Dusty Trail Camembert

I met a guy named Yann — a juggling radiographer with a zest for life and an uncanny resemblance to Bret Mackenzie from Flight of the Conchords — the other day in Queenstown while staying with some couchsurfers in a tent for the Jazz Festival (shwing!) and he invited me to hitch a ride with him up the western coast of the Southern Island.  He had never heard of Napolean Brandy so I bought him a bottle and he hated in it.  We slept in his car for 3 days, couchsurfed with a dreadlocked hippie (and CS initiate!!!) in Wanaka and saw a film at the aptly-titled Cinema Paradiso that a Canadian told me about when I met him in the ruins of Sukhothai, Thailand, around 8 months ago.  Yann wouldn’t let me pay for gas and translated my Gilbert Becaud songs in real-time as we cruised through the rain and built fires in corporate mining fields with unending amounts of wood.  We never stopped laughing.  Now I’m in Christchurch and I’m off to the Italian Festival so goodbye.

Throat, Seared Rare

I woke up in Christchurch this morning and I already had a sore throat.  Amazing.

It surprises me, too, that I’m in New Zealand, but I am.  Things are drifting away from me and scattering everywhere, at a pace I cannot match.  Things are silly and crazy and in the extremes, regarding temperature and tempers and otherwise.

A month, glorious and to be detailed later, spent with Jon + Doug, finished with us meandering back to a hostel in Brisbane, Doug tackling me to the sidewalk, me thereafter trying to fight him (I went so far as to head-butt him when the realization hit, wrestling with him, that he’s stronger than I).  It shouldn’t be, but it’s already a great memory.  Sorry if your head hurts, Signor Weissman.  I am happy to have your friendship.  Hi, Jon.

Now I’m headed down south to Dunedin, then to Queenstown, starting a hopefully-long streak of CouchSurfing through these islands.  Some folks invited me to go to a Queenstown Jazz Festival, and to go camping, with them, and I’m excited.  I excrete!

There are moments where I tire, where my new experiences traveling overlap with the old, where I wonder if I am outgrowing this lifestyle, but the fact is that I am seeing a constant renewal of beauty unfold before me with minimal effort and I have met and surpassed personal expectations a few times now, however unrealistic or impractical they may be.  I find myself in a pressure box, creative extremes tugging me in two different directions.  I have had so many different things to say, to share, to express, but I never have the time to allow them to come out.  I feel like I’ve been living full speed for such a long time, though concurrently I feel like I’ve been so devoid of so much — for example, I haven’t considered my own responsibilities in well over a year, and can’t look to the future at all, as I used to, so, all told, I have nothing to say, really.  Mostly, my throat just hurts.

The Dodgers, too, are hurting me.  Blah!!

Okay, that’s all for now.  More soon, and sorry for dropping off of the face of your planet for so long.  I will see you sometime soon, I promise.

Love,
eriC

Scarz

This is the best writing I’ve ever done, in an email to a 21-year old philosphy majoring CouchSurfing Host who lives in Dunedin, New Zealand.  I don’t even know if I’m going to Dunedin, but I wrote her this email anyway.  Hopefully she’s hot.

“I am interested in soorfong your couch!

Hi Lauren,

I’ve read your profile and ultimately decided that you aren’t concerned with reality or truth.  You contradict and confound, and take an philosophically anti-intellectual stance.  Do you also like to finish many of your rebuttals by referencing feces?  I do this too often.

I wonder if we could coexist, musically.  I’m slightly embittered but I live in my head.  I think I am like a recent Tom Waits ballad, or an accordion, or I’d like to be these things.  If you could be a musical instrument, what would you be?  You don’t have to answer that question.

I live in Melbourne, so I can’t text you without your being confused as to who I am.  If you agree to welcome me into your house with your friends, maybe then, when I arrive in Denudinern, I will text you to say, “hey, I’m lost!  I’m three hours late!  I am bringing 5 more people than I told you, and I smell terribly!”  Until then, hopefully the email will suffice.  I work in a restaurant and today some people came in from Incavargergill, and I can’t believe how Scottish they sounded.  Is this a south-south kiwi characteristic?  That’s so wonderfully exciting to me.  Maybe you’re not quite that south.

I’m from Logs Angeleoos, Calirogtgrnia, in the UFSA.  Why am I obscuring the names of all geography, you might ask?  I don’t know.  I’m SOOO tired.  I just wanted you to see that I wasn’t doing it to NZ cities alone.  My Melbournian friends peg me as being very self-righteous and think that when I tell them Australian TV is embarrassing, I am being a cocky American.  I don’t think this is true.  I have worshiped Australia and New Zealand for a long time.  Lil’ Chief Records is a Kiwi record label that I’ve worshiped forever, and I think that Heather from The Brunettes is beautiful.  I just don’t want you to think that I’m a cocky American, is all.

I also think you should know that I customize all of my CS emails to what I think that the recipient would want.  I have just finished sending an email to an artist in Christchurch who is an older man that sounds very weird, who I have perceived to be rather curt, so I sent a rather curt and self-conscious email to him.  You I perceive to be rather loquacious and arrhythmic, like a song by The Books, which is a band who, if you don’t know, you should check out, and so I am writing like this.  I’m also making many musical references because you seem to mention music a lot.  All that I’m after is free housing and simply nothing else, which is why I try to manipulate CS hosts via email into believing that there are commonalities that we share.  I’ll be able to laugh at all of the people spending $25 in hostels!

My emails are often very long.

I really like interesting people, but I think sincerity is the most important quality in all of mankind.  I think the only people that I despise, apart from particular Steve Miller fans, are the insincere.  Do you think Bob Dylan is insincere?  I hear he is doing the voice of a GPS car satellite system.  Could he need money that badly?  My father’s name is Steve Millman, by the way, so I couldn’t really despise Steve Miller that much.  It’s a familial thing.

I’m not on drugs or anything.  I’m mostly a very normal person, in fact probably a middle-aged man trapped in a 24 year old’s body.  I am too nice and while the majority of people might not be, I am not cynical because I have met amazing people.  One really good person I invest all of my earnestness in, and the rest of the people I try not to get upset about.  I have become better than I used to be at recognizing the good people.  Many of them have been through Couch Surfing.

This has ceased to be a couchsurfing request; I’m really just writing at this point.  I won’t be this interesting in person, if we happen to meet.  Sorry about that.

I hope you are doing well in life and school.  I wonder if I shouldn’t go to Graduate School, because thinking is so good sometimes.  I also wonder if I should just hire a car for my 3 NZ weeks because I don’t want to have to cram in a bus with a bunch of drunken slobs.  I also don’t have a lot of money.  Responding to this horribly masked request for travel advice is entirely optional.  I need to start making decisions for myself, and with spontaneity.

I’ve decided that if I received an email like this from a CSer, I’d be really concerned but also slightly curious, and also at least I read your profile.

Sincerely,

Eric”

The Mediocre Panjandrum

I’m currently cooking like a braised lamb shank with red wine and tarragon, with roasted balsamic potato bullshit on the side and like a spiced pumpkin-pear sauce over ice cream for dessert. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing – I found the lamb shanks on sale from $8 to $3.50, so I bought them, and everything else was lying around getting all expired proper – but I do know that I have another hour and a half for the oven to finish her up, so I thought I’d write an old update; obviously, they’ve been as sparse as ever, and likely more so.

Not to fret, however, for those keeping score: if you might have noticed that the population of gerunds in the collection to be a bit slight, it’s because I’ve just finished two short screenplays (twenty pages-or-so, each, so…not such a huge deal, unless you’ll allow me to consider it to be, in which case I will!). I’m writing or cooking with most of my free time, and my skin is as pale as a dead chicken’s, but this, and its associated contentedness, can be explained in the following paragraph:

About a month ago, I took a weeklong, exploratory trip to Tasmania, as many of you know. I was inexplicably unhappy in Melbourne, or at least felt a certain void within me, and in finding flights for about $30 each way, I decided to put my life on pause, rent a car, and drive down the coast of nothing. I was alone, had no idea of what I would do, or why I was going (as usual), and this model had succeeded in most precedent. Still, I was in my dream city of Melbourne and this was a huge concession of failure. I half-expected to return with no bed and no job, aborting my dream before it could even bloom.

I got to the tiny, two-roomed airport in Launceston, on the northern part of Tasmania, at night, and drew circles on the floor for fifteen minutes, trying to figure where and how I could rent a car, where I would sleep, and what I would do with my lone morning in this city. By the time I concluded that I could determine nothing, the shuttle had already departed, leaving me with another three hours at the quiet, cold airport. I secured the number to a hostel, reserved a bed, and when the shuttle driver arrived, he instructed me immediately to stay elsewhere, so against my instincts, I went where he took me. Upon arrival I met the most annoying women I’ve met in my life and spent the rest of the night figuring out how I could be alone. The result was a late night spent in a snug, Edwardian-hued reading room with Saul Bellow’s Herzog and a bottle of wine procured from a late-night liquor shop. This, mixed often with a shot of notebook and the “book I’m writing” (ha!), dominated my nights in Tasmania. My days, instead, were that when I wasn’t walking up a mountain or driving through the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen in my ham life. To put it simply, my going to Tasmania was a less-dramatic instance of a newt finding water after a post-natal lifetime spent inexplicably and invariably ashore. I loved her, and she loved me. Her nutmeg-scented woodlands, her peppermint rainforests, her topaz-and-sprite oceans and confectioner’s sands, even her moth-y lamb’s wool elders and wayward, Wayfarer youths, I loved. Tasmania in July was, if kissed by a touch of frost, the type of place where you drove for an hour without seeing a soul before landing at a place, almost accidentally, that was recently named the number one travel destination on the earth by Lonely Planet, still finding simply no one. Tasmania was my kind of place.

Arriving in the Bay of Fires wasn’t dramatic. I got into its nearest town around four or five, poked my head into the information center/library to ask an old man how to get to the heralded beach, then snapped into my car and drove out of town, but in the wrong direction. After a ten minute drive full of shame, I shot back around and drove toward the ocean. I drove, and then I drove more, realizing that this place wasn’t nearly as close to town as I expected it to be. The sun began to set and, considering that I hadn’t planned more than that night there (this only begins to scratch the surface of the abundance of beauty on the Apple Isle, that one can’t even devote a full day for fear of missing other places), I had to haul brass. Shooting defiantly past speed placards, turning my nose up and the countless nocturnal warnings and their associated and flattened kangaroo, koala, Tasmanian devils, wombat, and wallaby. It was like piloting a clipper ship, against millions of warning signs, through New York Bay, to find the Statue of Liberty littered with bullet holes: knowing that I could be victim of laying waste to a number of a country’s true icons was exhilarating or worrisome. Nevertheless, I hauled ass up and down hills in my rental car, racing the sun, trying to find a beach that faced the sun’s set. Ultimately, I found the tip of the collection of bays, screeched my car to a halt in a makeshift parking space, and literally ran through a field of brush and sand, resembling the long grass of the Cape Cod of my mind, before I could tumble on a beach I had completely to myself. I sat on the lichen-covered rock, famously surrounded by that molten orange, playing my harmonica with the lapping of the invisible water onto the sand, impossibly drenched with countless vibrant shells, rendering the beach almost pizza-like, and waited for that big, buttery star to plunge into the horizon. It was among the most wonderfully anticlimactic experiences I’ve had.

After that, Tasmania was mostly driving for mile upon kilometer, kilometer before mile, seeing no one and everything, blasting my music through open windows as gusts of wind carried Cameron Bird’s shrill voice past the frightened sheep, over the haggard crevasses, into the heartless and wild ocean. A night here was spent in some V-frame with no heating, breath visible in bed, sharing a bottle of Jameson with two weird and whimsical Germans, the hotel’s owner living ominous/omnipotent in the lit loft above us, these eight the only opposable thumbs for considerable distance.

Ultimately, I ended up couchsurfing on Mount Wellington, which is the crag that hovers over the otherwise pedestrian city of Hobart. I must express how grateful, for the city’s comparative mediocrity, I am for having found this place, as Mount Wellington manages to be close to the city while still exhibiting the qualities of Tasmania that I came to love. What’s more, though I arrived hours late for a curry party/couchsurfing convention, the last awkward guest to arrive before all of the guests departed, fifteen minutes later, my host ended up being one of the most wonderful people I’ve met to date. Her heart spanned Cataract Gorge, that awesome natural phenom located near Launceston created right around the Ice Age, her laugh as infectious as was whatever disease rendered the dinosaurs extinct, her taste in music and film as timeless and essential as a fern. We intended to perhaps do something with my time there – I tried to cook her decent Mexican food, and failed, and certainly never left the house during the evenings – but ended up staying up late, watching movies and discussing the heartbeat of the universe. My last night there, after I spent the day hiking on the mountain, calculating moss and racing the calm breeze at the mountain’s summit, we rented a few films and ultimately watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which made me cry for a long, long time. I should have been embarrassed, but I wasn’t, because Jo was crying, too, and again we proceeded to talk for three hours about things I’ve never expressed to another person before. My relationship with Jo was, and continues to be, representative of why traveling is necessary: with nothing in common and no bond or even ground, we nevertheless could, without pretence or effort or ulterior intent, break down social barriers on that mountain and become as close for one night as I’ve been with anyone. And no, I don’t mean close in that sense, thanks.

Back in Melbourne, all of my friends and co-workers noted the significant upswing in mood I carried with me. Even tonight, talking with my lovely French roommates, Elise and Elodie, they looked back with nostalgia to the person I was, fresh from my vacation.

Since then, I must say, life has been pretty normal. Not that it’s a bad thing, or that I’m complaining; contrarily, life has been alternatingly as great and careless as I can remember. Still, I am back to working full time at the restaurant, Deveroli’s, whose food is fatty and awful and overpriced (the lamb shank, priced at nearly $30, is vacuum-packed and located in the dry storage closet with no need for refrigeration), but whose staff is familial in every sense of the word. I complain about the place enough – I’m paid AU$13/hour with nary a tip in sight (if an Australian tips you 50 cents for a $40 bill, consider yourself lucky, seriously), and on our 12 hour double shifts’ thirty-minute break, if we want to eat from the restaurant, we are entitled to an absurd and measly 30% discount – but I’ve gotten used to it. I am friendly to the customers that are friendly, curt or worse to the rude or indifferent, and have come to appreciate the customers for the crazy and obsessive-compulsive lunatics that they are. Oh, the stories, so tailored for nonsense literature. Being a waiter, too, is different here than in America: if a customer unreasonably questions my service or my effort, I simply tell them, to their face, that I don’t care about their complaint, and if they ask to see my manager, I laugh at them. Some days I hate my life, and some days I just spend chatting with good or interesting people, hearing wonderful stories, or simply standing around doing trivia from the newspaper with my colleagues. Everyone urges me to loosen up and appreciate what I’ve got – I can roll into work drunk if I wanted to, and no one would really notice or care – but then one can’t escape completely from oneself. That’s not to say, however, that I haven’t done so.

Mostly, my reflections of life in Australia are mixed. It’s a great country, just as the USA is great, though in some ways, greater (Australia, mean…though this is a debate for another time), and Melbourne is probably the best city I’ve ever visited by a long shot. It’s just so easy and so colorful, in spite of her residents’ monochromatic fashion tendencies, and, more than anything, so well structured in regard to my own nose; every week is a new arts festival or a fresh cultural theme. With that said, I’m surrounded by my own language, and most of the travelers are here at the mouth of their journey, in regard to itinerary or mentality. Outside of the occasional difference in colloquialism, or the frequent passing of judgment I get for being American (frankly, it was tough going, initially, constantly deflecting ignorant, or even deserved, slander), it’s not much more of a challenge than moving to San Francisco might be, and this has been difficult for me. I would wonder, “why am I so far from home if I’m not even vainly struggling to learn a new and fleeting language?” “Shouldn’t I be learning of the Aboriginal philosophy instead of draining pints to Top-40 music?” “Am I doing anything at all for myself in being here?” All of this has driven me mad at times, surely.

By now, in reflection of most of this, I am able to say with resolute confidence that I regret nothing – truly nothing – I’ve done in my life. It was my dream to live in Australia, and I’m here; if my own stuffy prescriptions for travel haven’t quite been filled, plenty of others have. In the framework of my life and my personality, I’ve been well served, and continue to be well served, though far from completely sated, by my time here. As a “backpacker” that used to take offense to the title, I have been forced to appreciate a life without high-impact, life altering significance in the most obvious sense. Really, I’ve learned the value of Loosening The Fuck Up. Am I yet loose? Well, I’ll let this entry stand as testament to that. Still, more and more I find myself able to handle a variety of situations, and this traveling chapter of my life has really sprawled me across that register, but living in Australia as a flighty outsider without anything to contribute has revealed so many things to myself of myself. I’ve come to like my own country, my own identity (still two things as disparate as ever), and my security in being Me has never been stronger. I love sitting in my room listening to music, playing guitar, watching movies, or reading. I love talking to old people; I love seeding and blanching fresh tomatoes for sauce instead of opening a can; I love sitting for three hours with someone that matters to me, and I can disregard those that don’t. I can whistle to idiotic music while walking in public dressed like a clown, and I can scratch a number of things off my list as things I’ve tried a number of time, full force, to no avail. I might not be completely honest with myself and I might not be as happy as I could be, but at very least, I’m understanding the person that I am and what I value. I used to rank cultures from my preconceptions, figuring perhaps that I’d find more in common with a liberated, intellectual Europe, or an unpretentious, welcoming Australia. Well, though I can’t deny anything of anyone, I realize that special people are in a minority all over the world, that I don’t sport qualities Italian any more than I do American, and to me that’s far more hopeful than it is cynical. It’s taken me 30 countries to realize this definitively, and that I still thirst for more travel reminds me of how worthwhile all of it has been.

I don’t think life is to be squandered or saved. I think it’s mine to be spent as I please, and if that has me dancing naked and ablaze through some forest or living in isolation in the middle of a metropolis, who gives a shit? If you want to pick a booger, you’ll pick it.  And now I fart until my bed is warm enough for sleep.

Poet Laureate of the Cinema della Testa

My favorite writer is Tom Waits.  Why?  Because of lines like these:

// <![CDATA[//
// <![CDATA[//
The ocean doesn’t want me today/
But I’ll be back tomorrow to play

And the strANGELs will take me/
Down deep in their brine

The mischievous brAiNGELs/
Down into the endless blue wine

I’ll open my head and let out/
All of my time

I’d love to go drowning/
And to stay and to stay/
But the ocean doesn’t want me today

I’ll go in up to here/
It can’t possibly hurt/
All they will find is my beer/
And my shirt

A rip tide is raging/
And the life guard is away/

But the ocean doesn’t want me today

The ocean doesn’t want me today

SHOW ME MORE ILLUSTRATIVE WRITING THAN THAT.

Do your mind’s eye — and your heart — a favor: listen to Tom Waits.

A Diagnostic of Professional Nomadics

Why do we travel?  Where is it genetically written, apart from in the genomes (idiot), that some of us feel this absolutely crucial, life-bending pull into unknown and discomfort, while others opt for a warm hug?  If those in the former category, too, are this way by nature, can they possibly be, simultaneously, the type to cling nostalgically and desperately to a pair of shoes or a mindset or a memory?  Could preference and personality be exclusive, and is it possible to live an intellectual life making decisions to spite one’s true nature?  It on these questions that I hang my fight tonight, at the suffix of a marvelously warm winter day, feeling cozy and content and unadulteratedly adult sipping non-alcoholic tea, wearing my Uncle Paul’s old blue sweater, listening to Mehldau’s cover of Young At Heart without feeling the puff of tears protruding from beneath my Adam’s Apple.  It is from here, this realm of relative clarity and emotional stability, that I spearhead an analysis on why I’m here to begin with.  Perhaps along this arduous and sanitized road, we might stop and look at some landmarks, or even share the reading of the odometer.  Surely one would long for the good old days when this writer might actually discuss his experiences with more literary and less emotive indulgences, wouldn’t one?  Well, then, on we go:

It is honestly and with all sudden realization very difficult for me to write that I’ve been in Australia for nearly three months, while the memory of living in Thailand and the experiences afforded therein seem to belong to another person altogether.  Who I’ve been, or what I’ve been doing, has not occurred to me since I’ve been here; for someone who arrived with intentions to settle and assimilate (not to mention one freshly emerged from a once-enlightening meditation retreat), I’ve only discussed tomorrow since arrival, and have had my typical share of wallowing and projection in the face of a pretty calm and pacific existence.

When one tries to live abroad — in this case, I intend to define the instance of living in a place temporarily and as a cultural outsider with the aim of observation — one goes through a number of periods, beginning with a sort of renewed infancy on arrival.  This is admittedly a great draw to such a life, that we might enter every room unsure of our reverberations, where even in a country sharing our language, we might elicit a chuckle from the most innocuous phrasings, perchance offending someone with the angle of our elbows or confound someone with the placement of our hat.  If you’re lucky, you are forced to consider most aspects of yourself that come, normally, without consideration, like a writer that is forced to consciously avoid any and all colloquialisms and idioms.  With it, we can be rejuvenated and sometimes wholly conscious of ourselves, and, in turn, we might be able to reflect some of this back and compare from end to end.  The first time I really left home, I did so thinking that everything would be better over “there” (Italy, in this case), and, as I was so ready to allow anything, many things came to truly fit me.  I saw merit in looking around the corner, that even in coming from the most populous country in the world, the incredibly lonely and ironically commonplace feeling of loneliness might be flipped onto its head by encountering an entire culture that might actually and similarly place value on blanching tomatoes by hand (or by pot, you could say).

This works two ways, of course, for when you find other aspects of a foreign culture that don’t coalign with your nature, your entire background can be instantly illuminated, a swill that, normally tasting of tap water, suddenly tastes of Dublin Guinness.  As we struggle so desperately, so frantically (and often miserably), these lessons (I don’t need to say, but will) are simply invaluable.

So you’ve arrived in your new place, immediately projecting ideas and expectations onto your surroundings, and every little action is exciting.  As Cedric Klapsich so perfectly describes in L’auberge Espagnole, every street name sounds exotic, and simple chores take on new significance.  This, I would imagine, would be true with any change in life, and the courting phase can last any length of rope, depending on a million factors, most notably you and the direction your nose is facing.  In this phase, you feel like every night spent indoors a shame, every mirrored meal a waste, every path retraced a bore.  Soon, however, as your vacation ends and your life begins, it becomes necessary to open the same bedroom door every day, or to allow yourself a little trash time, or to grab some — gasp!! — McDonalds on the way to work (yes, I’ve admitted to it).  A struggle ensues, and you begin blaming yourself for all of this, thinking, EGAD, I’ve become as settled as I had avoided at home, and your mind lags, tangled in this sludge.  The old anecdotes and travel stories so typically surefire in a rootless existence become tired and useless, and you are forced to actually talk to people, to sit in comfortable silence with your housemates, to watch a movie without making sarcastic remarks, and friendships are either upgraded or discarded.

It is in this phase I currently find myself, and it has been difficult at times.  Melbourne — Australia, really, at the moment — has lost its function as a destination and now I’m meant to fend for myself.  Perhaps this is why I’m again feeling the pull to Tasmania, to Tonga, to Treason.  In any case, I am seeing that beyond all of the exciting allure of travel, all that appeals to every aspect of my being, stripped away, leaving only myself and my, as discussed in the last entry, habits.  So, where before I would cruise this marvelous city with wide eyes, it being a skyscraper built over a well-weathered foundation, so constantly at odds with its ever-changing face and dependably consistent personality, I must now either allow it into my blood stream while sowing a few drops into its soil, or pull the cord altogether.  This describes my current state of mind, with tonight pointing to the ground, not to the sky, for a change.  With that all said, what have I been doing amidst all of this riff-raff and yawnish conversation?

Well, for the last six weeks, I’ve been living in a share house in St Kilda, the beach side suburb south of the city, full of derelects and snobs at once, while working at the notorious local restaurant named Deveroli’s.  This eatery, located on a massively commercial and crowded street just five minute’s walk from my home, is big and somewhat impersonal, and likely owned by the mafia, but is also thankfully frequented by a Skittles bag full of crazy old people.

To wit, I finally got to chat at length today with the obese Croatian that comes in every day with the large group of grave-looking former Yugoslavs, yet sits inexplicably alone as his friends chat uproariously outside.  That look of eternal sadness he furrows on his brow swelled as I told him I was from Los Angeles.  “I fell in love with Califormian [sic] woman once.  Almost married her, but I let her go,” he says, his barrel chest rising in subtle shivers, stroking his bald, fatty scalp with eyes down turned.

“When was that?”  I asked him, stricken by his candor and drawn in by his pain.

“1961.”  When he said that, this mammoth of a man with a mountain of unfulfilling first date dinners stewing rancid in his belly, tears in his eyes, my life went down the drain for the next five seconds.  Everything came crashing against my skull, trying in vain for escape.  Can you imagine spending a life, hounded by such a toxic and omnipresent regret?  I immediately pictured myself slumping as he was, he fifty-one years my senior, and thought of all of the people I left behind, wondering after my decision of transience, fearful of finally settling at home, and if I would find myself there like sand at the bottom of a black depth of ocean too hostile and murky  to be reached by others.  Of course, with faith in your forgiveness and dependability, old friends, I remind myself, with a concession to self-importance, that I was out here living one of my true dreams — one that involves working in a diner, but a dream nevertheless — and that gave me a little faith in myself, too.  Finally the kitchen bell rang, and I had to leave this man, watching him sip his coffee in renewed silence, and of course imagined how easily one might find themselves in such a reality.  I can’t fault him for a thing.

Most times the restaurant, which is run by a twentysomething philistine, flamboyantly gay and intimidatingly testosteroned at the same time, who, without leash from the owners (whose names I will never know and faces I will never meet), who don’t seem to care how their business goes.  With that, he, and any other employee that feels so inclined, will yell at and belittle any customer that proves impatient, demanding, or disrespectful, and, as a waiter with a decent shake of experience by now, that can be truly refreshing.

Australians, however, don’t tip, and when I say that I mean it: yesterday I waited on a party of twenty that reserved a private room upstairs, them occupying it for hours on end, and, me running up and down stairs, carrying their paltry drinks and appetizers, I must say that I provided them with unsneezable service, even going so far as to discuss the challenges of teaching and the important role that multimedia plays in it.  How much did these friendly and gracious people tip me?  No, they didn’t.  So that just proves that Australians are a racist, inherently stunted and troubled people.  With that, and considering that I work 12 hour shift with singular thirty minute breaks, all illegally under the table, scrubbing toilets for $13, some five dollars below the minimum wage, you might say that I don’t love my job.  But, at least it’s close to my house and my coworkers constantly and ignorantly mock me for being American, while playing Madonna and Lady GaGa and other aural weapons of mass destruction.  Tomorrow I shall interview for a new job.

I currently share a small and cozy room with Jonathan Isao Burroughs, that old college football teammate of mine, and in our rickety, if slightly charming old cottage, we mingle comfortably with the other residents: Elodie and Elise, the two impossibly friendly and often confused French interns out here learning English, as well as Luke, the good-natured Brit who was undoubtedly disappointed to discover that the two single American guys moving in wouldn’t be quite so down to go out drinking with him as much as he’d hoped.  We somehow manage to keep everything in line, the house properly cleaned and, even with my eternal poops and my hour shours (or my hower showers, if you prefer), there have been few, if any, squabbles over space.  Life is pretty boring at times, in fact, in how smoothly things go.  Though Luke keeps borrowing my DVDs without asking me, and has had Punch-Drunk Love for some time, for which I am becoming nearly homicidal with frustration.

Regarding Production.  I’ve been writing, as you might expect, a shitton.  After a few months of preparation, including a weekend in Cha Am, Thailand spent writing an outline, I started a very epic book (which is already frighteningly more verbose and will probably be darker than anything I’ve ever written, lending me enough joy to help me realize that I have business or mind to be a screenwriter primarily), I’m working on a meager (but promising!) short film with Jon, and I have started writing another short about The Resurrection at the request of my old toothless friend that lives on a volcano in Sicily, who wants to gather a pool of filmmaker friends and pour all of that into production.  Robert Townsend knows as well as I whether or not I’ll finish any of it, but, as Ron Jeremy might have said, “it is better to shoot erratically than to not shoot at all.” (radio edit)

More importantly, I discovered a new love for cooking — tonight after work I made Twice-Baked Honey and Spice Chicken with fresh garlic mashed potatoes and bitter balsamic portobello mushrooms, while last week I made — from scratch, pointlessly and to impress you — apple pie tortettes, which fucking killed me when consumed with ice cream.  I don’t write poetry, as chopping garlic has come to suffice.  I still find “portcullis” to be a funny word.

Well anyway, it’s time to wrap things up.  With a contast struggle for definition, trying to finger what I’m doing here and whether or not that outweighs my time spent in a more closely permanent spot (like Los Angeles, or the USA at all, for that matter), I have come to a few conclusions: (1) ‘Please Call Me, Baby’ by Tom Waits might have the most beautiful chord progression I’ve ever heard; (2) Australians think that America, specifically Los Angeles, is the most gun-riddled, dangerous place on earth; (3) I do not regret any significant decision I’ve ever made, and am at present very happy and slightly secure with where I’m sitting; (4) love can presumably rewrite anything above, as well as all previous philosophies, priorities, plans, and worldviews.  Not that I know or am anywhere close to knowing, but I did just watch The Holiday with my neighbors a few hours ago and I think that gives me a pretty good say.

Poking Dream With Stick

Here I begin to start to unravel my experience here, thus far:

…I’m actually going to go, instead.  Next time.  Next time, though, I’ll discuss Australia, I promise.  There are some genius one-liners coming, thuogh, I swear.  What they are, only Matt Kemp knows.

Why All Celebrities Die in Santa Monica

I was just reading about this man and his website.  I’ve been purchasing from him for a few years — Aaron got a kangaroo scrotum from him, Uncle Mark a Cane Toad keychain — and have never ceased to admire the selection of moose shit, insect jewelry, alligator coffee accessories, and preserved shark fetuses he has on offer.  Finally clicking the About Us section, I read a little about this man, named Glenn.  Though he looks remarkably like James Lipton, he’s hardly so serious:

An avid traveler with 54 countries on every continent (outside of South America) bursting from his pocket, his love of the whatever led to a shark tooth jewelry business out of a camper van roaming the tradeshows of The Great Southeast.  When his lovely and beloved wife became stricken with M.S., however, they were forced to settle down in a shop, so they naturally relocated to a place just outside of the Hoover Dam in Nevada.  With all of their baggage spilling into the aisles, they chose to make haste and make stock of their taxidermic hats and fox oosik (look it up) toothpicks, boasting this shop as part-business, part-educating tool for the countless precocious youngsters littered about Hoover’s Mean Streams.

Unfortunately, Darel’s condition was constantly weakening, though in no way similar to her fortified courage and iron will; Glenn’s love wavered like a bullet, its path immediate and direct, and he stood strong-legged on his promise to keep the love of his life out of a nursing home, no matter how far she ventured in condition, even personality, from the girl he fell in love with so many years ago.  Enter Heidi, a professional orderly so profoundly moved, so loyally and lovingly devoted, to the family’s cause and fortitude that she made it a full-time gig: as a nurse to Darel, a housekeeper to their two cats, and a fully influential contributor to the shop’s upkeep.

Together, Heidi and Glenn wrung saline liquid, that juice of toil and pain, from their tear ducts and sweat glands, in heeding any and every need from Darel, who rendered herself as self-sufficient as a person in such a condition physically could, maintaining a characteristically headstrong integrity every step of the way.  Unfortunately, her path was reaching an end.  Tragically, after four long years of endless and heartbreaking struggle, Darel was released into The Great Beyond, fluttering like one of her cherished Deïopeia pulchella (known as the crimson speckled footman, to the layman) moths toward a great and well-deserved Light.  Darel, dead in the gloomy and ominous Nevadan June of 2000.

Naturally, Glenn and Heidi had a shotgun wedding at The Chapel o’ Love during June, 2001, and their love has since blossomed like so many Dendrobium orchids, a bloom so delicate and rare that one is tempted strike it freeze-dried, then dip it in polycarbonate and gold, lendiing a kind of special posterity that could only be topped by a resin casting of a snowflake, both of which are available online.  Anyway, Glenn was lonely, depressed, and hadn’t touched anything but female jalopy in years.

Well, in the wake of the terrorist bombings on the 11th of September, 2001, Heidi and Glenn decided to pack up shop and move back to South Carolina, opening a wunderkammer in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, peddling Scythian Lamb ferns and woolen narwhal tusks to the curious spring break commoner, cementing a dream that wasn’t exactly theirs but might as well have been.  Life was moving in the right direction, finally.

The Myrtle Beach Business quickly became a favorite on the boardwalk, attracting patrons and purchasers of all ages and financial levels, but for Glenn and Heidi, the real money, true joy, was online, and in 2002, they closed down shop and hammered the shop’s new, glimmering sign into a binary lawn — and a fertile lawn, at that!  Since 2003, Where Else On Earth? has become, simply put, an internet sensation, exceeding every other retail American, privately-ownedtaxidermy website in hits during the holidays of even and prime-numbered years.

Glenn and Heidi still reside in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, dutifully doting on their two cats’ whiskers and their neighbors’ children’s pectorals.  I currently reside in my dusty, bug-ridden St Kilda room, alone, whilst my housemate and some blonde bargirl he found are in the adjacent room, quietly fucking.  Here’s to life.

The End.

Wading In Vain

Hi again,

You’ll notice that I’m back.  Not with yet another hasty sketch of some harrowing journey into the spontaneous and haphazard, but rather (probably too-personal) descent into my most current sentiment, those pesky and ever-fleeting sensations that dictate the day and her outlook without allowing themselves to be so clearly defined as “emotions”.  We here see one’s internal malaise and vague confusion flop and flounder, occasional tugs from an anchor grounding a dull, floating sense of happiness coming from an atmospheric somewhere.  The jump from the Land of Smiles affords one plenty of residual grinning, but then the lips reveal nothing past the glistening enamel sheen of the teeth as the heart continues beating silently behind meters of phlegm and viscera.  And that’s how a WRITER, ladies and gentlemen, outlines a sense of superficial happiness!  None of this comes simple and direct anyway, does it?  Might as well have fun with it as I write.

I’m currently reading a book called A Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Strauss, and frankly while its the first proper fiction novel I’ve read without purpose in quite some time, that gap has lent itself its own relevance; the wait made me ready for some good, old-crafted prose.  It’s a moody and languid story of Samson, a mid-30s Colombia professor dug senseless from a ditch just outside of Las Vegas with positively no recollection of anything beyond his year twelve.  After some ongoing scientific analysis, he returns home to his doting wife to find that he has no idea of the person he was, certainly no clue of who the woman is and why he had fallen in love with her those years ago.  She asks him, distraught, “can a person fall in love without habits?”  This, of course, has given me some pause, certainly as a person who has, thus far, been wildly unsuccessful in such a category:

In traveling around the world, living abroad currently in a familiar setting filled almost exclusively with strangers, am I desperately fleeing my own habits?  Of course it’s been considered, probably assumed, since initial departure that I’m running away from something of myself, coupled with all of the correct reasons for travel.  Can one, coupled with the knowledge that an exercise in changing oneself is futile and even childish, make a constant and constantly subconscious effort to at very least break free from these so-called “habits”, the little hounding tendencies that are so devastating and so beyond our control, watching our actions flutter away as if we were watching them on TV.  Constantly undermining conversations with isolating pseudo (or non-pseudo, for that matter)-intellectualism; a general fear of taking any step forward in relationships, friendly or otherwise; a constant and unforgiving stream of self-criticism or even self-consciousness (see above and below); the intellectual admiration and practical rejection of a life of true spontaneity (and, for that matter, a life lived under a feigned pretense of “action”, all told a struggle between the desire to see oneself as untamed and exciting with a core fabric that may or may not prove to the contrary); the smug and superficial comfort in elitism, or the quiet hatred of philistines that seem to constitute the majority of the universe (nope, I do forgive myself for these, on second thought); the constant freeze and cowardice, or at least the self-conscious sense of being frozen and matched with the internal pursuit of aggression.

Are any of these my “habits”, or are they simply the makeup of who I am?  Saying, I mean, are one’s perceived deficiencies shakeable, and if so, is that desire to shake simply a product of one of the many perceived “deficiencies”, that omnipresent self-criticism?  I have given up on forgetting about it, I think — I really enjoy and admire the tenets of Buddhism, and they have a place in my life, but living without a sense of self is (no pun intended) unthinkable for me, as I’m a solipsistic masochist.  Perhaps that’s the term for it; you’ll have to ask my future analyst (if you’re reading this, hopefully this can consitute as the first session, thereby saving me on future billing).  The idea of being able to erase all of these, whether they are good or bad, is a remarkable concept to me.  What would we miss, if anything?  What would remain, glued to our genetic code, if anything?  Would we be recognizable to those that love us, and would their appreciation continue?  Interesting.

Perhaps I’m just lonely or homesick, and perhaps I’m happy and unable to recognize myself as such, or I’m being reflective because I stayed in today, but in any case, I’m trying on the hat of confessional author, a blonde and less dynamic early Philip Roth.  I hope you enjoy, or enjoyed, my spastic ruminations, and I thank you so profoundly for allowing me to voice them.  Hopefully the next entry will detail my consumption of some sort of reptilian blood or interaction in some aboriginal tradition.  Until then,

Here’s To Basking In Our Shortcomings!

Alien 4: Mastication

This, from an entry in my hand journal whilst still in Thailand.  It was a writer’s holiday and I like it, so I’m sharing.

15 February, 2009:

This must be the weirdest thing I’ve ever eaten — and and a little Thai girl just coughed on it.  If I saw this alive, I would SHIT myself.  Its topside is sleek, beautiful, sinister, a deep and shiny, unadorned and symmetrical black that hovers in the shape of a mothership, its hard shell popping up in two nearly invisible, evil eyes, slight and pliant gems set amidst the uniform skull.  On the belly is something of a nightmare: after an elegant lip convening in a sharp, central spike, this brown, hairy leather, studded with sectional armor, greets you at the midpoint with twelve violent pincers, all coiled inward and ready to burst your trachea without warning or apology.  This complex system, each leg slender and slippery, finishing as a pair of spikes in opposition to the typically curled, merciful claws of your everyday crab, is further continued inward with a sort of thorny vagina, a deadly beard with which it must beckon its prey like a Calabasas debutante.

Inside, then.  This creature’s flesh is not of sinewy slabs, nor is it a party of mushy oysters contained in innumerable compartments.  No, instead, it consists of thousands of thousans of tiny mustard balls, a sort of dark nest of fish eggs.  If Dippin’ Dots are The Ice Cream of the Future, then these are of The Crustacean of the (Apocalyptic) Future.  Each morsel is the same — no notable organs to mention, or at least not as presented.  They taste and feel like milled pellets of offal, a very subtle, creamy, almost chalky flavor that would be difficult to handle in more concentrated doses.

Here on the beach, the vendor prepares it by stirring in Som Tam, the ubiquitoushai salad of papaya, chili, onion and cardemom (or is it just parsley?).  The bright, crisp, incredibly spicy flavors herein counter the dank flesh well, and if you fish around — no pun allowed — you will actually fing leg meat dangling from the roof of the contraption, offering you a taste of normal crab for you to contrast and compare.

All of this, then, comes spilling out the back in a lively neon yellow soup, and lying the meal right side up when you’re done looks like you’ve just slain a medieval beast, not just scooped out your lunch with a spoon.

This marvelous little animal, all a bit bigger than an extended palm, looks more like the helmet of a Roman Leggionaire than a meal.  This is what nature would look like if Rick Baker were God, and as adventurous an eater as I claim to be, I can’t say that I loved it.  Still, for 130 baht ($4), I enjoyed it and its accompanying story, and that’s worth the price of admission — even if it was a trip into my nightmares.