ford Taurus pace. But the adventure hasn't ended. No, I'm afraid that so long as one has a brain, there is always adventure.

As I may have mentioned, I've been nominated to serve in the U.S. Peace Force. Two-point-two-five years of my roaring twenties lay etherized upon the operating table. A political map of the People's Republic of China is thumbtacked above the Ticonderoga. Sometimes I throw darts, other times I just stare.

My fondest memories from the past three years are some of the dullest. One of the many luxuries afforded to the chronic hobo is the freedom of occasional solitude. I spent a lot of my time abroad running or walking down side streets with an audiobook to keep me company. I got heavy into late night jogging during the Korean rainy season and would run six miles up the side of a small and misty mountain called Unamji, listening to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. "Chapter Seven," announced the narrator in his Welsh brogue as I panted and shivered along the shoulder of a four-lane highway, "The Atomic Bomb."

And Poland. Never have I had so few friends as I did in Poland. I spent the winter indoors, hacking at Polish grammar, boiling kielbasa, making music videos. When it got tolerably warm, I would walk the town from one end to the other, from the Christmas Village in the center to the coaldusty lunar outskirts and back again. I was consuming audiobooks voraciously then. I hiked into the Świętokrzyskie woods listening to Walden and only grudgingly came back out.

These moments seem more adventurous to me than any of the actual globehopping I've done. And the moments which remain fresh in my mind are arbitrary ones, seemingly hand-picked by memory to be void of any significance. I think often of the night Jared Nelson threw two fistfulls of CDs against the dashboard of my Dodge Intrepid and growled, "Keith Petit, you sloppy bastard," while Ramshackle by Beck played low on the stereo. I also think of the weird euphoria I experienced roaming the Daegu University campus at midnight under a full moon with some girl I was supposed to like. It was the first green space I'd seen in eight months. You could hear bottles clinking and Korean frat boys shouting over the hills. This memory almost drowns out the present with its intensity, yet I'm not sure why it's there.

I've quoted this David Foster Wallace passage before, but I will quote it again because I'm senile and loving it:

"... our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home ... imagine [Kafka's] art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens ... and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along."

And this little snippet from Heart of Darkness, which I read the other night, nestled in a naughahyde booth at the Village Inn on Galvin:

"... the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

I have seen strange things, but I've never been much for weaving sailor's yarns out of them, probably because I'm not very good at speaking in general. But I think it's partly that I don't find the plotline of my life all that interesting, and neither does anyone else. Often it's a non-event, or an odd sensation, or something moving in the periphery which fascinates me. Those moments where happiness bubbles out of you like an insupressible steam - where do those moments come from? Where do they go? Where did you come from, Cotton-Eyed Joe?

Jorge of the Jungle

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

Writer's Strike

We at Expatriate Act would like to apologize for the prolonged dearth of content on this blog, spanning from the afternoon of Friday, September 5th, 2008 to the morning of Monday, January 19th, 2009. This four-month blogo-lacuna was the fallout of an unforeseen breakdown of negotiations between the author, one Keith Petit, and his Handlers. What transpired might be termed a writer's strike, although it is unclear exactly against whom the author was striking, seeing how he is chronically unemployed and does not earn an income from any of his various and assorted (and sordid) vocations.

In addition to the usual gripes about wages, union representation, pseudointellectual property rights, and placement of inflatable mattress, Petit's bimonthly writing routine was disrupted by mechanical setbacks. There were difficulties uploading the data from his analog typewriter to the World Wide Web, likely stemming from a failure in the 2400 baud modem he had welded onto the back of the ink cartridge. Petit also expressed frustration with the blog-eat-blog world of the Blogosphere, disillusionment with his blogceleb status, and an undisguised loathing of the word "blog." It was also apparent that the US presidential election was having some adverse effects on his psychology, as he was unable to articulate himself for much of the fall of 2008 in anything but the frothiest of incredulous coughs and gags.

The author is doing much better now. He is drinking lots of store brand V-8. He is growing his hair out to prodigious lengths and heights. He spends long hours watching videos about microbiology. He is also nursing a stray cat in the backyard. One can only speculate as to why Petit is on the rebound. Doubtless a change in political administration along with the collapse of international trade have had some salubrious effect on him. One might even suspect that he is getting laid, but one look at the chalk-streaked corduroy suitcoat he sleeps in will rule out that possibility. Perhaps his Nordic physiology has finally come to grips with the fact that winter does not occur in Mexico. Or perhaps it is simply a technical issue: we have upgraded his analog typewriter to a 1986 Apple IIe computing machine, complete with lower- and uppercase letters, a floppy drive, and Oregon Trail. Whatever the case may be, there can be little doubt that Petit's muse is back. We look forward to reading his next entry.

See you in two months,
-The Handlers

Mañana in México

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

The Stink

Before I plunge too deeply into the Mexican chapter of my life, it is necessary for me to digress a bit and describe to my faithful viewers my living conditions in the great city of Berlin. I will draw heavily from the journal I kept during that time and embellish where necessary. My intent is not to slander my former roommate, Ben Pham, who persists living in those conditions somehow. But it is important for me to reconstruct those days of squalor so I can figure out how it is I wound up here – working close to sixty hours a week for five hundred bucks a month – and how the hell I survived for so long in Germany, working six hours a week and blowing five hundred Euros a minute.

So, we will pick things up on the 4th of July, in the present tense:

July 4th, 2008
We live in squalor. Ben's room is big enough for two grown men to live in, provided they took the time to erect some kind of partition, but we have not. The room is segmented into sovereign zones of garbage. My territory includes the deflated air mattress that I no longer sleep on and the heap of musty blankets on the floor that I curl up into these days, as well as a sinister black bag that contains six months of unwashed laundry. Ben has an actual mattress, an empty bookshelf, and several islands of dirty clothes and Assorted Shit that dot the floor like a Micronesia of filth. Thankfully, he has disposed of the lime green nylon mesh tube where he used to stash his dirty laundry. It dangled from the Chinese lantern in the ceiling and the fusion of light and stink attracted the fruit flies in droves.

There is a frameless mirror leaning up against one wall, like a portal to another equally disgusting dimension where all the crap on the floor is reversed. There is a constant droning, as though someone is drilling into cement, that seems to come from one of the neighboring apartments but assails us from all sides. There is a long hardwood desk where Ben and I do our paperwork. The desk is cluttered with triple-folded visa applications, US passports, the phone numbers of people who might be able to bail us out of jams, half-eaten foil-wrapped bricks of chocolate, a webcam that Ben hasn't used once since I got here, and scattered bits of plastic. Curled up on the empty chair next to me is the bike lock that I bought Ben for eight Euros at the flea market. He hasn't used that, either.

The place is so sloppy that I can't tell if it's getting better or worse, whether I am having a positive or negative impact on the apartment's overall level of entropy. The kitchen floor seems to be getting progressively stickier. It is impossible to ignore the fruit flies. Perhaps they stowed away in my luggage and followed me over from Poland. Or perhaps they have been here all along and I just didn't notice them when I arrived. Fruit flies become more noticeable as you go along. The Stink works the opposite way. You notice The Stink the first time you enter a room and notice it less and less every day thereafter, until the only people who smell it are those unfortunate souls who come into your room, or the people who are buying your drinks, because by then, The Stink is on you.

I'm thinking about leaving the country again. I'm approaching the possibility of life in Berlin like a starved wolf circling a visibly diseased carcass. Surviving here seems financially doable, but it only appears that way because I am not yet trying to make a living in Berlin. I am just a loafer and hobo-speculator at the moment, so I must be leaving a lot of things out of the equation. I can sit here and say, "$200 for rent. $200 for food. $200 for language school. I need $600 a month and fuck the rest." But there are always intangibles, and not just the ones people usually cite – unplanned medical disasters, travel expenses, taxes, apartment repairs – but also the True Intangibles, like Where the Hell Did it All Go? Those intangibles are multiplied twofold-and-rising by the flaccid dollar. So although the Berlin Bohemeslebens seems possible on the most abstract bohemian paper, in reality working a lot and coming home sweaty and depressed to our crumb-strewn apartment might not be so great for my psyche. It would be much easier to volunteer at an Italian winery. I would have my daily work. My host farmers would feed me three times a day and take me to the hospital if I started squirting chyme from my pores. I could stay there through the winter without having to buy any new clothes. And by the time the Peace Corps summoned me back to Blade Runner USA for my cough-and-turn, I would fly home with 500 bucks in the bank, all suntanned and lithe from months of Mediterranean cuisine and romantic farm labor.

I need to shut down this computer. Staying inside is driving me mad. I'm going to kidnap Ben and take him out for a ridiculous night in the Valley of the Turkish Whores.

That was July 4th. At that point in time, Ben and I were still going out on the town. Our credit hadn't yet crunched. Today I had planned on writing a pretentious rant about teaching the present continuous tense, but for our purposes, I think it would be better for me to continue regurgitating Berlin stories until I am fresh out of them. Then the pretentious rants will continue.

Hasta más tarde,
- Karate Keith

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.