The Seven Churches, Part III: Laodicea.

And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: 'The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation. I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

- The Book of Revelations

5:30 AM: New Laodicea.

ALLUHU EKBAR ALLAH EKBER! ALLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHU...

I sat bolt-upright in the darkness, my husk clanging dangerously inside my body and threatening to leap forth from my maw. The singing seemed to be coming from everywhere, including INSIDE MY OWN BODY. My skull was vibrating like a Himalayan singing-bowl and my vision swam.

Hey: did the "shower" - that creepy bolt in the all in the bathroom that emitted a strange mist all over everything EVERYTHING - just spontaneously turn on? Was that ceiling plaster crumbling down upon my body? And, perhaps most critical, what the hell was I doing here?

Flashback: Ankara, two and a half months previous

My first experience with the call to prayer (ezan in Turkish) came not a moment too soon. I'd arrived in Turkey with the promise that the school I was attending would send a gentleman to collect me from Esenboğa Havalimanı (Ankara Airport), but as I cleared Turkish customs - a cursory wave of the hand after digging out my US passport - there was nobody waiting for me. I stood there for a moment and tried my hardest to contain the panic that was welling up within me. Had I known that the school I was heading toward was a full forty minutes away and would have cost be about four times the amount of lira holding court in my sad little wallet, I would have probably spackled my briefs with my partially digested in-flight meal. And and AND, I didn't have the phone number of the woman who was heading this exchange program and even if I did, a cursory look at the alien phones - phones that seemed to only accept flimsy little cards of undetermined extraction- confirmed that I had been, indeed, thrown right the feck under the bus.

Near the terminal there was a small room that looked like a bus-station terminal. The blue haze of a hundred cigarettes partially obscured the features of the gentlemen holding nicotine-y court in there, and a thought - an alien, perhaps-I-have-a-guardian-angel thought - entered my consciousness. He's in there, it whispered. Um, there are like FORTY MEN IN THERE, I countered. He'll be the one in the nice clothes, it said, because you're going to be going to the Harvard of Turkey and he representin'.

Sure enough, upon entering the room (and getting a contact buzz), I noted that only one of the men was wearing slacks and a suit-coat. I walked up to him and said "Bilkent?" in a voice that I hoped didn't come out as it had in my head - shrill and desperate. He leapt up and smiled and grabbed my bags out of my hand. The rational part of me then began to interject. Dude, what if he's a taxi driver?, it asked. You don't know how much this will cost. Also, he could drive you from here to Syria and you'd have NO GODDAMN CLUE. The angel-voice interceded and urged me to look in the back seat of the vehicle parked at the curb. The sad little hand-lettered placard bearing my name was there, sure as shit. I took careful note to mentally french-kiss my guardian angel later and I clambered in.

Seeing as I knew about three words of Turkish at that time, I sat back and watched the Anatolian pageantry - as much as I could, as the driver seemed to feel that speed limits were merely the suggestions of mildly retarded politicians - and became more and more apprehensive. As we hurtled closer to the edge of the city I noted a significant amount of the "scantily-clad children playing with feral dogs and trash fires" phenomenon, followed soon by the "I'm not so sure that your house isn't made entirely of corrugated tin" sector. As the car paused at a stoplight, I looked in all directions and saw only what I would come to know later as gecekondu - a Turkish squattertown - and I thought: Huh. There was a sentient part of me that knew that this was likely only part of the city - I'd seen pictures of the school I was supposed to be attending, and many of the Ankara downtown. However, the part of me that had just been on a plane for seven hundred hours, in a Swiss airport for another three hundred, and then almost got its shit abandoned at the airport asked a polite, delicate series of questions: What are you doing? Did you think you were funny, packing two suitcases to come live in some other place for a semester? Also, did you happen to SEE THAT STUFF IN THE SQUATTERTOWN? BECAUSE SHIT.

A half hour later, we passed through a gate to get into the school, and I was unceremoniously left in front of a large building that I was assured was "Yurt Yetmiş Sekiz", whatever the hell that meant. Upon entry to the building, I was swept past the security checkpoint in the foyer and into a small, dark office where the Dorm Master Dude-Man held court. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, casting a glow that made the DMDM look like he'd been slapped by a flipper from the Porpoise of Incessant Jaundice. His narrow eyes were so blue as to be almost white, and his mustache twitched a little. He spoke no English, so an interpreter was sought. I imagine that the conversation went like this:

DMDM: [lights cigarette, exhales slowly] I'm not really sure why it is that you have come here.
Interpreter: Welcome to Dorm 78!
Me: Thank you for your hospitality. I will assuredly not intentionally set this building on fire.
DMDM: You don't look like an American.
Interpreter: I hope your travels were good.
Me: I haven't pooped in three days.
DMDM: Your room isn't ready because you requested a non-smoking room. [pauses to inspect cigarette, then gently - tenderly - takes an improbably long drag] I don't know why you subscribe to such lunacy.
Interpreter: We're almost ready to welcome you to our community!
Me: I am becoming uncomfortable now.
DMDM: I believe that some unfortunate student has been informed that he has a roommate by now. I hope you're happy.
Interpreter: Let's go meet your new friend and roommate!
Me: Awesome.

The interpreter takes me downstairs and to the threshold of a room that is being frantically cleaned by several young men in various states of undress. There's a bucket, hot water, a vacuum and sponges aplenty. As the high reek of lemony disinfectant reached my awaiting nostrils, I shuddered slightly; one of these men is my new roommate, and moments ago he'd been taken by force from the pleasure of a double-as-a-single and was handed a bucket and a sponge because some American dude was moving in. I wanted nothing more than to just stop living at that point, because really.

I was introduced to my roommate, who shook my hand and immediately left. Apparently, he'd been trying to get to the bus station so that he could visit his family in Gaziantep (a city in Southeastern Turkey) for Spring Break. Like I could have felt any worse; now he'd have to settle for the Antep Red-Eye bus because Spoiled American Dude needed a bed. After he left, I located the bathroom, which consisted of several holes in the floor in stalls. As I tried to figure out the logistics of how to use the hole-in-the-ground crappers, I opened the curtains and looked out at my view of Turkey: a parking lot and a partially abandoned building site. Bits of garbage tattered around in the midwinter wind, rattling morosely.

I sat down on the bed and opened my checkbook. I have enough money to go home, I thought, and nobody would begrudge me that. What was I thinking? Also: can you die from not pooping for this long?

At that, my lowest point, I heard something coming through the open window that sounded like singing. It's not a radio, I thought. And it's... it's coming from more than one place. It took me a minute to register that I was hearing my first call to prayer, and I swooned. No, not from exhaustion, dehydration, or from the pain of what surely was going to be a memorable dump as it moved down the Colon Highway, but I swooned from the sheer beauty of the sound, and - as loath as I am to admit it - from the exoticness of it. I was really here, and this was going to be my home for nearly six months, and every sunset was going to be like this, with men singing. I began to unpack, smiling.

Back to New Laodicea, 5:35 AM

The muezzin finished just as I was becoming convinced that I would be killed by sound and, about twenty minutes later, my heart-rate had finally come down from "methadone-addicted hummingbird getting laid for the first time" to "you'll likely survive." I was in a hotel room - very small, but very neatly appointed - and there could be no question as to where: Denizli, a largish Turkish city nearish to the Aegean. I say "nearish" because Denizli means "with/of the sea" but it is kinda nowhere near the aforementioned body of water, which is vaguely amusing. Amusing and sad.

I'd insisted that I and my traveling companion go to Denizli for two reasons: one, because it serves as a convenient base for exploring not one but TWO insanely awesome ruin sites (Aphrodisias and Pamukkale/Hieropolis) and two, because THAT'S WHAT I SAID NOW GET ON THE DOLMUŞ (minibus). I'd done my research and discovered that a precious hotel/hostel served the greater Denizli area and that the owner, Aslan, was a man of legendary hospitality and warmth and that his wife, Lord protect her, made mucver that would cause you to briefly die with sheer animal pleasure.

Our bus arrived in Denizli at dusk and wearily pulled into the otogar in the city center. I'd noted several things about the city as we made our way through it.

1) Cocks. Denizli is the cock capital of Turkey, and statues of them are EVERYWHERE. Everywhere with the cocks. On the sides of buses. On the civic seal. On the sides of buildings. Cocks cocks cocks. Yes, of course I mean roosters. Guh.

2) There seemed to be a persistent mist hanging about.

3) The one taxi driver lurking near the otogar had a cloudy eye and a pegleg.

The "persistent mist" turned out to be "an intense amounts of dust that, once the sun goes down, rains upon the city as though it were Pompeii. Also, it smells like burning." And I was wrong about the cabbie: it wasn't a pegleg, just a leg that was cruelly misshapen and painfully thin, perhaps ravaged by *urp* polio. I made a mental note to bump up the tip if we survived the ride to the Fantastic Unicorn Palace of Hostely Goodness. We clambered into the cab and gave him the address. He looked at it, looked at me - one milky eye fixed on my sweaty forehead, the other good one in my own dung-brown eyes - and said something in Turkish. He handed the address back to me and sat there. Sat there and didn't move.

OK, what the hell. I knew that some taxi drivers get commission if they bring the foreigners to a particular hotel, but this didn't seem to be about that. As he rolled down the window, lit up and went to Flavor Country, I had a hurried and - might I stress, awesome - conversation with my traveling companion that went something like this:

Me: So what do we do now?
Traveling Companion: Maybe we should draw a picture and write the Turkish word for hotel on it? Wait: do you know what the word is? Also: how are we still alive?
Me: He's a taxi driver, not a retarded six-year-old.
TC: What's your brilliant idea, feckstick?
Me: Let's get out of the cab.
TC: He is going to shank us.
Me. Bring it, bitch. I've always wanted to get tetanus.

We opened our doors, and within moments the startled driver got out and gestured that we get back in. Good times. So we did, and he started the car, sighed heavily, and pulled out into the dusty city, setting a course for the magical home of Mr. Lion.

We arrive in an ordinary city block and pull to the curb. The apartment complex we'd come upon had only one light on inside, and Mr. Cloudy-Eye gestured toward it. Then he pointed to a sad little building across the street that looked like it was once a hotel.

ONCE A HOTEL.

The cabbie, of course, had known all along. I swore under my breath and vowed to take my copy of Let's Go! Turkey! and heave it into the wine-dark sea.

The best part was that there was no "Option B." Denizli is an industrial city that is known throughout the country for good universities, rooster statues and THAT'S ABOUT IT. There were no other hotels listed for the city. Great. Sleeping in my clothes in the bus station. Again.

The cabbie had, by this time, gotten out, heaved our suitcases to the curb and lurched over to the front of the apartment, where he pressed the only lit doorbell on the switchboard. A man came to the window - it was about five stories up - and he opened the screen and yelled down to us on the street. The cabbie and the dude yelled back and forth for a minute, and then the cabbie stood in front of me and said, in perfect English, "May I please have my fare?"

Stunned, I gave it to him - with the handsome tip I'd promised him in my mind - as the man from five stories up came to the ground floor door.

"Hello, I'm Aslan", he said, and eagerly took my hand into one of his giant meaty paws. He looked the part of a lion - shaggy hair, broad nose, and a swagger - and I briefly thought about how people grow into their names. "How can I help you lads tonight?", he asked.

I explained that we were a) foreign and b) retarded and c) poor planners and that we were now in a postion of not knowing where we'd lodge ourselves that evening. Could you, kindly large man who looks vaguely like a big-cat, tell me where we might rest our weary and, might I add again, retarded, foreign carcasses?

He sighed. His hostel/hotel wasn't closed per se; it was now only open on a seasonal basis. And, um, this wasn't the season. He paused and then strode purposefully to the doorbell. This time a woman opened up the window, and Aslan began to conduct a (loud) conversation with the person whom I assumed was his wife.

She came down over the stairs WITH SHEETS AND BLEACH AND TOILET PAPER.

No no no, I began, but Aslan was already stopping me from speaking by standing in front of me in a vaguely felid pose which I interpreted as "shut up." He made tea in the waiting room of the ho(s)tel while his wife CLEANED A ROOM FOR US; we sat looking at the tawny liquid feeling like prolapsed walrus anuses as he talked about how much we were going to enjoy Denizli and the surrounding areas. When his wife was finished, we thanked her very much and she welcomed us graciously to Denizli. *I* would have rubbed my ass on the pillowcases, but hey.

Again, this can't be stressed enough: it was almost 10 PM by this point. And we were strangers. Foreign strangers who knocked on their door and said "Hey, are you a hotel?"

Aslan shook our hands, bade us good night, and retired to his apartment across the street. We sat on our beds, stunned at the hospitality and graciousness. As the dust settled quietly onto the Cock Capital of Turkey, we gratefully slipped into beds whose sheets smelled of sun and citrus and thanked our lucky stars that we weren't having to provide excruciatingly slow manual pleasure to old men in order to secure park benches for the evening.

When the muezzin woke us six hours later, we couldn't be angry. OK, so we resolved to take note of whether or not future accomodations shared a Byzantine wall with a mosque, but other than that, only gratitude.

As we packed and prepared for our trip to Pamukkale/Hieropolis and Aphrodisias, I remembered that the cock-bound, dusty Denizli sits upon the ruins of Laodicea, one of the Seven Churches. The settling dust whispered as it landed indelicately on the roads, on cars, on sad lawns. Over the din of morning traffic, mosque action and simit-sellers hawking their delicious wares, I heard the dust speaking.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

I took that to heart and I thanked Aslan in two ways. One, I hugged him, which elicited an eye-roll from my traveling partner, as apparently he was too patrician to have ever had to wash his pits and undercarriage with a paper towel in a public bathroom after fitfully sleeping on top of his luggage, fully clothed in seventy-five degree heat in a bus station. Two, I paid him twice as much as he asked for - secretly, as I left the rest of the money for his wife to find in the room. Hell, he'd even DRIVEN US TO THE BUS STATION FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. He'd heard our voices, he'd opened his door - and, well, tea isn't food, but it's really close.

We boarded the bus, glad not to be dead. I closed my eyes and drifted off, dreams of the four remaining Churches - Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira and Philadelphia - fluttering in and out of my consciousness like bleached marble songbirds.

Well, until we were abandoned on the side of the road forty kilometers from Aphrodisias. But that is a different story for a different time.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic

The Seven Churches, part II: Ephesus.

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, he that walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks: I know thy works, and thy toil and patience, and that thou canst not bear evil men, and didst try them that call themselves apostles, and they are not, and didst find them false; and thou hast patience and didst bear for my name's sake, and hast not grown weary. But I have this against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love. Remember therefore whence thou art fallen, and repent and do the first works; or else I come to thee, and will move thy candlestick out of its place, except thou repent.

- The Book of Revelations

Why does she have so many tits? I mean, come on; get a load of THAT.

- An unnamed Turkish friend

That morning I hadn't even bothered waking up at dawn to hysterically fling the curtains open or sob gently in front of the television as slick-haired mustachioed gentlemen gestured pointedly at happy sun faces or sad clouds that skittered across Doppler maps of Anatolia. I presumed that Satan would, indeed, win, and that I would come all the way across the planet without pressing my cheek against the heat-cracked pillars of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus. (This was something that I presumed would be forbidden, but the thought of it left me breathless and panting like a spaniel in heat.) I reclined in the darkness, allowing the Hooved One's victory to seep into my bones, embrittling them before my time and causing them to ache delicately.

From the kitchen I could smell the salça simmering seductively in a vat of beautiful, incredibly fresh butter, and could hear my friend's mother stirring something and humming. When she opened the door to the back porch, a shaft of gilded light snaked through the hallway and under the door.

A shaft of sunlight. The. Bright. Sky-disc. Was. Up.

Play it cool, I thought. You can do that, right?

I entered the kitchen slowly, my body loose, and beheld the four happy Turks who had begun to settle down to breakfast. Sit down, a menthol-cool voice whispered into my ear, and eat the delicious food before they start staring at you.

"So", the patriarch began while tapping his soft-boiled egg open, "I take it that today you two will go to Efes, yeah?" My eyes moistened and my vision swam; I presumed that "Efes", along with being the number one beer name in Turkey, was also the Turkified name for Ephesus (EFF-iss-iss), and the answer was hells yes. I couldn't drive a stick-shift, which is apparently all one can get in Turkey, but if I had to provide excruciatingly slow manual pleasure to a half-blind goat-merchant for a ride there while the sun shined WHILE THE SUN STILL SHINED, I was poised to make it happen.

***

Twenty minutes later the car slowed a little, and my friend/chauffeur began to scan the sides of the highway for something. "We can't be near", I said, trying not to allow sheer animal desperation to enter into my voice, "because the sign back there said that Selçuk is twenty-nine more kilometers away." "Ah", he said, guiding the car into some person's yard, "but the ayran is here."

Now don't get me wrong: I do love some good ayran. Ayran is very simple to make: take plain yogurt and add some lightly salted icewater to it, and then shake it up into a frappe. OK, so it sounds absolutely horrid when it is described, but take it from me: when it's hot and dusty out, and you're lucky enought to get your mitts on some ice-cold ayran, drinking it makes you feel as though you've been french-kissed by an archangel. You know, one of the really saucy ones with the three sets of wings. Or is that a seraphim? I digress.

He got out of the car and walked up to the door and knocked. Mind you, from the outside of this place one would assume that this was just some old house, but from previous experiences I knew that this was likely one of THOSE PLACES that everyone knew about and which would provide me with LOCAL COLOUR and ETHNOGRAPHIC PLEASURE.

A woman clad in şalvar came to the door and stared at my friend. At this point, had this been most places in the US, the woman would have fogged his ass with military-grade assailant-spray; because it was Turkey, she smiled brightly and began to shuffle out to a small shed near the door to fetch a tiny tea-table and Turkish stools. The Turk sat and began happily humming, merrily awaiting his treat; I was mildly aghast. Because I had not been offered any explanation as to why this woman, why this house and why oh God why these tiny stools that I was threatening to render into kindling, I was quite uneasy. It would have been like me going to some random person's house on my way to work and knocking on their door to be like "GIVE ME SOME COKE. AND A POLLY-O STRING CHEESE IF YOU HAVE ONE. ALSO SOME COOKIES. NO, NOT THAT SNACKWELLS SHIT."

True to his word, the woman disappeared into her house and came back out with a carafe of very thick ayran, which she poured into two glasses. As I drank, my friend explained that this woman was known throughout the entire province of İzmir as making the most sublime ayran in the whole of Western Anatolia. It was true; I may never again taste something so strangely refreshing. "And who would have thought", he mused, "that someone without electricty could make something like this."

The shadow of a passing cloud darkened the yard for a moment and my hysteria returned, now coupled with a healthy fear that I would poop my pants later as karmic retribution for having enjoyed this creamy, salty and only partially refrigerated treat so much. I clutched my friend's arm and croaked in a voice that sounded terrible and distant - like a faraway air-raid siren - that we needed to be on our way, lest something quite un-magical happen in this land of enchanted goat's-milk treatiness. As we left and as my friend paid her, the old woman asked us where we were heading. "Efes", my friend said. Her eyes glinted and, for a but a tiny moment, I thought I saw gathering tears. "That place is like an old friend", she said in a misty, far-away voice. "You know, a friend with whom you don't speak anymore." She paused and wiped off a glass with a rag. "When I was a girl, I wanted to be trained in the classics and archaeology. They were my first true loves. And then..."

In the trailing of her last word, I could feel the last forty years of Turkey's turbulent history, and I knew even without her telling me so that she was illiterate. The land of the galloping mare's head had come a very, very long way, but someone - something - had left her behind, alone with some goats, their milk and the salt that could be mined directly from the soil in her barren yard.

My heart/husk rattled within the tin barrel that was my chest with trepidation. I, too, had abandoned my first love, and worse still, I had abandoned THE SAME LOVE THAT THE OLD AYRAN WOMAN HAD. And and AND, I was soon to be hurtling at speeds generally reserved for particle acceleration on a Turkish highway toward one of the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse. You know, toward a place that God Himself told an angel He'd eff up by moving their candlestick out of its place lest those who'd left their first loves repented. Or something. Definitely with the candlesticks, though.

Oh, of course I still loved the classical world - why else would I be dragging several of my Turkish friends on death marches all across Anatolia if I didn't? - but my secret, first true love was the daring, brilliant and hubris-doomed city of Athens. Athens, which, while tantalizingly near, was still a sea away from where I sat and a world away from my newly-favored ethnographies about contested landscapes, genocide and the reconciliation of sacred/historical/archaeological space in large cities. OK, so it's pretty close to that last one, but you get the drift.

At last, we reached Ephesus and beheld the parking lot, which was an ocean of blinding whiteness - white gravel, white tour buses, pasty white Northern Europeans/North Americans bulging unattractively out of inappropriately cut white garments, aclutch their pallid white children. White bullhorns blatted in the sun-shattered heat and white dust swam lazily in volutes, kicked into the air by white strappy sandals. White-filtered cigarettes were devoured and ground into the white earth, which whispered briefly in protest.

I simultaneously wanted to die and to live.

Walking through Ephesus is an experience that is not really describable. The throngs of bleached tourists were, at first, quite unnerving, but as anyone who knows a damn thing about the ancient world, and indeed, of Ephesus, it is and was a city that can appreciate nothing less. The Star of Asia. The jewel in the diadem of the Ionian city states. Ephesus: second only to Rome in size, stature and grandeur. It would have been filthy, smoky and gloriously and wretchedly stinky as well, and there, in the burning Aegean sun, I made my peace with the reality of one of the most fascinating and engaging ruin sites in the whole of the world.

Ephesus would likely have evolved into a modern Turkish city had it not been for deforestation, which led to erosion, which silted up the city's famed harbor and turned it into a malarial fen. And then, oh wait, there were earthquakes too, because THEY don't suck at all. Finally, the inhabitants of the city left the burned-out remains of their own Wonder of the World - the Artemesion - and their once-splendorous pearl of the Aegean and fled toward Smyrna and to the interior of Anatolia. Abandoned, silted over and forgotten, Ephesus would await excavation in the twentieth century.

After spending as much time as I thought would be possible in the site itself, I darted into the souvenir tents that lined the path to the parking lot. After searching for twenty minutes, I found a small reproduction of the Artemis of Ephesus, replete with several penduluous sphereoids hanging from her upper torso. There were many of these statues to choose from, but I chose the one with the very large hat. After commenting on the polymammaric nature of the statue, my friend asked me why I'd chosen that one.

Together we walked toward the car and the promises of a renewed, long-lost love affair, of five more apocalyptic churches, and of the endless delights that Turkey herself provided for me every day. I realized upon reaching the car that I'd not answered his question, and I turned toward the city's ruins as I spoke.

"Because it looks like a candlestick", I said.

***

Me and the Ephesian amphitheatre

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic

The Seven Churches.

Write in a book what thou seest, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.

—The Book of Revelations 1:11

Part I: The first church.

I awoke in full darkness on what felt like a twin bed and immediately began to panic. The sane, rational, calm part of me was out back having a cigarette break, clearly, but before I made the potentially rash decision to thrash myself out of my bedclothes and bellow like a birthing water-buffalo, I calmed myself slightly and began to assess my situation.

The question that required addressing first was simple: where the feck am I?

Clues:

I sensed that someone else was in the room. This was confirmed by a heavy, wet sound that was likely a freshly-cut man-fart; the ensuing stench confirmed this. OK, so I'm in the dark, some dude is asleep in here too, and something eggy this way comes. Moments later, there came the sound of something being broadcast on a speaker outside the room where I was laying, attempting valiantly not to leap out of my skin, and it sounded like singing. A dude singing. Singing in Arabic.

Ah. OK, so I'm not in the U.S.

Things fell together quickly from that point. I remembered that I was studying abroad in Turkey, and had been at that point for several months. I was at the home of my Turkish best friend, who was likely the (unconscious) layer of the abomination that now assaulted and violated my person. Finally, we were lying upon two small beds at his parent's home, which happened to be in a small town in the İzmir environs. And, apparently (because the muezzin was calling to prayer), it was dawn.

Dawn meant one thing.

I crept out of the room and the memory of the layout of his family's house flooded back. Quick now, to the damn window, I thought, and it had better not be fecking raining.

The area around İzmir isn't desert, but it's not Seattle, either. I'd come to Ödemiş for many reasons - prime among them a really relaxed and wonderful opportunity to stay with a Turkish family outside one of the country's thundering cities - but I had another, similarly compelling motive. Namely, I wanted to crawl around the Roman city of Ephesus. Wanted may be too weak a word; would PERISH IF I DIDN'T GO would be more like it. Mother Nature, however, was not cooperating with my furtive and increasingly threat-filled entreaties to stop already with the unseasonal rain and general gloom.

"Mother Nature", I'd begin, while beholding a soggy Turkish town at dawn from the parlor window, "I have been kind to you thus far. I recycle. I use, whenever I can, fabric bags at the supermarket. I try to limit my carbon footprint as best I can. But if I have come all the way to Turkey and if I don't get to go to Epehsus, the Star of Asia, I will...break open batteries! Yes! And...throw gum-wrappers out my window! And, um, I'll TOTALLY PEE ON TREES."

From behind me came a soft tutting. My friend's mother was up already, and she'd seen how crestfallen I was. Yağmur yağar, she said as comfortingly as she could, her warm hand upon my slumped shoulder, and she left me with my dejection to begin breakfast preparations. Her words, though, weren't so much with the comfort: she didn't say "it is raining" but "it rains." Like, you know, FOREVER.

When my friend awakened and after meal/shower time, we talked about what we'd do with the whole awesome sprawling Roman ruin thing a non-possibility for the day. Having been a schoolchild in the area meant that he'd been "forced" to go to Ephesus about seven hundred times, but thankfully he sympathized with my nerdy plight and, mercifully, tried to not dwell on the fact that there were precious few days left that we'd be in the area.

At once, he brightened and sat up arrow-straight in his chair. "Well, we could go to this mountain nearby", he said, "and I think that there is some ruin-thing on it." My pulse quickened; he knew that if it was old and decrepit and poorly marked, I had NO CHOICE but to clamber all over it. I asked him - calmly - if he knew the name of the site and, after thinking for a moment, frowning into his (omfg) soft-boiled egg, said that he thought it began with an "S." Finally, after about ten minutes, he blurts out "SART!" and continues sopping up egg-mess with baked-that-morning bread.

Sart. Hmm. Nothing I'd ever heard of, and believe me, between my insufferable nerdiness and the CLASS I WAS TAKING ABOUT ANATOLIAN ARCHAEOLOGY at Bilkent, I'd have known it. Then I remembered: he'd know its name in Turkish, but he wouldn't necessarily know its ancient name.

I said it out loud. Sart. Sart. And then it came: SARDIS.

Mother of god, Sardis. Sardis, home to one of Asia Minor's most active Jewish populations. Sardis, jewel in the Lydian crown. Sardis: HALF AN HOUR AWAY BY CAR.

I tried to not show how excited I was for no other reason than I get a rabid, no-blinking thing going on and I didn't want to frighten my new Turkish family. "Sart", I said faux-casually, "that sounds interesting. And it's open in the rain?" "Sure", he said, "nobody ever goes there. It's in this field near a mountain."

NOBODY EVER GOES THERE. My head nearly leaked.

We drove in silence - well, except for a Whitney Houston (!) cassette in the stereo - through a nearby mountain pass and into a lush and surprisingly verdant valley that was redolent with wood smoke and wet rosemary. I saw the yellow "SART" sign from a distance and began to squirm uncomfortably for a number of reasons.

1) Delerious excitement.
2) Distended bladder.
3) A fear that I would, as resident anthro/archienerd, be forced to provide an excruciating tour of Sardis, a city I knew next to nothing about. Oh, and did I mention that my friend's girlfriend, who spoke about six words of English, was there, too? Then I remembered that one of my mutant powers is my ability to present information in a way that makes it sound truthful; this is fancy way of saying that I can lie with the best of them.

Something else made me squirm, too, and it took a while for me to pinpoint it. Suddenly, seven years of Catholic education pimp-slapped me across my face and I remembered - with dawning amusement and vague, unsettled fear - the Book of Revelations and what we'd been taught were the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse. The less hysteria-inducing name for them was the Seven Churches of Asia, and, as I recalled each of them in turn, I realized for the first time that

ALL OF THEM WERE IN TURKEY.

Suddenly my life had purpose again. Well, I mean other than eating anything Turkish that was put in front of me unless a dead, dead eye was looking back at me. Seven "churches", scattered across Western Turkey. Seven churches...of the apocalypse. I think that we all can agree that it was a foregone conclusion.

Regarding Sardis, where I was soon to be found leaping around like a meth-using, developmentally-delayed ibex in sheer ruin-induced euphoria, it is written:

And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars: I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead. Be thou watchful, and establish the things that remain, which were ready to die: for I have found no works of thine perfected before my God. Remember therefore how thou hast received and didst hear; and keep it, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.

Damn.

I tried not to think too much about that as I spent a lovely afternoon frolicking through nearly abandoned (but well-cared-for) ruins, feeding the guard goat (all Turkish ruin sites have them - dogs don't also serve the dual function of lawnmower) and, in general, praying that my latent powers over the weather would manifest themselves so that I could keep the menacing rainclouds at bay so that I could enjoy at least one damn ruin site. As we were leaving the site, I happened to look over into the ditch and, after a double-take, I told my friend to STOP THE CAR DO NOT GO ANY FURTHER FOR THE LOVE OF GOD in a voice that may or may not have sounded remarkably like that of a six-year-old-girl.

Snuffling around, oblivious to our intrusion, was a wild hedgehog. Fighting the urge to scoop it up and love it FOREVER, I watched as it snuffled further down the ditch and then disappeared into a copse of trees near the roadside.

The Turks were less than impressed. "Those things are everywhere", said my friend, "and they steal any food that isn't nailed to the floor."

A thief.

I will come as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee, I heard whispering through the swaying cypress trees.

We got into the car and sped away into the darkness of gathering night and endless rain, and I didn't - I couldn't - look back.

One down.

Me at the Temple of Artemis, Sardis (Sart).

Until next week, I remain,

Domonic

You get what you deserve, my friend.

Let's be plain from the onset, folks: I am a monster. I never anticipated that my unspeakable monstrosity would progress - nearly unheeded, by the by - this far. Since it has, I urge each of you to do one of two things:

1) Cleave to your choicest of deities and whisper devotional supplications to him/her/it on my behalf. Oooh, with some incense. Yes, incense.

2) Sit back and watch the show.

Now that I have made this - disclaimer? preamble? - I must hasten to add that I, unattached to any faith or reason, believe that shit begets shit. It breeds, hidden and reeking, like two unnaturally pale, pimple-riddled teenagers grinding nasties under the Wildwood (NJ) Boardwalk. In July. At low tide.

To whit:

Once in a great while, Keith and I find ourselves in a predicament. Let's say that we've neglected our dishes - this clearly NEVER HAPPENS - and they have begun to, much like a primordial ocean, create new life and, as a by-product, undesirable odours. Let's also say that one of us has decided in a moment of profound sagacity that breakfast and lunch are optional meals and that, upon the supper hour, one becomes so ravenous that one contemplates consuming the two-year-old OPENED package of Scottish shortbread cookies one discovers in one's glove-box. Again, I need to stress: this did NOT happen to me. More than once.

Living in Nashville, we're then presented with some options. Provided that it's not past 6. Or if we need anything between January through May.

Pizza. Three places offer it; one is good, and the other two...well, let's just say that I've scraped tastier things off my windshield. I mean, for the love of God: gas station pizza?

McDonalds/Subway: Great if you want to poop the bed/have your sandwich prepared by high school kids who have no interest in whether you live, die, or decide to grow mushrooms in your crack.

Steak: I don't want to have to give handjobs behind the Circle K Dumpster for dinner expenses. Again.

Quaint, local restaurants with ambiance: See previous.

Nashville is roughly equidistant from Bloomington and Columbus, two largish towns that have the same sorts of amenities but with dramatically different presentation of said amenities. And by "different presentation" I mean "one is filled with insufferable students, one out of ten of whom is my client, and the other was under water for two weeks this spring." More often than not, we'll choose Columbus because a) IN 46 to Columbus is not nearly as twisty-turny as to Bloomington and b) I need a damn change of scenery. Also: Columbus has the Anti-Wal*Mart, but that's for another day.

ONE AWESOME DAY LAST WEEK

Leaving behind two sinkfuls of TOTALLY CLEAN DISHES, we arrived in Columbus. My eyes - unfocused as they were from all of the hunger - swam lazily and fell upon the neon marquee of an approaching KFC. I felt a tendril of hot breath caress my earlobe before it wended its way to my auditory canal, where it spake unto me.

"Wouldn't it be nice", it said lazily, "to sink a fork into a robust, juicy, lump of deep-fat-fried bird? Mmmm. So juicy. So filled with secret herbs. Also, you can get those unnatural mashed potatoes with that brown gravy. Yes. Gravy."

*I* was sold. Convincing Keith, though, remained a hurdle. What if - heavens prevent it! - he'd wanted to seek succor at Taco Bell? May the thought perish, I thought, and lie reeking in the ground.

Casually - and clearly without mentioning that I'd heard voices mere moments before - I ask Keith if he'd wish to procure our meal from the crispy dead bird factory. With nearly no hesitation, he maneuvers the car into the KFC parking lot. Score.

Upon entering, we realized that this particular KFC had - and here you'll all have to be strong - a buffet. The creature who greeted us (a woman with a very...um...masculine presence) presumed that we'd be asuck upon the buffet, and after a brief consultation, we confirmed that. She handed us a styrofoam plate and, far off in the distance, I could faintly heard an angel die.

We'd gotten through most of our meal - part of which was, for me, half a plate of some noodle substance that tasted like chicken boullion - before we heard, and I saw, the unfortunateness that was occurring in the corner.

I'll pause for a moment to be clear with you folks. If you are eating, or have just eaten, or might be pregnant, or are of delicate constitution in general, the rest of this might not be your cup o' chamomile.

I'd noticed that a group of people - people whom I'd assumed to be a family of some kind - gnawing their way through a meal in the back corner. Upon closer inspection, my first impression - that of them being related - seems to be suspect, as they were a very strange mash of people. Middle aged men. Old women. Early teens. Not a woman in her childbearing-years anywhere near. I thought, huh, and continued to savage a chicken breast.

Until one of the preteens began to blow snot-bubbles.

And then snot-rockets.

On his plate.

His plate with food on it.

And...and...

OH GOD MAKE IT STOP DEAR GOD MAKE ME BLIND

Then we realized that they were likely members of an unrelated group of people who may or may not have had needs. By the time we figured all of this out, though, the rest of the meal was ruined. Ruined. FOREVER.

As we ran to the car so that I could keep my gorge down, we realized that this wasn't the first time we'd been run out of a KFC by other patron's behaviors. Granted, this sweatpants-wearing teen had needs, and none of that was his fault. But what is it about a KFC buffet that opens a portal directly to dining-experience Hell? I have never been to one that did not have at least three of these people/events/smells:

1) One person with eye-burning cuminy body odor

2) Someone who will disobey line etiquette so much so that you wish to permanently embed unwashed salad tongs into folds of their ghastly white blubber

3) A vague but persistent smell of human urine

4) Some middle-aged, puff-paint-sweatshirt-wearing woman in clip-on earrings demanding fresher biscuits

5) A child vomiting, unseen by its parents, who are only alerted to the blessed gastric event when the wave of stench crashes over them

6) Several elderly men who talk loudly about how they shouldn't eat fried chicken because it's really a (insert innumerable racial epithets here) food

7) A really mangy-looking toy poodle with fleas in such a quantity as to be visible to the naked eye

8) A WASPy elderly couple sucking the marrow out of chicken leg bones

9) An uncomfortable-looking Asian

10) Someone who has clearly defecated on themselves

By now, you're thinking one of two things: one, "What do you expect? I mean, it's a goddamn KFC", or two, "Why would you still go there?"

I'm not an idiot; I don't go to a KFC and expect to be confronted by the comforting smells of bleach and cleanly, hygienic patrons. They. Sell. Deep. Fried. Animal. Carcasses. There. And not just ANY carcasses: carcasses of birds who likely lived very short, unhappy lives.

I suppose, then, that I am being punished. I go because I am hungry. I leave never wanting to eat again. I go because I think that this time JUST THIS ONCE DAMN IT ALL that I will be able to get through it without puking in my mouth. I leave because this is never to be because the great wheel of karma is providing me with an immediate return of punishment for my patronage. I go because I believe in the good in people. I leave because people blow snot rockets onto their awaiting plates.

The world, it has been said, is a vampire. Instead, I envision that the world is that old woman, sitting along with a knitting magazine, gnawing marrow out of a chicken thigh.

Just a thought.

Until next week, I remain,

Domonic

Days and nights in Nashville.

It has been slightly more than a year since our hasty, poorly orchestrated Saigon-at-the-fall escape from the Greenwood Man-Lair and its array of insensate horrors. For those who do not recall the sundry evils that were to be found within and in its environs, allow me to refresh.

Black mold in levels that one would generally associate with, oh, graves that had been hewn into a flood-prone riverbank. In Equador.

Immediate proximity to one of Greenwood’s busiest suburban intersections – a four-way stop that, during rush hour, backed vehicles up for half a mile in ALL FOUR DIRECTIONS.

Adjacent proximity to a fire station that serviced not only Greenwood but also many of the southernmost Indianapolis suburbs. All day and all night. All night, I tell you, ALL NIGHT.

Neighbors who, in their own savage way, meant well; it’s easy taking obsessive care of one’s lawn – complaining vociferously to all who’d listen about the two fairies living next door who let their yard go to shit – when your dugong of a wife no longer has the wind in her to squat down on your man-pike.

The sixteen dead nursing interns in the crawlspace that were absorbing far too much lime.

Just when all seemed lost and I had begun to plait a noose of my own nose hair to hang myself with, Keith came home one day to tell me that he’d been released from his bondage at a nameless living history museum in the Fishers, Indiana, area.

And so, after “packing” and having the majority of our home delivered in a massive truck by three gentlemen who, while competent and friendly, made us feel a little squirmy inside, we began to settle into the community of Nashville, Indiana.

Population: 750.

That’s right. That’s not 7,500. Oh hells no. Seven-hundred-fifty full-time residents.

I’ve lived in smaller places in the past. As a child, I spent many summers in Renick, West Virginia, which – depending on how much bathtub-distilled moonshine the census-taker had consumed – had between twenty-eight and forty-two residents. But I was a child then, and lo, never did I once lust verily in the stark of the night for decent Chinese food only for it to be cruelly denied to me, so the innocence-factor wins out on that one. However, I’ve also lived in vast, thundering cities, both domestically and in Turkey. You know, places where it is possible to, oh, I dunno, see a movie. Or shop in a department store. Or have more than seven places to dine when the mood set me (four in the winter).

At first, my New Jersey “it’s nunna ya fuckin’ business, pal” upbringing – tempered a bit by living in boreal New England for more than a decade – caused me to distrust the local folks and their breezy questions. So no, Small Woman at the Circle K Counter: I’m NOT going to make idle chitchat with you while my debit for $4.37 for a bearclaw danish and Mountain Dew (the manwhore’s breakfast) goes through. No, Creepy Elderly Man Who Owns the Antique Place, I’m not going to sit down and have some “tea” with you on a rainy Saturday afternoon. No, Lady Who Owns the Strange Doily-Encrusted Store That Smells a Little Like Pee, I’ll not tarry long to tell you why I am looking for Boyd’s Bears that are dressed up as other animals.* No, Old Man Who Runs One of the Gas Stations, I don’t care that you saw a twelve-point buck on the way to work. Riiiiiiight.

After about two weeks, I began – like a pat of butter laying out in the death-heat of an Indiana August afternoon – to turn rancid. No, I began to soften to the idea of living in quasi-isolation, and began to view the locals with something akin to kinship. After all, they too could be waking up at midnight on a Friday and have nowhere to get some good Pad Thai. I got a library card. I became a local at the gas station on the corner where I often would procure my sad and, as aforementioned, prostitute-like breakfasts. But perhaps most crucial, I began to develop a close relationship with area merchants. And by “close relationship” I mean “I began to partially sustain several businesses single-handedly based on my purchases.” Is it mere coincidence that I live in a town whose favored artistic expression – primitivism – makes my heart soar? Is it coincidence that I live in a town where I can easily procure – with a local discount! - baleful Byzantine icons, homemade jar candles with soy wax and twisted wicks, gourds fashioned into masks and sassafras tea? Hardly. Is it coincidence that I live in a town where the nearby woods muffle the screams of the – yes. Nice little town. Mmm-hmm.

Just when I think that I know all that there is to know about town, someone tells me some delicious, horrid secret. Or a new steak place opens and is just sitting there, out behind the gas station, making delicious meaty treats without my knowledge. Or stores open and close nearly instantly, fluttering moths briefly alive inside a hot Mason jar. Or I finally find out what that hellish, accident-causing bend in IN 46 above town is ACTUALLY called by the locals (“Witch’s Curve”, but to me, always “The Juggernaut”).

Now that I adore it here, maybe, just maybe, I’ll open my mouth and let slide some idle gossip with the small woman behind the counter for once. And I’ll be on the lookout for that twelve-point buck, because damn.

Until next week, I remain,

Domonic


*Because they are goddamn cute, that’s why.