Missile.Aneous

Hugging trees since 1988.

2012-01-20T10:31:00.001-08:00

And then I celebrated the completion of my life story by drinking a scotch and riding the banister like a horsie because banister horsies make me feel funny inside.

I Resolve to not SUCK

2011-12-31T10:59:00.000-08:00

Resolutions. I resolutely believe in resolving stuff... in reflecting, rummaging, ruminating, and realizing that another 365 went by and I'm still a ridiculous retard. And in recognizing what a remarkable retard I remain, I can now resolve to get my shit together, whatever that shit may be, and whatever "together" is. Which means to stop writing that I'm resolving to get my shit together and actually get my shit together... which I resort to do, relentlessly, at some point, soon. (Really.)

I resolve to resume that one thing, refuse that other thing, redo that other crap, rewind that one time... to revamp, rebuild, reject, rescind, refuse, resign, react, and revive... and reassemble until I resemble someone respectable.

I'm on it, yo. After this exquisite lychee martini, these delectable slabs of kielbasa, and this riveting episode of Kourtney and Kim Take New York.

In 2011 I did do a ton of reflecting and, after starting the year beat down and broken, and after sweeping up my debri and tossing it to the wind, after meeting new creatures and reconnecting with old crazies, after work, concerts, festivals and long coastal hikes, and 900-page books, Indie dramas and god-awful make outs, with tons of food, booze, tears, laughter and g-chat convos, after leaving SF and roaming about NY, Wisconsin, and INDIA!... after turning another year older... with all that music, art, travel and unemployment - with all those feelings, actions, emotions and relations - I'm only reminded that, at best, I'm still slightly lost, totally confused, a little restless, and completely contradictory.

Yep. I thought about some stuff. And with sage-like wisdom I realized I get off on being lost, confused, restless and contradictory. It's all that nagging little nipping within me that keeps me moving, that fuels my creativity, sparks my desires, ignites my spontaneity, makes me try that weird rubbery shit with the six flailing limbs, and pushes me towards that which keeps me flowing, and that which keeps me fresh (despite my propensity to not shower).

And so, now that I've polished off my lychee martini, slab of salami, riveting episode of K&K Take NY, and after having reflected on 2011 after still not having showered, I'm ready to get my 2012 resolve on.

I resolve to go beyond form, or what I'm fed, and continuously think outside of the box:

I resolve to be the most amazing first date, providing that you provide me with surf and turf and a bottle of vodka to make you the most interesting man in the world!

I resolve to drown in brewed arabica beans on the daily and:

I resolve to strengthen my financial, analytical and critical thinking skillz and present things more clearly to people at work:

I resolve to be less stupid by exercising my cognitive skillz the morning after downing a bottle of cab sav:

I resolve to practice my skillz more often from the comfort of my own "home":

I resolve to, one day, not write "home" in quotation marks:

I resolve to continue drifting this year, but 100% more physically:

I resolve to wander. With wanderlust. Till the sweat drops from my balls:

In my wandering, I resolve to only meet "weirdos". Because it's always been the "weirdos" in my life who have been the most vulnerable and honest and thus the most interesting and inspiring:

What better way to meet a weirdo than having their ass in my face?

I resolve to get more bendy, breathy, stretchy and connecty with my chakras, chi and inner me:

I resolve to keep it scientific and observe humans objectively, with utter fascination, in the same way one would study orangutans who drink their own pee:

I resolve to fuck science and:

I resolve to smash broken records, choke the chihuahua, break free of pointless cycles and use "meh" more often in sentences:

I resolve to do only that which fulfills my Maslowvian and Lennonesque needs:

I resolve to make every day a good day:

And ultimately, as a Libra, as the only astrological / pathological sign represented by a cold, steel, inatimate object, as the titter and totter between the material and the spiritual, between beet burgers and deep-dish pizza, between organic kale drinks and 13.5% wine, between prancing about in 3-inch heels and being barefoot on the blades, between traveling abroad in tuk tuks and planting my sedentary ass on the couch in spandex, between auditing financial statements and birthing bizarre blogs, I resolve to find my fuckin' balance already.

(Or not. Meh.)

Please join me, dear cretins, in a toast.

Here's to reflecting, rummaging, ruminating, and inevitably realizing that another 365 went by and you're still a complete retard.

Here's to being slightly lost, totally confused, a little restless, and completely contradictory.

Here's to living simply, mindfully, fully, purposefully without purpose, and most certainly in uncertainty.

Here's to health.

To humor.

To balance.

To finding "home".

Yours truly, with tons of peace, love and genitalia,

Missile

White Mischief

2011-11-26T09:44:00.000-08:00

"When you make a sacrifice," says the palm reader holding my hand and looking intently in my eyes, "when you do this... when you give something up... things will come back to you twofold."

I chew my lower lip as I chew this thought over. This strange North Indian man is trying to convince me that fasting on Saturdays will somehow double my odds of financial success and vaginal stimulation Sunday - Friday. Being the creature of logic that I am, I stare back at him like he's an asshole. A few weeks later, though, after having survived an overnight train from hell that I'll need electric shocks to forget, and finding myself immediately sipping an Americano and gorging on a chicken wrap at a cliff-side restaurant overlooking the Arabian sea, I realize that the asshole man was right. Sacrifice does, indeed, pay off. I am on the soaring bluffs of Varkala - all color and coast - and I'm as happy as a clam.

Varkala is the type of place in India where agitated white people go to to escape from India, as there are no actual Indians anywhere to be seen. I file no formal complaint on this as I stare at white waves, white clouds, white awnings, and white European men in tight hiphugger shorts. I implore the latter to tell me what's so fun about standing two feet apart from one another and smacking a ball back and forth on paddles. What is this tomfoolery? Sit your ridiculous tanned asses down and go chain smoke some ciggies. My white ass happens to be under a rented umbrella, on a rented chaise at latitude lazy, longitude inactive, and is sipping electrolytes directly from a freshly hacked coconut. I spend two solid days at these exact coordinates laughing at the words "penetration" and "coslopus" in all of Chelsea Handler's books and managing an extensive sunburn on my right shin (a burn so bad that Canada - a nurse in the intensive care unit in her real life - will later poke at it say, "Fuck, America, I thought for sure it was a flesh-eating disease.").

Ha-low! I'm zee white European! You vanna play me with zee paddle ball?!

White girl, wildly inactive

At night- be it Chance / Fate / Coincidence - we run into some of our favorite travel buds from our days in the North - two Kiwis and a Brit who've been eating plates of hummus and boozing their faces off since 2pm. I squeal, pull up a chair, order up more hummus with a bucket of vodka, and talk a whole mess of nonsense with them until the imported Nepalese waiters curl up on the table tops in preparation for bed. One of the waiters offers to walk us girls to our guest house, but we decline the generous offer for dark alley island rape, citing that we're sure to be back for more hummus tomorrow.

Two days later I'm on a boat in Alleppey drifting amidst palms, lily pads, houses and canoes, watching life unfold simply and beautifully along the backwaters of Kerala. And when my boat pulls up late morning to my modest home stay along the bank, I'm greeted by Grandpa Gopal and Grandma Padma who garland me with flowers and place a powdered dot on my third evil eye. I spend the day reading, strolling, sunning and canoe-riding... and slamming down Padma's home-cooking and Gopal's "White Mischief" vodka. Gramps and I grow tight - he smacks me consistently on the cheek and feeds me extras of his sweet carrot halwar dessert, and we sit together chatting along the water, amidst claps of thunder and fireflies a-glow.

The exquisitely beautiful backwaters of Kerala

"Have some more," says Grandpa Gopal after smacking me on the cheek

Typical domestic scene along the waters

WHITE MISCHIEF vodka - the very thing that sends my ass to bed before my 65-yr-old hosts

In the beautiful town of Cochin, I find out there's an actual place called "Jew Town". I can't even express how verklempt (overcome with emotion) I am to hear this ridiculous bit of news. My meshugina (crazy) ass gets up extra early to walk giddy along the colorful seaside port, past the fish markets and Chinese fishing nets, through the spice markets and along "Jew Town Road", in front of shops named "Shalom"and and straight to the historical synagogue. I run into and strike up a conversation with a short white jew boy in a yarmulke who - shockingly - is from New York and majoring in entrepreneurial studies. This day could not have been more amazing and I rush back to write home.

The colorful residentials of Cochin

Chinese fishing nets along the port

The Chosen One on Jew Street in Jew Town, India

Really, India?! You never cease to be ridiculous.

The fifth overnight sleeper train is without incident. Unless, of course, you count the time I went to go pee and forgot to lock the door of the squat toilet and a strange man walks in on me as I'm watching my stream hits the tracks. Webster immediately sends over a carrier goat with a note to announce they've redefined the word "awkward" on my behalf:

awkward |ˈôkwərd|adjective1 when a girl is walked in on by an Indian man in the middle of a squat pee and goes from cozy and concentrated to startled and horrified and leaps up like a bare-assed ninja with the bottom of her skirt tucked into the top of her tank and a bottle of hand sanitizer in her mouth : Missile is 31 years old, a CPA, and an awkward fuck. Would you like to penetrate her coslopus?

Other than being mortified out of my mind - and laying there for about twenty minutes convinced that I had head lice (unrelated to squats and false alarm), the rest of the train ride is peaceful and without incident.

The squat toilet: functional, ergonomic, and excellent for a solid thigh stretch

Arriving to the bus station and no longer interested in "living like the locals", I'm thrilled when we upgrade to a deluxe bus in which I can actually put up my leg - the one with the flesh-eating disease on it. At one of the rest stops a ratty girl boards and asks me for money. I look at her cold and say, "Tell me the name of your mafia don first." She's loyal and refuses, but comes back a minute later, leans over my shoulder, pokes at my Kindle with a dirt-encrusted nail, and sends New York Times bestselling Shantaram skidding seven chapters ahead. Rather than bitch slap her across the face, I let her jab and stab to her heart's content because, in that pure and innocent moment, this child creature melts my heart. She reminds me of me: curious, sassy, surprisingly sweet under her layer of filth, and completely eight years old. I want to stuff her in an over-sized Bloomies satchel and keep her as my chihuahua.

No pic of the ratty girl, but here's a delightful vignette of my flesh-eating disease

I arrive to the city of Mysore without child or chihuahua and instead, enjoy the cool reprieve that the ankle-deep monsoon rain brings. It's also Diwali - the festival of lights - and one of the most important, crazy, cracked-out Indian holidays, which Indians celebrate by being extra, EXTRA obnoxious and blowing shit up. I celebrate by drinking wine, eating sweets and amazing street food, marveling at the Mysore Palace that's been specially lit, drinking more wine, then blasting firecrackers out of empty wine bottles off the roof like limbs aint no thang.

Look at the shiny lights!

Let's blow this bitch up!

And then, dear friends, there is Goa. And who to thank - Shiva? Jesus? Allah? - for its bountiful beaches, ravishing Russian hookers and plethora of Indian penis.

When I get to my hotel, the first thing I see from the vantage point of check-in is a white girl in a teeny weeny bikini gyrating to techno on her balcony while waving a rum and coke. Below her, down at the pool, respectable Indian families are swimming and having lunch. She is also the vision I get when I swing open the doors of my own balcony. "Hallllooooo!" she says, excitedly bouncing up and down. "I am from Russiiiiaaaa!!!! Vere are you from?!!!!"

"I'm from America, I just turned 31, and if that isn't enough of a deterrent and you still want to talk to me, I for sure have a tapeworm and gastroenteritis, so really, I'm no fun."

"Oh comes on," says her boyfriend Vlad appearing on the balcony with his blond crew cut and strong exposed thighs. "Vat is dis - how you say - bitch a moan about. You come and you drink and you make orgy now." I proceed to pop open the cheap bottle of red I bought from across the street, order up Domino's thick crust (delivered hot and fresh within thirty) and stare at these Soviets - how you say - make the stupid fools of themselves.

But nothing and no one could have prepared me for what I beheld on Baga Beach in Goa for the three days I shacked up on its sands. Pure ridiculous preposterousness is WHAT, preposterousness in the form of Indian men in Jockey briefs going into a very wet ocean - and then emerging from this very wet ocean - and then walking in front of me after having been submerged in that very wet ocean - with their Indian dongs now hugged tight by very wet cotton. Some of these banana hammocks are so old that they've lost their elastic and sag... and so, in addition to shlong, I see butt cheek and clunks of sand hiding out like stalagmites in caverns and cavities. The only thing that can make this situation any more excellent is alcohol. I roll up to the beachfront restaurant - past the cool Indian guy in the "Cancel My Subscription, I Don't Want Your Issues" t-shirt - and order up a Kingfisher and some chicken fingers and forgo my plans of visiting the spice gardens, flea markets, waterfalls, and the other beaches of Goa. I'm good with this goldmine right here.

Tight wet explanations of the very thing responsible for India's 1.2 billion babies!

On my very last day in India I watch the sun melt into the ocean, then walk back alone to my hotel. I order another large Domino's, pour myself some wine and head out on the balcony as Goa pours itself another monsoon. The rain beats down thick, but this doesn't stop some Indian man under an awning by the pool to put his slim fingers to the tips of a keyboard, his passionate lips to the mouth of a mic, and to belt out an excellent, accented rendition of Hotel California.

I smile.

India, Fate, Chance, or Coincidence has dedicated this song to me here on my last night, to my white Californian ass that can check out any time it wants, but can never really leave. I hold my wine high in the rain and I cheers the sky. I say thank you to India. Thank you for the madness of the North, for the ridiculousness of the South, for all of the trials, tribulations, tortures and triumphs on the trains, tuks tuks and alleyways in between. You have shocked me, mocked me, infuriated me, humbled me, tested me, and completely won me over (you crazy sick bastard of a country). And what else can I say.... I love you.

L'Chaim! (To life!)

Take it away, Eagles

Dirty in the Dirty South

2011-11-18T15:56:00.000-08:00

Arriving to Calcutta in the early morning, I'm completely weirded out. There's, like, paved roads, and stuff. And traffic lights. And cute bubble-shaped British taxis, and drivers within those taxis that ride within the lanes and obey the changing signals. This makes me squirmy, uneasy. I mean, what the hell is this, India? Where are the cows, the tuk tuks, the honks, the stares? I can move, I can breathe, I can hear shit, and I panic. I run straight to my hotel bar and order up Kingfisher beers and plates of pakora and proceed to drink away the day. And when night falls - that cold lonely night devoid of light and meaning - I drink buckets of Gorbatschow vodka. I past out cold and half naked and forget to take my malaria pill and in my dreams I cry out, Oh North India, it'll never be the same! How will I, how CAN I go on without you?

In Calcutta, I visited this drink menu many times. And I was ok with this.

But I do go on, because my flight's going on, and I'm pleasantly surprised upon landing in Chennai to see that the south still looks like someone exploded a mass of bombs in the streets... limbs, shrapnel, and excrement everywhere. This gives me hope that, even with its fresh air and puffy clouds and palm-studded beaches and coconut groves, South India will still be bizarre and contradicting.

I'm happy to note that my my hotel smells of urinal pucks.... and delighted when the concierge cringes his nose at me when I tell him, "That's right, sir, I am over 30 and no, I'm not married, and thank you ever so much for asking." I light up the sight of the track-side slums, at the scent of stagnant sewage ponds, at the dilapidated metro system that runs on MacGyvered mechanics. The men still pee on everything, the women are still sassy little bitches that shove sardines in my face as I walk through their fishing village, and there's goat. Loads of goats. And god knows I love me some god-damn goats.

Look at our ridiculous goat faces!

In the morning, after slamming down chutneys and walking to collect our travel humps, Canada says casually, "'Ey America - over there - by your bag - are those your panties on the counter?" I look to the pile of black lace bunched in open view of the dining foyer, just paces from the O.J. "Fuck!" I say, reddening and rushing to throw my body over my delicates. As a tuk tuk ride takes us to the bus station, I can't shake loose the sudden and haunting appearance of my thongs at breakfast. As though checking to see if they are but an apparition of the mind - but really checking to see if they're clean so I can go another day without busting out Woolite - I dig them out of my bag and hold them to the light. And just then, in a land where I'm already a slutfaced whore for exposing my shoulders, my tuk tuk rolls up beside a jam-packed, over-flowing bus full of Indian eyes, 90 pairs of which fall upon mine.

CLEAN.

They see London, they see France!

Boarding my own local bus, I'm curious as to why the driver has pink nail polish on, but find it best to sit still and not say anything so nothing else stupid happens. When I arrive to the beach-side town of Mamallapuram, I rejoin society by renting a rickety-ass, rusty bike that looks like it's been marinating in swamp fungus. I ride by intricate carvings and world heritage temples and, despite a relentless heat that curls my scalp like wallpaper under a blow torch, all is going well. And then it happens. In the exact same way that love just happens (or crawls out of the earthen core with its red eyes and claw hands), I step in cow shit. And just like love, I'm trapped ankle-deep in that shit, in the unbearable stink and slime of it. I scrape my flip-flop on the stony road and move the hell on. Walking past firecrackers exploding in the street for no reason other than to make me think I'm under siege, I end up on the rooftop of a restaurant gorging on calamari and curry, mixing Kingfishers with seven-up, then peeling my pants from my soaked-to-the-coslopus body so I can roast on my hotel room bed.

Option 1: Hang out here. Option 2: Lay in your hotel room with your pants off in front of your Canadian roommate

An hour later some idiot lets this idiot into an all-boy orphanage. Rolling up on a tuk tuk I'm greeted and swept inside my a mass of little boys who relieve of my purse, and slip off my poo shoes, and sit me down on a stool, and introduce themselves one-by-one. "Hi, I'm Crackhead!" "And I'm Psycho!" "And I'm WHOA!" "And I'm COOL IT." They're ridiculous, and they're everywhere, so I do what one should never do with already rambunctious children - I feed them two chocolate bars each so they won't hurt me. It's a giant mistake and the little Gremlins swell on sugar and yank me off the seat and shove me in the yard. "Auntie, Auntie, swing me!" says Suicidal, and soon he's hanging from my arm as I threaten to slam his skull into stucco. "Auntie! Aunite! Come snap your back in half!" And soon its limbo, and jump rope, and sweat, and scoliosis.

"Auntie" has just been terrorized by coke-addicted pre-teens

Some people hate day trains. Not this lazy sack of shit! Especially if you hand her a blanket, a pillow, and the top berth in the sleeper compartment, and then get out of her face so she can nap for 8 hours. I nap, then wake up to eat deep-fried chilis. I nap, then wake to sip some chai. I nap, then wake to explain to the Indian man on the other top berth that yes, I'm over 30, and no, I'm not married, and yep, it was awesome of him to ask. Eat, sleep, chill, read, and watch the world roll by... and end up in Madurai....

In Maduarai, I'm Invited inside an Indian home for the first time. And when you're a first generation white Russian American agnostic Jewish wanna-be Buddhist, sometimes you don't know how to act. And so I do what I do best when I'm trying to be proper - I sit on a day bed that doubles as a table and I stuff my damn piehole. I eat like a motherfucker. I slam curries and flatbreads and chutneys and, when everyone else is cross-eyed and bloated, I insist on another helping of lamb and chicken curry and rose essence cake. And as I cram like some disgusting hormonal cretin, I drink in the house itself - the two-burner stove in the tiny kitchen, the plastic chairs that serve as living room furniture, the out-dated antennae TV set, the calendars that mark the festivals, the incensed shrine to Jesus. And right as I'm out the door, my mother host clasps her hands tight and she bows her head low and BY GOD does she pray. And she doesn't ask for health and happiness and for the well being of her family, but that I, her porky little guest, will somehow act more feminine in the future. I walk off her monstrous meal in the markets of Madurai, past a schizophrenic old woman selling melons with her saggy melons hanging out the sides of her sari.

The next day I visit a temple and watch people worship, perform ceremonies, bless the born and unborn, and already being born and blessed myself, I get me some of this:

Jealous of my steez? You should be, amateurs.

After being pried from my man harem, it's all aboard my fourth overnight sleeper train. And not just an sleeper train, mind you, but the downgraded class, the one with no pillows or blankets or A.C. The one that smells of urine and stinkweed. The one in which the poor shirtless pilgrim who has nothing to begin with has chained his bag to his foot and looped that foot through the rung of his bunk because he doesn't trust his fellow brethren. The one that has me seizing in nervous fits of laughter and screaming, "Holy mother of god, I'm going to effin' DIE." I wrap my passport and electronics in a sheet I've stolen off another train and, combined with my bag of dirty laundry, create a Kindle and panty-stuffed pillow. I shmeer all 2.7 oz of my Secret Clearly Tropical antiperspirant gel all over my body and bury my face in my forearm. And all through that night, I stare deep into Canada's eyes, and once she's finished gurgling in neurotic baby talk, she stares back into mine.

Champagne wishes. Caviar dreams.

The Sacred City of Varanasi

2011-10-24T02:10:00.000-07:00

I wake up on the overnight train to the sight of a machine gun, to the sound of Indians belting loud in Hindi, to arms gesticulating in wild swoops.

It's 7:30am and peering down confused from the top berth, I see my beloved Canadian travel buddy propped in her compartment looking distant, like a koala overdosed on eucalyptus. She's been talking in translated tangles to the train police all morning, relaying how a hand reached over her head in the blurred hours of the night, how the padlock on her day pack was snipped off like foreskin, how she was sniped of her camera and cash.

I sit up in half sleep, head clunking against the metal roof, mind struggling free of cough suppressant grogginess. As the sitch slowly seeps in, as the sobering weight of the theft hits my guts, I feel the sad sting of loss, a creepy sense of violation, and bitter disappointment that I let this go down without notice under my knocked-out-on-NyQuil nose.

What if they'd stolen more, I think. Like a peak at my lady bits?

Climbing down the rungs and shimmying my own hump from out under the seat, I squeeze Canada's knee in heartfelt sympathy. I then give a big "ahhhhh" and check my mouth for crushed cockroaches, swallow the thick taste of this unpleasant and toothpaste-less morning, elbow my way onto the platform, and find my squinty self - at long last - in the holy city of Varanasi.

It's as if I'm seeing the wonders of India for the first time - studded with markets, teeming with temples, dripping with the dirty, the desperate, the devout. Pilgrims shuffle barefoot along the earthen ground, foreheads marked with the powders and sandalwood of their faith. Beggars reach out with frail and exhausted hands. Children dance and jerk about and cows flank the street, jutting snouts into endless buffets of trash.

And then there's me. Dumb... dumbfounded... ricocheting on a rickshaw ride to the market... sipping sweet chai on the cushions of a silk shop... sampling savory samosas from a street stand (thrown by a hand that's been Shiva-knows-where).

As evening falls I pass a woman with boils all over her body and a wild-eyed man exposing a twisted cobra in a woven basket and I flow, along with the town's own throngs, up the narrow lanes, through the crowded streets, and down to one of the city's 100 sets of ghats (steps) that line the Ganges.

I come upon the river as the sun takes a low seat on a cushion of sky, shedding a crimson glow over its shimmering spine. Crescent-shaped boats line its bank. Swarms of the pious in saris and lungis linger along its edge in preparation for pooja, for prayer. I stare out breathlessly over this blessed bank of bacteria... this sacred sea of sewage.... this revered reservoir of remains...

"This city's fuckin' cool," says Kiwi, swinging by my side with the remains of a mohawk that once was. "Twenty minutes till this prayer stuff. Wanna go check out the burning ghats?"

We set out along the banks, darting in the mud, scudding over slopes, slipping through the sludge. A bullfrog croaks from its bowels and from the bowels a man croaks, "You want opium? I sell to you. Is my business." I skid and I dip, I leap and I trip, and as my ass starts warning of an awkward skid mark slip, my eyes fall to the silver tip of river.

I freeze in sudden horror. There's something...drifting... floating...

"What IS that?" Breaths Wales.

"Are those... LIMBS?!" Exclaims England.

"OH-MY-GOD-IT'S-A-BODY!" Cries Kiwi, sending us girls into a united nation of screams. "Or a tangled mess of rope, you dumb twits. Keep moving."

We've been running so fast through the murk that when we round a corner and come upon Harish Chandra, the cremation ghat, I'm burned by the vision as though I've tripped face-first into the fire. Looming tall in the distance are five pyres sending mountains of flame writhing and roaring to the sky, striking at the air like the deadly darts of a snake. It's of the same staggering beauty as a boat-swallowing storm at sea.

"Is all the elements," says a short ragged man materializing from the dark. "The bodies, they burns on the earth... in fires that eats the airs... and the ash is gives to the river. To dies here, in Varanasi, it is very specials. It is to go straight to the God." Motherfucker's come out of nowhere and I get an urgent tap from my ass that says, "Listen, Missile, about those skid marks...."

"If you is the lepers, or the little childrens... or the womans with the babies in her stomachs.... or the holies man... or if the snakes - it bites you... then no cremations. These peoples are already pures and they go - plops - into the river. But other peoples... I get the sticks for the peoples to be burns on. I helps them. I ask for no monies, but you gives the donations now."

I gives no donations and I gives no damns. Instead I watch the towers of flame twist and blaze like sirens seducing the night. And with that image still burning in my mind, I walk back along the water's edge to the Dasaswamedh ghat where the entire world, it seems, has gathered for worship. I sit along the steps in sops of sticky sweat, watching five orange-clad priests swirling lanterns of incense and waving pillars of fire. They ring bells and chant hymns and weave the air with prayer.

5:30 the next morning I roll out of bed, eyelashes glued together in clumps. Wiping off with a wet one and walking groggy into the pre-dawn light, I see through blurry eyes the early-morning risers loading wooden carts and sweeping clean the the piece of street on which they plan to pop a squat. I'm startled by the sudden shriek of England who's been horned in the hip by a cow. (When I asked for one us girls to get rammed, India, that's not what I had in mind.) Under a fire-red sun that yawns up from the horizon, I descend the goat-lined steps, board a wooden boat, cover in the blanket of a cool breeze, and glide down the river Ganges. I watch silently as the morning rituals unfold, as the faithful wash, bathe, chant and pray, as the devout dunk, drink, douse and dip.

In the early afternoon I stave away the heat with an ice-cold shower, air-drying on a cycle rickshaw ride into town. I feel wildly strange as I jolt gracelessly back and forth, burdening an emaciated man who spits splotches of paan as he pulls me along. My face is a god damn shake weight, teeth clashing and flesh flying in ridiculous thrusts and, as I bounce and bob about, brain jolting against skull, I fall in line with a procession of men carrying a fabric-draped body. The body's limp head swings left and right, left and right, in perfect rhythm to the rise and fall of the plank on which it lays. The men under the plank sing and chant and throw flowers into the air. Left and right goes that head. Up and down goes mine.

I look away to concentrate on the passing areshole of a cow, on the eye wink from a shopkeeper, on the tobacco-stained, gap-toothed smile of a villager. But then I remember the little man who appeared from the dark, who, after scaring the living crap out of me, reminded me that death here is celebratory, that death means merging with the "supreme being" at best, or being reused / reduced / recycled as a donkey or another eternally-damned human at worst. And so I look back to the flow of fabric, to the march of singing men, and give homeboy a voluntarily nod, wishing him a smooth journey home.

At the cusp of night, as the sun slips low and gives way to a full-bellied moon, we board a small boat on the Ganges for evening ceremony. The power has cut out leaving the ghats and jutting temples that outline the bank in eerie silhouette. We are given ten lit candles, housed in leafy bowls, cushioned in a bed of flowers... each small flame representing a prayer, a wish to be sent into the bacteria-filled abyss.

Here, in the sacred city of Varanasi, in the spiritual heart of India, nowhere near nirvana, no more closer to enlightenment or any grander truth, but possessed with all that India's shown me, all that she's thrown at me, I lean over the edge. Wrapped under the warmth of a moonlit sky, and with fingers accidentally slipping into ripplets of e-coli, I send all kinds of good stuff into the sacred swells. For what it's worth, I dot the night with flickers of my light.

Hopped up on NyQuil or not... aint no one stealing this moment.

Agro in Agra

2011-10-19T00:22:00.000-07:00

After a night spent in a Bhataphur, the northern city known for its bird sanctuary and prostitution rings, and after having spent two sticky, intimate, crammed morning hours on a local bus, I arrive to Agra, that one place with that one unimpressive white marble monument thing, unheard of, unrecognizable, and of no worldly significance.

Evening falls and an auto rickshaw ride takes me to the exterior gardens of the Taj Mahal. Walking through manicured lawns full of squawking birds, I come upon the "eternal teardrop" looming tall in the distance. Beautiful, Breathtaking. Carrying a presence that smacks one straight in the salty, shvitzy face. A reminder that you are - indeed - in India. I pinch her tip for photos, then sit on a wall behind barbed wire along a dried-out river bed, dangling feet and watching the sun splash hues of yellow over her grand facade. In the distance, a cremation ceremony sends thick plumes of smoke into the air.

Climbing back into a tuk tuk, two leprous hands reach into our ride to beg for spare change. The engine roars to life and we choke past the mangled stumps, winding at impossible speeds through Agra's interior. The dizzying activity in the alleyways and the hustle and bustle in the slums play out as wild and wondrous as ever, the scenes whirling by dreamlike as though etched on the reel of an experimental mind-bending thriller. We torpedo through the streets, my brain processing things ten steps behind as scents assault, sounds bombard, and colors bewilder... as I run out of adjectives to describe this circus act on crack.

Bright and early the next morning, and as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever, I'm now in the interior grounds of the Taj, squinting through droopy eyes at her reflection in the surrounding pool and watching the sun rise pink and yellow over her marble. I walk through her cooled mausoleum and think - oh to be someone's 13th wife and be loved so deeply as to deserve, in death, such a grand monument in my honor. At this juncture in my life, I envision a dedicated plot in a field of cow manure, marveled over by the moonlit flies.

Hoping for a chance caffeine romance in a coffee shop, I come upon an empty cafe that boasts of "coffee on the move." I ask the solo guy at the counter for something strong.

"Yes, Ma'am," he says, leaving me be to a corner table as he steps outside to wave his arm frantically at a fellow Indian. He comes back, smiles, counts some change, scratches his balls through polyester pants, takes a long, snaking piss on the "How to Please a White Westerner" customer service manual, then falls to his knees like a spent camel, curling into himself for a mental snooze before calling me back an eternity later.

"Yes, Ma'am," he says, twisting the screen my way. "Strong coffee." He's punched in five espresso shots and rang me up for over $10, enough currency to buy a baby goat in these parts. I twist my face and say, "I'll just have a small black, please." I hand him 500 rupees and he informs me, "No change, Ma'am."

This is the first time Ma'am outwardly loses her Indian cool, reincarnating into a demanding, entitled American wildebeest. Yet to see some shit peculating, I stomp my hooves in impatience and demand my note back, informing this Indian sloth that I HAVE THINGS TO DO! But he - similar to the Taj - reminds me that I'm in India, yo. Miles of travel, hours of train rides, days on filthy streets, in filthier hotel rooms, in witness of the filthiest of habits have culminated in this moment of hopeless and helpless surrender.

With a head wobble, calm smile, and a refusal to return my rupees, the sloth sends me straight back to my seat to wait. Meh, I think - resigning to my unromantic fate as I plop down to watch a man pulling a wooden cart full of veggies and a boy thwacking a stick at the haunch of a cow - my only real task of the day is to avoid stepping in street shit.

I sit and think about all those times I've kept my Indian cool....

When the waiter has delivered my drink with a bug in it, I pick it out with a dirt-encrusted nail and thank the Hindu God of Protein for the extra nutrition.

When the tea man cuts open the curtain of my train carriage at 5:30am screaming "CHAAAIIIIII! COFFEE!", and after he repeats this three times in a row in case I didn't hear him the first %$#!! time, I make a conscious choice to not commit first-degree murder of a low-income villager who ranks low on an legally dead but socially alive caste system.

When everyone at my table is done with their meal and now onto those sweet sugar balls for dessert, and I'm still waiting for my paneer tikki massala and garlic naan (that come out at separate times), I choose to sit without complaint while staring creepily and comatose at some invisible object at the far end of the restaurant.

I can only "soak in the experience" when the daily power cuts leave me lathering blindly in a shower that hasn't seen a lick of Lysol in months, or leaves me drenched in sweat under a fan that has come to a sputtering halt.

The power cuts out again right as I'm sucking in some A.C. at a post-coffee internet cafe. The shopkeeper takes this time to sing and chant to a shrine in the corner of the store, folding his hands in dark prayer. He walks lit incense back and forth, back and forth, swirling smoke over postcards of the Taj in the front and up and over my ponytail and expressionless face in the back. He dips his hand into water and flicks it off his fingers onto the dusty street. I flick myself out right after.

After a lovely visit to the Agra Fort in the late afternoon, I take a long stroll down the streets and am seduced by a woodsy path. I wander on, lulled by nature and the presence of a peapock until the path dead ends sharp, leaving me standing - alone - at the base of a leper asylum. Frozen, expectant, and overcome by a haunting stillness in the golden light, it will be the explosive sound of a stray dog having an unfortunate bout of diarrhea that will cause me to leap ten feet in the air and stop peering under the asylum's arch with morbid curiosity.

I walk on past a little boy taking a doo doo in a gutter while simaltaneously flicking a coin mindlessly in the air. I eye the mangy mutt lapping up water from the that very same gutter. I pass by cross-eyed goats, a child rolling a tire down the dusty street with a stick, a man sleeping on his back on a cot, two strays mirroring his position in the shade. Teenage boys hover in a mass on top of motorcycles outside a small shop and one screams HA-LOW and reaches for my hand. I take it and shake it, but not before making sure he hasn't offered his left. I end up walking side-by-side with a woman who continues to speak to me in Hindi for ten minutes straight, even after I've shrugged my shoulders countless times and puffed out with extra enunciation, "NO UNDERSTAND YOU! ENGLISH! ENGLISH!" I give her my signature tight-lipped, full-cheeked smile and walk on.

I disappear that evening on an overnight sleeper in a carriage shared with two strange Indian men who snore and fart at random pockets of the night. I make a pact with the cockroaches scuttling over my head to co-exist in peace, as long as we make no physical contact. I wake up at 5:30 in the morning to the sound of a Indian mother fucker screaming, "CHAIIIIIIIII! COFFEEEE!" ... but, as with the roaches, I do not kill him. Instead, I patiently roll over in my compartment, falling back alseep, surrendering to the soothing sway of the train on the tracks.

You won the battle, India, but not the war.

2011-10-11T02:33:00.000-07:00

In India I've created a thing called a 'disassociation hole.' So if, for example, you are on a bus heading down the left side of the road -which is the right way in India but the wrong way in my already-confused American brain - and there is a road blockage ahead and your bus decides to make a u-turn and cross the center divider to the right side of the road - which is now the wrong side of the road that threatens a mess of twisted metal and mangled limbs - you just hug your knees tight to your chest, tuck your head between your crotchal zone, and picture rivers of chocolate, mountains of sparkles, and the long lost days when things made sense. You push the buds deep into the ears, dig your face flat into your book, and repeat, "All is well. ALL IS WELL."

I climb deeper into this dissociation hole when I arrive to Jaipur, Rajasthan's "pink city" - the largest one yet with it's 3.2 million people, all spewing about on their donkeys and camels and horses and sputtering choke-mobiles. Pushkar was calm and peaceful. This place is a mob of honks, a pile of black lungs, a dirty dustball of delirium. At least so says Day 1 of my period. Day 1 wants a bugless hotel room with soap and sheets and toilet paper and a towel without questionable welcome stains on it. Day 1 wants to spend an entire week sucking from a mask at an oxygen bar. Day 1 wants to cut an Indian bitch.

After catching a Bollywood flick featuring no kissing but plenty of prostitutes and girls gyrating in bikinis, and after passing a wedding procession that ups the streets decibels to "SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY", I'm followed by a cackling bunch of Indian pre-teens who insist I pay them to ride a costumed horse back to my hotel. Just what I wanted to do... prance up to the lobby of the Le Grand on my pretty, pink-painted pony. I pick up hot steaming cow shit and smear them away.

In the morning, after a lovely slave labor cycle rickshaw ride into the guts of the pink city (I know it's 100 degrees and you just woke up from a nap, but pedal FASTER, FUCKER. FASTER!), and after cramming into an impossibly packed local bus where my personal views are of a crotch, a flat ass accessorized with a fake Dolce & Gabana belt, four sweaty armpits and a premie baby, we arrive to the Amber Fort where I saw "cool, cool, awesome", then head to the cafe for A.C., an iced coffee and an over-priced microwaveable veggie burger. The sloth behind the register doesn't have enough change, so he throws me a pack of Orbitz gum as currency.

I do a photo shoot with 45 school children dressed in ridiculous blue plaid uniforms, 33 cameras pointed at my face, then visit the observatory where I plop in the shade, pant like a dog, go look at a sun dial, say "cool, cool, awesome", do another photo shoot with two Indian boys, and bludgeon two touts with sticks after they shove ridiculous shit in front of my face. "DO I LOOK LIKE I WANT A GOD DAMN PUPPET, MINIATURE ELEPHANT OR TEN PACK OF BEJEWELED PENS, YOU WALKING EPIDEMIC! DIIIIIIE!"

A ratted-hair girl comes up to me and says, "Money."
"No money," I say.
"YES! MONEY!"
"NO MONEY!"
"Chocolate!"
"You give me chocolate, bitch. I'm the one bleeding."
I give her a good sock in the belly and walk off.

Getting to lunch proves to be a feat as we push through the sidewalk masses full of locals, unoriginal touts and snake charmers, and cross jam-packed roads at our own risk, the bloodthirsty fangs of scooter, rickshaw, and bus wheels nipping at our ankles. All the while the pepto bismol / bismal city of Jaipur looms on, laughing, closing in on me, mocking my red face and tired feet and sagging shoulders.

Lunch itself takes forever and the waiter uses my spoon to open another girl's drink before tossing it back to me. I leave him some chewed-up Orbitz as a tip.

In the evening I stroll the streets in search of something, anything, but all I find is chaos. No lakes, no mountains, no twisted alleyways, no sweet smiles. Just exhaust that exhausts me and a clogged city that clogs and congests my head. Jaipur is all of India's madness with none of its flavor... and my patience has clearly worn thin.

Come dinner time, when we are deciding between Northern or Southern cuisine, between meat or veggie, I vote for vodka. Any place that serves vodka. And make that a double. Doubled.

Holies and the Hippies

2011-10-10T00:34:00.000-07:00

HWWAAAAAAT.

PPPPTTTTTT.

PLOP.

These are the romantic sounds I hear at 5:30am as I sit in the hotel lobby with my loaded hump and as an Indian man somewhere in the shadows performs the traditional morning choke / hack / spit / cleansing routine. I wave goodbye to that glorious symphony of snot and the rest of Udaipur's lakeside romance as I take a pre-sunrise (mostly-with-but-sometimes-against-traffic) auto rickshaw ride to the train station. It's not even 6am and coffee has not been consumed and I'm hauling up a flight of stairs, wobbling across a bridge, hunkering down another flight, and cramming myself into a day carriage where three of us Westerners sit across from three of them Indians.

I face a balding, rotund, double-chinned local with thin spiral-shaped lips and a somasa-stuffed gut.

I stare appalled at his rude meaty legs that have outstretched and shot under my seat, shoving my own two sticks into the corner. He stares without a care at my twisted face, puffy eyes, and too-long cotton pants that have swept up half of Rajasthan's dirt. We take breaks from our evil glare contest, he to spit tobacco out into India's countryside, me to pass out cold on the red window bars I've pulled down to keep me from tumbling out onto the tracks below, forehead vibrating against the pane.

Five hours later we pull into our station that smells of piss and, out in the mean streets, as we load our humps into the back of private cars, as we stretch out sore and cramped limbs, an old Indian woman appears behind us, ranting and raging, flailing her arm about and cursing out something that sounds like,

"BALALALABADADADADADAAAA!"

This is HER land, she is telling us ever-so-subtly in Hindi. I place an agitated western hand on my hip and think, bitch PLEASE, you should be more worried about the streams of garbage and emaciated animals and sinus-clogging pollution that blankets YOUR land instead of my innocent backed-up ass that glows stark white in peace.

Our car ascends a winding mountain road -- green, rocky, secluded -- and arrives to the small town of Pushkar, considered one of India's holiest of holes. Legend has it that one of the three main Hindu gods - Brahma - the giver of life - dropped a lotus flower over the desert land while being chased by demons and - BOOM (magic smoke and fairy dust) - the dry land turned into a holy lake. Swimming and splashing in such lake are people from all over India who have come to wash away their sins. Surrounding the lake in a circle are the ghats, or steps, and surrounding the steps is a town full of temples, markets, and dreadlocked stoned Israelis in ali baba poop pants, most suffering from post-service post traumatic stress disorder. Yet again an Indian contradiction - a holy place where you can't find a damn drink, but you can find a weed-smoking hippie with free-flowing armpit hair just fine.

I spend my first two hours in Pushkar sprawled on cushions under a blue gazebo on the roof of our charming hotel surrounded by lush green mountains, decompressing. All I can hear are birds chirping and the long, intestinal groans of cows below. Gone are the "BEEP" "BEEP" "BEEP" "BEEP" BEEEEEEEP"s that have ruptured my eardrums and grated my nerves to a sad mush of pulp, into a milky glass of saffron lassi.

At night we stroll the circular town and sit on the ghats to watch prayer ceremonies performed, as Indians sit cross-legged with a priest and send flowers into the holy water. I spot some crud between my toes and ask if it'd be alright to dip my feet. After first pouring a bit of the holy water on my head, I'm allowed to hike my skirt to a scandalous knee level and wade in to wash away toe jam and sins alike, blessing both my soul and my inflated traveler's cankles with Brahma's touch.

That evening, a gorgeous sun sets over a silhouetted lake.

The next morning I revisit the town on my own to sit on the ghats and soak up some spirituality. As I'm peeling off my flip flops and walking upon the hot marble floor, I am harassed my no less than four so-called priests, all attempting to shove flowers in my hand or insist I circle this way and that way and then sit under the statue of Ganesh for good luck. Hardened from over two weeks in India and of dealing with rupee-hungry leeches on the daily, I flash angry teeth, snarl, hiss, stamp and send them scampering away. I plop my solo self on the steps in the shade. Within minutes an Indian baby appears on my lap and I'm doing a lake-side photo shoot.

I watch with head cocked back as a man in a burlap skirt and orange turban squats along the lake. For fifteen minutes straight, in an unbroken rhythm, he scoops and shovels water into and out of his cupped hands -- splash, splash, splash, splash, splash, splash. He stands, does a 360-degree turn presenting Pushkar with his prayer hands, does a final few head bangs against the steps, then disappears up the ghats, blending himself into a market of people who - like him - are indescernably holy, devout or bat-shit crazy. I watch as others bathe in the lake, fill plastic to-go cartons of the sacred water, and drink enough handfuls of the stuff to send my American intestines to the intensive care unit. I observe all of this with a wrinkled forehead and a foreign wonder, finding Hinduism to be an intriguing religion - a religion where one can pick his own idols and method of worship in the same way one would pick a curry or a paneer in an Indian buffet. It's whatever is to your taste, sits well in the tummy, and makes you feel full at the end of the day.

I spend the rest of daylight following a festival procession around the town, a parade of speakers blaring and stick-bangers dancing and men with baskets raining the air with flowers.

I walk by the hippies sitting lulled in cafes, looking lost and glazed over like the roadside cows chewing on discarded cardboard.

I pass by temples dedicated to Krishna and Brahma and shops dedicated to patchwork skirts and hobo satchels.

I walk down a small lane of street food that soaks and steams and sizzles and simmers, and sniff the air longingly along with the strays.

I am followed about town by a crazy dressed in a diarrhea-colored wrap who places bowls of banana and sweets at my feet as though I am an idol to be worshipped (I make a sharp turn left at the ghats and lose him in an alleyway, only to bump into him at the open man urinals five minutes later).

I myself stalk the sadhus - the holy men - the ones who have given up worldly possessions and who sit at the base of temples or in tiny tents overlooking the lake, in complete silence and stillness. Peering through bushes and over small bridges, I contemplate their sanity before realizing that I'm the one huddled in a bush staring at hungry men in loin cloths.

At night I am eaten alive my ants as I watch the sun go down over the desert town and as Pushkar reenacts an ancient Hindu tale, lights fireworks and sets ablaze an erected demon statue (safety barriers nonexistent; little children scampering about these nonexistent barriers), symbolizing the end of the nine-day festival that's been blowing up all over Rajasthan.

I end the night by blowing up my own stomach with a sinful Israeli feast, washed down with holy bottled mineral water... the surrounding hippies leaning casually back in chairs, peppering the night air with joints hanging loose from fingertips and lips.

Search for Solitude

2011-10-06T03:53:00.000-07:00

And off she goes, past the car-jammed alleyway, left at the three-legged dog, through the tunnel with the donkey, right at the limbless beggar, across the cow-lined bridge, and sharp turn right by the three women slapping the shit out of their laundry on the ghats. I plop myself down lakeside for a peaceful, relaxing lunch, placing Kindle kindly and obviously on the table, and prepare to soak in Udaipur's sleepy afternoon. A quiet moment of solitude is all that I ask of you, romantic little grem of Rajasthan.

But alas. The 22-year-old waiter appears before me waving his long locks in the wind, telling me how he used to model and be a famous cricket player and knows four languages and how he has never touched an Indian woman and... sigh. I eat up my mixed vegetable curry and rice, drink down my mineral water, pay my $2 bill, and continue onward and forward, realizing that finding a single moment of peace in this country is just about as impossible as avoiding sweat in the ass crack.

I set myself loose in the guts of alleyways and I'm a spinning dreidel once more, flopping about at random, bouncing and ricocheting into living and nonliving things alike, waiting for the inevitable crash and topple... but I'm suprised when I hear actual "namastes" and receive smiles instead of cold expressionless stares. I present prayer hands and bow my head to show respect to those in the streets and get goofy little head wobbles in return. Indians wave down from colored cement terraces behind clumps of twisted power lines. Monkeys on the rooftops resist the urge of bending over to give me a solid flash of crimson ass. And after a solid sampling across the narrow lanes, nine out of ten ancient ones flash warmth across their wrinkled faces when I bid them a hello, saving their pent-up hissing and arm-waving for the cows.

Propelled by this overflow of kindness, I play with the barefoot kids, say "what up" to the man in a burlap skirt standing upright and rigid in front of a street shrine, dance about and dart around the neck-swinging roosters, accept hand kisses from a gaggle of giggly girls, leap over the runoff water from a bucket thrown from a house, and marvel at how those men on mopeds are still able to drive straight with their heads twisted back like that.

When night falls I go up to the roof and sit staring out over the twinkling, illuminated lake. I had been there earlier that morning at 7:30am, sipping coffee and staring out at everything and nothing when Moon, our Indian tour guide, joined me with his chai. We talk about Life, of having these beautiful moments of stillness, of how Life itself is a giant meditation, of how at any given moment we can push pause on our own remotes and - along with the dust and pollution and poop particles - breathe in the present moment and all the beauty around us. And this place - Udaipur - it really is beautiful. It's the type of city that makes you want to throw off your ratted Old Navy flip flops that have long become intimiate with cow shit and moldy showers, pull up a padded cushion, order up all of India's alcohol, and stare out blankly at the rise and set of sun.

I order up a double vodka and sprite and start to sip slowly, enjoying this cool, quiet moment of solitude on the roof when the waiter appears and tells me I look like a a maharaja. I say "maha WHAT?" He says, "A queen, ma'am. You look nice like a queen." (Two days of not showering can do that to a person, I suppose.) He asks me everything about myself short of my SS# before I hear my name being summoned from down in the guts of the hotel lobby. Alas. My threesome with vodka and the lake will have to wait.

Dinner is a tuk tuk ride away to an Indian all-you-can-eat thali place where you are handed a large silver platter and a whole slew of tiny empty bowls, which then sets the stage for a 5-ring dining circus of epic proportions. A parade of five men appear scooping and plopping, splashing and dolloping, shooting and torpedoing food at you at an impossible speeds. Naans and roti go-a flying and potatoes, paneer, yogurts, and sauces, fried balls and sweets have perfect dismounts from ladles, landing straight into bowls in heavenly heaps. My Buddha belly more than doubles in size this night.

After dinner, and back on the hotel roof, three days after the actual Indian day, I am presented a lit and personalized chocolate birthday cake. "We couldn't get you to cooperate... you were either passed out for 24 hours straight or off wandering off alone, endangering your life...." They present me a small silk painting of an elephant, camel, and horse, representing good luck, love, and strength, respectively.

So I end up amongst many, and it's not quite the solitude I have been desperately seeking in this perpetual honk of a country, but I'm all smiles as I sit amongst my small group of ten. I blow out the two flames on my "18 candle" and send smoke and twist wishes up into the night air, over the lake, all throughout lovely, charming Udaipur, over its celebratory festival stick-dancing in the center market, and all over this very bizarre, head-scratching spellbinding shitshow of a place called India.

Space Invaders

2011-10-04T02:00:00.000-07:00

Up at 6:30am, I am one with the dogs in the trash heaps - aloof, hardly blinking, and lacking the energy to scavenge and lick things. I climb into a tuk tuk and watch my driver slowly and methodically brush his long, thick mustache with a comb. He splits it down the middle, twists the bottoms with his fat fingers, then swoops the black locks behind each ear, all the while looking somewhat seductively into my half-open eyes. I look away from him and to my left where our darling 23-year-old fellow traveler from Wales sits dry-heaving as we negotiate the eerily quiet morning streets of Jodphur. After a slightly rough night, I myself am clenching certain anatomical parts, hoping that I am not gifted with a "turtle" demon of sorts on my 31st bday.

I somehow end up a bus and this time we time travel for 8 straight hours. I'm packed to the brim with Immodium capsules and I notice that the bus itself is exceptionally and more characteristically packed to the brim with locals, with its women in saris - bursting in prismatic colors - sitting crammed - Indian style - in the aisles. Their babies sit on laps, their men stand and grip bars above, and their older children team up in threes, pick an unsuspecting white person, and go invade some space and sit on some face.

A young girl swirled in pink cloth is leaning against my left leg. Her hand rests ever-so-delicataley in my lap. An hour or so later, after popping awake from many-a-coma-session, I see that her head has managed to somehow siamese twin itself to my inner thigh. She looks up deer-like behind her pepto-colored veil, points to the corner of my seat and produces a sugary sweet smile and bats a thick stream of innocent eyelashes. She melts my foolish heart and I let her up off the floor, turning my cramped two-seater into a very cramped three-seater, cramping more than just my innards.

Needless to say, I survive the ride without shitting my pants, without any noticeable blood clots, and manage to take in flashes of the lush rolling mountains to boot. But even after 8 hours of snoozing on my chest, my feeble system has completely crashed, and when I arrive to the city of Udaipur, Rajasthan's more beautiful and romantic gems - the very spot where Octopussy was filmed - the place with the lake and posh water-side hotels - I unromantically pass the fook out in my sheetless bed, muttering to and drooling on myself till 6:30am the following morning.

When I wake up and wobble discombobulated up to the rooftop, I'm greeted by the serene scene of a sprawling lake, of squirrels scampering and green parrots drifting from building to building, and of giggling families doing wash, bathing and swimming in the water below. I drink coffee under a much-needed cool breeze and exhaust myself watching others do yoga. On this, my American birthday (that I share with Gandhi ), I take a cooking class and learn to make a mean chai tea and veggie paneer that requires no less than 35 spices (35 of which will come spicing out of me 35 minutes later), take a sunset cruise along the water (while an excited girl from Delhi yaps my ear off about her dreams of being a dancer in NYC as the sun fades behinds mountains and a 7-star hotel), and get my palm read by a guy who looks more like a tax accountant than some spiritual turban-wearing, cobra-twisting mystic.

(Living to the ripe old age of 85, I will have two strapping boys whose lives I'm sure I'll manage to somehow screw up, a 25-30-year marriage ending in separation, and mad luck coming my way for 2.5 years straight starting on November 27th, the time when Saturn is due to reposition its fat ass in the Cosmos. I can double such luck to 5 years by fasting or donating black cloth specifically on Saturday, or by wearing white and dripping myself in Emeralds. (Thought you knew.))

Looks like I may need all the luck I can get because, after walking back from a painting class in town where I watercolored "Cankles", an elephant that looks like it went against its Hindu teachings and had itself a nasty bender in the slums the night prior, I got my very first moped slammed into my Missile guts. Yay! Hardly noticed it, though, because everything here seems to be a slam. And with that, I'm off to play a real-life game of Frogger with my body, get lost in the streets for the next five hours, ignore the 50,000 Indian Playboys leaning out of their shops, all pitching the same draining opening line - "Beautiful day, Miss! American? Australian? Where you from?" - and invade some personal Indian space. Right back at ya, mofos.

Red --> Neon Green --> White

2011-10-02T22:14:00.000-07:00

Oh Jodphur... you have kicked my weak, delicate, sensitive, flimsy pansy ass.

Come early morning I set out to explore her grand fort that looms tall and high from every vantage point of the city. Enamored by the blue-colored alleyways and stopped by masses of the local children asking for their pictures to be snapped, I fall behind the group and, when I make a mad dash to catch up, graceless footing causes me to stub my toe on the uneven, rocky streets and leaves an unattractive floppy gash in my big piggy. Though bleeding and slipping in my own flip flip, I consider this experience as an opportunity to soak in the kindness of the locals... a man rushes out from his clay house and pours water in the wound, then produces a brown liquid from a vile to stop the bleeding. From overhead a bandaid floats down off a blue balcony, fluttering in the hot air down to my foot below. I tape myself up, produce a heartfelt namaste to the small crowd that has gathered, and continue onward bound to the fort, more embarrassed by the production than hurt from my own idiocy.

We stroll the fort's beauitiful medieival grounds all morning long, winding our way through courtyards, up stairways, and through lavishly-decorated rooms. Every roundabout produces stunning panaromac views of the blue city, with its castles and marbled memorials in the distance. A few of us happen upon a room where one man sits cross-legged playing a santoor, a trapezoid-shapped string instrument, and another beats at a small pair of drums. I lay back on cushions, close my blood-shot eyes, and drift off to the classical, meditative beats as a fan cools from above. I open my eyes on occasion to wink and smile at the musicians.

I decide that afternoon to brave the city alone, and within two minutes I've already made a wrong turn out of the hotel, and one wrong turn leads into an entire web of wrong turns that leaves me deep and tangled in Jodphur's bustling streets. Gone are the sleazy car-salesmen-esque touts praying on the tourists... not a single soul asks me to enter or peruse their small store as I walk past smoking, churning, boiling food stands... as I slither past bangle, shoe, fruit and fabric shops. Instead the locals give me lazy, expressionless glance overs followed by the occasional hack as I step aside for their roaming cows and pigs in mid-chew, stroll past their tuk tuk drivers taking breaks to pee along a wall, get stuck behind their women carrying baskets on their heads, and walk with feigned confidence through their windy residentials where people read papers, brush their teeth outside, sit-cross-legged indoors eating with their hands, and where little tots pet goats and run around bare-bottomed and giggling.

Through the constant motion and movement I hear some scream "HA-LOW, HOW ARE YOU?!" while others run up to shake my hand and ask me what my name is. A few men on scooters buzz by and give me creepy eyebrow raises - I side step their vehicles and walk on. One man rides by on his bicycle and gives me my very first flick of the American bird. The more unsure turns I make, the more narrow and crammed with activity the streets seem to get, and the more neon green I seem to glow. Red and overheating from the sun, the fumes and the chaos, I seem to float through the dusty streets in a fuzzy dream state, taking in all the sights and sounds while simultaneously blocking them out to not have a mental rupture of sorts. I ignore the deafening honks and the glances and the exhaust clouds that envelope me and just walk, turn left, walk, turn right, and an hour or so later, by the grace of some miracle, I spot the town's phallic clock tower standing erect from a distance, which guides me to the loins of the bazaar.

I'm ready to collapse, but put that on hold to poke my nose into the enticing spice markets. A kid puts on the thickest of his charms, shoves my nose into a sinus-clearing jar of tea, and tries to sell me on his family's winter tonic, good for "body warming and sex." I sit with a young woman in her small shop and she serves me chai and tells me the history of her father's business as I pinch at her curries and sniff at her powders and walk off with a small pouch of her mixes.

Later that night a long tuk tuk ride takes us out of a town to "On the Rocks", a restaurant and smoke-filled discotheque for Westerners and Indians alike. We have candlelit dinner and drinks outside, then are shoved into our own little Western cave inside the club, separate from the locals, given a strict warming to not intermingle. When we are on the dance floor, bouncers leap out from hidden corners to shoo away the Rajashtanis. The music comes to an abrupt stop at 11:00 and the party is over.

I ring in my 31st birthday on Indian time on the now-empty streets of Jodphur on a tuk tuk ride home. Come 3am I will be gifted with two hours of on-and-off stomach and intestine unpleasantries. I've glowed all sorts of colors over the past twenty-four hours, but white seems to be the color of the hour.

California Raisin

2011-10-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

After waking up in the sand dunes at 6am, popping another pre-sunrise squat behind a bush, sipping hot chai and eating yet another deep-fried morsel - breakfast in cot - we board the camels and take a cool, breezy, slow-paced jaunt through the Thar desert back to the jeeps. Another bumpy ride and we were back in Jaisalmer, where I spent a good amount of time digging, picking and scrubbing sand out of unheard-of orifices.

Leaving behind the stoney-looking goat and such, the rest of the day will be spent on a five-and-a-half-hour bus ride through the desert, us whities intermixed with the Indians on local transport. The bus - decorated in the front with garland, plastic streamers, and miniature idol statues - is a double-decker of sorts, with single seats on the left, double seats on the rights, and single and double carriages up above to house entire extended families. Feet will dangle from above. Limbs will twist and intertwine in the aisles. I will sit solo in a reclined seat feeling very foreign.

There is no AC. When the bus itself is still, flies buzz and land on my arm, my cheek, my knee. When moving, I sit with my face turned towards the window, an arid breeze whipping in my face, chapping my lips, dirtying my cheeks and sucking my eyeballs dry. Because I do not want to use a public squatter on a 15-minute break two hours into the trip, I will spend the entire ride patiently holding my bladder and partitioning my water, even though I'm parched.

I watch an assortment of Indians board and cram into the carriages and sit cross-legged in the aisles... red bejeweled sparkly women and men in turbans sporting Colonel Sanders mustaches, and your more modern, approachable Indian man that always seems to be off to a business caz meeting in his button-down dress top tucked into form-fitting fancy pants, flip flops on clean feet. One such man will stand in the aisle next to my seat and peer down at me with those hot, burning, intense, unblinking Indian eyes, expressionless and unnerving. I will look behind me and into a carriage above and there will be eyes sending radioactive beams into my back and the top of of my crown. Eyes, eyes, everywhere those eyes - eyes that will forever haunt me in my nightmares.

I will glance up and my closest eye molester man will be so up in my personal space, I will feel his hot Indian breath on the nape of neck and he will smell the remnants of fried cauliflower balls in my saliva-less mouth. He gets so intimately close and stares with such heat and fire, I swear I feel an immaculate conception coming on... yep... any second now a cream-colored love baby is sure to burst from my loins and, when it does, I will accessorize it with eyeliner and squeeze fresh road-side cow milk into its waiting wailing mouth. Eye molester buggers off an hour later and now, more than ever, I am in need of an ice-cold shower.

I spend a good hour interacting with a large family that - with babies, toddlers, little tots, men and their concealed women - pack in tightly in the aisle below. We will snap pictures of each other, share photos, shake hands, and perpetually point, nod, smile and wave at one another. The rest of the time I will plug my ears with music and leave the bus' sensory overload for the rolling desert scene outside... of the garbage-littered street and little brick villages, of boys batting balls, men smacking cows away from their fruit stands, women bent over in half yanking crops from fields, every type of animal herd imaginable, people peeing and doing their poopsies on the side of the road, entire families crammed on scooters (babies up front, women in the back sitting sideways), and always, always, the scene of those squatting, sprawling, sitting tucked like pretzels in their tiny shops, on their backs with ankle over ankle, or on their tummies with a hand pressed to chin as they line walls, carts and street corners.

Bladder full, throat singed, and half a day later, we're in Jodphur, the blue city, the second largest city in Rajasthan with its 1.5 million people. The place is a mix of everything I have seen thus far, but on crack and steroids - it has the chaotic madness of Delhi city life with the ancient-looking charm of the golden city prior, all combined into a place with no smog checks and such palpable pollution - exhaust and fumes spewing everywhere - that I feel years come off my life from the tuk tuk ride to our hotel alone. It's another maddened, bumpy, tight-squeezed, choke-filled ride in the midst of the usual - people, cows, markets, and now other spewing vehicles. I run up to my hotel, Ponds wipe down my black face, then curse myself for not packing any Xanax.

Dinner is on the rooftop overlooking panoramic views of the Blue City (painted blue by the Brahman priests, to ward off mosquitoes and keep the city cool), with its famous clock tower and Mehrangar Fort illuminated in the backward. We hear the Muslim call to prayer and, after chickpea and curry something-or-other, I walk past the bamboo market and down the dusty fumey streets to watch boys and girls dance to festival music. I say no thanks when pressured to join in and walk back to my room and fall asleep lulled by my ceiling fan, overwhelmed, sucked dry like a raisin.

Bootiful Rajasthani Woman!

2011-09-29T23:12:00.001-07:00

Ahhh... free time in the golden city. Spent it stuffing my face with rich Indian butters, oils and creams (the gut be a-growin' exponentially), strolling through the village's handful of intricately-carved Jain temples (getting it all in before menstruation begins and India forbids me from entering her houses of idols), sitting in a cozy curtained shop, patiently looking on as a young girl henna-ed my entire right arm (because Indian magic market looks authentic and exquisite on albino tourist creatures), then strolled alone, hopelessly lost, through the city's twisted alleyways as the locals either smiled or snickered, as old Indian grannies hissed and cackled, as the touts shouted, "Miss! Ha-lo! You spend money now! Yes." Turning left at the salivating cow my arm is grabbed by an Indian woman who says, "Pretty henna. How much you pay? I do cheap for you on other arm, on foot, on face." As I stroll past colorful homes with beaten laundry flapping in the wind, as children run after and tickle me in the pit, I get, "Please ma'am, don't break my heart. You come have chai. Please. You come into my shop. I give you good price." Making the mistake of entering into a woman's fabric store, I watch horrified and with the utmost guilt as she and her entire family run up and down stairs producing skirt after skirt after skirt, none of which I have the desire to buy, and end buried under a sea of cotton and silk as they look down on me with forlorn deer eyes, hopeful and expectant. Needless to say, I came back to my guest house before dinner flummoxed, dehydrated, discombobulated, and all a-schvitz.

Come night we girls enter the shop of a floppy-tittied woman who dresses us up in Saris and cheap plastic jewels, and it's in this traditional garb that we shuffle about awkwardly through the town as locals point and hoot and holler and mock with, "Boo-tiful Rajasthani women!" We lift the bottoms of skirts to negotiate over poo and goo, past heaps of garbage and dogs with mangled faces, past cow asses and their swatting tails, scooters, scooters, scooters (that I've now learned to ignore the way the cows ignores her clan of flies), under bats that swarm overhead and by makeshift lighted tents set up for a nine-day festival. At dinner on a rooftop we sample gluttonous dishes and wash it all down with Sula, India's wine produced in the southern region. I sit bloated under the night's sky, comatose, burping and loosening my Sari.

While walking back at night through the fort, we stumble upon a herd women and young girls in the center square outside of the Jain temple doing a five-count dance with sticks. They twist and twirl and slap and rotate as music blares from speakers, as the men and young boys sit lined along the temple's steps looking on, clapping, and dancing on the side. It was yet another festival scene and a colorful, rich, authentic experience, the entire community out well into the night, glued together by faith, music and dance. Us sorry-looking Sari-ed creatures were handed sticks and yanked into the center of square to make complete and utter Western fools of ourselves, with your graceless little Missile looking especially like a lost lamb, full of paag and curry, draped in blue fabric that has long lost a very important safety pin, a crooked Bindi on her sweaty forehead, openly displaying her sad lack of rhythm to the general Indian population. Ended the night on the rooftop of our fort, beer and wine in hand, back into the cross-legged lotus position on cushions under the stars, dogs yapping in the background, festival sights and sounds lighting up the village below.

The next afternoon we took a 45-minute jeep deep into the scrubby desert and hopped on a bunch of fly-littered, agitated, foot-stomping, farting, moaning, groaning, slobbering, wobbly camels, and spent two hours swaying back and forth, side to side, and bouncing painfully up and down under the desert sun, bums bruising and thighs chaffing on a nomadic journey to the dunes. We were greeted at our camp with beer and fried snacks, then climbed the beetle-ridden sandy hills to take in the stunning panoramic sunset, which was insanely peaceful and beautiful. Skidding back down the sand heaps, we sprawled lazily on our cots and watched as four desert gypsies entertained us with foot-tapping traditional song and dance, and I screamed "NO!" and looked aghast when a gypsy hand grabbed my resistant arm and lurched me to my feet, forcing me to spin and twirl and move my hipless and hopeless body to some beat I couldnt quite catch, barefoot on the scorpion sand. Dinner followed (with grasshoppers leaping onto my spoon full of yogurt and rice), then it was back up the duney hills to light the 600 rupees worth of fireworks we bought in town earlier that day, exploding the desert with whistles and booms. We sleep that night under the open sky, and I sit staring up at the milky way and the constellations, surrounded by bugs and creepy crawlies and rabid Indian desert dogs who crept into our camp in the middle of the night, rummaged through our empty beer bottles, and ended curled full of their flea colonies under the base of our cots. I got up twice in the night, flashlight in hand, bleary-eyed, with unsure footing, stumbling up the sandy dunes to pop a squat and christen nature with my ignorant American pee... and as I sat open, vulnerable and alone behind a bush, thighs burning and bladder singing, I felt like a true Indian nomad woman, soaking in the peaceful and eerie stillness of the desert night.

My name is Sunshine and I'm Addicted to Opium.

2011-09-28T00:34:00.000-07:00

What a beautiful morning I had today. I sat dressed in a tank top and long skirt on the roof of Deepak guest house located in a fort of Jaisalmer (one of the main cities in Rajasthan), and drank coffee, scribbled in my notebook, and feasted on a British breakfast of baked beans (lord have mercy on me on my next bouncy tuk tuk ride) as I stared out over panoramic views of the sandstone-colored golden village below. The air was hot but pleasant, with a heavenly breeze that dried and blew back my gloriously-showered hair that no longer looks like I dunked it in a simmering deep fryer. Gone is the chaos and madness of Delhi city life and here, for the now, is the enchanting and peaceful madness of village life, in a place full of nomadic tribespeople, ornate temples, and flat desert land. Surrounded by temples, shops, and numerous stores full of touts offering henna, scarves, drinkable weed and memory cards, this place reminds me of a cross between an Indiana Jones set, some sort of mutton-wielding medieval town, and a gold-colored Mykonos.

Whereas two days back I was insanely excited by my ONE cow spotting in the streets of Delhi, I'm now no longer fazed by the sight of the country's holy creature - this place is littered with a bunch of fat lazy ones that sit in the shade of alleyways and in the middle of the road, gathering flies and flicking lethargic tails.

I last left off before my departure from Delhi. I took a final manic AC-less ride to the train station in the thick of city traffic, in the thick of the evening heat, and could literally reach out the window and poke Indian people and various animal creatures in their glistening brown eyeballs if I so desired. I marvelled out how tightly packed and surrounded my own little car was, and drank in the unflinching stares of 12 men in a tuk tuk, whispered namaste to the guy on the moped who may as well have been sitting on my face, smiled up and the sea of peepers staring down at my sweat stains from the bus that loomed overhead, and shook hands with the driver who took me to Delhi from the airport a few days back after we spotted each other in the honking, cluttered standstill. "How was your time here?" He screamed over a honk. "Wickedly insane!" I yelled over the sound of motors and moos.

The train station itself was a total trip - a sea of families lying curled on the ground in the main ticket station, and swarms of others waiting patiently on the platform. Our small group of white people was a circus act of sorts as we stood surrounded by men who would come inches away, cross their arms, lean on one hip, and stand there wordless, simply observing us in our mystical foreign weirdness. I myself had a little stalker man in a green top and white-washed jeans who followed me and my little backpack hump everywhere I went, a very intent skinny brown shadow. As usual, I smiled at women, waved at little kids, and stared back at all those who stared at me.

Before I left for India I was drunk and ramming pizza down my throat in SF and sitting next to a random boy who happened to say hello. Within minutes I had come to find out that he had been to India as well and, when I asked him what his favorite experience was, he told me it had been the long, rolling rides on the sleeper trains. "You get to see some shit. Real shit," he told me. My first (22-hour) overnight train was, indeed, interesting. When I first boarded I was shoved into my microscopic carriage and ended up with my face pressed against the pane of the window and a fold-able table in my crotch. After ramming all our packs under the seats and getting situated in our space, and accepting the six coffin-sized (2 ft x 5 ft) compartments that would be our new sleeping quarters, completely digesting the situation at hand, all became calm and mentally comfortable. We slowly rocked down the Indian countryside and for the first half hour of the ride, before the sun set, I stared open-mouthed and aghast at the series of slums that sat nestled at the base of the railway, men, women, children and animals littered all over its corrugated tin roofs and in its makeshift alleyways of brick and found debris. When the sun went down, extinguishing the site of the shantytowns, all we could see was the occasional flare of cooking fire that blazed in the distance and - POPPPP - right against the tracks. I managed to sleep well that night in my little top bunk coffin, in the same stinky and sweaty clothes worn the entire day earlier. I showered with a wet one, opted out of brushing my teeth, and used the squat toilet only once, deciding to hold my pee till the morning. Vacationing at its finest.

I woke up at 7:30am to the site of a rotund Indian woman in our carriage petting the curly hair of my fellow Canadian travel (this same woman will find me in the hall, tell me she is fat, that I am very skinny - too skinny - and then crush my ribs). It was reported that I produced the biggest "where am I, what the fuck is going on look" known to man before rolling back over and pushing snooze on this scene of weirdness. The chai man had already woken me up at 5am. He ran down the halls screaming, "CHAI, CHAI, CHAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII" while I groaned and buried my head under my sheet. Thirty minutes later my Indian guide's cell phone would go off in a repetitive Indian mantra of sorts which, he explained later, was his ritual morning wake-up call to give blessing to the day and to give worship to Lord Brahma's wife, the goddess of knowledge, art and science. Awesome. By 8am I had re-joined civilization, slitty-eyed, peeling back an over-priced orange, sipping on tea and eating a deep-fried chili pepper I had bought on a quick stop on the side of the tracks. I spent the rest of the train ride nestled in a separate bunk, listening to music, and staring out peacefully at the rolling landscape, which was now arid, scrubby land with the occasional heard of cows and sheep. My how quickly things had changed. Overnight.

From the airport to our hotel room located in the village's city fort, we took the most exhilarating, pants-shitting tuk tuk ride imaginable, traveling at impossible speeds through packed streets and tight alleyways, just inches away from skinning pedestrians, decapitating cows, and crashing into other high-speed, out-of-control vehicles. I gushed over my impossibly adorable room with its golden view of the golden village below, then took a 17-hour cold shower luxuriating in the magical power of soap and water. There was a hot minute in Delhi when I never thought I'd never feel human again. Bacteria water, what?! Bring it!

Had a magnificent lunch on the rooftop under colorful fabric and the cool breeze of fans, then spent all afternoon exploring the heart of the sizzling village, with its army men, unamused locals, giggling children, cows, and tourist touts. We saw a stoned-looking goat, a dude cruising by on an elephant, and Indian penis as men did their pee pees in a very open public bathroom. We were invited by the owner of a separate guesthouse for chai tea, and took him up on his offer as afternoon turned to evening. When he asked for my name and my story, I told him my name was Sunshine and that Ive had a severe opium addiction for years. In travel, you can be anyone you want to be... up until the point your youness creeps up on you and you see exactly who you are.

Onward bound to the town's liquor shop, we stocked up vodka and chasers (my true addiction), took another death-defying tuk tuk ride out of the city and onto ancient old burial grounds, and sat there sacrilegiously swigging under the ruins, watching the sun set over our fort from a distance, everything a hue of gold and yellow. We killed the night back on our beloved rooftop and indulged in more food and booze as we sat cross-legged on cushions, all under a moonless sky full of stars (two of which went shooting before us). Foreign boys with Australian accents talking of their rickshaw adventures through remote villages. Sigh.

And then up at 8am for some alone time on the roof this morning, to simply absorb from above the everyday routine of the fort-dwellers below, to have a quiet moment of gratefulness. Free, hair-blowing in a hot wind, with pen in my hand and a blank sheet before me, I can't even express how grateful I feel.

Jewish Delhi

2011-09-26T01:39:00.001-07:00

Hello from my first proper internet cafe in Delhi with - thank the lord Krishna - a steady pant now that I~m under the seductive spell of proper AC. Currently I am lobster-red and have taken on the qualities of an earthworm - slimy, oozy, moist and just straight-up distusting. Remind me to not wear skin-tight black jeans when schlepping about in third world countries.

Anyways, my first day in Delhi was spent with a 25-year-old local chick who took me around some of the more famous temples in the city. She schooled me on the basics of Hinduism as we walked barefoot along long intricate marble halls, and watched people bow down, give coconut offerings to, and drink the ground water that was used to wash the feet of all the various statues / idols representing one of the 33 million Hindu gods. Before I knew it I had unwillingly paid my respect to Lord Vishnu, the famous operator of life, and had an old Indian finger shmeering red powder on my forehead. I walked around with my red blessing for half the day which, mixed with sweat and dust and miscellaneous ewness, accesorized the super sexy sweat zit that had volcanically erupted on my face the night prior.

After an equally volcanically explosive lunch of all sorts of vegeterian samples, my new Indian female friend forced me to the cinema to watch a 3-hour Bollywood fick. I had to walk through two sets of metal detectors, was groped and patted down by very aggressive women who pinched my nips and damn near stuck their entire arm up my vag, and had my purse seized and searched. I watched ayuderic toothpaste commercials, was forced to stand with the rest of the theater to pay respect to the Indian army, and then spent three hours (with one intermission) watching a gorgeous Indiam Muslim and a hot-as-hell Indian Sikh man go through ridiculous and impossible charades, all the while wishing they would JUST FUCK ALREADY.

Exiting the theater, I almost forgot I was in India. A blast of heat enveloped me as I stepped into the dusty air, to the crowds, swarms, honks, and chaos. A fight broke out in the mall area and someone was chasing someone else with a very large crow bar of sorts. I just stood there staring at all the contradictions - the women in the traditional saris and bangles carrying shit on their heads, mixed in with the chicks in in Western clothes chatting on their cells. The sputtering little tuk tuks and delaptidated little buses mixed with the highly modern, air-conditioned metro system with plugs for your laptop so you can surf Facebook on the way home.

I exited the station alone and walked lost for a good 10 minutes, down the chaotic markets in the thick of the heat. A girl approached me with a crying little tot in her arms and kept smacking me in the thigh, then raising a pressed fingers to her lips while saying, "Money, money, yes, yes. Baby. Money. Yes." Persistent little bugger. Miraculously made it back to the hotel and, when night fell, I met my fellow travelers - it's just a handful of us that will be traveling together on local transport, rustic style - and have already picked out the boozers from the non-boozers and shared two long islands and a shit ton of more Indian food with the former.

Today was a ridiculous shitshow for my eyeballs. Took the local bus into the heart of - and walked down the sensory overload streets of - Old Dehi. Words can't describe the magestic chaos, how full of wonder I was. It was a series of tightly-packed streets and thin little alleyways, all brimming with people, action, sights, sounds, smells and INSANITY... a surreal madness. I sampled street chai and savory deep-fried pastries, and walked quietly through the the tight alleyways, negotiating over lethargic stray dogs, nodding my head at all the vendors sitting cross-legged in their shops, peering into haphazhard temples and homes adorned with Aryan swastika sybols and images of idols (all for good luck and prosperity). I watched men wash themselves down in public, and other sweeping with makeshift brooms, others rushing down the streets with wide loads on carts or behind cows.

It was here in the tiny jammed streets and in the Muslim temple that I visited where people would stand feet away and stare at me, some unabashedly with wonder, others whispering, and others approaching and asking if they can be in my photo, on my camera. I've had men gawk, women produce cold, unflinching stares, young girls giggle, and little boys who were scared to look my way when their mommies pointed at me said: "Look, child, there is an evil Anerican standing there who, according to Hindu philosophy, is the devil reincarted as a sweaty blotchy white bitch!!"

Went to Muslic Mosque, was covered in an orange wrap, and spent more time posing with curious and excited Indian people than I did actually discovering the area of worship. At a Sikh mosque and with a pirate-like bandana on my head, I watched men and women alike sitting quietly on rugs, then approach and bow down to their holy book, all under the calm, heavenly spell of three men in turbans who were strumming instruments and chanting hims. I sat and helped the sikhs roll out flat roti bread in the kitchen of the mosque, which will be fed for free to any visitors who desire to eat.

A man with no legs will ask me for some money in the street and, when I ignore him, he will ram his cart, which he is willing to move by a gear that he turns with his hand, into the back of my calf. He will apologize for this.

I've just come from the markets and shortly Ill be boarding an overnight sleeper train, arriving into Rajasthan tomorrow evening.

Namaste.

Girl be TRIPPIN~.

2011-09-24T09:10:00.000-07:00

4am. 4am is when my alarm shot me awake this morning, or yesterday morning, or whatever the hell time it was in the dimension of time that I was previously in, now that Im completely lost and existing in some other time warp in a dimension on the other side of the world. 4am is when I shot up raw and bitter, the wine and Extreme Pizza slices of the night prior yet to be digested in my 4am girl gut, at the most ungodliest of hours, when no man has a right to be happy, when all is gross, putrid and satanic.

But I was up for a good cause, and shuffled my way through an hour of washing, dressing, packing, assembling, shoving, tidying up, and splashing the last of bacteria-free faucet water on my face before heading out into the eerie empitiness of the SF night.

I rode the bus at 5am with all the other puffy-faced souls, pitch black neighborhoods illuminated in flashes along the way by neon signs on storefronts. I shuffled by a crackhead lady in a suit begging for transfer tickets and wobbled through the BART station with my 27-pound backpack protruding like a giant hunch on my back, looming high over my head. As I sat waiting for the train, staring ahead blankly through two sleepy eyes, a black man made some type of intergalactic eye contact, said hello, sat next to me, and had a very intense and animated conversation with some other person on the other end of the receiver of the non-existent phone he was cupping.

On the BART itself I watch as a man lays passed out on a seat, his beanie covering and smothering his entire face. He pops awake suddenly, leaps to his feet, punches the air three times -pop, pop, pop - like a schizophrenic Rocky Balboa, and tells himself he GOT THIS. He blows himself a kiss in the reflection of the train mirror, then comes over and leans on the back of the seat in front of mine and tells my non-present, blotchy, oily self that I~m beautiful in a thick ebonics accent. I avert my eyes and tilt the top of my greasy, unshowered head into his face.

I~m soon deposited at SFO where I will turn to the city itself and tell her how dearly I will miss her. Ill watch the sun rise from international terminal two as I sit a few seats away from three very foreign-looking foreign guys, long legs outstretched before them, chins pressed down on their chests as they sleep off some foreign debauchery.

I will spend 22 hours in time warp travel. I will read, taste the post-nasaly drip effects of my malaria pill, and slump in and out of leg-cramping sleep onto the shoulder of a ridiculously attractive Indian guy with a svelt physqiue, handsome face and tufts of many black chest hair that goes poking out from the top of his button-down shirt. I will have wicked good dreams.

And now... now... holy fkn shit. Just got to my hotel in the middle of Karol Bagh here in New Delhi, which is situated among a bustling market full of people, stands, small shops, stray dogs, and the perpetual and maniacal sound of honking cars and dinging scooters. I just saw my first cow in the road about five minutes ago, a big ol~hunk of meat sauntering itself down the sidewalk amongst the pedestrians. Twas a moment.

The adorable driver who came and swooped me up from the suprisingly well-organized, speedy and non-chaotic airport, and who smelled of a combination of ciggies and B.O., and who handled all my retarded tourist questions with the utmost patience (^what the hell is that weird-looking elephant human statue thing on your dash^:!), has pointed me to a lovely bar where I can suck on some beers to cool off from the stiffle of heat, should I get over the immediate shell shock of this place and grow the nads or stupidity to go out solo. Beers, he told me, are a girls drink. In exploring a more safer option, Ive been invited to join two old Indian pot-bellied men upstairs for dinner on the roof of this hotel.

Side note - I already knew that the idol on the dash was the Hindu God Ganesh, looked upon as a symbol for good luck, which I am secretly praying to right now, but just wanted to hear my sweet little Indian driver boy tell me all about it while driving in the middle of two lanes, while impatiently honking at all the buses, cycles, tuk tuks and young girls crossing the middle of the road in their saris, while he delicately screamed for a car in front of us - packed to the brim with brown limbs - to hurry the hell on.

Before I can even think about grabbing a drink or risking rape somewhere in the market area outside (walking the three feet from the car to get inside the hotel was a monumentous feat involving dodging oncoming vehicles while not tripping into fruit stands, or into the man selling kabobs out the back of his trunk, or over the clan of squatting loitters who were watching as I almost knocked into the other man slurping goop from a bowl), first thing~s first... Im in desparate need of a shower. Unfortunately the ^shower^ in my room appears to be a scary-looking grimy bucket thing with an attached measuring cup, to be filled to the brim with Indian bacteria-infused infection water for me to get my splish splash on. I do believe I need a game plan to get myself to smell good again.

I~m not sure how far my ignonace alone can take me in this place while I myself am alone.

Welcome to INDIA, the pre-beginning. It hasnt even started yet... I haven~t done shit for shit but arrive relatively safely and trip up on myself, and I already have post traumatic stress disorder. But so far, so veryveryvery good!

NAMASTE!

PELLETS.

2011-08-15T13:33:00.001-07:00

Bars. I don't do bars. Only for birthdays or goodbyes or congrats and or to please out-of-towners or to sit with an old friend pretending to care about their drama when really I’m drowning my own… or pretending to drown some drama when I’ll really just drinking in all the crazies around me for that non-existent novel that I’ll never get around to writing.

Why then, at 1pm on a Friday afternoon, did I plant the seed into the mind of Roomie #1? “Let’s go out!” I say to her. “Let’s go on a **** hunt!”

She nods furiously and I notice a pair of man-thirsty female fangs flash shiny in our kitchen.

Maybe I’m just bored of turning SF into expansive vistas and sprawling parks and enchanting stretches of coastal trails. I want out of my hibernation cave, back into Kingdom Animalia, back where all the beasts and fleshy mammals roam and roar about, where everyone sniffs and salivates and nips at random flank in a bloody feast of sorts.

Come 10pm I’m a miserable retch, completely over my own stupid idea and sitting there understated in stripes and skinnies, flats and a scowl. Roomie comes sauntering out in heels, a mini, a sequence tank, and perfectly flat-ironed hair.

I shudder and pour myself a drowner. Why, Missile, whhhhyyyy?! How much more fulfilling it would be to just stay home in bed and light a vanilla custard candle and fart into your comforter. But, aaaah, Missile, aaaaaaaaaah, against every fiber of your being you must step into the misty night.

I enter Kingdom Animalia. Within seconds I run into someone I know. He spills beer on my flats and asks loudly over the band covering Journey, "Are any of your girls dirty?” He introduces me to his boys as, "Don’t waste your time. She's smart.” He ebbs away when, after the third drink he's bought for me, I keep picking at my nails and say, "Meh, bleh, cool. Be gone, little Cretin."

Cretin’s friend saunters over, all tall and green-eyed and of German decent, a potential degenerate wearing a "Tide" detergent T-shirt. German is drunk and high and gets immediately lost in the depths of my baby blues. He plunges into their crystal waters and splishes and splashes about and kisses some dolphins and skims over coral reefs and drifts to a pool bar where he sips a margarita and rocks to a steal drum band. I – the girl, the flesh, the bone – stand on some distant shore, waving an expectant hand over his face. “Hellloooooooo….”

He resurfaces. He tells me he's a video gamer, loves sci fi, debates shit for the sport of it, and is extremely sensitive because of his absentee father, and I’m thinking, well this is just lovely - two sets of pretty eyeballs and we're done before we've began. I give him my number anyways for zee shit and zee giggle and Sequence and I clunk and zig zag on home.

We're feet from our door when a black SUV slithers by. I see five heads poke out of two windows and hear heckling, obnoxious heckling, vulgar heckling… "baby, baby" this and "hoochie, coochie " that.

I react. I am pure vodka... my blood is vodka... my brains are made of jello vodka that go jiggle, jiggle against my skull. My hand flies back and forth and I tell these fuckers off straight, something clever and classy, worldly and sophisticated. I turn my head back to finish stumbling home. I feel victorious! I feel superior. I feel… concentrated pain?!

Whatever it is, it’s ripped through my shirt and torn through some flesh and lodged itself deep in my shoulder, right in the sun-burnt blade. I reach blindly behind me and run a finger along my back and encounter a smooth ball that’s nestled its way in, a bloody-thirsty tic ready for a parasitic relationship full of vodka and lime disease. I turn to Sequence and say, "I think I've been shot."

“HOLY SHIT, girl! They BBed you! Right in your back! You’re bleeding! Let’s get their license! Let’s call the cops! This is assault! Are you hurt?!”

I bore in with a bored nail of mine and pick the ball from my flesh and flick it on the pavement. I touch my back and feel the open wound. I feel the warm trickle of blood and look at it drying on my finger. I’m hurt by this, yeah. I’m hurt in ways beyond the physical. And I’m thinking, fuck, I really liked that striped shirt. It was sexy, yet loose and flowy, and THE perfect mask for quesadilla gut. Now it’s all ruined.

“Are you infected?! Do you need the hospital? Girl, it’s a hole! It’s bleeding! Let’s GET THEM!”

Zee German texts. “Did you walk the two blocks home ok?”

I light a Glade candle and undress in the glow and dab some generic-brand antibacterial goop into the black and bleeding abyss and climb under the covers and text back: “I’ve been BBed in the back and I’m about to do what I knew I should have done all along and pelt into my comforter. Nice meeting you. Off wiener zen.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bundled up thick in my highly-fashionable sherpa, I draw the strings of my hood tight against my neck and set out on a mission. I want air, sun, water, birds, nature, music, the movement of flesh... but on this particular day the city is in a tizzy. She is dark and ominous and pissed as all sin, all rage and spit and madness. She howls wind in my face. She blasts sand against my cheeks. She twists tornadoes of dirt in my eye. I press along but each step is forced, strained and met with resistance. My temples sting from the cold. Music is ripped from ears as the buds go sailing diagonally in the gust. My pants blow up to my shins exposing ankles and ugly socks and massive hiking shoes two times too large for my feet. Face and hair and guts and flesh are rippling and blowing back until finally I say, “OK, OKKKKK! SHEESH!" and about-face home. The city continues to spew and hiss and churn as she flings wind, sand, and dirt at the back of my head. Pelt, pelt, pelt, pelt, PELT.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hunger. Me want food. Me open fridge. Roomie’s tuna mayo combo in a bowl comes flying ouy at high velocity, smashing at my feet. It’s as if there had been a scratchy throat sitting at the back of the bottom shelf that had hacked and spewed out chicken of the sea. I stare down at the ugly tiled floor, at the sad and stinky mixture of fish and glass shattered and scattered about. Nose upturned I think, awwwwww, and craaaaaaaaap, and damn it all to hell, why me, and why TUNA of all things. I reach for paper towels and do my best to mop up the mess, and use an ugly sock to kick remaining crumbs of glass and fish under the fridge. The next day I buy a new $1.59-cent StarKist packed in water and canned chemicals and replace the silver bullet in the pantry, feeling this ever-so-slight sting of pellet to skin.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It’s mid-week and today my office is California 1, my cubicle: Ocean Beach. I’m heading towards the sand with my salami mustard sandwich, lost in peaceful thought, drifting in some daydream, staring at the giant sheet of silver illuminated under sunbeams, when a fuckin' bitch from the guts of the Oakland ghetto slams into my shoulder. She snaps me out of reverie and spins me one-eighty degrees floored. I turn to stare back at her, mouth a-gape, eyes burrowing into her black, humorless soul in disbelief. Really?! Seriously?! What was that for?!

Dark, ominous and pissed she says, "You had it COMIN’, BITCH."

Not wanting to chance a real bullet to my baby blues, I rotate my shoulder back, say not a damn thing, and walk on to my waiting ocean.

~~~~~~~~

Zee German texts. He wants to know if I found zee gunman yet.

I ignore him and stay curled in bed with my ugly socks and the only German that ever did it for me – Bukowski. I’m reading “Women” and I can’t stop. I read and read and read, completely enamored, all day and into the night until I’ve sucked the last page dry with my feline fangs.

"I poured myself another wine. I couldn't understand what had happened to my life. I had lost my sophistication, I had lost my wordliness, I had lost my hard protective shell. I had lost my sense of humor in the face of other people's problems. I wanted them all back.”

I set my own glass of wine down on my nightstand that had somehow gone unscrewed, pegs and bolts sticking out all over the place like sliced wire exposing its innards. The top of the nightstand was sloping downward and on top of that avalanching mess sat my $2,000 laptop, desperately clinging and defying gravity. I set my wine glass down amongst that mangled, tangled madness, almost as if I wanted it to happen.

I watch the spill in slow-mo, a bloody river of wine flooding the guts of my MacBook, Sutter Home seeping deep into belly of the motherboard. I check the keys and "S", "T", U", "P", I", and "D" won't work, then a day later, nothing else does.

~~~~~~~

2:45pm two days later and I’m spinning on a stool at another bar – the “genius bar” in the Apple store. Sitting next to me is a guy about my age with an over-heated iPad that threatens she’s gonna blow. I have my back to him the entire time. Yeah, the back with the gaping hole in the shoulder. And yeah, the shoulder that was slammed into. He talks over it and asks what I’m in for.

“Hm? Me? Oh, the usual: red wine and stupidity.”
“Oh no! First time here?”
“Nope – stepped on and cracked the screen about two years back.”
“Also the doing of red wine?”
“Indeed, stranger. Indeed.”

He’s pleasant and cool and chatty, but I don’t really feel like talking. I’m spent. I’m shut down. I’m beat down. I’m worn out from all these weird-ass pellets, all these blatant and implied hits and spills and slams and shots that keep telling me that something is up, that something is off, that something is welling inside me, that I reek of stinky StarKist.

I've declared myself afflicted with chronic discontent and the only prescribed cure is movement, forward motion, something new, something different.

I look back at the guy over my wounded shoulder. I know I’m leaving the city to spice things up and I don’t want to start anything I can’t finish. In six week’s time I'll be in India where it's perfectly ok to have sand and dirt lodged in every pore and pelted in my face, where my shoulder is sure to be slammed on the daily by a few of its billions of people, where I expect stinky things all over the floor, where I'll inevitably blow the circuits of all my Western electronics, and where I won't dare flinch or shoot my mouth off when men or the country itself heckles and throws rocks at my head. There, abroad, during travel, completely clueless, in a place and space completely challenging, the pellets will be expected.

“So,” I say, “Taking a break from work right now?”

He laughs and shuffles in his seat. “Actually… I’m in kinda, sorta in between gigs right now. I’m an entrepreneur. Just figuring out my next move.”

“Really? Kinda, sorta same here. I’m a CPA, also on a break.”

“I’m a CPA, too! AND a lawyer… and not sure what to be after that. But planning some exciting stuff for now. A three-to-six month trip to China and Thailand and India because – ”

My baby blues triple in size and spray crystal water beams at him, like blood gushing from a pellet wound all over this stranger who now resembles Buddha, Vishna and Shiva combined. Did I spill on my Mac to meet this boy to have him to comfort my insides, to make me feel normal? Was he sent to sit next to me at this genius bar to speak my language, to make me feel less alone in all my unrest?

“ – I just need to regroup and recharge, ya know?”

“I know.” I think of my own plans for India, of how I can’t wait to replenish my own well by watching people shit on train tracks as I shit out third-world stomach worms.

A Genius behind the bar collects my laptop and hands me a form. “That’ll be $259 for the 2 drops of $5.99 wine, you dumb fuck. Please sign here.”

Before I leave, the unemployed accountant / lawyer / discontented entrepenuier guy enters Kingdom Animila and nibbles on my flesh a bit, on a portion that’s pellet-free. He says, “It was really great meeting you. Perhaps we can talk India over a glass of wine? As long as you don’t bring your computer....”

Oh Vishna and Buk... what to do? What to do?

I will go on to accidentally drop my iPhone 3G hard against the pavement and smash its screen to bits, that's what I'll do. Pelt, pelt, pelt, for zee shit and zee giggle.

Look Ma - I Alienated Myself from P*nis in Only Three Week's Time!

2011-07-29T14:52:00.001-07:00

I accidentally drop my iPhone 3G into a public toilet in N.Y.C.

It's mid-Feb on a frosty day and the weather has stuffed me into an over-sized goose down that I'd slipped into feet first - cuz I'd jammed the zipper (drunk) - on a New York evening prior.

Nature calls as I'm wobbling along the water and, about to be a wide load in a narrow water closet, mittens go in the mouth, purse slings over a shoulder, and smart phone nestles stupidly into the deepest depths of a butt pocket.

The pants go down and...

PLOP.

I spin ‘round in horror and there it is - my iPhone 3G – all sunk and submerged at the bottom of the bowl.

A single bubble streams from the dock connector and breaks silently at the surface.

I gasp(!) and reach in barehanded(!!) and fish out my blacked-out baby(!!!) and stab at its buttons(!!!!) and beg, “Breathe, dammit, BREATHE!!!!!"

It coughs, spats, flitters and flickers, and with whatever juice it has left, and soaked in other god-awful Manhattanesque juices, informs me that SEWER WATER IS NOT A COMPATIBLE ACCESSORY, BITCH.

And so it lives.

And so I exhale deeply and shuffle off to Battery Park....

It’s now real-time end of July and this phone of mine is fully functioning, ringer on and signal strong, yet there are no vital signs. There are no rings, dings, beeps, pings, blips, bloops or buzzes, and when I whisper, "Marco?" into the microphone there is no "Polo!" from the speaker. This thing may as well be floating in the tank of a toilet because - in just three week's time, I've gone and done it again.

I've successfully alienated myself from any contact with penis.

The Illusive Symphony

Four days after the 4th, I fall sick. In my throat is Uma Thurman with Hattori Hanzo and they both be slicing shit up. In my nose are wild-haired scientists with their neon green blends that brew and boil over. I'm gross, I'm bedridden, I'm the polar opposite of "roar, baby, roar".

By Sunday I've gone insane, so I suck down some Dayquil, lull into a gypsy trance, and board the bus to Golden Gate Park. The Symphony is playing at Speedway Meadows and I want nothing more than to spread a blanket across the blades, sprawl my sick body under the sun, and take in SF's finest.

I get to G.G.P. and the main streets are closed off to bikers who whizz by me in waves. I mistake the sound of wheels whirling for violins weeping and end up in the Buffalo Paddock. I backtrack toward the Polo Field, but find myself at the Windmill. I poke at Google maps, which brings me to the Tea Garden. I scratch a wrinkled forehead and lick and point a finger and pour over starred signs that read: You are *HERE*, directionally-challenged dipshit, and that symphony of yours - you ain't ever gonna find it.

I'm on secluded trails, the sun starts to feel all scorchy, the gypsy juice is wearing off, and - holy fuck - is that a vulture overhead eyeing my baking flesh? An hour after this crap and I crack, resign, buy an over-priced pretzel slopped with mustard, and weep epic tears of FAIL.

A guy appears behind me on a bike. "You wouldn't happen to be looking for Rita's party, would you?"

I can smell my pits at this point. They are not party-it-up-with-Rita pits. "Nope. Just desperately looking for the will to carry on."

"You been looking long? I saw you wandering about a mile back, 45 minutes ago, over near the bison."

I would have blushed a fiery red had I not already been singed from the wilderness workout and hopped up on cough suppressant. "Yeah, I got a lil' lost. Way to notice, though, Creeper."

"I can't help but notice girls in boots and ponytails with eyes hidden behind Chanels."

I give him my number so he'll leave me be and I leave him behind for a little knoll.

It's not quite Speedway - but I stretch out on the dandelion grass of Spreckels Lake, set against the charming backdrop of the box-like houses of the Outer Richmond. The sun burns hot into my black skinnies. Seagulls sweep low over the lake's surface. A couple drifts in and out of consciousness on a hill to the left. A gopher goes poking out of a hole inches from my head and sniff-sniff-sniff-sniffs until he bolts from my B.O.

No longer seeking out some illusive symphony, I am feeling oh-so-European and like a sweeping painted figure in this serene, Seurat-like scene. The reservoir of mucus in my chest is but a tub of plums shriveling sweetly into prunes.

I come home golden, sun-kissed, heart all a-flutter... and to a text message from My Penis Pretends to Care man.

"Yo. According to my mucus calendar, your lime green snot of four days ago should now be a honey Dijon yellow - so it's probably a good time to start nagging you about that meaningless sex we're supposed to have. I mean, it sucks you still can't breathe, even though you're probably lying to me about that, but I've got this schlong here that needs attending to. Can I offer to bring you something? Perhaps some tea as I attempt to tea bag you?"

The Ball Decapitator

I'm not volunteering because I have a good heart. I just think the homeless are hilaire.

The truth is I'm a useless un-employee and so I take my unemployed self over to Glide Memorial on Ellis Street, put on a hairnet and tie plastic 'round my waist, reach for disposable gloves, find a coordinator and say, "How can I pretend to be of service?"

He takes me to the guts of the church, into the kitchen, to a cutting board station, and points at boxes overflowing with iceberg lettuce. He says that I'm the salad lady today and hands me a ridiculously large knife.

I do my best Uma and unwrap the plastic off the berg and slam its bottom onto the table and rip out its black heart core and peel off goopy bits. I wield the knife savagely over the head, salvaging only the purest of chopped leaves, which I then scoop off the board and sprinkle like angel dust into a bin of soon-to-be caesar.

I do this over and over, decapitating ball after ball, occasionally interrupted by a homeless drifter who stumbles into the kitchen and says something peachy like, "Where the hell is my god damn cheeseburger?!"

Two hours later I soap down my station and sweep up the floor and help a handicap man to-go his mashed potatoes. He's telling me about his c-c-c-caaa-c-c-c-c-c-cat as I grab the mound of mash and deliver it to a doggy bag.

I attend to the old Asian lady a few tables over who - NO! (she shakes a sun-splotched hand at me) - doesn't want the carrots. Just the bread in one bag, the berries in the other and - NO! (turkey neck goes swinging) - don't touch her fried chicken - she's gonna tear through that ish right now. I say, "Cool, cool, my princess bride. As you wish."

My time ends and I bow out gracefully, popping my head into the main dining area to peak at all the homeless eating up piles of the plain salad I had slaughtered out back. As I nestle my hands into the pockets of my zip-up hoodie and shuffle my way out, a homeless guy in his 20s turns back to me and says, "Thank you very much" before bounding up the stairs and disappearing onto Ellis.

I let that gesture of random gratitude sink in, and as I walk past Union Square and take my bus home, my heart feels as full as those iceberg bins.

But a dark cloud rolls in in the form of a Facebook message from Over-Reacting Scorned Penis man!

"TWO days. It's been TWO days and you haven't responded to my text after our ONE date, HALF of which you paid for. I simply asked if you were feeling better and if you were down to do something this weekend, which you didn't deliberate on yet, being tied up in your hairnets and all. Anyways, no biggie - just felt like making you feel like the rude, thoughtless, disrespectful and heartless subhuman that you are and to display the obvious disconnect in our personalities. Please email me back to confirm that there will be no date TWO and that you are a flaming bitch. By the way, I'm not angry or anything."

Victim of Rape

I wake up on Saturday morning and, after eyeing in the mirror my deep-set, almond-shaped, Asian-esque eyes (from which I dig out deep-seeded wine-induced night goop), I read up on how the Mongols raped and pillaged my Russian Jewish ancestors under the rule of Genghis Cunt.

I'm deeply saddened because I feel that - outside of understanding the language and listening to my mother's mutated accent - the only cultural ties I have at age 30.5 to my rich Ukrainian heritage are to these rape-ridden Mongolian beef slits of mine.

And so today I make a pact - to get it all back - to reclaim who I am - and to stuff my god-damn face. I set out to "Little Russia" in the Outer Richmond, a seven-block strip along Geary that transforms into an enchanting remembrance of my childhood, one full of foul-mouthed, food-loving, vodka-swigging, jewelry shop-owning degenerate immigrants who pinched bloody hell out these over-inflated cheeks of mine.

I wander the misty streets and duck into delicatessens, pick through the produce, and chat up the owners. I press fingertips and face against glass full of schnitzel, krugels, kielbasa, and beets. "Is that cow tongue?" I quiver. "And pierogies?!" I sing.
I plant on a planter,
pirozhok in hand, all deep-fried and thick-packed and minced up with meat.

A man comes out of a bakery and finds me in a moment, as I'm making like a Mongol and raping my food. Grease oozes from dough and seeps through a bag and surges into fingertips and flows through a bloodstream, electrifying and tickling a now nine-year-old soul.

In our mother tongue he wishes me, when translated literally, "a warm and pleasant appetite."

Full of gas-inducing beef and under the glow of nostalgia, I squint up through two slits and tell him, "Spacibo." B
oth stomach and heart are full beyond words.

I'm brought straight back to America, age 30.5, as I'm scraping canola oil out of unheard-of orifices, all spacibo / thanks to a text from Densely Persistent Penis man.

"I think you mentioned you're reconnecting with your rapist past, but that doesn't really explain why you're always busy on my one day off. And, even though, at this point, a retarded ape would get by now that you have no interest in me sexually - and never will - ever - I still need to call you out on this, just to make things as awkward as possible between us. I don't know why I have this weird masochistic need to hear you say to my face that you have no interest in sitting on my face, but I just do, ok? And so, I must know, is asking you out on a 'real' date an exercise in futility?"

The (Flip the) Bird Chick

I see her again - for the thousandth time - the bird chick. The one who pulls up in her Ford Escape and places a tupperware of water on her hood and sprinkles seeds along the asphalt and ends up peppered in pigeons. She walks to the water's edge with birds draped on her forearms, planted on her shoulders, and huddled on her head. The ones that can't fit her body simply flap about her feet.

And each time I drift by I'm MADDENED with the thought: Is she lonely or insane?! LONELY or INSANE?!

Today I can take no more.

I creep up like a creeper and send half her flock flying....

"Hate to interrupt but, by chance... you the bird bitch?"

"Excuse me? Can't HEAR you. What the hell'd you just say?"

"WINGED CREATURES. ALL OVER YOU. YOU THE CHICK FROM HOME ALONE?"

She snarls and hisses and throws seeds at my head.

I say the birds are like a halo and, "Can I please take your picture?"

She squawks, "NO and not NEVER, now get the hell out-my-FACE!"

INSANE, I conclude, as I touch eyebrows a-singed.

I walk away, eyeing the even more insane magenta / orange sun setting over the lapping waves of the bay, and think how the bird bitch said, somewhere in the midst of her spew of hate, "I'm just here to see the sunset." Which is what I came to do too.

Lonely, I think, and leave her be to her droppings.

At home there's a missed call from yet another missed penis.

"I didn't leave a message because I'm actually good-looking, so the fact you didn't pick up is - WHOAAAAAA, bitch, WHOOOAAAA. And what's going on with you anyways? Where the hell have you been? Who the fuck talks to bat-crazy bird women for (pigeon) shits and giggles? All's I gotta say is... you're LUCKY you're hot."

In the Park, With 'Bee' and 'Buk'

San Francisco - she loves me - and always gives me second chances. Even when I refuse to answer half of her calls.

And so there I go again on a Sunday afternoon, boarding the "twenty-late" in the last days of July. I sit next to a bum with "scent" and scabbed-up head as the bus crawls painfully slow through Golden Gate congestion. It passes the park with its nonexistent Speedway and lurches to my stop at the stunning Stern Grove. I've arrived to my amphitheater nestled under redwoods, with its logs and dirt mounds and grass patches for seating.

I tip-toe past people who litter the tiers, over blankets and baskets and bottles and bud. I stumble by brie and over slabs of salami, past couples and clans and other "alien"ators like me. Plopping on a slope, I plant into the grove, and prop with one boot to keep me from sliding.

I avalanche down the hill regardless, damn near in the face of the guy smoking a joint on the tree stump to my left. He sucks in the smoke and blows clouds into the canopy above. I say "hey", breathe in his recycled air, prop myself back three feet up the hill, nibble on berries, read some Bukowski, feel the hot burn of the sun in my skinnies, and wait for the music... the long-awaited music.....

And it begins. Beethoven. Play by the SF SYMPHONY. Illusive no more.

It took a bit of time, some lingering snot, a lil' bit of giving, a taste of my past, chats with the unfortunate, and unfortunate penis, to bring me to this scene under a canopy of trees. No longer under the strains of some desperate, maddened search, and miles away from bison, I got there. In the end, I got my little symphony under the sun.

Right at intermission and with a heart filled with overtures, I also get a missed call, which I send straight to a black hole.

"Heyyyy, it's Creeper from GG park. Yeaaaaah, so, I sent that text the other day with that clever idea about coming over to your house mid-morning and having you quench my thirst with your brita water after my vigorous man ride so I could model my thigh-hugging spandex and ultimately seduce you and get it in. What happened? You know, I never got to see your eyes that day. Don't know their color, their shape, if one is glass, or if both are Mongolian rape-set, but your ass sure did look great in those jeans! I'm calling now because I don't want to miss an opportunity in case, somehow, like if your phone was floating down the Hudson or something, those fifteen earlier texts didn't go through. If you do want to hang - awesome - and if don't want to hang - awesome too. Unless you really don't want to hang, in which case you're a bottom-feeder in sewer water and your lettuce-chopping and selfish bouts of soul-searching are all a filthy lie."

I look at my beloved iPhone 3G before setting it to airplane mode and wonder, why the hell didn't I leave you be to your watery grave?

Girl, That's Messed UP!

2011-07-07T16:06:00.001-07:00

“The main thing is, and this is totally serious, to remember to laugh at yourself."
~Sunday, July 3, 2011~
The setting sun beams in thick from the small kitchen window and comes streaming in through the door of the living room and plants itself like a fat cat directly on my face. It’s 8pm and I slowly crack open eyes that are painfully a-slit. I find myself on the rug, in my jammies, red-painted toes poking out from under the corner of a comforter that’s been haphazardly thrown on the floor. Roomie #1 is passed out to my right, there is a to-go box full of empanadas and cheese sauce on the floor to my left, and (500) Days of "Bummer" is running in the background.
From the TV I hear a girl say, “Start from the beginning and tell us what happened.”
I sit up and scratch my head.
Well. What happened is that I had gotten up that morning like a respectable 30-year-old woman with the intent of making it to Jazzfest. I was legitimately on my way to catch up with Blue Balls and had been dead set on rounding the corner and walking the handful of blocks up Fillmore. I was planning on sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him on the astroturf while bloating myself on beer and listening to trombones and saxophones on this pristine summer’s day until, burping up all that brew, we inevitably make out publicly behind a funnel cake stand.
But yeah, I don’t quite make it past the alleyway of my house that is shared with a restaurant.
The bar manager - the Lucifer of liquids - offers Roomie #1 and me a free drink. We are sucked into a spiraling vortex in which one drink leads to another drink which leads to assortment of shot concoctions which leads to an entire group of us shouting "Salud!" and wiping chins and slamming down empty glasses. And then tortilla chips and guacamole and tuna tostadas and plantains shmeared in bean sauce birth out of this vortex and big bang their way into a severe food coma that chemically combines with all sorts of other spinning / gaseous / explosive matter in this engulfing black hole until... there I go, rewinding my way through the alleyway, back up the stairs, and back into the house where I pass out like a real lady on the living room floor.
My phone buzzes at midnight and splashes a glow on my face as I lift my neck and do the one-eyed squint thing long enough to process a text from Blue Balls: “North Beach. Come.”
I muster an audible “fuck” before neck muscles give out and my face plops back into my pillow.
Missile has messed UP.
~Sunday, June 26, 2011~
It's an early evening on a gorgeous Summer's day. I've got the buds in the ears and I'm walking along the water's edge toward the Golden Gate Bridge, swinging the hips, snapping the fingers and high-fiving the Scandinavian tourists. All is ridiculously well.
But then Friend calls.
Friend’s in despair. Friend asks if she can come see me.
“Sushi and sake bombs?”
“But... but... I was going to skip along the sand and prance amongst the pigeons and….”
“See you in thirty, dirty hippy.”
Dirty is right. I’m a disheveled mess. After a brisk walk home I pull greasy hair into a tight bun, spread scented lotion over a body that hasn't showered in 36+ hours, squeeze dreadful dreadlocked legs into skinnies, and slip feet into flats to hide toes that look like they’ve been gnawed on by a PMSing beaver. I am unmaintained in every imaginable way that a female can be unmaintained on an unassuming Sunday.
When I get to sushi I see that Friend In Despair has called in additional reinforcements in the form of two guys that apparently like girls who smell good. Mortified, I discreetly sniff my masked-up musky body to see if it’d be safer to bolt. But there’s no real escape and, even worse, I find myself duped into a date of sorts when I’m left alone an hour later with the one dude with the cute nose, the adorable freckles and the very full lips.
Unfortunately for my un-muzzled female hormones that I liken to that of a slightly retarded Chihuahua, we share common interests (damn) and he’s actually pretty stimulating (double damn) and after four hours of conversation on stools in the most classiest of bars, he makes sure that I’m made fully aware of those full lips (triple dog damn it all to miserable bloody hell). An hour after that I'm being slammed against my front gate.

A drunk girl goes walking by and says to the rest of her drunken clan, “Oh my god! I’m gonna take a picture!”
To drunk girl I say, “KEEP WALKING, BITCH.”
To me the retarded Chihuahua starts yapping, “let 'im eeeen, let 'im eeeen, let 'im eeeen, let 'im eeeeeeeeeeeen!”
But ughhhh, that nemesis of mine, that annoying nosy piece of shit, Self-Awareness, comes sauntering over and leans his egotistical, self-absorbed, all-knowing arm onto my shoulder and whispers, “You do realize, honey, how unmaintained you are right now. Those full lips couldn’t get past that storm-ridden Amazonian over-growth you got going on if they were made of machetes.”
Self-Awareness lights a cigarette, throws his head back in laughter, and proceeds to linger and loiter on the dark sidewalk like the creepy bastard that he is.
And so from whimpering thin lips I say to Full Lips, “Goodnight,” and curse my way through the alleyway, straight into a cold shower and straight into the waiting arms of Dove and Gilette.
Missile has messed UP.
~Tuesday, June 28, 2011~
Is there anything more superb than the intimate San Francisco dinner party where 14 people make nice around a makeshift table that's made to fit four and that's now set up in the makeshift dining area of a re-arranged living room no bigger than your cubicle?! I think not!

I am excitedly on my way to such an event - hosted by the bar manager (BM) of the Vortex - carrying two bottles of crisp white wine through the crisp streets of the Western Addition, the fresh woodsy scent of trees wafting through the air as I walk by Victorian homes and black guys on the sidewalk hollering, “Love to love to love yaaaaaa, baby!”
When I arrive I do what I do best at house parties that involve cooking and uncork, pour myself a heaping glass, and move to some far off corner away from the knives and the onions. I stand there looking as pretty as one can look without straightening jew hair that multiplied in the mist.

The lights are dim, candles are burning, music is playing, and vino is free flowing. It becomes a fast flurry of white dishes served to a melting pot of gay and straight, brash and polite, OCD and ADD, work-a-holics and alcoholics, Type As and Type I Don't Give a Fucks. Also
flowing throughout the exquisite 7-course meal is great conversation intermixed with my unrestrained booze mouth. BM informs me of this with:
“So in between the seared scallops with mint sauce and the candied walnut arugula salad, you scared the shit out of the three girls to your right with all your talk about hair removal."
(Ain't that messed up.)

The party ends after midnight cheesecake but I decide to stay behind. I’m wary when BM downs some tequila and takes my boots and drapes my legs over his lap and nestles his hand into the cozy cove of shins that are crossed.
He says to me, “You say you can peg anyone, but you can’t really peg me, can you?”
“You bar guy. Get girl drunk in vortex. Girl no remember shit the next day.”
"Oh, but there's more." He tells me the unabridged story of his life: "And so then one day, while in the commune, he took my brother's hand and rammed it onto a cactus...."

After sinking into the crack of his couch and chatting till 3:30am while drinking bubbly and eating mass amount of French bread with brie, I appreciate and understand BM so much more. To his fascinating story I say, “Well, that’s not conventional.” And then I curiously ask, "So how would you peg me?"
“As... intelligent. And a free spirit. But flighty. And emotionally disconnected.” (Read: Seriously, bitch, when the hell are you gonna let me machete my way through your Amazon?!)
Just then my eyes go a-flitter and my emotional wirings start to malfunction and my attention goes toward BM’s roommate - who has walked in with her unemployed musician hipster boyfriend - who within minutes is telling me about how he once came out of a ten-day silent meditation retreat completely euphoric - which his pops mistook as being psychotic - which is why he was subsequently and unjustly admitted into a psych ward. The girl chimes in with, "I was in a psych ward too once." She waves it off by adding, "Rebellious teen thing."

At this point my head feels like the sixth course - like a solid chunk of protein that is accompanied by a side of mashed potato mush that's all been flooded in tomato broth. Come 4:30am I collect my legs off a lap and hoist mi'crack out the crack of the couch and call a cab home.
Missile curls up into a little kitten ball in bed and falls asleep by 5am and doesn’t get up until after your lunchtime. I’m not quite sure if I managed to mess anything up other then my own internal clock that has long been smashed and pissed upon, but probably, in one form or another, known or unbeknownst to me, I’m sure I maybe sorta did. I think. Regardless, I emotionally disconnect and sleep soundly that morning / afternoon.

~Friday, July 1^st, 2011~
Whatever is the opposite of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, this is what I am at 9am. I open the back door of the cab and ease myself in and tell the driver to head toward the Marina. He assesses me through the rear-view mirror and says, “How are you?” I manage to croack out, “Messed UP.”
Blunt honesty on a workday apparently amuses the crap out of well-put-together Middle Eastern drivers who resemble Geraldo Rivera. He roars with laughter.
“You have hangover today, but you have gooooooood time last niiiiiiight!”
He roars again, and he’s so sunny and jovial and full of life that I can’t help but rest my chin on my propped knee and just watch him with a smile. “Yes, yes,” I say, “Four-too-many gimlets always make for a great night!”
He is so much more insightful than the other Middle Eastern inquisitive cab driver of 11am a week or so prior. The one who looked me up and down and said, “You vear man's t-shirt but you in heels." "That is correct, sir." "You go on date last night?" "No, just to a party." "You no go on date?" "Nope, was just at a party." "You come from boyfriend's house?" "No, no boyfriend. Just crashed with a friend after the party.” He starts chuckling to himself, then slaps his knee and says, "You ever hear dis saying, da shame of walk?"
But now I am clear across town, in a neighborhood I’d previously never been in before, going up and down the charming, sunny, hilly streets... and as I try to breathe through my nose to hold back the pukes, Geraldo says, "You youuuuung. You have fun now. You go crazy! Because trust me, it go by very, very fast."
I can see his eyes glaze over. He is 53 now but in his mind's eye he's for sure envisioning those times when he could once throw women in the air like spicy falafels with yogurt sauce and how these women would land perfectly straight on his perfectly functioning lamb kebab.
I say, “You’re not gonna crisis now, are you?”
He drops me off and I shame-of-walk-it through the alleyway and say hola, hola, hola, buenas noches to my Mexican hombres and I say hi to Roomie #2 who is doing crunches on our infamous living room rug. I myself do one massive crunch by rolling back into my beloved fetal position to begin some real sleep en mi cama at 9:30am.
This week has been weird, I think, as visions of sugar drinks still dance in my head. Am I just a mess in general? AM I? But then I picture Geraldo’s thick 'stashe and infectious laugh and sweet nostalgic face and his words of wisdom and ask myself, other than that obnoxious Self-Awareness, who the hell else is keeping tabs on me right now anyways?
Meh. I young. I live. I go to sleep till 2pm now.

'Pon-tificating

2011-06-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

In 2002, at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, I came upon an art installation made completely out of tampons. It was an utter clusterfuck of cotton and rayon piled high and haphazardly into a clumpy mass of thread, displayed on a wooden pedestal, and illuminated by the splash from a single bulb hanging from its own solitary string.

When I saw it I was cramped with curiosity, bloated with wonder, fatigued with awe. I felt a kinetic movement of oneness between the piece and my soul, like I was experiencing toxic shock syndrome right then and there.

What was it about that installation, that giant orgy of Tampax, that I found so wildly wondrous? It wasn’t until recently that I realized that art was imitating life, that the piece was symbolizing womanhood in all its bloody (and gory) glory, and that I am but a living, breathing, walking representation of a ‘pon.

I’ve never felt more like a tampon than after having been away from San Francisco for five months... after having lived in the SUV-filled suburbs and thrown myself into contract work that I don’t particularly enjoy... and after having hibernated and, in that hibernation, thought about how hard it is to balance all there is to balance while still maintaining one's self. I realize now, more than ever, that women are the biggest coot plugs there are.

The woman, like the tampon, is a thing of strength, built to fortify, to absorb. And yet when you break her down, she herself is made of the most delicate, fragile of fibers.

She’s valued and treasured, clasped tight within the vaginal walls… or conversely, forsaken and forgotten, left to rot near the cervix until guilty fingers fish her out a week or two later.

She comes wrapped and shielded, factory-approved, yet sheds her plastic applicator as you slowly let her in… and once inside, she’s there (for at least 8 hours, 17-26 if you pass out drunk) to bare the bloodiest of all messes.

And yet no matter what junk she’s put through, she only ends up molding, expanding, growing.

There I was, almost a half-a-year back, a tampon nestled blissfully in the perfect hole of SF: warm, cozy and odor-free. And I had purpose: I was working in symbiotic harmony with the city to allow for giddy gymnastics in white pants without embarrassment. And the flow was majestic, the exact match to my absorbency level.

But due to timing and circumstance and the course of life’s cycles, and by the very nature of flow itself, things changed... they went from light to heavy and a torrential downpour of madness ensued. I threw on my Donna Karen galoshes and braved the storm - even called in the leak guard for reinforcement - but bloody hell - there’s only so many milligrams of plasma a skinny-ass Ukrainian-American jewpon can take. My hole was no longer a-bliss, but a-piss... and over-flowed. I resigned and stopped fighting, realizing that some things go beyond my “regular” control.

My string was yanked.

Just like that I was back in Orange County to work as an accountant, to live at home with the ‘rents, to be single, bored, and creatively-repressed, with the full knowledge that nothing would be changing for months on end. Awesome. Hey life – why don’t you throw acid on my face next time – that would be way cooler.

In moving back temporarily for work, I had plucked myself out of the proverbial hole and cannon-balled head first into the toilet, spiraled through the rustiest of plumbing, and plummeted into the deepest, darkest depths of the piranha-filled Pacific. Absorbed to max capacity and completely misshapen, I’ve been lost at sea since, drifting like a bottom-feeder and making my way through the murkiest of murk, waiting for shallow waters... for bouncy... to burst out of the ocean like a dolphin on crack whose crack just got tickled.

What's been most comforting and connecting is that, along the way, I’ve come across other tampons in the gook, some teary-eyed, others stoic, some strong-willed, others weak… all dealing with their own bloody sops... death, anxiety, heart-ache, job hatred. And we’ve all filled each other’s gaps during our time at sea, our individual experiences colliding to make one curious, beautiful, nonsensical installation.

Marooned for months, it’s been a hard hiatus away from home, and yet it's felt fruitful, like I was meant to be adrift.

But I, the bloated tampon, exhausted and wind-whipped, sun-scorched and blue-lipped, a pruned, famished, frazzled mess, every pore and fiber of my core soaked with too-muchness and not enoughness, can finally make out the geometrical shapes of the Bay in the horizon.

And unless the tides change within the next week or two, I'm finally going to smash head-first into the steel mass that is the GG Bridge, and be dragged with the current over the jutting rocks, and wash ashore amongst the kite-surfers and the seagulls, along with the kelp and syringes, and be deposited like a dead fish on the sand, my watery deliverer slinking away without so much as a "later bitch."

And as I'm minding my own business of existence, foaming up froth, hacking up another half-a-year's-gone by, some little barfoot sun-kissed giggly shit with freckles and an adorable mop of curls, en route to catch his frisbee, is gonna step on my string and, realizing I'm slimed between his toes, recoil and scream in disgusted terror, "Mommy, it's an engorged tampon, and it's moving!"

And I won't react. From lethargic lips I'll muffle, "Fuff off, kid" and lay there quiet and still, fanned face-down on the ground... and dry... and release the bloat... until I'm but light and white and whole again, a slim, sleek bullet shielded in plastic, ready to be plucked again at random and shot into another dark, gooey, questionable hole in the hoo haw of life.

Ready to go with the… flow.

And what have I learned from surviving this overly-dramatic journey out da vazhin? My absorbency. This bloody tampon is upgrading herself from super to super plus, with ant-slip grip.

See you soon, San Fran. =)

Even Blue Balls are Meant to Be

2011-06-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

I wake up at 11am in a bit of a funk and saunter all groggy into the kitchen to peel back the curtains and let the light in... and to have my traditional pre-coffee bout of purposelessness, loneliness, blah/blah/blahness that always seems to nag at me at a time of transition and change and six months of shameful funemployment. This tradition usually lasts for the five minutes that it takes to brew up my personality in bold Sumatra ground arabica bean form.

On this particular morning I'm saved by the grumble and the hiss and the pour and the sip and - ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.... the caffeine courses through my veins and snakes up my spine and pulses behind my pupils and - yes - I'm able to see what a gorgeous summer's day it is and that - crap - I have about 1.5 hours left before this coffee high fades and I morph back into a flailing little cockroach that can't quite get itself upright.

I force my ass outdoors, to the gym, to the elliptical, to really beat out all that's been eating my beaten soul.

As I'm walking home freshly endorphined, light as a feather and stiff as a bitch who hasn't worked out in half a year, who should come leaping by but that one guy I've given blue balls to off and on between 2002 - 2008!

The creepy part: I had thought of him just an hour back, while at the gym, right as I was feverishly guzzling back gallons of water, right as my bastard capillaries were exposing me to be the lobster-red mess that I am. My very thought was: "I hope I don't run into that one guy who I know works out here who I gave blue balls to off and on between 2002 - 2008."

You're never safe if you're alert and present and tuned into the synchronicity of the universe. And so there he went - the guy I had given blues balls to off and on between 2002 - 2008 - on a run - at approximately 4:30pm on a sunny SF afternoon - damn near crashing into me like a happy but oblivious bee dressed in head-to-toe Lycra.

He does a spin and buzzes past me without notice and I stare at him dumbfounded, mouth half open, finger pointing awkwardly toward him... no words forming from lips that still carry a post-workout shimmer of sweat. There he IS - WAS - WENT - is going - is leapin'?! - now dashing over a planter and springing onto the street and skipping back onto the sidewalk and prancing into the horizon like a gazelle on crack.

I shrug and proceed to wobble home on thighs that feel like jello.

With the remainder of my coffee high + 30 minutes of newly-gained gym endorphin high + 15 minutes of the rubber / latex high I got after stealing the batteries out of the Comcast remote in the living room and using my lucid dream vibrator to shoot my legs over my head (no blue bits in these parts), I think about synchronicity in the city. A sexy concept, really. You know, when two seemingly unrelated events end up colliding, or not colliding, in a meaningful way on the sidewalk while your boobs are looking extra flat in a sports bra. When you think of Blue Balls and Blue Balls goes bouncing by.

I think about how a couple weeks back, at the Union Street Fair, I had been strolling past booths full of kettle corn and smoking wieners when something possessed me to turn my attention back behind me, to a table full of strangers. And just then I see that one of the "strangers" is actually the untz untz Jewish engineer guy who had once ditched me on a date to go dance and purse his lips by himself by a set of speakers (yeah, THAT guy)... and he just so happens to look up from his menu as I go sashaying by in my House of Dereon jeans (mmmm hmmm).

We blow each other air kisses knowing that it will be the only thing being blown between us, ever.

That I consider to be... coincidence, timing.

I think about how days later I'm at a happy hour after a seven-hour Napa wine-tasting tour, guzzling back a dirty martini to cleanse my palette of the seven gallons of the vino had earlier. I'm with my visiting friend from Alaska and her man slut friend from SF who we both knew back in our So Cal days. My girl friend from SF meets up shortly after and I say, "Girl Friend From SF, meet Man Slut who also lives in SF."

Girl Friend From SF looks at Man Slut curiously and says, "I feel like I knowwwww you...."

They stare at one another with cocked heads. I sit there staring at all the cocking, waiting, expectantly, before it clicks. Man Slut leaps enthusiastically from his bar stool chair, rocking the table and rippling our drinks, and points at Girl Friend From SF and says, "Undergrad! I slept with, like, at least four of your friends in college!"

My eyes light up with joy and I clap my hands and say, "Well, isn't this delightful! We all know each other! Wonderful! Just wonderful!"

That I consider to be... degrees of separation.

I think about how after my visiting friend from Alaska leaves, after we had spent an entire week together bouncing from bar to museum, from bar to restaurant, from bar to concert, from bar to bar to Bar Tartine to that one other bar, how I had changed into my jammies, pulled tight my blackout shades, curled up into a little blue ball in bed, and interchangeably wept for my soul and slept for about four days straight.

Upon waking I had foraged through Dr. Oz' website in search of a longevity detox purifying drink that would undo all the damaging damage I had done from bar to bar to bar to that one other bar.

My roommate comes home a few days later and finds me slumped on the kitchen floor, cross-eyed, bloated, and burping up pulpy pools of the pureed celery / kale / apple / carrot / non-fat yogurt concoction that I had drank too many days in a row and that had now started to stream from the corner of my lips down to my white tank. I'm seizing from the stuff. Overdosing.

The roomie, however, JUST SO HAPPENS to be carrying the antidote in the form of not one, but two boxes of Patxi's deep-dish pizza that her friends couldn't finish at dinner. Citing her own lactose intolerance, Roomie bequeaths to me not one, but both boxes of saturated fat. She shovels a jalapeno-encrusted slice down my throat on a spatula and guides my jaw to chew... and it's like a needle of adrenaline piercing through my breast plate, roaring me back to life.

Now THAT I consider to be good fortune, the doings of a heavenly angel.

But synchronicity... synchronicity has a more it-was-meant-to-be feel to it. Like a tickle to the ass and when you look up to see who slid the feather along your crack, you catch wind of a coy Universe looking all innocent, twisting from side to side with a finger in its mouth....

Just three weeks back I was sitting in So Cal with one listless leg up on the table, clicking my way through all the clinically insane Craigslist ads for over-priced rooms to rent in San Fran. I was DYING to get back. And yet all that seemed to be available for my return was a partitioned off living room space that I could share with the likes of Alex, Spencer, Michelina, Rebecca, Natalia, Farhad and Su Yon in a charming 1.5-bath Victorian flat in the Lower Haight. Or I could coexist with the lady who threatened to stab me in the neck if she ever caught me eating produce that wasn't organically grown.

This is how amused I look after two weeks of this bullshit search:

It's at this point that I start wishing I had never given up the lease on my old place.

My friend invites me to stay alone at her pad in Oakland. Why not, I tell her. I can continue the virtual search up north and continue to suffer rejection and emotional abuse at the hands of scorned a-holes and anal-retentive schizos I've never met, while I question my own self worth, and while I drink the last of your liquor, smoke the last of your weed, and eat the last of your frozen taquitos. Sounds great!

The day before my flight up to the Bay I check out the listings that don't have photos, something I hardly ever do because I believe these ads to be more of a breeding ground for rapists or idiots who don't know how to get the pretty picture off their camera and onto that boxy-looking thingie.

But this day I un-click the photo requirement and I see a description for a room in the Marina, located in a house on the same cross street that I used to live on. The room features a charming non-functioning fireplace and crystal chandelier. The girl occupying the room must break the lease and it is critical for her sanity that she make like a tree. The ad drips in desperation... and familiarity.

I know this non-functioning fireplace. I know that chandelier.

Both my scalp and my listless leg are now covered in hair and prickles as I realize, dear friends, that this is my old place, the one I had given up... and the one that I had wanted back.

I was barely able to steal the last of my friend's frozen taquitos in Oaktown before I fully move to the city, to this OLD HOUSE of mine. I shuffle my old bedroom furniture (which I had left behind with the girl who look over my lease) from the 8x8 room I had once occupied to the larger room that I had always lusted after... the one with the fireplace, the chandelier, the extra leg room to do acrobatics. I launder all the spiders and their demon spider babies off my clothes that I had left in storage for five months in the back patio.

Everything was eerily already there for me, waiting patiently for my return.

If that ain't ball-tingling synchronicity, I don't know what the hell is! And not of the blue persuasion. It's the kind of synchronicity that explodes all over your face and blinds your right eye.

So now, in the mornings, in the pre-coffee state, when I saunter into the kitchen and peel back the curtains of my old and now "new" home, as I reach for my arabica beans and organic cage-free eggs and spelt bread, I try not to think that I am back in SF without purpose, without meaning, or that I am lonely or this or that... because thoughts do manifest into reality. It's a proven mystical fact for the Missile.

Rather, I stand there feeling grateful for all my good fortune and for this ridiculous life that I lead. I stand grateful for all this time I have to think and chill and write and do whatever the hell I wanna do without answering to anyone!... for my repulsive humor, for my own money that I put in my own bank that I now fritter away on booze and the prostitution of inner being, for my overall health if we exclude the liver, and for the good looks that allow me to give men blue balls at my leisure.

I trust that somehow my mind met matter in a crazy collision of synchronicity and that I am doing the right thing with my time and that I am meant to be right here, right now, even if that right now means...

Drinking at Notte, Bus Stop and Blue Light... drinking at Red's Java House, Palimino, and the Wine Bar in the Ferry Building... drinking at Aub Zam Zam and Alembic and Tacolicious (thrice over)... and in Napa all day and at One Merchant one night... at Tipsy Pig and City Tavern, Yoshi's and Delfina... Delarosa and The Fillmore, Monaghan's and The Brixton... at Public Works and Elixir... and in my own bed, alone, as I research raw veggie detox purees that taste like my asshole and vinyasa yoga studios that I will never go to and... and... damn.....

Coffee... high... fading. Morphing... into... cockroach... now.

The Final Cut

2011-01-04T15:53:00.001-08:00

Riding the bus one day with my usual load of Trader Joe's, I catch the eye of an Asian lady sitting across the way. She turns her nose up at me and gives me a theatrical thizz face because – apparently – she can tell from ten feet away that I hadn't showered or bothered to shave for four days and she sizes me up for the blue-eyed, fair-skinned, vile, diseased threat that I am. I gnash my teeth and hiss back at her and, as with the other people on the bus, we turn our heads to focus on some invisible object in the distance so we don’t have to look at or smell one another.

Enter older white lady with blonde spiky hair. She's dressed in all black and dragging a paisley-patterned eyesore of a suitcase which she plops down – along with her carcass – two seats away from me and she – like all the others on the bus who are pouring over maps or staring out the window or jabbing at their iPhones – seems normal enough to not stir my fight-and-flight response. That is, until, she fumbles with the zipper of her suitcase to reveal a heap of synthetic wigs – all curly, twisted, tangled, and knotted – and reaches her hand into this sea of strands to produce a bottle of water. She unscrews the cap and fills her palm and throws the water at her face. The droplets ricochet off and fly beyond her head, spattering against the panes.

She fans herself with her hand and, still not satisfied, pours Aquafina directly onto her lap, the water cascading like a fall down her mountainous pooch, breaking into rivers down the seams of her pants, and reforming into a small pool at her crotch. Unfinished still, she unloads the remainder of the bottle onto her head, the beads leaping from her blonde spikes as she thrashes her hair about in the bus, each droplet infused with her insanity.

It's like a music video featuring a blonde fighting off a hose that she just can't seem to control, with nothing left to do but giggle and bask her breasts in the water that happens to gush out at her in slow-mo... only this particular woman was fugly, completely out of her god damn mind, and did nothing for my southern bits.

I watch the run-off of water in total horror as it slithers onto the seat between us like a poisonous snake, darting and flicking its tongue at me, threatening to strike.

Asian Thizz Lady has a look of unimaginable contempt on her face. Her previously-droopy expression is now contorted in a way to make one think a magician boarded the bus and willed her brows and left nostril to levitate to unheard-of heights. In my own disgust I do my best to channel the abandoned Russian orphan who has joined the circus to finally feel like she belongs, and contort my body in such a way that I acrobatically balance myself on one butt cheek as far from this lunatic – and her contaminated reptile water – as humanly possible.

Only then did the Asian lady look at me with understanding and turn up a very small but perceptible smile. Amongst trying to stay dry from the torrential downpour of madness and balancing skillfully on my right ass cheek, I look back at Thizz Face and think...

Damn - It took something completely disturbing - and my display of discomfort - to make us bond, to make you crack a smile.

Days later, on my way to my evening yoga class clear across town, I am riding the bus next to a woman with flying saucer eyes. She is talking to herself - to her many selves - in a proper British accent. "No Frederick," she scolds. "It's not nice to hit other people. Sit down! Stop that immediately!" I turn down my music and think, "Shit. This one's certified."

Flying Saucer Face continues with, "Today is October the fourteenth, two-thousand-ten, and it is 6:47pm." She makes a grand gesture with her hand and, in doing so, her finger brushes a wisp of my hair and she turns to observe me with her haunting eyes, which makes me gasp and clutch my yoga mat and wish that I can shrink down in size and crawl into its dark, eco-friendly folds. She hits her head a few times and continues to talk of scones, butlers and other such poppycock. I sit there frozen, my heart beating tenfold, afraid this woman will mistake me for disobedient Frederick and sink her mouth into my neck, tear out my jugular, and whip out a scalding pot of Earl Gray with which she can take down my blood and her evening tea.

She filled me with such unease that I show up to yoga a nervous wreck, and have to squeeze in seven extra vibration-filled ohms to regain balance, to calm my chi. And I think...

Damn - how sucky that another person's deal, of which I did not contribute to or had nothing to do with in the first place, physically affected me.

A month later I board the bus with a small suitcase, on my way to the airport because I am leaving my beloved city for a work opportunity. To my left sits a bum with a yellowed, dirtied beard, looking ever-so-calm and Jesus-like in a ratted shirt and shorts. He is carrying a tennis racket and eating peanut butter straight from the jar with a plastic fork. To my right sits a slumped-over bald man who talks out his thoughts in methodical gusts. "Get off in two stops," he says and, as we near his block, "One more stop. Not this one. The next." Across from me is a black man in a jacket covered in bird crap, and atop his shoulder sits a beautiful white parrot dressed in a red devil outfit. The parrot nuzzles its head against the man’s cheek and in return, the man pets the parrot’s head in pure love and adoration.

And then a woman boards the bus, alone. She is clearly foreign, a tourist, with a blow-dried mop of black hair that appears to have been styled by a cyclone. Her yellow cardigan has a stain on it (perhaps the remnants of clam chowder), and she looks so frazzled and disheveled that I suspect that she’s been violently raped by sea lions on the Wharf. A young girl gets up and offers this woman her seat and the woman, dripping in misery and bitterness, says, "I vill stand! It don-a matter now! I've-a had enough!"

Sandwiched between Jesus to my left, Rain Man to my right, and sitting across from a man who has a bird as his only companion (one that shits all over him at that), I think…

Damn - my only sadness is for this woman who has been so clearly stripped of humor, if she ever possessed any to begin with.

I get off at my stop, thankful that my own baggage is small, that I had packed so light, that I was able to quickly squeeze on and off that bus with no problem. And still reeling from that final display of madness, I am left with this final thought:

We are truly the directors of our own films. The footage lies raw before us and we, individually, sit for days / weeks / months / years in our own editing rooms, sift through the bits and pieces and, ultimately, string together our own final cuts. Flying Saucer Face spun a horror. Parrot Man crafted a love story. The bald man created a cerebral thriller, Asian Thizz Face a foreign drama. And is one tale really more compelling than the other? Does any one film ring more true?

If there's a lesson to be learned from all those "certifieds" I encountered, it's to not judge any of the movies, but to watch with humor, compassion, and an open mind. It's to not let other people's films overshadow or make me think any less of the quality of mine. And it's to stick fiercely to my own genre - the quirky, independent documentary, always based on a true story.

Now DAMN - if you'll excuse me, it's hot as balls in these parts and I'm off to unload a bottle of Aquafina on my crotchal zone.