Furg Goes MIA

A mother's tale...

2005-07-28T01:51:00.000-11:00

Very rarely do we get to share the joys of creation. If I ever pass an eight-pound piece of jelly-covered flesh through my loins, I hope my experience is one of love, and caring, and horses.

http://flickr.com/photos/violentz/sets/273157/

View it as a slideshow--the way it was meant to be seen.

The water washes all.

2005-07-25T11:56:00.000-11:00

My pasty skin leaves ghostly impressions in the moonlight. Naked, I stand next to a basin of murky water. I know there is a bucket, though I cannot see it. I grope for it and dunk it into the water. Quick, Lamaze breaths prepare me for the cold rush I know will come next. It hits me fast, the water, and at that moment not even the sixteen hours I have been on my feet could make me tired. But the second rush is pleasant and I remember holding a man’s head still and watching his life leak onto my skin, his friend’s face mangled and chewed by glass and steel, still clutching the Salva Vida beer can. Salva Vida, life saver. Gallows humor, I suppose. I’m conditioned. The third rush flushes it away again and I hear children of the village giggle as they watch me bathe; they want to know if I am white everywhere—if perhaps my skin was bleached by the sun. Two women approach and shoo them away. They, too, have come to wash and we silently pass the bucket back and forth. All I see is the illusory glaze of eyes. All I hear are our shared gasps as the water hits us again, and again.

Would you like to join me for some Vermox and warm milk?

2005-07-24T13:29:00.000-11:00

There is a slightly superstitious saying that there are only two ways to get rid of worms in your body: one, to open your mouth next to a bowl of warm milk and wait for them to crawl out and into the bath; or two, which I might add is a far more scientific approach, to take una tableta de Vermox dos veces al día por tres días. Given that the milk in Honduras is just as toxic as the worms, Vermox has become the preferred method of medicinal magic throughout the country.

But a lesser-known worm—the bot larvae—frequents their moist, mosquito coasts and does not abide by these rules of eviction. They have only to bite you and the process begins. You could be walking, working in the garden, blinking your eyes in the sun, or sleeping, with your mouth open. Once inside the flesh, they burrow two anal hooks to secure their location. Barely visible but for a small hole and spiracle, the larva grows until your skin looks like it is trying to push lemons through its pores. There are four ways to take care of this little devil: one, to use the acrid white sap of the matatorsalo, but that leaves the little corpse floating just under your skin; two, to smear a generous slathering of Vaseline over the air hole and watch the maggot squirm out of your flesh, gasping for air; three, to glue that baby shut and squeeze the suffocated worm out the next day like a popped zit. Or you could leave it, let it feast on your DNA like a tiny fetus; witness the joys of this transmogrificational experience.

Or, if you are very lucky, you will just happen to be on a medical mission with a full staff of doctors who can pull the son-of-a-bitch out without leaving random body parts or anal hooks burrowed in your skin. They will pull it out alive and thrusting against the forceps. ¡Felicitaciones! They will put it in a jar for you so you can name him Lester, and he will join you for dinner—fresh Vermox in milk.

I couldn't resist:

....yeah, that's what it looks like.

Food for thought

2005-07-22T11:23:00.000-11:00

Pizza:
Pizza Slut
Little Seizures
Papa Schlong
Domi-hos

Taco:
Taco Hell

Burgers:
Booger King
McDon'ts
Arsleez
Dairy Queeze or
Dairy Queef
Fart-ees

Chicken:
Freaky Fried Chicken
or Kentucky Die Chicken
or (as Marta says) Kentucky Fucky Chicken
Pus-eyes

Subs:
Blimpee pee or
Blimpoo

more to come....

Bulgaria welcomes you.

2005-07-22T11:16:00.000-11:00

The train is freezing and all I have to keep me warm is a slightly damp bath towel. I’m curled into myself, horizontal on a train seat cushion that I’m afraid to let my skin touch. I blink, hoping my eyes will adjust faster so I won’t lose sight of my luggage on the rack. My camera is my pillow. I wish painfully for sleep, but it seems less likely as the train jerks to a stop.

The door to my compartment yanks open and I jolt up. Three men enter and sit purposefully around me. I move closer to the window and straighten my affairs, my clothes, my hair. The sun still hides behind the mountains, but the tell-tale blue of morning sky frames the rolling peaks. I am awake as the man across from me begins to ask me questions. I shake my head and say simply, “English.” He smiles a spaced grin and hands me a gallon of beer in a plastic bottle. I check my watch. 4:30 seems a good time to start drinking. I take a long swig and let the stale suds of Bulgarian beer settle on my taste buds. The men approve. Between the four of us there is almost enough language ability to say hello. It doesn’t seem to matter because we’re sharing warm beer for breakfast. They descend from the train to work the mines; I guard the beer and greet the sun.

That’s a beautiful poem; now get the hell away from me.

2005-07-21T03:22:00.000-11:00

I’m reading Dante’s Inferno and you hand me your poem consisting of the single line, “Amanda is hot” and you ask me if I get it? Well, gee wilikers, TJ, I’m stumped. It wasn’t enough that I had to hear the guitar renderings of a complete stranger for the last three hours, or that you always manage to run your dirty fingers through your grease-slicked hair before you try to touch me. “Amanda is hot.” Well, you wrote that so beautifully I wish you would write a song next.

I was kidding, TJ, not that that would cross your mind. I’m suddenly far more interested in talking with the convict, still in penitentiary orange, sitting just a little ways in front of me. Perhaps he killed someone.

“Ladies first,” he had said to me earlier, probably to check out the first hairless ass he’d seen in ten to fifteen, but at this point it seems flattering.

Please sing something else, like “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” If I head to the front of the bus, you’ll surely follow me; and any further back, and I’ll be sitting on the urine-drizzled commode. I guess there’re only eight more hours anyway. So “Amanda is hot,” and “Danty was a pretty cool guy,” and “Greyhound sucks.”

Is he grabbing my ass? I think he’s grabbing my ass!

2005-07-20T05:56:00.000-11:00

Wow. I mean, wow! This guy’s good. I’ve been on this metro for nearly twenty minutes and I’m just now noticing? I should have seen it coming—the way he darted to the seat next to mine when there were plenty of other spaces. I didn’t even feel it right away; good timing with the vibrations of the tracks, my subtle friend. So tricky. So sly. No, surely I am mistaken.

Nope! That’s his hand. On my ass. With his finger moving just enough in a “tisk tisk” motion. Oh yeah, it’s definitely there. Ooo, didn’t time that turn just right, now did you my man? This is intriguing. Do I say something, or just get off at the Villiers stop and wait to catch the next metro, or just get off at my stop and pretend nothing happened, or just ask him if he wants me to get him off all the way? This is ridiculous. And sick. And….funny. Sad times in pervert land. But damn he’s good. I have never been so impressed by a mindless act of perversion. I didn’t feel a thing, but there he is shaking his leg, and rubbing his unoccupied palm on his knee, and thinking dirty French thoughts about how he’s getting away with it.

Perhaps I should say something. But then again, he’s the best groper I’ve ever encountered. Damn, what’s more twisted, this dude, or my thought process. Wow. Stealth man, I salute you!

I love you, but stop calling me

2005-07-17T03:14:00.000-11:00

Nothing personal, and nothing directed towards one specific person, or two, but stop calling me at all hours of the night and day. First off, if you know me at all, you know I hate the phone. I find it a terrible, impersonal extension that people hide behind in an attempt to avoid human contact and to shelter their emotional fragility. How many times have we called someone to ascertain feelings or ask for a date instead of asking him or her in person? It's so much easier to deal with rejection over the phone because it is so impersonal, and nine times out of ten, we're checking ourselves out in the mirror as we're talking (or performing some other perfunctory task such as checking email or watching TV, so it isn't as if we are truly invested in the conversation anyway). I much prefer e-mail or IM, not because I am under some funky form of disillusionment in which I believe these forms of communication are far more personal--because they are, in fact, more impersonal--but that they at least do not pass themselves off as personal through the disguise of a familiar voice.

Second, I am no longer in college. Chances are highly likely now, that at 3:00am, I am not working on a paper, or at a party, but in my bed, hopefully asleep. I know I used to pride myself on the fact that no matter what time people called me, I was ALWAYS awake, but now that novelty has worn off. I recognize that many of you are in different parts of the country or world, and the time zone doesn’t really occur to you, and I do enjoy hearing about your escapades, but next time you are laughing at the funny man on stilts at a protest, please check your watch and do some basic math to see if perhaps I will be conscious to hear of such events. It’s not that I don’t love you, or even that I hate the phone, but that I’m working very hard to fix this insomnia thing and it becomes very difficult to hook-up with that Sand Man character if you are calling me every five minutes. Sending love from my bed (and not in that way you perves).

24h/24h Service

2005-07-16T05:54:00.000-11:00

If you’re like most Americans, then you’ve probably wondered what the deal is with the French. Now I have spent a fair amount of time in France and I can honestly say that I have not a clue. The French are a mysterious breed—their women, pouty; their men, stinky—but beyond all that, there lies the true anomaly that is the 24h/24h café in Paris. There are but five of these illustrious cafes, all strategically placed throughout the city, but none so well as La Maison Blanche, which sits directly across the street from the Gare du Nord.

I found myself at La Maison Blanche the way I suppose many the traveler has—seven hours before my scheduled 04h56 departure, I was nearly euro-less, bogged down with luggage, and freezing in the January open-air of the adjacent station.

The coffee was hot, small, and overpriced. The waiters were curious, small, and overpaid. One man in particular managed to display the most intriguing business etiquette. He spent most of his time locking people out of the café and, I imagine, standing in a corner waiting for some unsuspecting traveler to pull on the doors once, twice, three times if he were lucky. He’d watch them scan the exterior for confirmation of the hours of operation before throwing up his delicate hands, rubbing the space of bald on his forehead, and then finally opening the doors to say that they were not serving in the 24h/24h café. I stirred raw sugar into my un-served cup of coffee. The front doors wafted open, smacked a man in the ass as he left, and accepted just enough January to chill my drink. I was lucky to have been admitted, let alone given a table and chair—albeit a more miniature version than I would have liked, but nonetheless—and could not expect some IHOP-esque refill.

A flustered Greek man pulled on the doors a satisfying four times and the waiter appeared.

“No, you cannot drink here. If you miss your train there is a waiting room for that. You cannot come here and start buying things from us.”

But surely I misunderstood. I called to the waiter and asked if they were indeed open all night. Yes, they were, but, “No, this is how we lose our jobs…these people come in and they take our tables to sit and drink one cup of coffee all night. What kind of business would we have if we let people just come in here and buy our things?”

What kind of business indeed? I put my coffee cup to my lips and glanced around the empty café. What kind of business, indeed.

Carrying a dog skull will get you stopped at customs.

2005-07-16T05:52:00.000-11:00

But please, don’t take my word for it. If you go sea-shell hunting on a beach in Mexico and come across a skull, by all means, please pick it up, and dust it off, and wonder what kind of animal or breed of animal that particular skull belongs to, and how it came to rest in that particular spot. Wonder so long, and so hard, that you have no choice but to bring it onto the catamaran to study it further. Caress it. Explore the dry eye sockets with enough vigor to make the shipmates slightly more attentive than usual. And when you finally do get to the airport, make sure you pack that poor dog skull—surely it’s a dog skull—with your carry-on so as not to risk it being broken by some less-than-attentive airport worker. And don’t get the hint when they stop you to search your bags at the x-ray machine. And do decide to speak a few random words of Spanish at the exact moment you pass through customs on the American side of the border, without your passport handy. And swear up and down that it’s only the tan that makes you look Mexican, and that you have too innocent an appearance to be doing anything wrong. And do show the customs workers great condescension. They love that. But not as much as they will love your explanation for carrying a dog-skull across the border. And not as much as they like back rooms and cavity searches.

“But this is made of American metal.”

2005-07-16T05:50:00.000-11:00

They told me this, or rather, “ça c’est fait du métal Américain” and that I could not bring it on the plane. Could someone please explain to me why my three-inch, or seventy-five-millimeter, long carabiner cannot join me on this flight? But it is made of American metal, I know, but it is also not a knife. Not a chainsaw, not a shiv, not a nail file, nor a needle; not acid or matches, not razors wrapped as gum. Is there any reason other than those words that read “made in the U.S.A” that keep this smooth, dare I say rounded, strip of metal in the hands of that guard and not on my water bottle? Oh. C’est fait du métal Américain. Perfect, parfait.

Who wants to cut the cheese?

2005-07-16T05:47:00.000-11:00

There is something incredibly relieving about landing safely after a long flight—something so relieving when the luggage arrives on the carrousel. I suppose its mere presence should incite the purest of joys, as if the airport just birthed matching luggage sets. I suppose I should light a cigar and yell, “Twins, can you believe it? Twins!” I suppose the supposing is what gets people into trouble, and I suppose I should be grateful that there was no drug-sniffing beagle to sit accusingly next to me this time, nor a trail of fabric scraps where my belongings used to be. No, this time it was paper, just paper. Seventeen separate search notices and one bright-orange confiscation card.

Apparently I have the right to do many things, but bring a knife onto this particular plane was not one of them. Generally speaking, I don’t think I would ask the flight attendant to please retrieve my luggage from cargo so I could use said knife, but if in my hostile airport takeover I got the nerve to ask, I highly doubt that my gift-wrapped cheese knife with the word fromage cut out of the blade would be my preferred weapon. But then again, I don’t very well have that chance now anyway…now do I?

Smuggling?

2005-07-16T05:45:00.000-11:00

Yes, that’s exactly what she was doing. Yes, that makes perfect sense. What other reason would a young American woman have for traveling alone in this country? What could she be hiding? Why would she sleep still clutching her bag and fix her stare out the window? This is a perfectly justifiable reason to pull her from the train in the middle of the night. Yes, a perfectly reasonable reason to confiscate her passport, stuff her in a cell, ask her questions in Macedoninese, expect her answers to make sense in any language. So what if you didn’t find anything in her bag. That doesn’t mean anything. Yes, a strip search sounds necessary. Yes, yes, indeed. Still nothing? Indeed. Well, make some phone calls and check again. Still no? Well, then. Well, false alarm, then. No harm done, then. Hope you enjoyed your stay, and please come again, then.

We’re going to need more Scotch over here.

2005-07-12T02:55:00.000-11:00

It’s 3 am on a school night and I’m leaving an underground jazz club, four gypsies, a band, and a 100€ bottle of Scotch. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. I walk to the eight to twelve foot gate—for some reason the height fluctuates at a Scotch 3am—that separates me from the front door of my host family’s apartment building. I push the code--*0. I push the code--*0. I push the code another three times, all the while pretending to look for a key, to tie my lace-less shoes, to stretch my back, before I realize that the phrase, “Ça c’est le code pour le jour” that Madame had uttered the week before really means that there is a night code to this gate that I do not know.

There’s some good news. I believe the words, “oh shit” come to mind. It’s 3:30 am on a school night and I’m standing twenty feet and a gate from the Promised Land. I do the only thing an intelligent woman with a phone and a good excuse can do—I begin scaling the wall in the rain, in my stilettos. Half-way up I hear the words every intelligent woman who is scaling a wall at 3:30 in the morning wants to hear, “Police, Police!”

It's 3:50 am on a school night and I’m standing twenty feet and a gate from the Promised Land, explaining in French to the police why I am scaling a gate in the rain, in stilettos, on a school night, with Scotch on my breath, and gypsies cat-calling from an underground jazz club down the street.

No, but pour me another Scotch

2005-07-12T02:49:00.000-11:00

It’s 2 am on a school night and I’m sitting in an underground jazz club with four gypsies. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. I’m mellowed on wine sent by the club owner and tapping my foot to Mediterranean beats. The gypsies order Scotch that is brought to the table in a locked case. Ice fills five glasses swims, empties, and swims again.

I’m drinking 100€ Scotch on a school night with four gypsies and the band. We’re talking life and love in slurred syllables of languages I may once have understood. The night is young and so am I and would I like to “faire l’amour” with a burly gypsy man? He smiles, leans closer, offers bottles of champagne. I smile, see slobber, hairs in places only skin should be. He raises an eyebrow, I hope that’s all. I raise my empty glass.

Sometimes you just get sucked in....

2005-07-12T02:23:00.000-11:00

Ok, yes, I was sucked into this phenomenon called "the Blog" mostly so I could use this as an online journal for my buddies in case I end up living somewhere where they have computers but no mail system or telephone (the very likely situation, I'm sure), but also because everyone else at this freaking Music festival seems to have one and damned if I'm going to be left out of the opportunity to bitch and moan to a probably non-existant audience. For all my dear HU friends, these first few posts are dedicated to you, especially you little Cara (an honorary HUer). You'll probably recognize them as the emails I wrote to you two years ago when I was in France, etc. Also, I was told I could make money from this, and we all know I am a cheap little bastard, always trying to "pull a furg" (as my buddy Zirwat puts it) to make a buck and get somewhere (hopefully cooler).