dom's life in the corn

The Seven Churches, part IV: Pergamum.

2010-02-05T08:42:00.001-05:00

And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write;
These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges;
I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is: and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth.
But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication.
So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate.
Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches;
To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

- The Book of Revelations

7 PM: Behramkale (Assos), Northwest Aegean Turkey

Ahmet and I had settled down into a meal - one that I knew I'd remember for the rest of my life - when his cellphone rang. He looked sheepishly at me and I tried my hardest to pretend like his ringtone - something hideous, like a snippet of some wretched ska song - wasn't ruining the atmosphere of our setting. Five feet away from me, the wine-dark Aegean lapped at what I determined to be a crumbled Byzantine fortification of the tiny port. Holding court on my plate were dozens of tiny octopi, braised in what I have to assume are the smoky-salted tears of angels. The sun was setting over the gilded crest of the Greek island of Lesbos, dim and misty in the distance across an azure slip of sea. Somewhere, a goat bleated and a gull cried.

And then the ringing. Oh, the ringing.

After the third time it rang - each of the previous calls being dispatched via a deft maneuver wherein Ahmet squeezed it through his shorts pocket - I was ready to make some suggestions.

"Ahmet", I said quietly, " for the love of the infant Jesus just answer it. If you do not choose this course of action, I will be forced to assume that I have permission to launch the device into the sea, wherein it will be swiftly set upon by various pelagic bivalves who shall encrust it utterly."

He got up and answered it while I slowly continued to savor my betentacled treat. When he returned several minutes later, he looked rather ashy. At first, I attributed it to the fact that both of us looked like we'd gotten smallpox before being blowtorched. As he ate, he kept looking at me over his plate as though I were ready to release poisonous spores from my eyebrows. I was preparing to apologize for being short with him about the hell-phone when he put down his fork and sighed heavily.

"My uncle died today", he said.

As I silently awarded myself the Dogpiss Asshole Friend of the Year Award, I asked how he was holding up. He said that he wasn't close to this particular uncle, but that his presence would be required - and required anon - in the southern Turkish city of Adana for the funeral. "I have to be one the damn pallbearers", he said moodily as he pushed the remainder of his dinner around on the hand-thrown ceramic plate.

It was at that moment that I, with dawning horror, realized that the trip we'd planned - only a third of which we had left - would have to end. I'd spent quite a bit of time in Turkey, but I didn't think that being left to my own devices without a native speaker of Turkish was wise considering that I had, apparently, a singular inability to distinguish that which was Awesome from that which was Incredibly Stupid. Ahmet must have sensed my hesitation, and he put down his fork and looked at me. "You ARE going to go on with the trip, right?", he said, fixing me in my seat with his very serious eyes. "You understand Turkish. You know how to get food. You know how to get places with public transportation. And you've done nothing but talk about Satan's altar for days now. I'll kick your ass if you don't go."

It was true. I'd spent five months in the country and I knew what to get in restaurants, how to find what I needed in cities, and - perhaps most important - I had the razor-honed ability to home in on a ruin site like I was a carrier pigeon on crystal meth. And I had been talking about Satan's altar - rumored to have been inside the Red Basilica (Kırmızı Avlu) in Pergamum - far too much to have come that far without seeing it and its hoovey goodness.

We left Behramkale reluctantly. The ruins of Assos are easily some of the most evocative in all of Anatolia and indeed the entire of the Greek-speaking ancient world, and the village of Behramkale was debilitatingly charming. Ahmet clearly didn't want to spend an entire day and night in transit to Adana (stopping in, of course, Ankara) and I was loath to part from his witty company. It was therefore all the more fitting that we had to hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck from the harbor to the upper town, and that keeping us company in said pickup truck was a goat. A goat that had continence issues. Goat raisins everywhere. ALL THE TIME GOAT RAISINS. As we sat on the side of the dusty road picking livestock shit out of our clothes and awaiting our separate buses - his going southeast, mine going straight south - a donkey walked out into the road and stood there defiantly. It was as if he was thinking Yes. Yes, I am an ass. An ass in Assos. I get it. Morons.

I parted with Ahmet, wishing him a safe and goat shit-free trip, and after three dolmuş connections I found myself in one of Turkey's legendary climate-controlled sleeper buses. Before I got on the bus in question I'd handed my luggage to the bus driver and had asked - perhaps more pointedly than I'd intended - if this particular vehicle would be dropping me off at Bergama, the Turkish city that clung to the side of the ancient Pergamene acropolis. He assured me that the bus was indeed going to be stopping at Bergama and I clambered aboard the bus to my seat.

The next thing I remember was that I was being shaken awake by a man whose fen-like breath swam with the heady presence of onions, cigarettes and coffee. Haydi, haydi, Bergama'dayiz he said, and each expulsion of breath crashed over my face in a way that made me briefly imagine that I was being slapped with a diaper that had recently been filled by a tot who'd been eating slightly spoiled Indian food. It was dark out beyond the bus and the unflattering interior bus lights had been turned. We were not moving, and everyone - I MEAN EVERYONE - was looking at me with a mixture of pity and impatience. I rallied and flung myself down off the side of the bus to find my suitcase waiting for me already. Quick as a flash the driver and the porter teleported back onto the bus and it sped away into the awaiting darkness of an Anatolian night.

Wait. Why was it so dark?

I was too sleep-addled to piece it all together quickly, but when it finally came to me I felt icy dread creep into my man-area, and it withered accordingly. No, I wasn't in a well-lit but appropriately well-worn provincial otogar, perfumed as it would be by cologne, smoke, the smell of roasting meat and the vaguely reassuring scent of diesel exhaust. In fact, I was standing on the side of a Turkish highway in the middle of the night with a suitcase, a Discman and a rapidly-growing desire to live.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness just as some small animal skittered across the desolate stretch of highway - mother of God, was that some sort of ghastly lizard or something? - and, just as I was about to leap out of my skin, I saw the outline and lights of what appeared to be a skeezy roadhouse. I didn't know they even had those here, the lucid part of my brain interjected in detached ethnographic interest. It was then that I saw what appeared to be four fire-red lightning bugs moving in lazy circles above the ground of the parking lot. Moments later four shadows detached from the more concrete darkness and I noted with dim fear that the fireflies were the cherries of four cigarettes, each one of them clutched in the hand of a burly twentysomething Turkish man. The men began to stride purposefully toward me and it was then that I began to pray.

Dear baby Jesus in Your hay-scented manger, I began, I know that you probably aren't terribly amused by my profound interest in the Seven Churches, but get me out of this and I'll make sure to...um...VISIT YOUR MOM'S HOUSE. Oh, I did that already in Ephesus. Uh, I'll...GAZE ADORINGLY AT MOSAICS OF YOUR COUNTENANCE. Ah. Did that already at the Hagia Sofia in İstanbul. Look. I don't have much. I'm sure you're a reasonable divine infant. Can you help a former altar boy out of a bind? Or are you going to be LIKE THAT?

They were drawing closer and I began to understand just how fecked I was - foreign, fat, and forsaken - and how nobody on the earth knew where I was at that moment. So this is how I am going to perish, I thought, alone on the side of a Turkish highway in the middle of the night, snuffed by creepy Turkish hooligans before my time. It made for a lovely tourism advertisement. It was at that moment that one of the men detached from the group and walked up to me. He took an impossibly long drag off of his smoke, exhaled and said

So, are you going to Bergama?

IN ENGLISH

to me.

I recovered from the shock of being addressed in my mother tongue in the middle of Anatolia more slowly than I'd like to admit. Upon closer inspection, the burly twentysomething Turkish hoods of my imagination were in fact four reasonably-dressed college kids who were heading home on that same bus for their vacation. Home to Bergama. Despite these revelations - and the resulting disappearance of the metallic taste in my mouth - I had fixated on why this particular gentleman had addressed me in English. I was surprised because I'd spent a lot of time in Turkey and, almost without fail, people presumed I was Turkish. It's not my "look", although there are certainly Turks who look like me. I don't flatter myself to presume that it was my ability to blend with the native population, but because I was in pretty good franchise of how things functioned I did get by unnoticed for the most part. My analysis was interrupted by the young man, who sported a kicky goatee like mine (at the time) and had begun speaking again.

We just called a taxi. Would you like to share it with us? I found the strength to say that yes, indeed, I'd like to not die on the side of this highway, and he laughed heartily. It turns out that we were quite near Bergama - as my eyes adjusted, the lights from the city glowed welcomingly in the distance - and, reassured that I wasn't about to take the Big Dirt Nap, I asked why I was left to perish. Oh, he said, if there are fewer than ten people getting off at a certain city, they drop you off on the outskirts to save on gas and time. Well, at least the cheap buses do. I vowed to become fluent in Turkish so that I could write a scathing letter to the chairperson of the We're Crappy and Strand You for Giggles Bus Company just as the taxi arrived. We piled in and, in the gentle glow of the globe light I introduced myself to my four companions and thanked them for not taking my sweet sweet life. They laughed again and asked if I had a place to stay in town. I was so preoccupied with not being slaughtered that I hadn't given it much thought, and it was clear that it was quite late. One of the gents, Mustafa, then told me that his grandfather owned a hotel in town that I could stay at called, strangely enough, The Gobi Pension. He worked there too and would make sure to take care of me. I nearly wept with gratitude.

And about the English? They had seen the book I'd been reading before I passed out and, apparently, I had been speaking in my sleep. They were in the seats behind me, they assured me, and were in no way stalking me.

The Gobi Pension was perfection. Mustafa and his charming grandfather checked me in and told me about the complimentary Turkish breakfast that could be had the following morning and trundled me off to bed tutting softly about how weary I looked. My room overlooked a busy road and, on the other side of said road, a street fair was quite earnestly in full swing. I opened the window and listened to the fair and the lingering sigh of the city as night overtook it before passing out in my clothes on the bed.

I awoke early and, eager to not miss the lovely breakfast, I made my way downstairs. Patio tables set out on the sidewalk positively groaned with Turkish breakfast fixins: abundant tea, tomatoes, cucumbers, bread (loaf AND simit), olives, salça, feta cheese and hard-boiled eggs in İznik- style egg-cups. I tore into it like a badger until I noticed a young blonde man sitting alone in the corner poking dejectedly at his egg. I brought my plate over to his table and asked if I could sit because HEY I WANTED TO TRY NEW THINGS OK. He looked at me quizzically and I began to wonder if I should ask in French or German (neither of which I actually knew) when he bade me sit. His name was Serge, he was in fact quite fluent in English and he was a Belgian tourist visiting Turkey for the first time. He had no earthly idea what was going on, like, EVER. (Did they mean to set out olives and tomatoes for breakfast? he asked. Yes. Yes they did, I counseled whilst cramming said delights into my awaiting maw). I asked him what he planned to do that day, informing him that rabid hell-cats wouldn't be able to keep me from the Pergamene acropolis and the Red Basilica. As we talked over the eggs and olives and learned more about each other, I revealed that I was taking Anatolian/Greek/Roman archaeology courses at my school, and he beamed. Who better, he asked, to go to Pergamum with? Serge was a big believer in serendipity.

Serge and I became fast friends. He was bright and witty and quite a conversationalist, traits which I prize dearly. Instead of taking pictures, he wrote and sketched in a journal about his experiences, which I found fascinating. We set out after I gorged myself, and as we walked to the site, we noticed that a young man of about thirteen was tailing us. As my experience only the night before had proven to me, Turkey was a place where wonderful and unexpectedly delightful things would happen just at the moment when you presumed that you were about to be murdered, and I wasn't concerned. Serge, however, was still guarded, and he became quite uneasy. Um, so what's with this kid? Pickpocket? Glue-huffer? he asked. Let's ask him, I said, and Serge looked mildly horrified. C'mon, it's a kid, and we're strapping lads. We can take him. Serge tittered nervously.

I turned around and walked toward the boy, who looked quite startled by this development. Can I help you? I asked. It took a moment, but the boy beamed and answered. Can you speak English with me? I am learning it in school. Sure, I said, but in exchange you have to help us. When we're done today with seeing Pergamum we'll both need to find the otogar to leave town. Can you help with that? The child nearly squealed with delight and agreement. I winked at Serge, who looked on in wonder. It was clear that he was beginning to understand the magic of serendipity as it played out in Turkey. As we walked to the site, we held an extensive conversation with our new friend. His name was Mehmet (Call me Mike, he begged), and he liked American music and British television and had a dog that he named after an obscure Ottoman pasha. He had a cat, too, but her name was a little different. He'd named her Madonna. That is awesome, I said, and meant it.

After temporarily parting company with Mehmet at the foot of the hill leading to the sites, Serge and I spent the better part of a day in the extensive ruins of Pergamum's acropolis - I in nearly unglued archaeological bliss, Serge writing and sketching dutifully in his notebook and looking pensive - before we descended to one of the secondary sites nearby. It was the site of the Red Basilica, which in antiquity contained an altar that was crowned by a sinister-looking hollow bronze statue. A priest would get devastatingly high from inhaling the smoke from a burning medicinal herb and would climb inside the statue and gibber until he passed out/shat himself, all the while making oracle-like pronouncements. It was this place that St. John pronounced was where Satan dwelled and I stood there, transfixed, in the roofless ruin and tried to imagine how beastly sweaty those priests must have been after being released from the bronze statue. Mmm. Satany and musky.

After taking in as much of Satan's altar as I could stand, we made our way back to town. True to his word, Mehmet was waiting for us at the edge of town to show us to the otogar. After he brought us there and helped us buy our tickets - Serge going to Çanakkale, I to Ankara - we bought him an ice cream and a Coke and passed a lovely hour watching the street fair's pagentry.

Serge's bus came first, but before he got on he scribbled his email address on a postcard and asked me to keep in touch. Many months later, I got an email from him; he was teaching English and French in Nanjing, China. Apparently, while he and I were climbing around the ruins, I'd talked extensively about my love for the Chinese culture and the Chinese language, and he'd recorded that in his notebook. Reviewing it later while poised to choose a country to teach in, he'd chosen China in large part because of how rabidly I'd talked about it. He was so damn happy, he said, and he had me to thank for it. Serendipity indeed.

Mehmet stayed with me until the bus came. Absently I reached down to the ground for a rock or a stick as a little souvenir of the wonderful day I'd spent with two new friends, and when my hand came back up I noted that I'd come upon a rock.

A white rock.

As I boarded I put the rock in my pocket where it would be safe. The muezzin was crying out from a nearby mosque, a sound that was dulled and finally muted by the interior of the coach. As we pulled away, Mehmet waved happily at me through the window with - did I imagine it? - a little bit of mist in his eyes. The hum of the air conditioner whispered softly, and I half-imagined that it spoke with St. John's words as I closed my eyes for a much-anticipated nap.

To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

For the first time in my life I had to rely on myself to navigate around another country and its culture alone, and in doing so I had learned to trust in the often surprising innate good in strangers. I'd gotten over my fear of taking risks because I somehow knew that Turkey and her countrymen would ultimately not disappoint me. I arrived in Ankara puff-chested and cheeky-proud and, for the first time in my life, I felt like an adult. A man.

My white rock doesn't have a name written on it - I checked - but of this I have no doubt: I had overcome.

Until next Friday, I remain,

Domonic

The Seven Churches, part IV: Smyrna.

2010-01-29T20:09:00.001-05:00

And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These things saith the first and the last, who was dead, and lived again: I know thy tribulation, and thy poverty (but thou art rich), and the blasphemy of them that say they are Jews, and they art not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Fear not the things which thou art about to suffer: behold, the devil is about to cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days. Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches. He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.
- The Book of Revelations

When first I began to tell people that I'd made fairly concrete plans to spend several months living in another country - another, might I add, Middle Eastern country - I was confronted with a sadly anticipated mixture of wonder, incredulity and, most enchanting of all, thinly-veiled racism.

Me: So, I think I'm going to be studying abroad in Turkey next year.
Older Female Quasi-Relation: Oh my.
Me: What?
OFQ-R: Isn't it, you know, [whispering] completely filthy there? You know?
Me: What?
OFQ-R: And those Moss-lem men will just stone a woman to death in the street for being alive.
Me: What?
OFQ-R: Well, you might as well just slit your own throat. In your own bed. Then rob yourself.

After a while, in sheer exasperation I began to actively lie to people who had heard about my plans to study abroad (likely in conversation with my mother).

Distant Relative Feigning Interest: So, your mom told so-and-so who told what's-her-face who told blahbitty-blahbitty who told me that you're taking off next year for parts unknown.
Me: Yes, I am going to the Congo.
DRFI: Isn't it incredibly dangerous there?
Me: Well, if I escape being hacked to death by a paramilitary death squad for a pack of smokes, I'll likely become a host to a parasite so rare as to not have a classification yet. Worms will burrow unbidden from my skin and my eyes will leak out of my skull. Small pieces of my body's extremities will rain down on the forest floor after becoming dessicated and necrotic. In the end, I'll die alone, sweaty and parasite-ridden, while shitting my pants and moaning like a crack-addled whore in heat. But I think that would be the same anywhere.
DRFI: I'm just going to go freshen my drink.

One soul-crushingly rainy afternoon, my mother and sister and I went out to my grandfather's house in the malarial fens of Orono, Maine, ostensibly for a lovely visit. In the course of the conversation, my mother mentioned that I had gotten accepted to study in Turkey for that following Spring semester. Casually, as if it weren't significant, my grandfather said "Oh yeah, I was there once." And the he moved on to talking about, oh, grout or something. Maybe about chowder. Or his broken electric griddle.

I couldn't help but stare nakedly at him. This was a man who, from the time I moved to Maine, hadn't - to the best of my knowledge - left Penobscot County, and from frequent declarations to that effect had less than no interest in doing so. But he wasn't always like that, my subconscious stated baldly while forcing my mouth closed. Remember: your aunts and uncles were all born in different states. And this wrinkly seventy-five pound man used to be in the Navy. Oh yes.

I interrupted his train of thought to ask him about his time in Turkey after he finished his riveting story about, oh, I dunno, finding the last tube of Gleem toothpaste on clearance at the Shop N' Save.

"Oh, it's a godforsaken place", he said, and shuddered a little. "Hated it."

I was a little crestfallen, but I asked where he'd been in the country. İzmir, he said, and it was a hellhole. I knew I'd be based out of Ankara, but still, I needed to know why the country I was poised to be spending a hell of a lot of time in soon was so repulsive. I pushed further, and he sighed. It was at this time that I closed my eyes slightly to take in his story whilst imagining this sixty-something man in the prime of his youth and wearing what I have to imagine would be a kicky little sailor's outfit, complete with an adorable little cap. It was amusing on many levels and was denaturing the sting from his previous "hellhole" comment.

"So, once we docked in the smelly little harbor, we went on shore leave. I went to a little cafe on the water and got a coffee or something and then I smelled this sweet smell coming from the tables beside me. One of the men asked me if I wanted some of this hubble-bubble thing, and I was like 'sure.' When I woke up three days later we were headed back out to sea. And I couldn't stop shitting my pants."

I was relieved, to be honest. My grandfather had seen about ten minutes of Turkey before he accepted the fragrant hose of what I assume was a nargile filled to the brim with the finest hashish outside of the Afghan lands FROM A PERFECT STRANGER. I could easily and without the subtle ache of regret write off his entire statement with a notation of "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT UM WOW". Expunged. Forgotten.

As we prepared to depart, he took me aside to ask me for a favor. "Could you bring me back some of their funny money?", he asked quietly. "And maybe a postcard?" I assured him that I would perform both tasks and would send his postcard from İzmir herself. It was then that I caught a tiny, fleeting twinkle in his eyes. You filthy old man, I thought with a smile. You loved that hash, didn't you?

***

Many months later, I awoke in the humid darkness of a sleeper coach bus. Something heavy, wet and hot was pressed against my shoulder and I presumed it was my Turkish friend/brother, who had fallen asleep moments after leaving Ankara and had slumped three-quarters of the way into my seat. I had no idea where we might be - we could have been halfway to Belgrade - but somehow I didn't want to wake him despite the fact that I knew my arm would hang dead at my side for the better part of an hour after we disembarked. Shortly afterward the helpful announcer-person came over the bus' intercom and stated that we'd soon be arriving in İzmir. My friend roused instantly and nearly pressed himself through the window in the hope of getting a glimpse of his most favored of cities. After several minutes of mute anticipation we rounded a corner on the side of a large hill and there it was, glittering softly, arcing gracefully around its promenaded, palm-tree-lined harbor.

İzmir, birthplace of Homer.
İzmir, the Pearl of the Aegean.
İzmir, nicknamed "the phoenix" because of the number of times it had been burned to the ground and had arisen, glimmering, from the ashes.
İzmir, formerly Smyrna, and one of St. John's Seven Churches.

I gasped nearly inaudibly.

İzmir isn't usually talked about much in travel literature. When it is mentioned, it's usually spoken of as a convenient, centrally-located place to stay while one attempts to ruin-hop on the Turkish Aegean coast. Admittedly, it is exactly that. However, places like Kuşadası are far more likely to provide the types of services the bleach-bloated Northern European hordes require as they disembark from their cruise ships/rented caiques for Ephesus. You know, services like postcard stores that sell only cards depicting Greco-Roman statuary and their prominently erect phallii. Or restaurants specializing in the preparation of various schnitzels. Or shops that proffer poorly made (and technically illegal) fezzes. And, while emphasizing the convenience of İzmir's location, most books describe the city as one might describe a highway-side Super 8 Motel on the outskirts of Detroit. Mostly clean. Pretty safe. Glue-huffing kids will likely not swipe your wallet. What they almost invariably fail to mention is how absolutely refreshing and charming the city is and how, upon departing from it, one begins to immediately wonder when you might return to it.

I fell for İzmir that night in the otogar, waiting to turn around to Ödemiş. I dared not mention this then, as I felt that revealing undying love without having even gotten off the bus would make me seem, oh, unhinged. Much like the feeling I got in most of Turkey - the feeling that I somehow really, really belonged there - I felt as though the city had already claimed me as its hairy, chunky lover. Or something perhaps less creepy/disgusting, like "From what I saw from the breath-fogged bus windows I felt like I'd lived there before, in a former life or some junk. You know, improbable nostalgia." Wait. That's just as creepy. Forget I said it at all.

Before we set out for Ödemiş from Ankara my friend had indicated a strong interest in having me bring my passport on the trip. While I wouldn't have ordinarily done so (at that time I apparently had a desire to live on the edge), there was an unnatural gleam in my friend's eye that begged both obedience to his will and trapjawed silence about it. I went with it because, hey, a week with a real Turkish family in a very small town in İzmir province is worth that much and more. The day we we set out to go to İzmir he asked me to take my passport with me so that I could, and I quote, "do some special shopping" for him. I was unsure about what kind of shopping would necessitate/be aided by an American passport, and I didn't ask, but the possibilities I formed in my head excited me. Again, this is because Twenty-Year-Old Domonic Apparently Had A Death-Wish. It was after the blissful morning of sightseeing in the old(er) city and vapur (ferry) riding that it became clear to me that my friend wanted me to

TRY TO GO SHOPPING IN THE BX/NEX LOCATED ON THE HARBORFRONT

for Nike shoes.

For those unfamiliar with US military bases both in the US and abroad, there is usually an exchange - fancy word for "a store" - located there for the convenience of the servicepeople. For Army folk, it's called a PX; Navy, it's called NEX, and for Air Force, it's called BX. For those unfamiliar with living abroad, Nike shoes are UNFATHOMABLY EXPENSIVE outside the US due to import markups and the perceived social status associated with them. Owning a pair of them in Turkey meant not only that you could buy and sell all of your friends but that you could sell their mothers, too. Sell them INTO WHITE SLAVERY. I may be exaggerating here, but only slightly. My friend's presumption was, of course, that American shoes being sold to Americans in a little slice of America would have an American price tag, and paying $90 for shoes was better than paying the $320 most stores in the country were posting. And by "better than" I mean "wouldn't suck the root as much as."

Two asides:

- Nike in Turkey is pronounced "NAYK", rhyming with "bike." Turkey is only one small sea away from Greece, a country where Nike, goddess of victory, was worshipped as an avatar of Athena Polias/Promachos. Just sayin'.

- Nike products do nothing for me, like, AT ALL.

So there I stood in front of a nondescript doorway leading into what looked from the outside to be an old airplane hangar, passport in my brine-covered hand, waiting to live, waiting to die, waiting with strangely specific instructions on color, width and style. In a last-ditch effort to spare my own life I tried to convince my friend that being an American citizen and an American serviceman were two very different things; the Special Eye-Gleam, however, compelled me forward.

I entered and immediately I was faced with some sort of turnstyle. Behind it was a woman - a woman in cornrows! - and I noted quickly that about three inches of shatter-proof glass separated us. She looked me up and down the way one looks at a woman in a spaghetti-strap top, sweatpants and flip-flops as she tries to flag down a bus in January in the Midwest: there's a mixture of confusion, horror, and revulsion. I immediately felt the need to evacuate onto myself but I figured that this would complicate things even more. She pressed the So Now You Can Hear Me Through This Glass Button and spoke.

Be-Cornrowed Military Woman: Can I help you?
Me: Um, yeah. My Turkish friends all think that I can shop here. I probably can't. I am wasting your time and now you are going to execute me, right?
BCMW: Lemme guess: Levi's jeans.
Me: Nope.
BCMW: Nike shoes.
Me: Bingo.
BCMW: You can't shop here.
Me: Can I have a note to that extent? Because damn.

As I left, I got a glimpse of the goods, and there was indeed a wall of shoes. After I told my crestfallen friend that they existed, and existed in a dazzling array of colors and styles, he lifted his watery eyes to me.

It must be like a church in there, he said.

Later that night, with zephyrs carried off the Aegean blowing the scent of the sea through the city streets, I asked him what he meant by comparing the BEX to a house of worship. He'd not meant any irreverence, he said, but had wanted to compare it to a place where a particular group of people could go to be safe and together. Of course, I'd imagined the Altar to Indonesian-Made Petroleum-Formed Foot Encasements, and, while it wasn't the synagogue to Satan St. John referenced, it seemed close. And Lord, was that altar FANCY.

Until next Friday, I remain,

Domonic

The Seven Churches, Part III: Laodicea.

2009-05-28T22:27:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-03-16T20:18:00.009-04:00

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.

2009-01-22T12:50:00.002-05:00

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.

2008-12-19T18:11:00.001-05:00

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.

2008-12-12T12:58:00.001-05:00

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.

God rest ye, Billy; a return to Friday 'blogs.

2008-12-05T12:55:00.006-05:00

Dusk was rapidly cloaking the Pennsylvania countryside and I, becoming intensely fearful that nothing but a 1995 Toyota Corolla separated me from the corn-fed, monstrous radioactive deer that stalk the countryside in that forsaken state, nearly missed the sign.

Wheeling, WV 13

Unnatural excitement began to radiate through my body, from my bones outward, and I realized that I'd neglected to blink for several minutes. Wheeling. WHEELING.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeling.

I am sure that this is the point where you are expecting me to explain why it is that I was tenting up in my khakis at the thought of going to Wheeling, WV. "Lord, I bet it's something fecked", you think. You'd have every reason to believe it, as my motivations are often mysterious even to myself.

Would you believe that it's because of a Billy Joel song? Is that fecked-up enough for you? I thought so.

From a town known as Wheeling, West Virginia
Rode a boy with a six-gun in his hand
And his daring life of crime
Made him a legend in his time
East and West of the Rio Grande

- Billy Joel, "The Ballad of Billy the Kid"

Magical, no? Well, even Billy Joel admits to taking some liberties with the song. And by "liberties" I mean "he made it all up ALL OF IT YES IT'S ALL MADE UP." Including, sadly, the fact that Billy the Kid was from West Virginia, as he was actually from (gasp!) New York City.

Nonetheless, there I was, at this point less than five miles from Wheeling, and I just HAD TO GO THERE WAS NO OPTION NO THERE WAS NOT LEAVE ME ALONE. I glanced down at the gas gauge and saw that it was laying, tender and lover-like, upon the "E". No time like the present to gas up, I thought, and guided MCBess toward a Pilot station.

When I am traveling, I take special pains to stop at Flying Js or Pilots, as they provide several critical amenities for me.

1) Distilled fossil fuels.
2) Embalmed meats and carbonated fructose beverages.
3) Restrooms that nobody will eye-stab you for using without purchasing something.
4) Ethnographic BONANZA, both in terms of clientele and artifacts.

After fueling up and nabbing a cola and a "beef and cheese" Slim Jim product, I found myself at a rather large magnet display. "Something that says 'Wheeling'", I murmured, turning the rack again and again.

Bupkus.

No hats, no shirts, no magnets, no snowglobes. People: how hard is it to print the word "Wheeling" on something, honestly?

I selected a magnet that showed a lovely West Virgina gristmill and another that said "Philippi Covered Bridge." I went to the checkout and an older woman in a festive holiday (Halloween) sweater greeted me with what can only be described as the sound of someone attempting to gargle tuna.

Consumptive Old Woman: This it?
Me: Um, yeah. Hey: where is this covered bridge? Is it in...oh, I dunno...Wheeling?
COW: [looking down] I don't know.
Me: [crestfallen] OK. Well, do you know where it is in West Virgina? I have relatives in Auto - the Renick/Lewisburg area.
COW: Again, I don't know. I live in goddamn Pennsylvania, all right? God.

I got back on the highway and called my sister.

Julie: What the hell do you want?
Dom: Go on Wikipedia.
Julie: No.
Dom: Do it NOW.
Julie: Fine, fecker. [clickety clickety click]
Dom: Look up Philippi Covered Bridge, West Virginia.
Julie: Why?
Dom: That is a question that is between me and the ages. Just look it up now.
Julie: It's in Philippi. (http://users.hrea.coop/post/philippi.html)
Dom: GODDAMN IT.
[hangs up]

This left only one option: I needed YES I SAID NEEDED to go to Wheeling itself, as I was not about to leave Wheeling without SOMETHING with that word on it.

From the bridge, Wheeling looks cozy and precious, flanked on one side by the mighty Ohio River and appears to be filled with historic buildings of antiquey sweetness. Wheeling at night, though, on a dank, cold late fall evening, was quite a different story. Neon signs advertised all-male boarding houses, and legions of street people roved the narrow lanes. That which looked to be cozy and antiquey before now appeared to be more urban decay than anything, and, fearing that I would be attacked for my Maine plates, I attempted to make a hasty exit.

Left turn. Right turn. Left again. Where the hell was I? Where were the signs that would point me toward the river of traffic that was 70 West? Was that a corpse merrily afloat in the ashy Ohio?

I finally found my way, having refused several window treatments at stoplights - one offered from a man whose bottle looked to have been filled with urine - and, keyed up and melancholy at once, I crossed into Ohio. I have to admit, though, that I looked back, much as Lot's wife had done.

I love you, Wheeling. I don't have any idea why, but I do. And I'll be back.

When it's daylight.

Until next Friday, I remain,

Domonic (OK,soIhaveaproblem) Potorti

One word I just can't say.

2008-10-25T23:26:00.005-04:00

When I was in Boy Scouts, our troop would often be finished with our activities sooner than the alotted time. Rather than keep eleven ten-year-old boys in the house where, surely, only horrors would be perpetrated, our scout leader would turn us loose out in the yard for a game of tag.

Well, some boys got to play.

My mother would always, without fail, be there in her car out front of the house waiting for me to get out. Early. Sometimes as much as a half-hour early. She wasn't cross-stitching, she wasn't doing crosswords. Just listening to the radio and waiting.

I now realize that the time she spent in the car waiting for me - no small hands tugging at her, no small voices making demands of her - may have been catharsis, her Calgon-take-me-away moment, once a week, waiting in the gathering dark in that 1989 Toyota Corolla. I know that at the time I felt mild annoyance (why didn't I get to stay and play?), but maybe, just maybe, it was she who'd have had the right to be annoyed at my own intrusion on a precious and fleeting moment.

It wasn't just picking me up from Boy Scouts, though. My mother was early for everything. An hour early for work. A half-hour early for the doctor. Always the first to a family function, usually even as the setup was still commencing, a plate of food in her hands. Early dropping me off at my dorm on my first day of college. Early for the steak and lobster dinners I treated her to every semester at the dining commons at school. Early taking me to the bus so that I could catch my plane to Turkey. It became a part of her that made people rely on her even though there where precious few whom she could rely on herself. It was a characteristic that made people smile when they saw her, though happiness was something that I believe she had to fight so very hard to hold onto in her own life.

Two Mondays ago, she was early for the last time.

At 7:30 AM that day, she lost her final battle at 54, eighteen hours before I was to have seen her one last time.

I'd spoken to her two nights before. "What can I bring to you from Indiana?", I asked. "Nothing. Just yourself", she replied. I could hear the oxycodone in her voice.

I tried, Mom, I really did. But you must know that now.

I'm writing this in her chair, where she spent much of her time in her remaining months. I'm writing in the dark; the eyestrain is terrible, but everyone else is asleep and this minor pain must blanch in the face of the agony she endured, day after day, in this hot little apartment. Her bed is made and, beside it on the nightstand, her glasses are just where she left them. Beside them is a picture of her on her wedding day, looking terrified, with her mother beside her. This picture has always been by her bed. Once, I asked her why she had that picture, and that one alone, on her bedside. She told me that not a day went by that she didn't think of and miss her mother and that, if given one wish, it would be to spend one more day with her mother.

At the time that I asked, I just couldn't comprehend what that kind of loss would feel like.

I am about to find out.

***

I haven't posted for more than six months because she, my most ardent fan, couldn't sit long enough at the computer to read it. In the next weeks and months, I - like she always did - will need to find solace in laughter.

Domonic

There is no Domonic, only Züül; or, a return to the 'blog.

2008-04-23T07:44:00.000-04:00

Before I’d even left the state of Indiana on my drive YES MY DRIVE to Maine, I began to bear witness to hallucinations borne out of a crushing ennui – the kind that causes one to briefly, but very intensely, believe that the sweet release of the Eternal Repose would be just the salve needed. Nothing messy, mind; no, perhaps you’d pull off the highway and into a bracingly maintained rest facility (read: last cleaned before the fall of Saigon and containing the mouldering osteological remains of Public Health employees), turn off the engine, and then just stop living. Right there. In your seat. Half-full bag of Pizzaria Pretzel Combos at your side.

Instead of awaiting the prompt succor of death, I began to hold animated conversations with a four-inch Chinese-made plastic figurine of Triton from The Little Mermaid, who holds perpetual court in Orhan’s dank interior.

Me: So, Triton, Lord of the Unsleeping, Baleful Sea, what say you to a lunch composed entirely of sodium-encrusted, overpriced treats that one can purchase from a warty, surly attendee with questionable hygiene habits at a gas station that is gently perfumed by urinal cakes and slightly expired dairy products?

Triton: Feck yeah. Hey: how’s about some Corn Nuts?

Me: Regular or BQ?

Triton: BQ! *

As I navigated Orhan through most of what remains of the lands of charm and cruelty that are the Rust Belt states and into the pine-pitch and brine-incensed perfection that is the State of Maine, I amused myself by envisioning several people who had antagonized me in high school perishing in comical, if not gruesome, events that only occasionally involved being surgically impregnated with several live, distempered mustelids.

Ha! I’m just kidding about this. **

Through a miracle of technology, my new cellphone*** has a voice recorder function that allowed me to carefully document a controlled, yet rapid descent into stark madness. I’ll replicate each of these messages below as I, nearly a month later, am only really beginning to understand just how close I’d come to becoming the Heir Apparent to the city of Ungluedopolis.

- “I just don’t understand Wilfred Brimley.”

As I mutely beheld a massive heap of a woman who – God love her! – was cramming a cream-filled cruller the size of an infant into her slavering maw while her taloned hands were aclutch a 250 oz. Mountain Dew all the while waiting in line to purchase twelve carefully selected Little Debbie cakes, the gravelly, rotted voice of Wilfred Brimley whispered dankly into my ear.

“Die-uh-bee-tus”, it said. Then: “Go fetch me a soft-serve cone, son, an’ I won’t hafta whup ya.”

I feel rather badly for the wretched advertising folks who, after trying to drum up an afflicted celebrity who would be well-known enough to extol the virtues of a diabetic testing supply venture, could only find Wilfred. Now, I am sure that he’s a lovely, lovely man. God in heaven, all I have to do is THINK about Cocoon and I begin to fall to pieces. But really.

- “I wonder what it takes to become hardcore.”

I’d stopped at the Angola Service Center, one of the bracingly clean and prohibitively expensive rest stops on the New York Toll Me Until I Have to Declare Bankruptcy Thruway. Mostly, I’d had to release what I imagined in my delirium to have been twelve gallons of blood-filled urine into an eagerly awaiting vessel. And by “into an eagerly awaiting vessel” I mean “onto the face of one of the thirty-two hundred teenagers who’d been disgorged from six YES SIX buses in the parking lot.” I scampered into the building, beheld the cost of one McDonald’s cheeseburgers ($33), made my deposit, and scuttled back to the embrace of Orhan and some awaiting Combos. It was at this point that I noticed that the woman in the car next to me was behaving strangely. At once stately and regal as well as icy and brooding, she tucked two razor blades into her weave INTO HER WEAVE and began to delicately coat her face with Wal*Mart brand petroleum jelly. Then she rolled down the window slightly and shook a Black and Mild cigar out of the battered pack and proceeded to fire it up. She cranked up something very angry-sounding and began to scream along to the words.

At this point, I had to pretend like I was looking for a new CD in my case so that I could continue to watch what I was sure was going to be the best show, like, ever.

She turned off the car, got out, STUBBED THE CIGAR OUT ON HER HEEL, and marched purposefully into the Angola Service Station. I am forced by sheer logic to assume that someone who was to be found in that establishment had an interesting afternoon, courtesy of the most hardcore woman I’ve ever seen.

- “Who finds rock graffiti to be hot?”

As one moves across Upstate New York and into the Finger Lakes region, the topography becomes a little more severe. And by “severe” I mean “cliffier.” Near dusk, I found myself transfixed by the sight of a beautiful rocky outcropping that, when one looked carefully, nearly concealed a delicate, misty waterfall.

And because humankind is, at best, insensate and guttery, someone had taken a large amount of (what I have to presume is high-quality) spraypaint to the stones to declare undying love for “Lynn” in “1971.”

“Lynn”, if you’re out there, I hope that you’d not filled your panties with unspeakableness upon beholding this travesty. Instead, I hope that the clod who defiled that beautiful natural space tried to go a little further than you’d liked on Prom Night and that you used your (home-dyed) shoe to shatter several crucial teeth out of his Skoal-tinged dental arcade. I hope you behold the everlasting monument to your brief time together and wonder absently whether or not he’d ever gotten a partial, and if it holds ghastly court in a little bourbon glass beside his mattress-on-the-ground bed in his dank trailer. Finally, I hope that you wonder this while seated next to your slightly doltish but vastly sweet, loving husband, with your spawn angelically asleep in the back of your feet-smelling minivan while on the way back from the Zoo, where one of the wee ones vomited a corndog onto a fainting goat at the petting zoo.

You know, I can tell tender stories, too.

- “The Back-of-the-Head-Explosion woman’s haircut needs to stop.”

I will be the first to admit this: I am not, I repeat, NOT, on the forefront of fashion. Many are the days when I look at my wardrobe, which consists of several colors of the same short-sleeved “dress” shirt, dozens of khaki pants, and shoes so dull that they might as well be hospital clogs, and think: feck it. Feck it all. I don’t live in Milan or Paris, and if I did, I’d probably still dress like I’d just wiped the pine pitch off my hands and slithered forth from the great North Woods. The only difference would be that folks would be hissing about me behind manicured hands in different languages.

This having been said, a startling and – if I may be frank – hideous trend has been rapidly on the upswing as concerns women’s hair. Ordinarily, I don’t even really NOTICE women’s hair unless the “do” is a) incredibly unwashed to the point of reminding one of the grave or b) it defies basic laws of physics. The hairdo I speak of falls within the second category.

Imagine, if you will, taking a stop-motion movie of someone getting brutally executed with small-caliber weaponry. The bullet enters the forehead and exits, along with considerable amounts of gick, out the back of the skull. Now, freeze the picture right there and turn the melting brain and skull fragments into hair that has become brittle with the application of thirty cans of AquaNet.

Now that you think about it, you have ALL seen this haircut.

At first, this haircut was popular with twentysomething girls who were, perhaps, living on the periphery of coolness. You know the kind: maybe they live close enough to a largish city or town to paint their nails and know where the nearest Buffalo Wild Wings is, but they will still choose bubblegum pink for their bridesmaid dresses. Anyway, after about a year, I saw the B.O.T.H.E. haircut on older and older women. Women who could have, perhaps, spent less on the expensive haircut and more on Polident.

When I entered the gas station in Massachusetts and saw the creature behind the counter sporting one of these, I nearly walked back out into the gathering dark, gas light ablink, to wait for a lingering death aside the highway. Instead, I grinned cadaverously at her, prepaid my petrol purchase, and was just about out the door when I

[Lot’s wife]

looked back. She’d bent down to pick something up off the Slushy-tack floor and, Jesus Mary and Joseph, the top of her skull was clearly visible. I’d heard that this happens; one adopts a constrictive and unmanageable hairstyle and the shit just begins to fall right the feck out in clumps. That’s how awesome she’d wanted to look.

This needs to stop or I’ll just grow one of those stinking vermin-filled ZZ Top beards that nobody thinks is sexy**** and then…yeah. You’ll see then. Oh yes.

- “Sometimes places are past their prime.”

Coming from a town (Bangor, you wanks) whose heyday was the rough-and-tumble 1800s and early 1900s and whose title of Lumber Capital of the World evokes the heady sensation of, after a grueling day on the mighty Penobscot, getting plowed and planting your flag on a buxom barmaid in a barely darkened corner of some seedy tavern in the Devil’s Half Acre, I know what it’s like to be from a place where the past completely overshadows the present. Unlike “museum cities” in other parts of the world, like Athens, Istanbul, Beijing, Venice, Rome and Jerusalem, the all-consuming American need to immediately destroy something unless you can actually still smell the paint drying is catching up with a rapidly aging populace. Just try bringing someone who grew up in Northern Indiana in the 1930s to Gary to understand what I’m talking about here – A Christmas Story it is not. Yet somehow, this all seems to be most powerfully felt in Rustbelt/Erie Canal towns that just couldn’t make the transition once the one thing that connected it to the wider world just stopped existing or was imported overseas. Bangor, while no longer a lumber-producing area, is now a fairly cosmopolitan town that thrives now on the leftovers of tourism revenue and Canadian mall obsession, but many of the small towns in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York I passed seemed to fairly ache for a past that is now denied to them. Sad, weed-choked canals and five-and-dime stores with sunbleached, dead fly-covered displays vie for nobody’s eye and, if one is lucky, one grows up there, becomes aware of a need for more, and leaves, only to return for poultry-laden holidays. They become the places where people grow up, not grow old. And, with each oncoming night, they age gracelessly a little more and become an embarrassment to those who cling to life there while yearning for a mini-mall with an attached Yarn Town outlet.

Not that I have given this any thought at all.

- “Why don’t we hear more about the archaeopteryx?”

When paleontologists first discovered the sparrow-sized reptile-birds in deposits in Germany, people were completely dumbstruck.

“Shit”, they’d often be heard to remark, “that lizard could probably, you know, flap its primordial wings and maybe glide for pitifully short distances and junk.”

Evolutionists were clearly tenting up in their lab-pants, as this was – to them – a clarion display of thousands of years of brutal, natural processes producing linkages between two unlike groups of chordates. Creationists wondered aloud why nobody was thinking about why God had chosen to place these fossils there to make us falsely believe in, well, witchcraft. It was a watershed discovery, and in the many years since, it has been overshadowed by the discovery of dinosaur mummies, dinosaur DNA and nearly complete T. rex skeletons. I guess it’s just me, then, left wondering:

What might that little bird have tasted like? *****

- “Two lanes becoming twelve near large cities makes me unnaturally excited.”

When one is developmentally delayed enough to drive from Nashville, Indiana, to Bangor, Maine, the first major city one encounters is Columbus, Ohio. All at once, it seems, the two lanes of 70 East flutter open to ten lanes of brain-stem-removed, window-rolled-down-with-really-obnoxious-music-blaring death-speeding that can only be the direct result of profound retardedness. Despite having said this, I was oft to be found selecting highly inappropriate music, rolling down Orhan’s grimy windows and just pounding it to the floor. And by “highly inappropriate music” I mean Jump by Van Halen. This happened in Cleveland, Buffalo and Albany, and each time, I got a little bit hotter for the experience, before “major cities” gave way to, um, New England. Speaking of Buffalo…

- “I fear inappropriate sculptures of largish ungulates.”

I get to the Buffalo area around duskish – the sun is definitely on its way to the giant solar stables at this point – and I’m focusing on a) getting a glimpse of the Buffalo skyline and b) trying not to perish in an accident that I am guessing would leave my relatives with about twelve pounds of flesh to bury or cremate. As I’m going under some sort of overpass thing, I notice in my peripheral vision that

uh, a herd of North American bison

was thundering toward me. I gag slightly on the mouthful of LiveWire Mountain Dew long enough to realize that some civic authority in the “All America” city of Buffalo had selected to erect a smallish herd of bronze bison along the edge of the New York Thruway.

Now, I’m all for civic pride. Buffalo has it rough; were it not for nearby Niagra Falls and a decent proximity to Toronto, Buffalo’s infrastructure would have gone the way of many other Rust Belt cities. When one also factors assloads of wet, heavy lake effect snow, a decaying periphery and relatively high unemployment and you have what could have been a fresh bit of urban hell. But Buffalo has clung to life and lifted itself up out from its dependence on heavy industry to become a town that is both pleasant and charming – and worth a visit if one has the chance.

However, while I am no large mammal expert, I know enough about bison to know that the Northern Lakes region of the US would not have been their choicest homestead. As everyone clearly knows, bison would choose most often to reside with your mother.

When civic leaders decide to erect large, fairly realistic whimsical metal beasts alongside major highways, it gives one pause.

- “What would Ruth Benedict have to say about Massholes?”

As World War II raged throughout several major world theaters, an anthropologist named Ruth Benedict – for reasons that, to this day, remain slightly suspect – begins to work on an ethnography about the Japanese people. Immediately, two issues come to the forefront of any discussion of this work, entitled The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

We were, at the time, at war with the people she was studying. Like, cratering their shit up.
She was interviewing JAPANESE AMERICANS IN INTERNMENT CAMPS IN CALIFORNIA.

Ethical issues aside, Benedict had some…interesting…theories about why the Japanese people were flying themselves into Allied warships and, in general, acting a fool. The “best”, in my opinion, was that Benedict believed that the Japanese were a martial race of folks because, um, they got

potty-trained too early.

She felt that the Japanese desire for cleanliness led children in the Land of the Rising Sun to have to control their sphincters too early, which psychologically bound them to an existence based on a hyper-ritualized need to control things. Like other countries, apparently.

Flash forward to three weeks ago as I crossed the border from the Tri-State Area into venerable, stodgy and cantankerous New England via the MassPike. Cleverly designated on road signs with a “pilgrim” hat festooned with a lovely buckle (which, apparently, IS THE WAY ONE KNOWS SOMETHING IS PILRGIMY), the MassPike is a study in no-looking-back stark raving insanity. Not only were several people traveling at speeds I’d normally envision for aircraft takeoff but several vehicles had ceased being beholden to the generalized laws of physics. This comes as no surprise to other New Englanders; as I’ve spoken of long before, each New England state has woven a vivid tapestry of stereotypes out of wool dyed from actual, honest-to-Pete experiences one has when interacting with the other five states, and nary a New Englander is shy about regaling you with the hoary details.

“I’d rather hump a gourd than make it with a girl from Connecticut – you’ll wake up with half your pecker gone and your fridge empty.” – overheard in Providence, Rhode Island

“If you don’t have membership in a homophobic, anti-Semitic, klanish yacht club, you might as well not live in Rhodie.” - Spoken in a whisper in a restaurant in Stow, Vermont

“The only reason to go to Maine is if you want to spend a week having retards feck up your food and stare at your wife’s tits all day.” – unwanted advice given in Cambridge, Massachusetts

“New Hampshire: the cheap booze makes you forget that you live in such a shithole.” – overheard in Orono, Maine

“Vermont is the kind of place where you go to die of ennui while old white people overcharge you for shit they pour out of trees.” – spoken on a bus in Hartford, Connecticut

“The people in Massachusetts are the worst drivers who have ever existed on the face of the planet, and this includes nations where the law code is based on things spoken to village elders from the mouths of livestock.” – overheard in Narragansett, RI, Ogunquit, ME, Windsor Locks, CT, Burlington, VT, and Portsmouth, NH, among dozens of other places

The last statement invites easy questioning. If everyone things something, is it true? And, more pressing a query, should the children born in the Pilgrimlands just shit themselves for a couple more months before moving toward a cleaner, more socially acceptable mode of evacuation?

- “Why do people die in quarries?”

As I passed a quarry that looked as though it would be the portal to the Styx itself in Massachusetts, I beheld several stern warning signs around its rim that cautioned people to not cavort about in its frigid, uncaring depths. Having grown up in states where both abundant fresh water resources as well as expanses of briny deep are able to keep locals from swimming in bottomless, steep-walled abandoned industrial pits, I find myself wondering what the attraction is. Don’t people listen to ghost stories? Is one nudie-swim worth having your bloated remains fished out of a watery pit-grave? If you live in a place where this is the only cool thing to do, wouldn’t playing “chicken” on the railroad tracks or enjoying a lovely game of Russian roulette be just as attractive?

***

After this point, the rest of the messages I’d left myself were apparently in a language I’d invented to amuse myself to stay awake and alive, but which I have subsequent memory of at this time.

Somehow, though, I think that these were enough.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic (Icareaboutthereallyimportantthings) Potorti

* If you don’t know what movie this refers to, please don’t tell me, as I will lose intense amounts of respect for you.

** Not really.

*** Don’t ask how I got it.

**** Except for a very specific subset of gay men. Don’t ask how I know this.

***** My guess is like squab that’s been soaked in gasoline.

Eleven pipers piping and twelve drummers drumming.

2007-12-22T11:52:00.003-05:00

I just don't have the strength for this anymore as, oh wait, I'm writing this two days from Easter Sunday (today is Good Friday) and shame at my own inadequacies fills me with a special, lingering guilt that can really only be enhanced by the cadaverous memories of a Catholic upbringing. The sensation is rather like being piped full of ditch-water, old ashtray leavings and cold, step-on-some-gick-at-7 AM-barefoot cat hurl.

Domonic (wavingthewhiteflag) Potorti

Ten lords a'leapin'.

2007-12-21T19:40:00.004-05:00

Long ago, in a place where the landscape can most aptly be described as "monotonous, but with shit-tons of corn" and where one can (and one has) nearly broken one's face open after almost plummeting to the earth after slipping on a three-pound, muddy-brown, Grizzly snuff-induced snot-and-saliva slick-rope, two young, dapper and happy lads got themselves all tarted up and went to the ballet.

One of these gents was - despite a cultured upbringing and a burning, seething, nearly incapacitating desire to experience the ethnographic, the exotic and and, most of all, the ceaselessly bizarre - never taken to a ballet. Since he was unsure that he was willing to be talked about behind elegant gloves and through clenched teeth as "the guy who goes to operas and ballets alone, and most likely has either an apartment filled with pet serpents named after people in the Bible or dozens of mewling, nearly feral house-cats he imagines are his savage minions", he'd waited until the right time - and for the right person - to take the plunge into the world of high culture.

As a small child, this gent would often be found curled up with a small book near holiday-time; within, the book told the thrilling story of living toys, of three-headed anthropomorphic rats, and of a valiant object whose humble beginnings as a servile, seed-coat-crushing oddity did not reflect the bravery and courage within him. Of course, the whole "what the living hell?" factor was significant when selecting the book over, say, a book about grisly, unsolved mysteries which he surely didn't ever read with a flashlight in bed until he nearly soiled his undergarments. Some things in life, he concluded, are inexplicable. Like that bag of potato chips that appear on top of the fridge - just out of reach - once a month, when Mom gets a little edgier and starts asking us to "get the blue feck out of her fecking hair." Or like how one's father could stand by as one was nearly murdered by waterfowl. Or like how, after asking for a sister to be produced from one's mother's swelling belly and then getting one, nobody really seemed as interested in purchasing the squalling, moist mass of evil as one would have hoped.

Many years had passed with little thought given to the illogical and, if one considers it closely, rather terrifying story when the other dapper chap presented him with two tickets to see it perfomed by real people as a holiday gift. Real people. Real people in remarkably snug clothing, flopping about on a stage on toes strengthened with strange wooden blocks. He could scarcely believe that it was finally happening.

As they sat in the darkened hall, beholding a cherished holiday classic being performed for them, Dapper Lad #1 found himself unable to gain sweet release from three thoughts that, like popcorn hulls, had lodged themselves somewhere they ought not be.

One: One can actually hear shoe hitting ground when a ballet dancer hits the floor from a leap. On television, one can't, and thus one magical thing that ought to have remained that way - the idea that ballet-folk were actually airy, weightless wind sprites - was murdered and was interred, and lay moistly mouldering in the humus.

Two: The story really didn't become any more accessible to the adult mind, and one should just really sit back, revel in the enchanted music, and forget that three-headed anthropomorphic rodents aren't really all that common.

Three: Those tights really do not leave anything to the imagination. As I silently prayed to Saint Martinus, the patron saint of blinding, gonna-vomit-in-your-own-beard testicular injury, I hoped that each of the leaping 'lords was packing a jock-strap at the very least; one of those pointy, wooden-tipped shoes to the twig n' bits would be enough to ensure that one would shoot blanks for the rest of one's life, to be sure.

And so, on this, the tenth day of Christmas, I am reminded of the realization of a cherished childhood hope to personally witness humanoid vermin attempt to skull-feck a young girl and a living parlor decoration, and of a fervent hope that ten leaping 'lords had at least packed a sock in that shet. Because damn.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (thenutcracker,indeed) Potorti

Nine ladies dancing.

2007-12-20T12:58:00.018-05:00

Long ago and in a land perfumed delicately with hidden, spicy things, meats on various skewers, and with but a hint of human hair lanolin, partially-enclosed sewers and car exhaust, a young man, his deliriously delightful cousin and his uncle saw fit to interrupt a potent moment of modern Mexican history by patronizing a touristy staged folk dance-stravaganza.

In our defense, three conspiratory situations led us, Judas goat-like, to this betrayal without being in full franchise of what we were getting ourselves into.

1) At that time, two of the three of us were severely challenged in the "speaking and/or reading Spanish" department; my uncle's involvement with the activities of our host family meant that he wouldn't necessarily have been paying attention to, oh, the news.

2) CNN.com is pretty much how I get my news, and without access to it, I might as well be residing on some random Pacific atoll for the amount of knowledge I have about goings-on when I am abroad.

3) We were pretty much doing anything that the Mexican host family we were staying with decided would be awesome to do.

The majority of the time we'd spent in country by this point was in Hujuapan de Leon, a largish Oaxacan city nearish to Tlaxcala (in the northern part of the state) and Mexico City. However, one of the brothers of this family secretly lived in Oaxaca City, the Big Mole-Sauced Chicken Thigh herself, and thought that the city's beautiful landscape, baroque architecture and lively culture would be interesting to us. After a few days in Hujuapan - which, I hasten to say, is a lovely place - I fiercely desired to see a more vivid, in-your-face (read: exotic) Mexico; the anthropologist in me clamored for regional costumes and the opportunity to purchase ass-loads of handicrafts, the historian lusted for sight of fifteenth-century architecture and the part of me that remains human lusted after food that wasn't hacked out of or drained from a goat.

We get to Oaxaca in the middle of the night and proceed to pass right the feck out after driving from Huajuapan. And by "driving" I mean "my uncle did all of the driving because a) it was a stick-shift car and b) because it was Mexico." While tooling around the city the next morning (and, as an aside, frightening my relatives with my insensate, rabid lust for ethnographic artifacts), we casually mentioned that we'd not seen anyone in more traditional clothing to our guides. While I certainly wasn't expecting everyone to be girded in hand-woven woolen delights, we had been assured that Oaxaca was a city that prided itself as being a bastion of traditional Mexican lifeways. That, and, uh, we'd been promised that we'd see cool things. One of our guides then disappears and is gone for about thirty minutes; he returns as though he'd not been gone, and our unspoken supposition - that he'd needed to duke - was not challenged.

Later that night, we begin moving toward Oaxaca's zocalo, a word that I have been assured means "stewed chicken neck that one dredges up from the bottom of an otherwise perfectly lovely soup." No, it's the city's biggest plaza or square; Mexico City's zocalo (which I believe is capitalized [pun!] with a "Z") is pretty damn enormous and has the biggest flag I have ever seen in my entire life flying above it. Anyway, at this point we're told that there had been some "problems" in recent months in Oaxaca involving teacher strikes. My uncle indicates at this time that he'd been peripherally aware of this; my cousin and I are like, hmm, yay! Civic unrest! In Latin America! While we are here!

At that moment, an earlier exchange I'd had with a shopkeeper made much more sense.

Me: How much is this weird rug-thing with the creepy birds on it?
Elderly but spry shopkeeper: [fantastically enormous sum of money]
Me: Feck this shet. [leaving]
EBSS: [grabs my shirt and partially kneels] Lemme level with you. I'm hungry. My eight kids and my fifty-nine grandkids are hungry. Nobody comes to this god-forsaken hole anymore now that the teachers have gone and fecked everything to death. Putas! Bad for tourism. Bad for my belly. Hey, make me an offer, man. It's either that or I'll hide in the alley and wait to slit your throat for your debit card. What'll it be?
Me: How's twenty-five bucks sound? Isn't that, like, two billion pesos?

He mumbled throughout the entire transaction, which led me to believe that I'd royally bum-banged him for betraying his desperation. However, seeing many other, similar objects later that week for sale at a quarter of that, I came to the realization that I might as well have greased up, licked my lips and bent over for what I'd paid. (My guides nearly died with shame that a) a Oaxaceno could have done that to a tourist and b) that I was nearly functionally retarded when it came to how much one should pay for things in Mexico).

So: teacher strikes. Widespread unease. A highly weakened tourism base, through which one out of three Oaxacenos earns a living. Well isn't THIS effin' fancy, I thought, but kept my white, round-eye trap shut as we moved toward the zocalo.

As we move toward the city center, I begin to wonder why we'd be doing so. Heaps of things laying the middle of roadways reminded me a little too much of the barricades in Les Misrables; a confirmation that this is what they actually were didn't necessarily reassure me. Let's keep going, our guides insisted, and because Conspiratory Situation Number Three was still in effect, we just went with it.

At this precise astral moment, 1691 miles away, Keith logs in to CNN.com to see that there has been some "violent" unrest in Oaxaca, Mexico that week. He proceeds to lay a golden egg in his boxer-briefs.

In another part of the forest, we begin move through the zocalo, which had been cordoned off by protesters and was covered in graffiti, posters, and wet garbage. My uncle, who'd been to Oaxaca's city center before it looked like that, sighed at the passage of a beautiful thing

and then began to take pictures.

It was only after the second flash that I realized what he was doing, and lawd, did I become sore afraid. "Pray, dear uncle, what are ye doing?", I squeaked, trying to look as grave and somber as the unwashed folks who were cooking things in holes in the pavement. "Perhaps these fine AND CERTAINLY JUSTIFIED folks would like to not have this bit of hell immortalized in thy camera."

I don't think he heard me, or else politely ignored my entreaty; the unwashed folks who were cooking things in holes in the pavement went back to moistly reeking and cooking, and my uncle got quite a few great pictures of the zocalo. I can say they are great now because a) I'm about 2,000 miles away and b) I didn't get murdered.

The crudely-drawn hand with the middle finger is pretty saucy, no? I have to admit, though: I couldn't draw a better hand myself, so more power to the proletariat.

At the center of the zocalo, they'd covered over what I've been assured was a lovely fountain with anti-Ulises (the then-governor of the province) smear.

On the surface of this note: we're sorry things look like shet but we're making history.
Subtext: Go home, white round-eyes, and leave us the feck alone.

The tarp-city.

Finally, my cousin got up the chutzpah to ask the all-important "WTF are we doing here?" question of our guests, and we were led quietly to a building just on the edge of the zocalo and guided inside.

Ah. A Mexican folk-dancing troupe. Our whining about not seeing "traditional" Mexican things meant that our hosts had secured us five seats at a performance of Oaxaca's very own Grupo Folklorico Teotzapotlan, which held court on what would ordinarily have been a rather beautiful hotel's dance floor. However, as the front entrance of this establishment was, oh, directly off of the city's ruined zocalo, things had...well...gone south a bit. There was still pride and charm, but let's just say that big metal bars do not a decoration style make.

The leader of this group was a woman who apparently calls herself "La Gordita", which, yes, means "The Little Fatty." In Mexico, like many other much cooler places in the world, being plump is pretty fly. She whistled through her teeth a lot to signal dance maneuver changes.

Ladies dancing. OK, motherhumpers: there are only seven of them, as opposed to the requisite nine. But two of the gentlemen DID have a rather feminine energy...

Also: I don't know why there are pineapples on their shoulders, so don't ask.

And the "Gaily-Painted Gourd Calabash Held Aloft While I Have a Lacy Headdress-Thing On Dance", which was my favorite of all.

We left the folk dance feeling better that we'd seen some local color and that we'd (through our hosts) been able to pump a little money into the city's dying perishing tourist infrastructure. The fact that we'd crossed over a de facto picket line to do so, though, meant that I felt as though the acts canceled themselves out in terms of karmic retribution.

Later that week, though, as electrolytes were ejected from my body at speeds generally regarded when speaking of horseracing, I became aware of the ghastly, altogether stark truth.

And so, on this "ninth day of Christmas", I am reminded of a crossed picket line, a dancestravaganza, and, as high retribution for this from an as-of-yet undetermined spiritual force, losing twelve pounds of water weight in a foreign country.

I remain, as ever,

Domonic (maybeitwasthatchickenneck) Potorti

Eight maids a'milking.

2007-12-19T12:34:00.000-05:00

Good sweet hay-scented baby Jesus, how does one move forward from here?

Long ago, in a fertile, silo-studded valley that was perpetually fragrant (not unpleasantly so, mind you) with the dung of hardworking domesticated beasts of the earth, a cripplingly naive youth in improbably inappropriate clothing learned exactly how the white substance that one dumped out of a carton onto a morning bowl of Pectin-Bearing Arboreal Treet Rings came into existence.

Now, of course I knew that milk came from cows; I wasn't raised on some forsaken coral atoll in the Pacific somewhere. However, when one approached the subject of exactly how the milk sprang forth from the ungulate and found itself deposited into the merry little pail that the Happy Farmer Man carried about, the books I had as a child were strangely mum. (This has definitely changed, let me tell you). For all I knew, the milk was secreted from the cow's sweat glands, or was vomited into the bucket with mild finger-down-the-throat coercion. Needless to say, as a child who loathed milk intensely, I wasn't altogether eager to piece together how this process played out and I turned my attention to other matters, like how one can catch things on fire, like innocent insects in the vicinity, if one has a magnifying glass and some nice direct sunlight. The fact that cows had violently pink, swollen teats hanging from their undersides similarly did not make a connection, either, even when seen with a calf asuck upon them. (I just made that word up, but I enjoy it. Asuck. Huh. Awesome.)

I went at a tender age a few times to visit with my uncle, a small and large animal veterinarian who served the entirety of this sweet dung-fragranced valley, and, when his schedule and my tender sleep cycle permitted, I would ask to go on "ride-alongs" as he went on call to serve the livestock on many area farms.

It goes without saying that I learned an intense amount of crap about life, about death, and about the ghastly, oozing things that animals can produce upon their bodies. In short order I'd seen bovine twisted stomach surgery, a live calf-birth, administration of bovine birth control, the slick-glove-up-that-place test for bovine fetus development, and a good, old-fashioned digging-the-shet-out-of-an-impacted-hoof session. I saw a goat get induced to vomit after eating several nightshade plants and got to witness how steers get de-horned. However, what nasted me out the worst was the ultimate discovery of how milk was taken from a cow.

So, we arrive at a lovely family dairy and I, knowing full well that I'd soon be encountering massive amounts of freshly-extruded shet everywhere EVERYWHERE OH DEAR GOD EVERYWHERE, I maneuvered myself to be near the cow's heads. This is because - and I have no idea why - cows immediately evacuate bladder AND colon upon smelling/seeing/hearing my uncle, the vet, as he enters the barn. A small barn-child, oddly barefoot, notices me and asks me if I want to see the cows get milked. Since my options were, at that point, go with this strange barefoot waif or linger long enough in my uncle's nearness to get asked to hold a cow's tail away from its taint so that he could thrust his whole arm up in that shet, I decided to follow.

At this point, the previous cow was being led out of her containment and was lumbering toward the freedom of the outdoors and a new cow was being led into the restraints. As she was secured, a strange, octopus-like device with tubes was produced and, to my unblinking horror, was attached to each of her four teats.

Well, as I mentioned before, I wasn't wholly aware that they were teats. In fact, I was fairly certain that they were very small, yet potentially functional, penii.

I can fairly hear the sound of Diet Caffeine Free Coke atomizing in your throat as it is expelled through your sinuses and into your nasal cavity. Yes. Make your fun. The sad little town-kid thought that cow's udders were where their four tiny penises (penii henceforth) held delicate court. Sad, isn't it, that he didn't even know that cows were always female? Yes, this was the same kid who could name the genus and species of several dozen dinosaurs, and yet was poleaxed in horror at the sight of the savage fellatio he'd assumed was part of the milking process. Feck you all: I was seven, and I have unhealthy genetic material.

I watched, agog, as the machine began to withdraw milk/'sperm' from four tiny penii, and I turned to the mutated child near me to ask if it hurt them. He said that he didn't think so, but that they were usually pretty glad to get out of there when they were done. I bet they are, I thought, as whiteness swirled down into the tank nearby.

I spent the better part of the night lying awake following a particularly vivid dream wherein I was sucked dry by a milker that had been attached to my eyes and face.

It was only later that week that I was able to see a young Amish woman milking a cow, stool and bucket, and ask her about what it all meant. Through her slight Pennsylvania Dutch accent, she explained that yes, cows were girls and yes, the milk that came from them was channeled through nipples, like the ones I and she had, except, uh, cows have four of them. A nearby cat that was laying in the sun showed me that some animals have six of these things.

Then, she turned one of the teats toward my face.

And pulled.

Warm, unpasteurized milk sprayed in my face, and I swooned and nearly fainted in abject horror. She thought this was funny and demonstrated it on herself, but this time the milk ended up neatly squirting into her maw. The part of me that could not imagine milk being warm (outside of a kitchen) immediately knew, deep within, that I'd been ejaculated upon, despite recent evidence to the contrary.

Haha hell, Amish tart: you'd later become one of my roots, and methinks that the lifestyle that ensued would be abomination to you and your people.

And so, on this, the eighth day of Christmas, I'm reminded of how what can only be labeled profoundly retarded naivite coupled with a savage attack from a woman who lived as though it were 1750 caused me to believe fervently that a female bovine had released unspeakable jizz upon my seven-year-old face.

I shet you not.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (traumatizedforyearsyetvindicatedeventually) Potorti

Seven swans a' swimming.

2007-12-18T12:47:00.000-05:00

Long ago, in a land perfumed once a week with the tang of Skittles manufacturing, a desperately nerdy, ill-dressed youth entered an art contest hosted by a nearby community's public library.

The theme of the contest was simple: draw a picture, freehand, of a scene from your favorite book. As shrewd as I was nerdy, I quickly surmised that many of the entrants would be coached by their loved ones to depict humble, classical Americana - Huck Finn rowing the Mississippi, deleriously happy children being disgorged from a Conestoga wagon - you know, that kind of smarmy, trite crappola. Fortunately, my favorite book at the time did not fit neatly into that framework. It was Helter Skelter.

Haha! No, I'm just kidding. Well, maybe. Anyway, my favorite book at the time was E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan, which made sense because a) I'd apparently developed a debilitating interest in non-goose waterfowl and b) I played the trumpet as a child. Actually, I did no such thing, but I wanted to divert attention for all of the Freudians in the audience regarding my childhood obsession with eggs and phallus-necked waterfowl.

At any rate, I developed a color-pencil-on-white-computer-paper sketch of swans doing something - flapping about, perhaps, or dipping their necks into the pond or some crap like that - and sent it in to the contest folks.

A week later, I got a phone call.

So yeah, I'd won. $25, if memory serves. That and some sort of plaque. But we had to go this this creepy ceremony to get it, which, while I was on board, likely served to ruin a perfectly lovely Saturday for my parents.

We'd been at the ceremony center (a small room off of the pathetic little library) for about ten minutes when I realized that my hunch was confirmed: dozens of children had depicted the overdone (yet, of course, vitally important) classics and had neglected lesser-known works. I mean, come on: how many ways can one represent Tom Sawyer tricking his friends into whitewashing that fence?

After the ceremony (during which all of our works were projected onto a largish screen for all to see), a young woman who'd gotten "Honorable Mention" to my "First Prize" came up to shake my hand. As she did so, and as our parents exchanged forced formalities, she leaned in so that I could hear her speak. And by "speak" I mean "hiss, as though she were speaking Parseltongue":

Your drawing is shit it looks like a fat ugly white duck and I know you copied it out of the book and mine was better and you'd better give me that money and I'll cut you faggot yes I will just give it to me now and I won't have to slit your mother's throat with a soup-can lid in front of you and then rape your cat to death with a broomstick just try me I will

I backed away from her slowly, smiling all the while so as to not alarm our families. Then, reconsidering my options, I moved toward her, her fiery eyes nearly incandescent with rage and hatred, and leaned in myself.

I didn't copy those out of a book you pus-filled she-harpy no I didn't I went out to a lake with a machete and waited for those swans waited for hours waited for days and when they came I sketched them and when I was done I hacked them into two thousand bloody pieces and ate some of them raw so I could have them with me for all time and then I buried the rest under your house and the heads are under your pillow oh yes they are so you'd better go home and check also don't feck with me or you'll know what it's like to be skinned like a deer and then decompose in a shallow grave in the Barrens oh yes you will don't test me bitch

From my pocket I withdrew the snow-white feather I'd brought with me for "luck" - yes, I already knew I'd won, but one can never be too careful - and I brushed it lightly over my slick-moistened lips. Slowly. Deliberately. She didn't need to know that it came from one of the hideous white pigeons that the crazy old Polish woman (Mrs. Pzxwycwcki) across the street raised. Her eyes betrayed nothing in terms of the level of sheer, steel-melting hatred, but they'd grown wider in shock. Her father - whom I must assume was a hell-imp of some kind - hugged her and told her that they'd be going out for ice cream. As she left, she looked back at me, and I mouthed "Enjoy your five dollar prize, whore of Satan" to her and she politely, daintily, gave me the finger behind her back.

So, you ask, what was her favorite book?

Would you believe that it was none other than Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret?

Girl was probably on her first rag, uh.

[inappropriate?]

[do I honestly give a fig?]

[because, uh, she threatened to kill my mom and my cat]

And so on this, the seventh day of Christmas, I am reminded of how a depiction of swans, swimming about on a sheet of cheap computer paper, won me $25 - and four Ninja Turtles, subsequently - and of how I nearly got sent to juvie for shanking a fellow ten-year-old in a dank New Jersey public library.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (no,really,shesaidshe'dcutme) Potorti

Six geese a-laying.

2007-12-17T12:04:00.000-05:00

Long ago and in a land where satellite dishes are considered to be the state flower, a porky youth with abnormally large hair nearly perished under the steely, unyielding beaks of a trio of trained assassin-geese.

"Old news", some of you interject, partially masticated sustenance dropping in globs from your maw. "So you're going to tell us about the time that a goose nearly murdered you under the 'watchful' gaze of your paternal unit. Let me get back to my knitting/online chess tournament/bong/spy novel/bondage session."

Well, truth be told, I was going to tell that one again because a) it was about two years ago that I'd written it and b) it's exceedingly relevant, as we'd gone to specifically identify nesting geese, for I'd developed a nearly paralyzing interest in eggs. However, there exist among your numbers a few who remain devoted and faithful despite what would appear to be my singular inability to 'blog consistently, and I fear the crushing weight of your cold, stony judgment as much as I fear, say, heavily make-uped flesh-consuming circus entertainers.

As I'd mentioned in a previous post, my grandparents had purchased or otherwise procured three greylag geese to serve and protect the other, potentially more vulnerable fowl on their small farm. As many people are aware, geese are highly respected for their fearlessness and their ability to, as need arises, feck the living daylights out of marauding night-creatures that dare to breach their territory. The Romans revered geese, as it was din created by the Vestal virgins' gaggle of geese that awoke the Roman guardsmen as unkempt Gauls attempted to take the city; later, the dogs who remained asleep on the watch were, erm, ucified-cray. Anyway, long story short: geese are good guards because they are fiercely vindictive, unrelentingly cruel, balefully sleepless, and intuitively understanding of what one would need to do to hurt other living things until they begged for the sweet release of death.

Once one gathered up the fortitude to venture beyond the fenced safety of the front and side yard of the house, it was inevitable that the geese, pressed wing-to-wing and forming a three-headed, hydra-like feathered mass, would be waiting just beyond the gate, feigning disinterest and lathing their tongues over their nonexistent goose-lips in eager anticipation of the melee that would surely result. My grandfather had, in his wisdom, placed a stout walking-stick near the gate which was to be used by his ungrateful, ankle-biting grandchildren to make sure that they weren't able to get close enough to actually snuff any of us, as surely that would have been bad times. However, since there were three of them, they became slowly clever enough to plan velociraptor-style attacks where one or two of them would remain in plain sight while the other hid, hoping you'd turn your young, nutritious back to it. My rule of thumb was, therefore, if I didn't see three of them, I'd climb the other fence - tetanus be damned! - to get out into the pasture and the other parts of the property.

One day, however, I - perhaps under the influence of Benadryl, as I'd often need to take it for several days after I arrived at the homestead - went and unlatched the gate and began to walk toward the barn

without the gee-dee stick

and, incidentally, wearing thong sandals.

I look back on that moment and wonder if, perhaps, it was the voice of Satan as funneled through the hissed whispers of three greylag geese that made me do it. The fact that I'd not procured the stick was bad enough; the flip-flops made the situation lethal, as running would be out of the question in the slick shet-encrusted barnyard. I knew better than to wear them out there, but I was clearly entranced by corporal evil and was being led to an untimely death.

I made my way through the barnyard past the long-abandoned turkey coop and was within several dozen yards of the barn - and safety - when I became acutely aware that my passage had not gone unnoticed. Low at first, but growing steadily in volume, a hissing sound began to emanate from what I'd initially taken to be a smallish gray bush. As three serpentine necks reared out of the "bush", I moistly evacuated into my Rude Dog and the Dweebs jams. (Raise your hand if you remember jams). The largest of the geese detached from the group and it turned one of its infected-wound-yellow eyes toward me. In a moment of what I presume to be stark insanity, I could faintly hear it hiss-speaking to me.

Your mistakes will cost you your tender, delicious life, it said. Your pathetic, battered carcass shall nourish me and mine for a week. Also: jams are SO thirteen seconds ago.

I launched myself toward the barn in fluid motion that I would be unable to replicate in the present day; it involved nearly twisting my spine in twain. It was also at this time that I began to shriek like a seven year old girl who'd fallen into a well in the vain hopes that someone would resond to my pleas for merciful intervention. The goose similarly began its hellish pursuit; possessed of the knowledge that I'd worn my day-glo green flip-flops and that I would most likely avoid flop-piles as best as I could because of them, it lurched forward, beak agape, to snuff me.

As I hurled myself across the barnyard I was overcome with a sense that I should not, as Lot's wife had been unable to resist, turn around. I had just come to the threshold of the barn when something heavy and unspeakably feathery struck me in the small of my back and I fell to the earth face-first, gasping. It was in that moment that I knew that I'd not survive this experience and at once I began to envision what my memorial service would be like: the tiny black coffin containing the four pounds of gristle that the geese had left behind holding court at the front of a black-draped chapel, guilt-stricken, weeping relatives and friends, and a pianist gently hammering out the best of Bruce Hornsby's corpus. I could feel the goose's hot breath in my ear as it prepared to deliver the coup de grace when, suddenly, the weight of the creature was mercifully lifted off my back. I sat up and beheld, wheeling the the heat-shattered heavens, an abnormally large red-tailed hawk; the geese, fearing for their own sky-delivered mortality, had abandoned their fatty treat to clumsily hide themselves in a stand of brush nearby. With only one flip-flop remaining, I clambered into the hayloft and prayed earnestly that the hawk would eviscerate mine enemies.

By dusk, it was noticed that I'd gone missing, and my grandfather found me rapidly rocking myself, muttering incoherently about pâté, in the darkening hayloft.

The eldest, largest goose was to be found for the better part of a week carrying around my other flip-flop in its horrid bill as a grim reminder of its powers. I would gaze upon it from behind the fence, hands clenched around a scythe, with a mixture of fear, hatred and what I later would realize was a strange version of respect. You know, the kind of respect one must have for something that can slaughter you.

In later years, as the geese aged and began to succumb, one by one, to their own delicious mortalities, I found myself rooting for their antagonists with a fervor one generally associates with Latin American soccer devotion. God bless that fox whose gullet was to be filled verily by the largest, slowest goose; finding his wing and a spray of down-feathers in a field caused me to nearly tent up in my pants. God bless the bitter, unrelenting cold that crept into the bones of the next goose, transforming it one night into a twenty-five pound lump of frozen, corporeal evil. God bless the load of buckshot that blew the head off the last of them when it became so old and senile that it broke both of its feet chasing cloud shadows.

And so, on this, the sixth day of Christmas, I am reminded of how a trio of trained goose assasins nearly laid me out for the Big Dirt Nap. You know, because childhood isn't unsafe enough without worrying that you'd pass through the belly of a web-footed, hissing louse-bag.
Whatever.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (Iwillfinishthisblogseriesevenifitkillsme) Potorti

Five golden rings.

2007-12-16T19:46:00.000-05:00

Two nights ago and, uh, less than a quarter mile from my window, the restless North Atlantic began to whisper and moan through the Penobscot's thick, fluminal ice-crust. Its voice - at once the nearly inaudible sound of a harbor seal sliding into the icy brine, of bladder wrack settling onto itself after winter neap tide's ebb, of innumerable unseen crustaceans scuttling across moonlit rocks encrusted with mussels - traveled through the still of a midwinter night past the garish slot casino, up Larkin Street and through my opened "bedroom" window, whereupon it found me scaring myself silly with a dogeared copy of Needful Things.

"You haven't blogged for days", it hissed. "Fecker. Feckerrrrrrrrrr."

It's true, but I have to give myself credit where it is due: I've been on a holiday bender, and asking me to do anything other than remembering to not allow the contents of my colon to festoon my festive holiday skivvies would have been asking a whole hell of a lot, let me tell you.

In actuality, I've been fairly poleaxed by the task of preparing an entry that is framed with the concept of golden rings. Birds I can do: as a child who was fabulously obsessed with fowl of nearly every variety - and, more pointedly, the calcite-coated spheroids they produced - endless fodder was at my beckon call. But rings? Golden rings? And five of them?

At first I thought I'd write about how, on a brisk early spring night in March of 1980, I came into the world in Utah, a state known at that time for being more socially permissive of polygyny than most places outside of the tribal world. Five golden rings placed upon five dowdy women's liquid Dawn dishsoap-encrusted hands. Five golden rings on five hands as they tousle the blinding white, nit-ridden Aryan hair of the litter of children they'd inflicted upon the world.

Then I thought I'd launch into a venomous rant about how one golden ring, when placed upon my hand by an adorable, impish lad next October, won't provide me with legal authority in the corn - or in forty-seven other, similarly shitty states in a country that purports to be the Land of the Free. But then I thought that I didn't want to be THAT blogger, and I left it alone.

Then I thought I'd tap out a hopeful message about how five rings, joined together in symbolic unity, will fly over China's profoundly ancient capital Beijing this summer as thousands of athletes from around the globe join together in amicable international sporting venues. However, sports bore me so badly that all I want to do during the Olympics is scream until I black out whenever well-meaning people I know ask if I'd managed to catch a particularly tasty American victory over some tiny, developing nation's athletes on the telly the night before.

Instead, I'll take those few and devoted back three nights ago, to my nearly aborted entry into the Pine Tree State, and to a bearded twentysomething lad who'd been seated diagonally across from me on the flight from Detroit to "Portland."

I try my darndest - Lord knows I do! - to not stare at people who have large, disfiguring tattoos or crippling, impractical body jewlery. However, those of you who have had the "pleasure" of my company for even twenty minutes know that one would have better luck leaving a box of Little Debbie snacky-cakes in the chow hall of a juvenile fat camp and expecting to find it virginal an hour later. And so I stare, and stare hard. Like I'm the product of first-cousin mating hard.

The gentleman in question boarded long after I'd buckled in and had begun mentally providing dialogue bubbles for the blocky figures in the laminated Passenger Instruction Manual that was provided in the seat-pocket in front of me. As I provided the flight attendant who was ushering people onto the inflatable slide a naughty bit of wit, I became aware out of the corner of my eye that the bearded lad was a little twitchier than most. Maneuvering my eye in its socket a little further, I beheld a magnificent webbing of Japanese-inspired tattoos that radiated from his wrist up toward his elbow, where they disappeared under his t-shirt. His hand disappeared into his breast pocket, fell upon the 3/4 full pack of Native American Spirit Lights, gently toyed with one of their filters, and fell back to his lap. "Oooh, a hippie", I thought, "a tattoo-obsessed, nicotine-dependent hippie."

Ordinarily, that would have been the end of the entertainment, but when Tattooed Hippie Man reached one of his yellowing hands to the reading light (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence, if one can believe it), the resulting light glinted off what I momentarily presumed to be a lost pirate's treasure that had lodged itself on this gentleman's face.

Three golden earrings. Two in the left, one in the right.

One golden ring, bull-like, across the nose.

One golden ring that was STRETCHING A HUGE HOLE IN HIS BOTTOM LIP LIKE HE WAS SOME SORT OF AMAZONIAN TRIBESPERSON BUT WITH MORE BLING-MONEY.

Two things immediately leapt to mind as I attempted, in vain, to not dry out my eyes staring at him.

1) How does one smoke when one cannot produce suction? Was there a cork he put in it when he wanted to go to Flavor Country? Or, oh wait, a tipi-encrusted landscape where one is offered peace-pipes?

2) Sometimes the Baby Jesus provides me with the most precious gift of all. No, it's not peace, or food, or money, or contentment. It's blog fodder that neatly addresses a difficult topic, and it's worth all the myrrh in Arabia.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic (Isnexttimegeesea'layingbecausethatwillbeeasy,havingnearlybeenslaughtered
bysaidwaterfowlundermyfather's"watchful"gaze)
Potorti

Four calling birds.

2007-12-15T12:02:00.000-05:00

Long ago in a distant, and, might I add, significantly hillier, land, an ennui-afflicted youth began rifling through his grandfather's belongings in what would ultimately be a futile attempt to find a hidden stash of Dum-Dum lollipops. (Had I but asked for them, I would have been provided with enough of them to cause my teeth to plink merrily out of my skull onto my grandmother's linoleum with a sound I'd like to imagine was reminiscent of a steel-drum band tuning their instruments. However, the hunt is often more rewarding than the kill).

Near the root-cellar door - the cellar being the repository of home-canned goods AND a gigantic, mutated translucent mouse-consuming spider named "Earl" - I found a curious contraption that looked rather like a snuff-box. It had a lid that was loosely circle-hinged to one side of the rectangular box and, burned into the box's bottom was the image of a wild turkey. When I asked my grandfather what it was, his eyes twinkled a little as he slowly moved the lid across the box, making a god-awful din. A din which, once he got it working properly, sounded suspiciously like a turkey's gobble. He handed it to me and, in a wise move considering the burning stares being generated by my grandmother at the racket-making device, took me outside and pointed up the side of the mountain at the brooding forest beyond.

"There are turkeys up there - go see if you can scare some of them up." Again with the twinkle. Before I could ask for my slingshot so I could plug one of them with should it be lame enough to traipse into my midst, I was shepherded beyond the yard-gate into the barnyard and given a lollipop. He disappeared quickly into the house, most likely to cackle himself into flushed oblivion at the thought of a ten-year-old in the woods calling birds.

By the time I got up the side of the mountain and into the woods, the old fear began to creep inside me. Many were the times when I was wandering through those woods and I would hear a large creature walking nearby - walking with me - just out of sight. And, in a part of the world where bears are numerous, it didn't pay to not be aware of your surroundings at all times. My grandmother loved to tell the story of how she had given me a colander once and bade me collect blackberries from a nearby bush on the mountainside; as she watched, a young bear collected his own treats from the other side of the bush, neither one of us aware of the other's presence. Honestly: it's enough to make you want to lay cable in your boxer-briefs.

After collecting myself from the hike up the mountain I began to fiddle with the turkey call, at first only making awkward squeaking sounds akin to the sound of a rusty nail being pulled out of a transient's head. Oh, I mean, um, an old board. Anyway, after ten minutes I'd gotten The Sound down-pat and I set upon burying myself in the humus surrounding me, so as to be, ahem, invisible to my "prey."

After a half hour of squealing and screeching, I'd begun to feel like I'd accomplished my task of driving any living thing - insects included - from me for a quarter-mile radius when I looked up into the trees.

Birds.

Big, black, ugly birds.

They had come!

As I gazed upon the magnificent creatures who had responded to my (clearly) expert call, I came upon a grim realization when I beheld how the dappled woodland sun glinted off one of the bird's naked pate.

Awesome. Vultures. The din I was creating must have sounded like a pitiful creature's death throes and, eager for the opportunity to plunge their naked heads into its bloated mortal shell, they'd gathered to watch the show. Finding a ten-year-old crouched under a pile of dead leaves must have been utterly anticlimactic, I imagine. Though, considering their brains are about the size of a standard pencil eraser, they might have been thinking about, oh, bird-lice.

And so today, on the fourth day of Christmas, I am reminded of the very special youth who spent an afternoon calling birds unto him only to become acutely aware that those that came would have, if not for their profoundly weak bills, pecked his eyes out for wasting their time.

Until tomorrow, I remain,

Domonic (Irealizethatthebirdsthemselvesweren'tcalling,buthey,who'swritingthisthinganyway?) Potorti

Three French hens.

2007-12-14T00:29:00.000-05:00

Long ago, in a faraway land perfumed with heady balsam and the wild North Atlantic’s briny tang, UMaine's Hilltop Dining Commons decided that they’d fit a sow with a fine silk hat and go all fancy for the final celebratory holiday meal of the year.

As those of you who attended a college/prep school/boarding school/prison are aware, the culinary finery that is put forth by the average cafeteria is usually limited to tarted-up extruded meat products, lukewarm soup that originated from gigantic, industrial drums and soggy, deep-fried starch-bits. Hilltop Dining Commons, however, was usually more up to snuff and had, by the time I graduated, extended their fairly creative cafeteria-style entree/side selections to a full salad, soup, and stir-fry bar. Plus, once a semester, the Maine Lobster Council (yes, there is one of those) donated lobsters for the Steak and Lobster Night, which I, during my four years at beloved Maine, never missed.

Nonetheless, when we began to see flyers advertising an olde-timey Yule Ball-themed finale dinner, we were sore afraid. No good can come of this, I thought, as I saw allusions to wassail, figgy pudding (uh, what the feck is that?) and, most alarming, "wilde game."

Granted, this was Maine, and while the state in general was likelier than most places to provide a righteous bounty of non-domesticated protein, I wasn't entirely certain that we'd necessarily need to be confronted with the prospect of going hungry in the face of poorly prepared deer and moose venison, bear cutlets, or, God forbid, sundry lacustrine or pelagic waterfowl. As the "feaste" drew nearer, the organizers let slip a few more details of what would be served. To our mute horror, "French hens" appeared on the menu, spawning a raging debate about what makes a hen French, necessarily. Would it be rude to the other woodland fowl? Did it, even in stifling heat, don a kicky beret?

When darkness fell over Central Maine at 3 PM that night, we found ourselves eerily quiet as we made our way through the sub-arctic chill to the Commons. That afternoon, as a backup, we'd purchased a case of ramen, lest we find inedible the "holidaye treates" that had been prepared for us.

I found myself standing in front of Hundreds of Angel Pins on Your Hat Surly Serving Lady and blankly asking for a "French Hen", which was being served wrapped in a protective layer of tinfoil. Shapeless and about the size of a toddler's head, it was unceremoniously dumped on my tray with a wet-nap and the other "treates" I'd asked for and I made my way to the sitting area to begin consumption. None of the others in my group had dared order the hen and sat mutely staring at me, awaiting the un-mummification of the tin-clad parcel that was, at that point, emitting a vaguely poultry-from-a-spit odor. Yet, there could have been anything in there. As I began to wonder once again what had become of Jimmy Hoffa's remains, I peeled back the foil to reveal a mass of flesh and bones that had, at one point in the not-too-distant past, been a smallish bird. Like a tiny chicken. A tiny chicken -

Wait -

Squab?

No - they wouldn't be able to clear that through the University. I jabbed at it with a utensil for a moment as we regarded it with wonder and apprehension. What kind of bird is this small and yet looks remarkably chicken-like in death?

At that moment, a (balding) woman who was wiping some spurped-over ranch dressing off the counter of the salad bar noticed the commotion coming from my end of the table.

"It's a goddamn Cornish game hen, you assholes", she belched. "Now eat it."

While not as profoundly disappointing as the partridge vs. quail debate that was to become a part of my life three years later, I have to admit that I ate that hen with less gusto once I found out that a) I'd been deceived and b) someone hadn't blown it away in the woods. And, much like a crab, it was a lot of g-d work for about three largish mouthfuls of food.

And so, on this third day of Christmas, I am reminded with wistful nostalgia of the time that the University of Maine provided me with a purportedly festive, yet nearly unidentifiable avian carcass upon which I would sup.

Until tomorrow, I remain,

Domonic (enoughwiththebirddays-whendowegettolordsa'leaping?) Potorti

Two turtledoves.

2007-12-13T12:32:00.000-05:00

Long ago and far away, in a distant land redolent with the fluminal reek of the shallow Muskenetcong, an elderly Eastern European woman whose primary claim to fame was her palmistry raised snow-white birds as a grim hobby. Many an afternoon I'd look across Liberty Street to her garage, above which the fowl waited to live, waited to die, and waited for an absolution that came with her adept egg-shaking population control.

Many who saw these creatures wheeling through the heavens around the self-proclaimed Chocolate Capital of the Western Hemisphere - a title it futilely attempted to wrest from Hershey, PA - thought that they were doves. Chunky, white doves. Doves, like those which were provided as sacrifice in the ancient world and which graced their tables later on in a startling variety of preparation. Doves, like the one which Noah sent forth from the Ark.

In reality, they were pigeons. Cornish-game-hen-sized rats on the wing, perpetually poised to take enormous, righteous dumps upon any shiny surface. What's more, these pigeons owed an allegiance to the old woman and formed an air-force of considerable might. Each morning, as she made her way to the church for her morning prayers, they followed her on the wing and supplanted themselves upon the spires and belfries of the sanctuary, awaiting her return home.

Oh, they had their enemies. Small y-chromosome-possessed children with slingshots made quick work of several, and supervising adults, gazing upon their newly-washed vehicles that had been festooned with white-hot bird excreta, usually looked the other way. Best still, as illustrated by my sister's youthful shrieking bedroom commentary that "one of the pigeons was eating another pigeon", they often met less pleasant ends by passing through the digestive systems of a largish legion of falcons that found the dumpy feather-lumps a rather satisfying feast.

And yet, on a frigid, moon-lit December night, with the scent of church incense still in your nostrils on the walk home from midnight mass, they were almost beautiful - hundreds of fluttering snowflakes set amid the canopy of the heavens.

And so, on this second day of Christmas, I am reminded of those "doves" and how no creature, no matter how repellent, is really completely an abomination.

Well, except for hagfish.

And, uh, lampreys.

And blackflies.

[and my pets]

Huh. Well, it was a nice thought.

Until tomorrow, I remain,

Domonic (IwieldedaslingshotlikeanAmazonmaiden) Potorti

The first day of Christmas: A partridge in a pear tree.

2007-12-12T12:16:00.000-05:00

I know I haven't blogged for, oh, a month and a half. If you'd like to know why, please send me a request including a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Domonic Potorti
Nashville, IN 47448

Note on the sending envelope the phrase "I'm Whiny for Absolutely No Good Reason" and I'll make sure to send you very special holiday greetings, perhaps with a photograph of me proffering an obscene Mediterranean hand-gesture.

***

Long ago, in a distant, herb-and-lamb perfumed land, I found myself retiring most nights to an eleven-floored, single-sex dormitory on the edge of the Anatolian steppe. After greeting the danışma dudes who were ensconsed in a wee glass box in the threshold of the dorm - and, more often than not, dodging their well-meaning yet irksome requests to teach them how to play guitar (which, apparently, all American males are able to do from the moment of their blessed nativities), I'd retire to my ground-floor room and await the inevitable.

Many nights, it would usually only be a few moments before a young gentleman would, having discerned that I'd returned from my daily toil, knock on my door with a very special request.

*knock knock knock*

Me: Hi, [insert Turkish man's name here].
Young Turkish Male: Hey there. [averts eyes to ground, kicks floor shiftily]
Me: What's up?
YTM: So, yeah.
Me: Let me guess: you have a shopping bag full of random meats and other sundry ingredients and you're wondering if I can transform them magically into something edible, yet savory.
YTM: You're the best.
Me: You are aware of my cut, no?
YTM: A plateful of whatever you come up with, check.

I would then retire to the ghastly little kitchenette on our floor, pots and pans under each arm, a bag of weirdness in tow, to make some magic happen. Usually it was a box of pasta, some extruded meat products, some butter/olive oil/prepackaged herbs, and perhaps some tomato paste. That wasn't usually too hard - "American chop suey" became a staple dish that semester - but occasionally I got thrown with what I was presented with, given my meager cooking talents.

[As an aside, these weren't lazy boys. They often were ashamed to ask for my help, but given that many of them were raised in families where a woman, usually their mother, was a stay-at-home, they'd never had to cook for themselves at any point. This, coupled with the fact that many Turks distrust pre-packaged dinners, meant that my ground floor Yurt Yetmiş Sekiz angels were about as useful in the kitchen as a jar full of warm sputum.]

One late spring day a chap from down the hall came to me with a little box of macaroni, a jar of salça (spicy pepper/tomato paste) and a curious carton filled with impossibly small, speckled eggs.

Me: Uh, what the hell are those?
YTM: They come from the bird.
Me: Yes, I am aware of that, as I assume you'd not consume, say, reptile eggs. But what manner of bird squatted these out?
YTM: I don't know their name.
Me: Look: you're a nice enough chap. But if I am going to be making - and partially consuming! -an omelet fashioned out of endangered songbird ova, I'll need to know now.

While I prepped the rest of the ingredients, I held one of the miniature eggs in my hand. You'd need at least twenty of them to make a decent single helping of scrambled eggs, I surmised. In the meantime, he'd scuttled away to his room to pore over his Turkish/English dictionary, and came back with triumph written on his eighteen-year-old face.

YTM: From a partridge. They come from a partridge.
Me: You're kidding me, right?
YTM: What do you mean? They're delicious. [makes smacking sound, licks lips and rubs belly in the international sign language for tastiness]
Me: OK, fine. Let's cook this crap up.

Twenty minutes later, my fork was hovering hesitantly over a tiny portion of partridge eggs. I'd not asked how they were collected, or where, but I felt as though I had to experience them if for no other reason than to be able to say at a later point in my life that I'd done it. I find that this is the impetus for many of my more rash, hasty decisions, and eventually the part of me that commands that I do things like this will be the death of me.

Upon consumption, I found them to be...eggier?... than that which is extruded by hens. It wasn't an altogether unpleasant taste, but I can't say that I would - given the amount of work involved in breaking dozens of eggs for a decent meal - be eager to experience it again.

Later on - much later, and in the US - I found out that the eggs in question were not actually partridge eggs, but had come from farm-raised quails, as this is popular in Turkey. My friend's dictionary had betrayed him and I was robbed, ultimately, of a good story.

However, to this day I choose to believe that they came from a partridge because a) I am insanely stubborn and b) because I just want to, OK?

And so, on this, the first day of Christmas, I am reminded of that Anatolian partridge who provided me with the ability to consume what I have to assume was the most minuscule omelet ever recorded.

Until tomorrow, I remain,

Domonic (quailsandpartridgesareinthesamebirdfamilysoit'snotincoceivablesoleavemealone) Potorti

Moving; or, sometimes experiences can be likened to having Satan's sulphurous hoof planted swiftly and firmly into your man-bits.

2007-10-16T12:41:00.000-04:00

Part One: The Utter Abandonment of the Greenwood Boy-Lair.

"Relax", said the nightman, "we are programmed to receive. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave."
- The Eagles, "Hotel California"

Holy shet, I just quoted The Eagles. Somewhere a moth-winged wood sprite has drawn its last, guttering breath, paying the ultimate price for my malfeasance. This is because, as everyone clearly knows, each time an Eagles song is played or quoted, something pure and innocent just stops living.

The decision to leave the Boy-Lair, aka The Cave, for parts newer and, perchance, less dank, was relatively easy to make, and involved a thirty-second conversation:

Me: So, now that you don't work at motherfecking insensate evil Onner-cay Airie-pray, what say you to moving to Bloomington, as we both are tied academically to it? Oh, and I work there, too. Like, every day. Also, this house is the size of a child's shoebox and reminds me of living in a coffin. A coffin full of mold and pet fur. A coffin full of mold and pet fur at a four-way stop a block and a half from a fire station.

Keith: OK.

We began searching Bloomington for rental houses, and nearly instantly we ascertained that our major requirements for a home would eliminate a vast number of possibilities in the vicinity of Indiana University. They were:

1) The landlord should not be willing to accept crack as a rent payment.

2) There should not, when one has windows open, come the sound of inebriated fratboys yelling at chaste young maidens in passing cars to "show [them] [their] tits."

3) The property owner should not be adverse to allowing two feral beasts of the earth inhabit said property, as - while it is difficult to believe - we've become attached to the gazelle and the hellcat. The gazelle, therefore, would also require a fenced yard in which he could extrude his hot loaves untethered to a human hand.

4) The rent had to be less than $800.

After two months of searching - and two piteous near-misses - we'd resigned ourselves to our collective fate (lingering death by mold-spore and encroaching suburban blight) when Keith began to explore the option of living in - *gasp!*- a Bloomington-adjacent community. We settled on the idea of Nashville, Indiana, population 950, which is a nearby self-proclaimed "art community." What "art community" means in the parlance of my people is "ass-ton of little stores wherein one can procure, say, handblown glass unicorn Christmas ornaments in July."

In many ways, Nashville reminds me of many communities in the Mothership - heavily touristed at certain times of year for primarily natural attractions, blessed with an abundance of unique artisans and their handiwork, and amply provided with spittoons and bootscrapers in front of the local Kwik-E-Mart. When the autumnal tourists and their fecking evil Harley donor-cycles have departed, they will leave behind a community that has only three chain restaurants, two stoplights and one supermarket. Hell, there isn't even a CHINESE place there, which absolutely atomizes my medulla to contemplate, for I imagine that there is, as we speak, probably a decent little Cantonese noodle joint opening up on Venus.

On the plus side, though, Nashville feels like a community. It remains to be seen whether or not this will be, given the population size, awesome or not. I can easily imagine a time coming where the the gas station clerk will know which fatty breakfast pastry I'll select before I do; also as imaginable, lively discussions about what the two freaks living out on Tuckaway Ridge are up to.

Villager 1: Did you see that ghastly Blair Witch-esque "folk art" wicker star they've festooned their house with? Bitch, please.
Villager 2: Oh, snap!
Villager 1: And wasn't the smaller one wearing a little Cornish driving cap yesterday? Cute, yes, but wow.
Villager 2: Yeah, and the big one apparently *hushes slightly* has to drink Metamucil. No, I ain't playin'!

After quite a bit of jockeying on Keith's part, we found a place that was a) in our price range, b) in a quiet, neighborly and partly wooded neighborhood and c) entirely precious. Two bedrooms, two baths (two baths, I tell you, TWO BATHS), galley kitchen, living room/dining room, full back porch looking out into a copse of trees and, perhaps best part of all, a rather large former art studio that will become, in the next weeks, The Book-Ridden Sanctuary Where Pets Are Forbidden.

But, as one is surely aware, moving comes with a terrible price. That price is "twenty bucks for twelve nearly-expired Vicodin you bought from a relative who underwent surgery a while ago."

Part Two: The Actual Moving Day, or, How Next Time I Will Make Sure I Am Sedated, Preferably With Russian Horse Tranquilizers.

I stood in our new, two car garage peering intently into a smallish room which, I was told, would be where our dryer was to hold court. Never you mind, good folks, that the garage does not connect to the house with an internal door, meaning that laundry would have to be taken outside to be dried in the garage; instead, I was captivated by childlike, red crayon graffiti that someone had scrawled onto the wooden walls of the room. "666", they said, and "All Hell's Braeking [sic] Loose", and "Lord Satian [sic] Possesses All Who Enter Here."

Awesome, I thought. Well, at least I have a vial of Pope-blessed holy water - not even making this up - which I will use to consecrate our dryer room. Added to the charm of the nearly nude, nubile young lass on a race-car poster that the previous tenant "donated" to us and which hung drunkenly over one of the garage walls, it was an atmosphere of nearly incessant merriment.

The movers showed up exactly on time in a truck that could have been used to carry, oh, Lithuania. We'd decided to use movers because a) it cost the same to hire them as to rent a UHaul for the distance we'd be covering and b) I fecking hate moving things. As they disembarked from the vehicle, the three mover-gents came toward us and asked where they could begin. One of them was a twentysomething with teeth brown as November mudpuddle; the black coffee in his dingy mitts and Marlboro jutting forth from the left one clarified this for us. The second mover-gent was in his late fortys with a long gray ponytail; he was thin like a reed and my mind's ear could hear his spine splintering into gory shards under the weight of my book collection. The last was a bald, strapping lad who had two improbable piercings, both of the "barbell" variety: one transversed the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, and the other sat firmly underneath his Adam's apple on his neck. As my bowels loosened thinking about how much pain either one of those would have brought to Good-Sir Number Three, we showed them into the house where all of our sundry shet held court. Within an hour and a half, our entire house was in a truck and bound for Brown County and the dozing hamlet of Nashville. Two hours later, they were pulling away from the new Man-Lair, having quickly and professionally brought our home to us on - and I can't stress this enough - ONE TRUCK.

Well, most of our home.

You see, we'd not packed up most of our kitchen. Or our bathroom. Or some of our garage.

And we still needed to, oh, I dunno, clean.

By 2 AM that morning, we were - for the most part - done. Along the way, the part of me that ever liked any aspect the Greenwood Boy-Cave died, was interred and began to moistly reek in the ground. If we never see that place again, it will be too soon.

But then I remembered the two year's worth of holidays we spent there. The anniversaries, the birthdays, the lazy Sundays, my recuperation from appendectomy surgery. A part of that place will be in us - in that first place where "you and I" became "us" - forever. And a part of us will remain there, too.

Well, if by "part of us" I mean "all of those dead nurses stacked like cordwood in the crawlspace", then yeah.

Until later (and internet connectivity is regained), I remain,

Domonic (nevermovingwithoutburlymovingdudeseveragain) Potorti

This much I know is true.

2007-08-31T12:11:00.000-04:00

It's a lazy weekend afternoon, and it finds your pallid leviathan carcass moistly reclining on your living room couch while you absently behold twelve straight hours of Friends on DVD. From somewhere in the house, an almost imperceptibly low, steady purring punctuated by the sound of a plastic eye rapping rhythmically on the hardwood floors; the smaller of the two house-beasts is bringing himself to savage, felid "climax" atop an increasinging fecked-to-death cephalapod toy. The larger of the two house-beasts taps to a corner of the kitchen where it briefly contemplates extruding a few clunkers on the dingy linoleum and, in an astonishing display of restraint, decides instead to return to his dog-cage wherein he commences to lathe his tongue over his entire body at decibel levels generally associated with roadwork. Outside, a songbird troubles itself to break into a twittering symphony before it is rewarded for the effort by bursting into greasy flames in the oppressive Indiana summer heat and, as its immolated avian corpse catches a portion of our brown, dead lawn on fire, it becomes intensely interesting to the smaller house-beast, who pauses in his unlikely, unholy union long enough to "chatter" at it through our dog-nose smeared front window. Ordinarily, you'd get up to stop any one of these blessed events, but it is at this moment - lawn ablaze, cat humping a squid, dog autofellating, Chandler saying something witty on the telly - that you come to the realization that you have

ceased being able to care about much of anything.

Instead, you open a bag of nacho cheese Doritos and begin to sully your fingers with unnatural, day-glo cheez-product and settle in for the show. Later, as your insides begin to buckle from the aforementioned Doritos and the accompanying orange-tropical fruit Gatorade you've washed them down with, you begin to ask yourself the question that dare not be asked:

How did it come to this?

The answer, my few and potentially devoted, can be summed up with one word -

AUGUST.

For me, if the month of August - and the late July weeks leading up to it - were to be characterized by a smell, the bouquet would be rather like what I imagine might issue forth from an toddler's underside after it had taken special pains to covertly consume vast quantities of slightly spoiled Indian food.

I won't lie, folks. I look forward to August and the accompanying shetstorm in my place of employment as one might look forward to a lengthy stint on one of Texas' death rows. Yet, each year August comes and goes without the additional bonuses of worm-ridden, shetty prison food, frequent and brutal anal rapes in the showers, the opportunity to attempt to fashion stabbing devices from sundry contraband objects and, finally, the bittwersweet release that comes with riding the Intravenous Poison Chariot and the accompanying, all-expenses-paid trip to Big Dirtnaptown.

Don't get me wrong: I love my students, and I am glad that more and more of them choose Indiana as a place to live, work and study. Each one of them is talented, unique, and each of them makes my life - and the life of the community at large - better, brighter, and richer. It's just really sisterfecking hard to keep that perspective sometimes when you have a student weeping moistly into what can only be described as a hand-knitted potholder in your office while your phone is ringing, as sixty frantic, desperation-laden emails are flapping their vile cyber-wings into your inbox faster than there is any human way to deal with, and as other staff members - desiring desperately to know if you are working on some other complete diarrhea-tornado of a mess from THEIR emails, appointments or phone calls - lurk in your doorway, entreating your assistance, all at the same time. As you longingly gaze at an unnaturally sharp letter opener in the shape of a Persian phoenix and wonder how long it would take for someone to notice how long you'd been in the men's room, you snap out of it - oh, happy dagger! my ass - and press forward with your day, as it's the only thing you really can do. Well, I mean, other than screaming into a pillow at noon and four each day until your vocal cords shred up like gory Circassian chicken and developing a cleverly-disguised substance abuse issue.

I'm not entirely sure why August comes as a surprise to me every year. The Dyad of Incessant, Unrelenting Ghastliness is, and will always be, a fixture for any international student advisor's life in August. The Dyad, for those outside the blessed field, is:

1) New Students.

Most new students are doe-eyed, fresh and happy - a little nervous, understandably, but nonetheless ready for a new term, a new town, and a new life. However, vis-a-vis my twenty-person office, almost twelve hundred of them. This means that, if each of them had but one and only one question or issue, there would be twelve hundred problems. With each moment that an issue goes unresolved, the desperation factor, coupling nicely with intrinsic cultural baggage and good old-fashioned frustration, multiplies exponentially. What this means for us is that often the staff members in my office have but to breathe deeply, momentarily go to our happy places, and briefly touch the tasers taped under our desks for a hit of heady reassurance as a few of our (understandably scared, frustrated, angry) students shriek, cry, speak in tongues and cast you nicely into the role of Person Who Is, Singularly, Making My Life Unbearable. It is a role that I, as someone who is apparently dead inside, play with unfettered abandon and unusual panache.

2) Returning Students.

On top of the nearly 1,200 new students, about 2,500 former students return for classes right around the time the newbies get here. While the vast majority of students take the time to find out what they need to do to travel outside the US and return safely, it remains a given that no matter how many emails we send as reminders that there are going to be a handful of troublemakers. And by "troublemakers" I mean "people who call hysterically twenty minutes before leaving for the airport with no idea of where their documentation is." Now, things happen sometimes. But I'm not entirely certain that if I was going on an international flight that I would wait until a half hour before I left to see if I had, oh, a valid visa to broach the country I was to be entering. Maybe that's just me, projecting my own beliefs and cultural background onto other people. Or, uh, perhaps

it's just hot-breathed insanity issuing straight from the lips of Satan to not think of these things before trying to enter Fortress America as a foreigner in a post-September 11th world.

But hey, who am I, right?

For us, the creamy brown sewer-icing on the month of August is that it's hotter than a goddamn blast furnace in Indiana in the summer. Initially, I thought that I was just being stupid and that it was my own icy seawater blood that was preventing me from appreciating temperatures in the nineties with triple-digit humidity. Then one day I saw a nun tear off her habit and vestments right there in the street for a moment of blessed relief. It gives one pause: if the sweet infant Jesus is attempting to cool off a nun - his bride! - it's got to be as though the Hooved One's loins are pressed directly on skins of the rest of us. And let me tell you: he's not so fresh down there.

***

Speaking of "not so fresh", I went to the Indiana State Fair this year.

OK, so maybe that's not the world's fairest segue. Haha, "FAIRest." Anyway, I love big state fairs, which may come as a surprise to some of you in my readership. And by "some of you in my readership" I mean "those of you who have seen me shriek like a seven-year-old girl when animal poop gets anywhere near me." That having been said, the five or so summers I spent living with relatives in West Virginia toughened me quite a bit; it's not every day you are lowered into a newly-completed liquid pigwaste cistern to clear out cement debris or get to assist with the castration of young barnyard animals. Added to the West Virginia experiences were a few early morning trips with my Uncle Anthony, a large and small animal veterinarian in rural Pennsylvania, to behold bovine twisted stomach surgeries and to witness the miracle of seeing a calf splurp out of a cow's bunghole, among other things.

Mostly, though, the fair provides me with an entire day of high-grade improbable nostalgia. I've gotten to experience, on a very limited scale, the lives of my relatives who work the land and raise, care for and dispatch its creatures, but there is no way that I could even pretend for a moment that I shared in their experiences. I am aware that it's not glamorous work - hell, heaving a bucket of freshly-extracted pig testes into a nearby wooded ravine is a sobering chore - but as someone who has been touched by a farming way of life, I have to admit that I find a measure of allure in the idea of it. I say "the idea of it" because my soft, pallid body would be as worthy of a six-day-a-week regimen of manual labor as it would be to swimming the English Channel. However, when one of the houses I looked at renting two years ago proved to have a chicken coop in the backyard, I have to admit that I laid a calcite-covered spheroid in my drawers. Farming in small, recreational doses: apparently OK in my book. And pants.

The other attraction to the fair is, of course, the ethnographic experience provided for you nearly free of charge. Whilst consuming something deep-fried on a stick (this year, the "hot" innovation was a block of frozen Coke, deep-fried on a stick), you have a nearly endless eye-buffet of humanity's highs and lows parading forth right in front of you. Strangely, Indiana's state fair takes place right in the middle of Indianapolis, just north of downtown, but the folks who come to the fair are - let's be honest - not city folk. Lots of cowboy hats, lots of leather fringe, and lots of shetkicker boots. Even more often, adults dressed in Loony Toons-embossed clothing and sticky, red-faced children sullenly following their parents to find the shetter. Belly shirts girding people who could, perhaps, rethink said attire. I feel like an outsider most of the time, as though my (nearly) two degrees produce volutes of a nearly visible reek of pretentiousness in the face of hard-working, ag-Americans. But, just as I think that, I remember waking up at 5 AM to bottle-feed an orphaned calf (named Calvin, then renamed Calvina when its gender became apparent) one summer at my grandmother's house. So, there's a little bit of it in there - not much, as being near animal shet still makes me shriek - but it's enough so that I, like thousands of Indianans, can feel connected to our glorious state fair.

But honey-child, come on: ain't NO reason on this blue-green earth why you need to be wearin' that Tweety Bird tubetop. Oh, snap!

***

Dear filthy Bloomington hippies,

First off, let me start out by stating for the record that I have very few issues with those who live alternative lifestyles, as that would be hypocritical in a way that would cause my head vaporize on my squat neck in terms of karmic retribution. I can appreciate your commitment to political and social issues (Tibet, legalization of low-impact narcotics, electing leaders who are committed to a communist agenda), your alternative dietary needs (meatless, dairy-free, tofurkey-at-Thanksgiving veganism) and your commitment to gird yourself with outwardly non-conformist clothing woven from hair, bark and will-o-the-wisps. Hell, I applaud your decision to mat your hair into strange, bulky cylinders that hang lankly off your skull.

But let me tell you something:

When you smell so bad that I gag and begin to dry heave on the street when you pass, I feel as though I have been violated in a deeply internal way. It's one thing if, say, you're homeless and don't have access to a stick of Right Guard while rifling through a Dumpster for your dinner. It's another thing altogether when you are a white, suburban twentysomething with four fifty dollar bills in your hemp wallet and a Prius hybrid car. Hygiene is, if you've been noticing, important to American culture and I am here to tell you that yes, Brother Dreadlocks, you can be a nonconformist AND still not have to reek like a calving Asiatic elephant's nether-regions. I've seen natural hygiene products - organic, even! - that are cruelty free and fashioned from, oh, I dunno, mint and sage and tea-tree oil. Barring that, aren't there special sticks that one can use in the shower to take the stench off - eucalyptus branches, for example?

What I am saying is this: unless you are a hobo, there is no excuse for you to smell so badly - even in the brick-oven heat of Indiana's summers - that I find my partially digested and nearly disgorged lunch sloshing in my mouth like a hellish stew. Should you not heed my entreaties to properly de-stink, I will be forced to utilize the only power available to me. So when a three-hundred pound man named Albert "The Lip" Fontinelli comes to your home and asks you to take a walk in the woods with him, you can rest assures that your pitiful remains will make a sound meal for nature's non-vegan lifeforms.

Kisses,

Domonic

***

Now that all seems to be simmering down, I should be able to post again.

If you're still out there. [sniff]

Until then, I remain,

Domonic (OK,soIdidn'tpostfortwomonths-sueme,bitches) Potorti

Mill City, the Windy City and an early grave.

2007-06-15T12:14:00.000-04:00

2:17 AM (Central Standard Time)
A shifty hotel somewhere in Chicagoland

I waited, crouched low to the floor in a position I can only imagine must have been favored by early hominids when giving birth to their young, to hear the muffled death-rattle that emanated briefly from the room next door before scuttling to double-lock and bar the door of my dumpy little hotel room. When I'd accomplished that, I pushed the ragged, cigarette-burn-hole-ridden little loveseat in the "spacious seating area" against the door for good measure and scuttled back to wait, hiding uncomfortably into the space between the bed and the window unit, for the assailant to smell my fear, break down the door and exterminate me. I was already envisioning what the room attendant's face would look like when she found my eviscerated/garotted corpse when I heard the neighboring door open and close, followed by strong, heavy footsteps moving away from my room and toward the elevator. A minute later, a largish pickup truck in the parking lot coughed and sputtered to life and motored away to disappear into the traffic heading towards the city center. I rankly wet myself in relief and passed into base unconsciousness on the filthy floor.

Six hours earlier: Minneapolis, Minnesota

"When O'Hare goes down, it goes down like a truck-stop whore on crack." - pithy Midwestern witticism

"...nature is a whore..." - "In Bloom", by Nirvana

I'd gotten about halfway through a dinner salad (comments unwelcome) that weighed as much as a newborn at a little Minneapolis Airport bistro with Scandinavian wooden furniture (again, keep it to yourself) when one of my coworkers called me.

Coworker: Hey, we're on the plane right now.
Me: [shetting pants, looking at cell-phone time display] But our flight doesn't leave for another hour and a half.
Coworker: We decided to fly standby - go see if you can get a seat!
Me: [looking at quarter-eaten salad; for $12, you'd better believe I was going to finish it] Uh, no, I think I will wait for our original flight. Also, I do wha' I wan'.
Coworker: Fine, betch.

After parting ways with Life in the Corn Acolyte Brooke (with whom I was dining), I approached the "Departure" monitor to confirm my flight's gate number. Written in crimson next to the departure time of my flight was

Muahahahahahahahaha

That can't be good, I thought, and made my way toward the gate. I harried-looking airline representative was backed into the corner of the waiting area, and several people - those who hadn't begun to plait a noose to hang themselves from any stringlike object in their purses/carry-ons - were howling, gnashing teeth, rending garments and donning sack-cloth. He'd gotten most of a meaty paw around his can of pepper-fog when a woman - and I use this term loosely, as she was more like a velociraptor with Lee Press-on Nails - leapt upon him and began to savage him with her teeth and nails, shrieking something about "her connection to Tampa."

As the representative was torn into tiny, gore-soaked man-filaments by what can only be described as a poorly-equipped death-squad, I noted that the monitor had changed to reflect a real departure time - and, while it was delayed, it was only an hour's worth of a delay. Why the carnage? I asked myself - silently, of course - as a man near me began to scrape the human skin out from under his fingernails. What was left of the representative at that point could have easily been interred in a standard movie-concession JuJuBee box.

I looked at my Chicago to Indianapolis boarding pass and did a little mental math about the layover.

Huh.

I would have twelve minutes, presuming we landed and deplaned at the instant that we were slated to be there, to get from one terminal to another.

In an airport so large that it has its own zipcode, post office and issues its own stamps. Hell, it even has its own delegation to the UN.

Needless to say, I wasn't holding my breath. We boarded solemnly, as though we were being flown to exile in the gulag archipelago. As I passed the tiny heap that was all that remained of our representative friend, I kicked it quietly. Defiantly. Clearly, it was his fault.

Forty minutes later

We'd been sitting on the tarmac, unmoving and growing increasingly agitated, for thirty-five minutes when the pilot came over the loudspeaker. It was none too soon; at that point, the tension and hostility had grown to the point where an object placed between any two random seated flight customers would have begun to smolder before leaping into greasy flame. And, since we couldn't tamper with OR disable the smoke detectors per federal regulation, that wouldn't have been a savory turn of events.

Pilot: MuhwuhWUHhuhhuhMWUHWUHHUHhuhmuhmuhnuhsuh.
Woman sitting in front of me: [fashioning a shiv with her nails out of a 2 oz. bar of carry on soap] WE CAIN'T FECKIN' HEAR YOU, FOO'! TALK ENGLISH! SHET!
"Special" Male Flight Attendant: Ma'am? Can I help you? Would you like a pillow? Or some {gagging slightly} mouthwash? On the house, honest to God.
WSIFOM: What I wan', crackuh, is to know why we not leavin'.
SMFA: [giggling behind manicured hand] Didn't you hear what the pilot said?* Also, aren't you, like, white?

In a flash - barely visible to the naked eye - she took him down and began the arduous task of trying to cram his 110 lb. frame under the seat in front of her. We would have stopped her had we a) been strong enough and b) not disagreed fundamentally with her decision. As she began to rock herself rhythmically in her seat, moaning "Dear sweet Jesus, get me to Tulsa", we taxied to the runway and lifted off into the sodden darkness.

One hour later

We got to O'Hare near to midnight in the wake of a storm that had, apparently, soused things up a wee. We were informed by a young woman airline representative that, because we'd missed our connections because of weather - an Act of God - we'd have to either sleep in the feckin' airport or find a hotel for the evening. As she fired a warning round over our heads to keep us in line, she threw pink hotel discount slips on the floor and ran, her pumps abandoned for the sake of speed.

Twenty minutes later

As hotel rooms near the airport began to rapidly fill in the wake of massive cancellations, those who earlier were able to calmly get rebooked by their airlines became utterly unglued. As my impromptu travel companion managed to book the last two hotel rooms within a half-hour radius of the airport - using a shrewd skill-set of cunning, speed and ruthlessness - she motioned to the door to the awaiting taxis. She'd made the mistake of speaking loudly of our hotel confirmation within earshot of several passengers who, from the look of things, would be spending the night dining on filth they'd have to dig out of the shiny metal garbage receptacles located every ten feet in the terminal.

Impromptu Travel Companion: Jump in one of the feckin' taxis! They heard me! THEY HEARD ME!
Me: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of OH MY GOD SHE'S GOT A TIRE-IRON
ITC: Drive, motherfecker, DRIVE NOW PUT YOUR FOOT ON THE GAS AND DON'T TAKE IT OFF

Our taxi driver peeled forth from the curb not a moment too soon; the dead travel fast and they'd nearly succeeded in breaching the cab and slaughtering us for our hotel rooms. As we put more and more distance between us an the unholiness of O'Hare, our taxi driver - a West African immigrant - asked us where we were going.

ITC: BlahBlah Hotel, please.
West African Taxi Driver: Where is that?
ITC: How should I know? We're not from here; we're just stranded in this godforsaken hole for the night.
WATD: I don't know where that is. Do you have their number?
ITC: No - I called them through the airline rebooking number and they patched me through.
WATD: I need their address. Or their phone number.
ITC: I have neither. Hey: shouldn't you know where this stuff is?
WATD: Umm, it's my first night driving this cab.
Me: Jesus jumped-up Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar! Will we ever catch a break? [beginning to hysterically sob]

As my traveling companion handed me a bottle of water and a Valium, she called the hotel through 411 Information, got directions and, at nearly 1 AM, we arrived at a hotel that was - and I am being generous - poised at the intersection of Barrio Avenue and Demilitarized Zone Street. As I watched a fifteen-year-old smoke something out of a test-tube while awkwardly trying to crouch behind the hotel Dumpster, I thanked the Baby Jesus that I would have to pay $79 for this experience.

The proprietor barred the door three times behind us and reholstered the Beretta he'd leveled at us upon our knocking and checked us in. I stumbled, reeking and broken, to my room and attempted to broach it with my little card-key.

*flashing red light*

OK, again,

*flashing red light*

I gave the door a rude hand gesture and kicked it before staggering back down the stairs to the reception desk. The desk manager looked harried and worn down, but any compassion I might have felt had died and lay stinking in the moldiest corner of my soul three hours before.

Me: Key...doesn't...work....feck....feckfeckkeckityfeck.....
Harried Desk Manager: Yeah, none of them work.
Me: So...why...giving...to...me...fecker?
HDM: Well, one can always hope, yeah? [wan smile]

I wanted so very much to leap across the desk and tear his throat out with my teeth, but instead I smiled weakly and made double-sure to fart loudly in the elevator as he escorted me to my room to open my door with the masterkey. And, considering that I'd had eaten phở
for dinner the night before...well, God be with the lad.

One hour later - 1 AM

I was woken out of broken sleep by a rhythmic creaking sound. As my sleep-deprived mind began to comprehend what must be transpiring in the adjacent cell, the woman began to moan. I'll spare you the details, but the general trend of the conversation was based on commands for continued, and more rigorous, coitus, as well as queries as to whether the owner of the phallus was enjoying himself. About ten minutes later, their headboard began slapping against the wall and, as I went to the magical place with all of the unicorns and the Snicker-bar bushes, they brought themselves to savage climax. I anticipated that they would light up, go to Flavor Country, have some pillow talk, and pass out from dehydration (him) and hoarseness (her). Something must have gone awry, though, as I am fairly certain that an hour later he gutted her like a trout before disappearing into the night, leaving me smashed into the crawlspace between the bed and the window AC/heating unit, soaked in my own urea.

But what can you do, eh?

I got home to Indianapolis Airport - I nearly genuflected in the terminal in gratitude for making it finally - six hours later, reeking of piss, b.o., and heaven knows what else. My bag made it through on my flight, and as my traveling companion and I parted ways, I made my way toward the cab stand. The gent at the little podium commented offhandedly that I smelled like a hobo and hailed a cab for me. I heaved my luggage into the trunk and clambered in. The driver pulled away from the airport turned to smile broadly at me.

Another West African Cabbie: Are you having a good morning?
Me: I've soiled myself twice in the past three hours and I no longer care.
AWAC: So, where are we going?
Me: Greenwood, Xxxxxxxx Road.
AWAC: I don't know where that is. I can't get there. Does that exist? Where is that? Are you sure of that? Hello?

[sound of my medulla atomizing at the speed of sound]

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (Satanismymotor) Potorti

*Girl, Chicago's not, like, letting us take off! There's like, some storm and some junk! Yea!

"Wow. It must be nice to hope for the thing you wish to want."

2007-05-26T18:17:00.000-04:00

"Jerri Blank", aka Amy Sedaris, "Strangers with Candy"

As I laid moaning like a whore in my sweat-sodden hospital bed - fever-plagued, eating my dinner out of a hole in my arm, unbathed and reeking for nearly four days - I made certain to spend my precious waking moments attempting to piece together my misdeeds to determine why I was being punished with not one, but two hospital stays (appendectomy, diverticulitis) in 2007. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that nothing* I'd done so far in my twenty-seven years merited this year's medical gang-rape, so I determined that I would need to pay a call to a local past-life regressionist/high priestess/Kroger employee named Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz to see what might be at the root of my ghastly, unbidden issues as of late.

[ring, ring]

Male voice: [urrrrrrp] Who the feck is this? It's, like, 10 in the goddamn morning.
Me: Good morning, sir! I was wondering if I could set up a meeting with Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz for this afternoon.
Male voice: Better make that next week. She's on the rag and's been giving all of her male clients "herbal remedies" that make the heads of their decks bleed.
Me: Good to know. So, how's Wednesday of next week?
Male voice: No good; that's the night we meet with our swing partners over at this dungeon across town for some -
Me: [reaching for something - anything! - to kill myself with] Alrighty then. How's about Friday?
Male voice: Yeah, I'll tell her. Hey: when you're on your way over, how's about you stopping at the Circle K down the street and bringing me a package of White Owls? You know, the kind with the white plastic lip-guard.
Me: Only if you promise to not smoke them while I am there, as the aroma they produce reminds me of that time I had to have my ingrown toenail cauterized with a laser.
Male voice: [whispers] Awesome.

Friday afternoon finds me standing next to my car, door ajar, beholding a tarpaper shanty and wondering if I'd made a wise decision. Several emaciated feral cats wended their way through calf-high weeds to greet me; finding a largish stick several yards from my person, I held the mewling, distempered beasts at bay with it long enough to broach the "porch", whereupon I was greeted by the delicate scent of pet feces, nag champa incense and Velveeta. I used the stick to rap upon the door; when several minutes passed and I was not received, I turned to hack my way back to awaiting (and unlocked) Orhan. I was about halfway across the "lawn" when a man's voice called out to me.

Morbidly Obese Man with Combover: Do you have my ceee-gars, whelp?
Me: [beholding a creature on the porch who, surely, has spent a significant amount of time hiding under a bridge] Here they are. I must insist, though, that they remain on my person until I leave, lest you begin the process of immolating and "enjoying" one. Also, you owe me $7.
MOMwC: Don't you judge me, son. Also: Shirley - uh, I mean, Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz - has agreed to knock the seven clams off your fee today.
Me: So, this means that I am paying $3 for the pleasure of her company? This is going to be one quality regression.
MOMwC: Damn skippy, motherhumper.

He bid me forward into the inner sanctum of the shanty and I, for my part, attempted to suppress my gag reflex and open my Inner Eye to the experience. This was difficult given that the inside of the home was less in keeping with my own ideas of what these places would be like (Enya on stereo, tasteful lezzie decor, a woman clad in a willowy frock) and was more as I imagine the interior of one of those hermit-apartment might be. You know, an apartment inhabited by one of those people who live for twenty-five years in a place, never go outside, have seventeen cats and when they die, only the stink of their rotting corpses alerts neighbors to their passage.

I was shown into a small, darkened room where - from the eye-stinging reek of it - the nag champa was merrily burning. Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz was sprawled in a rather unladylike position on a small daybed behind the reading table and, upon our approach (and with a deleriously sputum-filled throat-clearing from MOMwC) she leapt up, covered her nearly-exposed junk with the yards of linen she'd girded her body with and summoned her mistiest, most supernatural voice. Which, considering that she was a chain-smoking fiftyish former Jewess from Albany, came out sounding like Bea Arthur trying to talk through a mouthful of tuna.

SLUNT: [hack, hack] What brings you to Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz this fine day? Oh, wait: aren't you the guy who's trying to figure out why his twenty-seven-year-old guts are rebelling against him? Like, from past lives and shet?
Me: Yeah, I guess that would have to be me.
SLUNT: Yeah. Well, let's get started. Before I open your Inner Eye, I will need to know two things; one, do you have the three bucks? Two: are you allergic to bat guano?
Me: Yes, and most likely yes.
SLUNT: Shet. Well, how about Crisco?
Me: That'd be fine provided that I know what you are going to do with it. If I wake up and my jimmies are covered in lard, someone in this room is getting tasered.
SLUNT: Just close your goddamn eyes.

When I awoke an hour later, Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz was panting like a fallow deer in heat and was scrounging about in a macrame handbag for her More Ultralight 120s. I frantically reached for my genitalia and, finding them Crisco-free and dry, I began to calm myself.

Me: How'd it go?
SLUNT: [visibly shaking] You just stay the feck over there, wouldja?
Me: Ah, I take it that it went well.
SLUNT: Look, I don't mean to judge, but your soul will need to go through at least three hundred more lifetimes - many of them involving clergy membership - before it is clean again.
Me: So, who was I in the past?
SLUNT: Well, let's just leave it with this: I'm fairly certain that you were responsible for the importation of the Black Death into Europe, the invention of the first decapitation machine, the idea for an exploding tip for whaling harpoons, the summary execution of the Romanovs, the Dutch occupation of the Congo, the establishment of the Khmer Rouge, the idea for the partition of India and Pakistan and the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.
Me: So, wait: I was Mao Zedong?
SLUNT: Well would you LOOK at the time?

I left with more questions than had been answered (and by left, I mean "was forcibly driven out of the reeking tarpaper shanty by a remarkably agile MOMwC and his butterfly knife"), but one thing was clear: it was the misdeeds of my former selves that had provided the karmic stick that roiled up my present-day innards. For this, I spent four days alone in an isolation ward room because of a raging Clostridium difficile infestation, requiring that nurses and doctors suit up like biohazard/hazmat teams to poke me. For this I had to go for three days without food, receiving nourishment via a suspended bag filled with clear liquids, only to be told that I can never again eat popcorn, nuts and seeds. For this I had to endure countless nurses and doctors asking me incredulously how old I am, as diverticulosis is very rare in people UNDER THE AGE OF 40.

I do know one thing, though.

{whispering} [down with cow demons and snake spirits!]

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (FeatherSonoftheEast) Potorti

*OK, well, selling all of those fifth-graders that home-brewed John Stamos' Proud Greek Nutsack probably had something to do with it.

A Turk, a Dane, a Pakistani and an American are driving to İstanbul.

2007-05-20T11:59:00.000-04:00

Last week I became utterly poleaxed by ennui over my lunch hour and, seeking the sweet succor that only a series of Wikipedia entries can provide, I fired up Mozilla - and stopped. It was at that moment that I was suddenly consumed with a desire - nay, a clarion need - to Google my own precious name to keep tabs on who was spreading smack about me.

Whether I was bidden to do so by the gravelly, dead voice of one of my more dominant personalities or the decaying-corpse-reeking breath of the Hooved One, one just can never tell.

In mere moments, meantime, I was presented with several dozen links, each of which purported to contain my name in some fashion. Some I'd fully anticipated; this blog's URL, for one, and links to several articles I wrote for the University of Maine's student rag. One of the links had a funny URL, though, and purported to contain pictures.

[awesome?]

I gingerly scrolled down to the URL of the site that claimed to sport photographic evidence of me and hovered the mouse pointer over the link. The part of me that still has residual ability to feel was filled with icy dread, but, as the part of me that couldn't give a fancy fig animates my limbs, I felt my fingers tap twice on the mouse clicker-thing.

The last thing I expected to see - well, other than documentation of my supposed linkage to that Chiang Mai Harelip deal gone wrong from last August - were pictures of a twenty-year-old me taken by one of my friends when I was studying abroad in Turkey. There I am, staring back from across three continents and more than six years at a balder, fatter and arguably more educated man who is on the cusp of thirty. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - or, as I eventually did, break open a pack of apple strudel Pop-Tarts and settle back in amazement at the show.

Of course, I have my own pictures of Turkey. Thirty-six rolls of film worth of them, in fact. But seeing these - well, somehow it's different. Anyway, with apologies to Bilaal Ahmed (the photographer in most of these shots), I have taken some and put them on here so that my readership can mock my haircut and inquire as to the whereabouts of both the gray hoodie (deceased) and the red fleecy thing (also deceased).

Left to right: A twenty-year-old Domonic, Jacob HØgild and Syed Bilaal Ahmad.

I wasn't entirely sure what I should have expected when I arrived at Bilkent University. The University of Maine didn't know, either - after my application had been approved and Bilkent had sent their acceptance letter, I was informed that I was to be the first UMaine student to go there. This was news which, as you might imagine, I greeted with the enthusiasm level one reserves for scraping a rapidly-cooking animal carcass out of the grill of your car as, you know, Turkey just so happens to be in the Middle-feckin'-East. I also didn't anticipate that I would be one of only three new exchange students at the school.

Just three of us. Nine thousand Turks, and three of us. [There was an Australian exchange student who'd been there since the spring, but he didn't count, as he could speak Turkish.]

My "orientation" consisted of the young Pakistani chap who'd picked me up at the airport standing me in the middle of campus and pointing his fingers at several distant buildings.

Young Pakistani Chap: [while trying to light up his fourth smoke on our ten minute walk] So: you can eat there, there and there. You can also eat there, but it is rrrreal shet. You buy your books there. The bank is there, and the post office is there. And the library is over there. [takes impossibly deep drag] Alright then. I am getting laid in about twenty minutes and she rrrrreally hates if I am late. [begins to walk away]

Me: [misting up and becoming frantic]

YPC: Look: if you get lost, just say "Yurt Yetmiş Sekiz" and someone will tell you how to get there.

Me: What's "Yurt Yetmiş Sekiz?"

YPC: Oh my fecking GOD. It's your DORM. I have to motor so that I can bum a rubber from my friend.

Wherever you are right now, YPC, I hope your pee burns when it comes out.

This is Jacob and me in my ghastly little dorm room which I shared with a young Turk from Gaziantep. He (the roommate) was a nice enough chap save for a few minor details:

1) He let his friends chain-smoke in my room.
2) He talked on his cell-phone until 2 AM every night.
3) He BATHED in the most foul cologne that has ever graced the male form.
4) I had to hide my food because he'd eat it without asking.
5) The window you see behind me? Every morning at 7:30 AM, he'd open the curtain, open the window, and blow snot-rockets and hork lungers onto the awaiting plateau scrub below.

It was so great to live with him! Oh, and did I mention his grandmother called every other day at the precise astral moment that he'd gone to class, leaving me to try to muddle through explaining to her in broken Turkish that her grandson was a troll? Or that he called showering "douching" and would announce loudly that he was going to perform as such every single time he did it?

Fortunately, though, I didn't have to spend that much time with the Roomie of Doom because I got "adopted" by the four gents living next door. This is Jacob and my best Turkish friend, Dinçer, at the Atakule (Atatürk's Tower) in Ankara. Dinçer is from Ödemiş, near İzmir, but was born and raised (until he was ten) in Australia. He took my education in how Turkey functions to immediate task by teaching me soccer cheers which, while grammatically educational, often contained profanity so startling that merely thinking them caused the stench of sulfur to elp forth from your skin.

For example:

I am going to plant a pine tree in your mother's (feminine parts) and (make love to her) in the shade.

So genteel. As an aside, you had better either be double the size of the dude you are saying that to or else be saying it from another continent, preferably separated by at least one ocean.

The three yabancılar (foreigners) up inside the Atakule, Ankara.

Jacob's best Turkish buddy, Güneş (behind me), took us home to İstanbul so that we could behold the Big Meat on a Stick herself. We stayed at a hotel on the Asian side of the city that was - and I have to be frank - the most horrid little place I've ever laid my delicate head. Of course, that's what you get when one pays $8.50 a night. Anyway, this is us in Bolu, on the road to İstanbul, at some little truck-stop. It wasn't much to look at, but the food was great - and, as one might imagine, incredibly inexpensive.

Me, grinning at some asshole joke I'd just cracked, on the ferry from İstanbul to the Prince's Islands. The Prince's Islands (or the Adalar) belong to the İstanbul metropolitan area by jurisdiction, but the two are worlds apart, as on many of the islands there are no cars allowed. This starkly contrasts to İstanbul, where I was nearly smacked out of my skin four times by drivers - one of whom had come partially up over a sidewalk in order to make a hairpin turn.

While on Büyükada (literally, the Big Island), we met up with Güneş' old chummy, a part-time resident of the island who is distinguished in my memory for being one of the few blonde Turks I met while there. He's second from the left in this picture of us climbing down from the top of Büyükada, wherein is seated one of three of Turkey's remaining Greek Orthodox monasteries.

Jacob, Bilaal (taking picture) and I, lost in İstanbul, trying to understand some old man's animated sign language directions with little success. He really did try, though, but our impenetrable foreign retardation rendered his efforts futile.

Back on Büyükada, we were accosted by this Dutch kid and his American girlfriend (seated in the first two seats on the left) as we were walking around; their relief at finding Anglophones caused a nearly palpable reek.

Jacob pointing something on the European side of İstanbul out to me; I'm fairly certain that this photograph was staged.

Drinking something warm somewhere in İstanbul.

Güneş horsing around with Bilaal while I look on in amusement; the Bosphorus and the Black Sea stretch behind us.

An international homoerotic moment? I was clearly either intrigued or uncomfortable - it's probably safe to say both.

At the Sultanahmet Camii (the Blue Mosque), İstanbul. I am looking really, really white.

Güneş' family treated us with the hospitality that Turks are legendary for; in this particular case, a breakfast that would only see the hostess stopping bringing out more food with the sweet release of death. Just when we thought that we were going to very literally, a la the "gluttony" victim in the movie "Se7en", die from overindulgence, Güneş' mom brings out oranges the size of hubcaps and begins to peel them for us. Clearly, the hard-boiled eggs, bread, simit (bread rings crusted with sesame seeds), börek (pastry filled with herbs and feta), honey, feta, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, lamb ham, tea and chocolate weren't enough.

Our favorite restaurant in Ankara, Haci Arif Bey's. They made ayran (yogurt frappe) that makes me want to slap your mama.

Good Lord, I got a lot of use out of that fleece. Me and Dinçer on the Alle, Bilkent University.

Us (me in the background, trying not to trip on something) at Hattuşaş, the Hittite capital city. I'd thought of renting a mini-bus (and a driver) for the day to go there, and I got all of my friends up at the crack of dawn to go. We had a blast. It was, incidentally, the last trip I went on with both Bilaal and Jacob together. As our time in Turkey wore on, we each found our social niches. Mine was with the Aegean boys next door - Dinçer especially - and Jacob had Güneş. Bilaal ended up finding quite a few Pakistani buddies with whom he'd socialize. By the end of the semester we saw less and less of each other until we found each other leaving notes and voicemails, always missing each other as we went off into our own little realities.

[cue the instrumental theme from "St. Elmo's Fire"]

Seeing these pictures made me miss how I felt every day when I was in Turkey. More than that, though, I miss my friends terribly and wonder how and what they are doing.

[pausing to huff from can of paint-thinner]

Ahh. Wait: what was I talking about?

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic (weepynostalgiaisofttobecuredbyinhalinghouseholdsolvents) Potorti

Business up front, party in the back.

2007-05-07T12:10:00.000-04:00

Thursday's dusk came the the Greenwood man-lair on gentle April zephyrs that carried only the most delicate bouquet of the Marion County (metro Indianapolis) Stench Combo, which consisted of burning tires, sun-scorched asphalt/oil refinery effluvia and a side of diesel exhaust; to drink, a glorious whiff of the Indianapolis dump which, while more than ten minutes away by car, is growing increasingly foetid in the early summer's heat. Were I to have been luxuriating in the dog-loaf encrusted yard in the canvas camping chair that was not long ago my only piece of upright furniture, I would have most likely puked a little in my mouth before wondering absently if scoring a rock would make it all better.

Instead, I found myself crouched under my desk battling a power-strip as I unplugged anything that might be part of my modem and router in a titanic battle of wills.

What I Wanted: The ability, as I saw fit, to 'blog.
What the Modem and Router Wanted: To be feck-sticks.

It was at this moment - mere seconds before I began to uncontrollably shriek and start ripping at cords like a coatimundi coming down off of methadone - that Keith, my personal deus ex machina, spoke.

Keith: Hey, I saw this weird wire that came down off a pole in our front yard.
Me: I saw that too, and wondered if it was to bring us sparky mortality.
Keith: Maybe we should call the Insight people. [pause] NO! Stop it right now!

[sprays me in the face with water bottle as I begin to savage a wire with my incisors]

Fifteen minutes and a fancy troubleshooting session later, it was determined that we would indeed have to be the recipients of a service call. Would someone be home, the computer-borg-dude asked sweetly, between 8 AM and 6 PM on Saturday? Seeing as how they had our gamete-producing organs over the barrel, we had no choice to affirm.

8:15 AM, Saturday morning

[phone buzzing in the bed next to me; it's a "317" area code - metro Indianapolis]

Me: Who the feck is this?
Voice: Hi, I'm John from Insight.
Me: Oh, gee whiz, I'm sorry! I am just drunk is all.
John: Yeah, I tied one on real good last night at the tittie bar and now I am weaving through - OH HOLY SHET LOOK OUT
Me: John?
John: Feck, I just almost knocked a twelve-year-old Catholic-school girl out of her saddle shoes.
Me: Huh. Well, I take it that you're going to be on the way soon?
John: I'll be there in fifteen. Hey - [whispers] - you got any weed?

It was only after contemplating his parting words that the part of me that is still able to remember things jogged a little bit. I'd been asked that question before.

Could I dare to dream that I would be the recipient of a divine visit from my boil-handed, Marlboro-perfumed Zippo-holstered buddy? Would I - on yet another occasion - be privileged enough to watch the early spring sun glitter off of his oily mullet? Would I - for the second time! - be forced to clean mud-clods that had liberated themselves from the treads of his size 15 blood-stained workboots from the sanctity of my home?

I'd just lowered myself onto the porcelain throne when a knock resounded through my seven-room shanty. I knew better than to have tried to accomplish The Unspeakable with someone on the way; inevitably, one gets caught with one's pants down, and not metaphorically. I hastily completed the task at hand and properly sanitized my hands to greet John, who, upon seeing me at the door, butted out a half-smoked Marlboro Light 100 [?!?] out on his heel and pocketed it.

Classy.

As I led him through our yard - mindful at all times to avoid the scatological evidence of Zeke's unheeded existence - I beheld John's Zippo holster, which carefully cradled the steely butane-filled lighter. I'd not noticed the time before that the lighter was emblazoned with a Confederate flag; how I could have missed this, I have no way of knowing. As I lifted a single pallid finger into the heavens to point out where the cable had tumbled into the tree and partly into our yard, I was taken aback by the absence one thing I'd most looked forward to gazing upon in regards to our special Insight buddy:

His mullet was gone.

I'd not have the pleasure of watching the spring sunlight dance merrily over his greasy neck-cape, and for this I was powerful angry. There's just nothing amusing about a quarter inch of hair under a tidy baseball cap unless owned by Britney Spears. As I frantically tried to reassemble the pieces of my shattered world, I looked to his hands. "At least, dear Baby Jesus in Thy hay-redolent manger, let there be boils", I mouthed. When he removed his gloves to root around in his pockets, their relative smoothness - I mean, other than work calluses - forced a single drop of brine from my left eye.

What had changed? OK, so there was still a little bit of the John from last year in there, but few people take off a mullet once they grow it in, and fewer still are able to rid themselves of gigantic, Roma tomato-sized hand-boils without the aid of a blowtorch and a witch-doctor.

The answer came when the sun glinted off something else other than what was, perhaps, the most exquisite mullet that has ever been grown.

A ring. A wedding band.

Now, whether he'd been married all this time but was unable to wear the ring because of the Clementine orange-sized pustules, I will never know. I do know that the promise of regular sex will cause gentlemen to do strange things, like cut off nearly a foot of flammable hair or go to Chinatown for hand-salve made out of narwhal placentae.

As he snaked a cable from a cable-box located several feet into our neighbor's yard - an old, bitter and, might I add, balding neighbor who has on several occasions called our landlord to tell him how we don't keep our lawn to his standards - I thought: good for you. Everyone needs someone, and the fact that somebody - perhaps that very evening - was polishing his one-eyed gopher made me feel hope for a world that will soon be bereft of a free Paris Hilton.

As he got into his truck, he waved goodbye as he prepared to light the butt that he'd stashed in one of the pockets of his carpenter jeans. He rolled down his window all the way and beckoned me closer.

"You sure you don't have any ganj, buddy?"

I assured him that I didn't and, looking crestfallen, he motored into the distance. Somewhere, perhaps in the shadow of a the Giant Sparkplug Building in our state's bullet-ridden capital, a thirtysomething man with nearly invisible boil scars on his hands will try to shake down a pat of weed from a seventy-year-old man who is barely holding in a bowel movement in the vain hopes that he'll be transported to a skunky heaven aided by a rebel Zippo. When the MedicAlert van shows up, he'll have nowhere to run.

But at least now he'll have someone to bail him out.

Until later, I remain,

Dom (unlesshewantedsomeExtraStrengthTylenolhewasoutofluck) Potorti

A census-taker once tried to test me.

2007-04-13T12:56:00.000-04:00

I drank his cerebro-spinal fluid like cherry-lemon Kool-Aid.

***

She came last Saturday afternoon, her graying head bent low to the frigid winds, and knocked witheringly on the "front" door to the wretched hovel I call my home. I'd been expecting that the birthday present I'd bought for myself was to be delivered at any astral moment, and when I saw that she wasn't a postal service representative through the slats of the blinds, I was tempted to release the hounds, recline in a comfortable chair and sip an adult beverage while watching them burrow into her body cavity for a snack - a welcome break from the housecleaning that seemed to be going nowhere. As I watched a pet-fur tumbleweed creep unbidden across the floor in direct affront to my efforts, I remembered: the closest thing I have to a "hound" is the anorexic, neurotic gazelle/alligator mix that was, at that moment in time, engaging in his favorite pastime; namely, looking baleful. The other house-beast, though, would have taken her out with profound pleasure were he not preoccupied with the insertion of his bifurcated cathood into the mantle of his plush squid lover. To make matters of speaking with her more difficult, I was scantily clad; on my trunk, I'd chosen to wear what people in my old multiethnic New Jersey neighborhood called a "wop tee", and, girding my loins, hung a pair of scuzzy shorts that were stained in a way that left little to the imagination regarding the accident that rendered them into house-pants. I turned off the ShopVac, wiped my greasy forehead on a rag and opened the door.

Me: Hi. What the feck do you want?
Graying Survey Lady: Can I come in?
Me: No.
GSL: Do you remember getting a letter two weeks ago indicating that I'd be coming to your residence to conduct a survey about drug use and abuse, and attitudes towards them?
Me: [lying] No.
GSL: Well, I'm here now and it's motherhumping cold out here, so would you please give me ten goddamn seconds of your time? Inside?
Me: [reaching into pocket for machete; not finding one for many obvious reasons, looking around for suitable braining instrumentation] Fine. But only in the mudroom, which smells like a dead hobo's foot that has been encased in a ski boot in July.

She began by asking the preliminary questions that would determine if Keith and I were going to be eligible to participate in the actual survey itself. After five minutes, the results were in: apparently, the opinions of two very liberal, Indiana-dwelling, non-Hispanic crackers matter greatly to the NDUH (National Drug Use...uh...Hippocamp), and we were selected to receive a later visit if we so desired. While I am vigilantly poised to assist in the acquisition of knowledge of nearly any form, I wasn't entirely sure if I was thrilled about being asked deeply personal questions about a sensitive topic without any real idea* about how the data would be collected and utilized.

GSL: We pay each of you thirty bucks in cold, hard cash for participating.
Me: See you Tuesday.
GSL: [under her breath] Awesome.

7 PM, Indiana Special We-Can't-Make-Up-Our-Mind Time
The Greenwood Man-Lair: Tuesday (Last Night)

With the stench of our hastily-consumed white-trash dinner still hanging pregnantly in the air, we welcomed Graying Survey Lady into our home, where she quickly ensconsed herself at our kitchen table. Keith, who had never met the woman before, offered her tea or something else to drink. Her eyes trained to various parts of our kitchen and, determining that she'd more likely than not need an inoculation to use any of our glasses or mugs, politely declined and began turning on the laptop computer. She explained how we'd answer the questions (privately, via laptop) and gave a little prepared speech about what the data would be used for; namely, some sort of genocide.

After answering a dozen or so questions about tobacco and alcohol abuse, the survey started to become interesting. Questions about marijuana use turned quickly into questions about huffing paint-thinner and Pam, and from there, cocaine and its sundry forms. Before long, the survey began to look like this:

[22] Please refer to the Handbook provided and turn to Visual Reference Number 4. On this page, you will see pictures of various narcotics; since we assume that you were too fecked up to remember their names while you were using, please un-dilate your pupils and concentrate. Hey: maybe the nice lady will give you some Cool Ranch Doritos after this session if you're really good.

Please indicate your response by pressing the appropriate number keys when you your disease and chemical-addled brain will allow you to remember the following:

a) Which of these pretty pills did you chase down with a chaser of a liter undistilled Ukrainian vodka last Saturday night after finishing the Walker, Texas Ranger marathon on Canadian Broadcast Television?

b) Which of these pretty pills did you meticulously grind into a fine powder which you then snorted off the ass of a Indonesian businessman using a rolled-up 10 rupiah note? I mean, we assume it's the blue one, but go ahead.

c) Which of these pretty pills caused you to go to a formal work function dressed in a Hawai'ian bedsheet you'd cut a head-hole out of in the full belief that you were the rightful reincarnation of the Panchen lama?

[Processing previous answers; please be patient, as this may take several minutes]

Based on your previous answers, our records would indicate that you are most likely high right now. Though this survey software can't be certain, it is probable that you are flying tight on the wings of JSPGN, colloquially known on the streets as John Stamos' Proud Greek Nutsack. Though known to cause involuntary paralysis and death, bully for you for managing to score a pat of it in your pathetic soccer-mom neighborhood.

Please press [1] for 'yes' or [2] for 'no' if you are willing to allow the survey-giver-lady a sweet drag of its face-numbing goodness from your stash.

{pressing [2]}

Fine. Be that way.

[23] Since we have determined that you are, chemically-speaking, on a different plane of existence at the moment, please indicate for our survey how you feel about Annie Lennox's music video "Walking on Broken Glass."

a) Annie Lennox frightens me; is she, like, a vampiress or something?
b) I asked for a powdered wig for my bat mitzvah.
c) I have improbable nostalgia about eighteenth-century France; snuff, slightly rancid meat, harpsichords and guillotines all sound pretty fancy to me.
d) John Malkovitch sired a bastard child with me and refuses to return my calls, so seeing him with a ridiculous ponytail always makes me smile inwardly while I cut pictures of us on our vacation to Mallorca into nearly microscopic pieces with an X-acto knife.

[pressing 'c']

[24] Which of these languages do you speak? Please select all that apply.

a) Susquehannock
b) Manx
c) Ubykh
d) Mohegan
e) Cornish

[selection of 'c']

This was a trick question, as all of the languages on this list are functionally extinct - some for more than a century. You are some special kind of retard - and a functional liar. I have half a mind to terminate this session and refuse to give you the thirty clams - which, considering that you'll spend it on smack, might be a service to you. To redeem yourself:

[24] One of the following street-drugs is real. Please select it from the list below.

a) St. Blaise's Glass Eye [SBGE]
b) Chiang Mai Harelip [CMH]
c) Cicero's Hairy Taint [CHT]
d) Georgia HomeBoy [GHB]
e) Shirley Temple's Uvula [STU]

***
The survey ended (after a correct selection of "Georgia HomeBoy" **) and the Graying Survey Lady gathered her things and gave us each a crisp ten and twenty combo apiece, bid us good evening and, looking over her slight shoulders the whole way, hastened from our home.

We held our cash up to the light (you can never be TOO sure about these things) and, determining that we were possessed of genuine mint, proceeded to plan for how we'd spend our newly-found largess. Eyes agleam, we knew there was no other choice for our purchase.

The next night, under cover of darkness, a brand new DustBuster was secreted into our home to begin a long life of abject drudgery sucking up pet-fur tumbleweeds the size of capybaras.

Until next week, I remain,

Domonic (no,wereallydidbuyahouseholdappliancetosuckuppetfur) Potorti

*Other than the letter which had arrived two weeks before, which clearly, in black and white AND with graphs, told me exactly what it'd be used for. Whatever.
** I am not making this drug up. I had never heard of it and it either exists or is, potentially, a ruse-drug name used to lure liars into false confession so as to eliminate their data sets. Either way, wow.

Nearer my God to thee.

2007-04-04T19:05:00.000-04:00

Following a harrowing day in the office during which you, in passing, wondered whether the rafters in your garage would be able to hold your swinging mortal shell suspended from a length of rope, you spend the next hour on your commute behind five cars traveling in a "five under the speed limit" clusterfeck. After providing several fiftysomething women with the opportunity to gaze upon highly suggestive and incredibly offensive Italian hand gestures, you guide your American-made piece of shet into your driveway and finally broach the sanctity of your home, happily kicking off the lazy-man slip-on shoes girding your reeking man-feet in the semidarkness of twilight.

It is at this time that you step quite firmly into something wet, yet also curiously tacky.

The "liquid" begins to soak through your sock and seeps into the spaces between your toes, which have begun to curl unconsciously in mute horror. The part of you that hopes and dreams that what you are stepping in is not pet effluent dies, is quietly interred and lies stinking in the ground. From somewhere in the darkened house, you hear the telltale sound of a plastic eye rapping rhythmically against the hardwood floor as the other pet brings himself to feral climax atop a stuffed squid; the pet from whose bladder sprang the bitchin' righteousness you've trodden upon is cowering in the back corner of his pet-bed, stock still, hoping against hope that The Big Mean Bearded One has visual acuity based on motion.

As the sock in question is peeled from your piss-soaked foot, you continue to move into the kitchen, where the larger pet's shet cairn holds court under the kitchen table. Composed of about nine carefully extruded nuggets, the cairn is surrounded by yet more decaying urea. Helpfully, this particular deposit has traveled downhill and has broached the laundry room's borders, bringing the total number of rooms that will require sterilization to three. Upon closer inspection of the room, your eyes can't help but to train to the vicinity of the litterbox, where a smaller, yet equally impressively extruded, shet cairn produced by the other pet rankly entreaties for your attention.

Given this information, which product(s) should be made from these pets?

a) A smallish drum of Elmer's glue.
b) Low-cost, high nitrogen garden fertilizer.
c) A medium-sized pair of moccasins, replete with tiny fringes around the edge.
d) Shark chum for National Geographic cage divers.
e) All of the above.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (no,really,Iamtotallyreadytorendertheircarcasses) Potorti

A fingerbang from the Hooved One.

2007-04-02T12:55:00.000-04:00

Wow, there goes my "PG-13" rating.

It's been twenty-six days since a writhing four-inch vestigial organ was delicately removed from the reeking morass that is my innard cavity, and I'm slowly but surely on the mend. As of yet, I'm not spry enough to resume my night job of stomping on the throats of those little kids in the mall who wear those ridiculous skate-shoes, but I'm back to my day job, which is only slightly different [making bewildered international students weep in my office after they've ruined their visa statuses]. All told, this past March felt rather like a rough, lubleless ride on Satan's filthy phalanges.

To make matters worse, Balthazar - the proclaimed "meatloaf with ears" himself - has continued displaying a disturbing behavior which Keith and I had prayed fervently was merely symptomatic of his blossoming pubescence. Its continuation serves little purpose other than to illustrate to us that there is, indeed, the seed of evil walking among us on tiny padded feet.

When Balthazar was a kitten/larva, we provided him with all of the toys he could possibly have ever wanted. Other than milk-jug rings, though, he really had no use for any of them - except for a fairly realistically designed squid plush toy I'd procured in Newport, Rhode Island, in college. He snuggled up to the squid and would oft be found nestled into its maroon tentacles, completely unconscious.

Aww, precious, right? Two of God's creatures that would have never had a chance to meet, spooning on my bed.

A year and a half later

[phone rings]

Dom: Hey, what's up?
Keith: Not much. Hey, uh...your cat....
D: Jesus God, what's wrong with him now?
K: Well...
D: Is he OK?
K: Well, he's...fecking his toy squid.
D: No he's not.
K: Yes, he is.

[faint sound of purring and the squid's hard plastic eye rapping rhythmically against the hardwood floor]

D: Wait: didn't I have him neutered?
K: I don't know what to tell you. Oh wait, yes I do: your cat is making passionate love with a stuffed cephalopod.

For quite some time, I was fairly convinced that what Keith had seen was Balthazar playing with the squid in an unorthodox way. The alternative - that my impish baby boy was planting his bifurcated petie in his long-cherished kittenhood best friend - was simply not something I wanted to entertain.

That was, until I beheld it myself.

I'd wondered why Mr. Squid's swimfins had been torn free of the maroon fuzz and why his mantle had been pressed so flat. Turns out that

my cat had been fecking him to death

by savaging his fins to "hold on" while simultaneously kneading his formerly cylindrical mantle into oblivion.

I tell you: I am nearly misty with pride. Not only is my neutered cat punching his little pink one onto/into God only knows what in our home, but he is also deeply entrenched into a fetish that, when invoked even in conversation, rather makes me want to never have sex again.

"Well, at least it's not your leg," a friend quipped recently. This is true. However, coming home to find a stuffed squid splayed out in post-coital disarray and hosed down with what I have to assume is feline Cowper's juice and saliva, his hard plastic eye turned to me in silent accusation and bitter lamentation, I have to wonder: should I take it away from him? I am fully aware that, as a limber felid, he has alternative - yet more orthodox - ways of releasing a little steam. Whither, then, the cephalopod? Do I allow my cat one of the few pleasures a housebound pet can have - a pleasure which, while horrid, doesn't really harm anyone but a six-year-old squid toy? Or, should I respect the squid's wishes to not be banged into shreds by a bored twelve-pound neutered housecat?

Before you judge him - and, by proxy, me - I ask that you behold the mark that lies upon this furry wretch's flank:

Conclusion: Balthazar has no choice but to savage any living thing that comes into his strike range, rendering flesh into shreds of tissue and gore. He has no choice but to awaken his daddies at 6 AM on a Saturday by mowling until, bleary and incensed, they stagger forth to pay attention to him. He has no choice but to produce volutes of stench via his catbox, which has been classified as a Type 4 Biohazardous Waste Site by the UN. And finally, he has no choice but to relentlessly shag a stuffed squid into the ground.

He's got the mark.

He does what he wants.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (mysonhascomeoutoftheclosetasaplushie) Potorti

Hastane'ndeyim.

2007-03-07T11:43:00.000-05:00

Night before last, I awoke from a sound sleep to the sensatation that a rabid honey badger was attempting to liberate itself from my bowels. Thinking that I was, perhaps, um, unable to drop the kids off at the pool, I awaited the sweet relief of a gut-busting dump.

A cherry-flavored magnesium laxative frappe, a cup of joe and five hours later: nada.

An hour and a half at the "Prompt"care -itself filled to the gills with the most unspeakable creatures, like the vaguely humanoid "baby" who shrieked like he was being impaled with a sewing needle until his mother surrendered a pallid teat for his awaiting maw- I was referred to a little Greek surgeon across town. By now, I was fairly sure that my insides were acutally going to burst into greasy flame, and, after Dr. Hellas poked me one final time, he told me to head on over to the hospital.

For my emergency appendectomy.

So here I am, sans a vestigal organ, a ten-inch stapled scar across my belly, wearing nothing but a backless gown and a smile. The surgery went well, but I'm still hurting quite a bit - but it isn't something that my personal morphine drip won't solve.

So yes, this is my first - and, hopefully last - hospital 'blog.

Until my staples get removed, I remain,

Domonic (yayforunneededorgans) Potorti

A letter to the puckerbrush.

2007-02-28T12:02:00.000-05:00

Dear Professor Hunting,

Last night, for reasons unknown, I began to search the internet for an email address where I could contact you. It's been six years, and I knew that you'd probably not remember me, but I'd wanted the opportunity to tell you how much you and our Creative Writing class influenced who I am today. I'd wanted to tell you how your wry wit and soft voice captivated me in the classroom and how you'd forced me - and the rest of the students in my class - to look into parts of myself where my basest humanity nests and grows. I'd wanted to say that two of my thesis committee members commented on how well I write and that my thesis was a pleasure to read, and that I feel as though you had a great part in that. I'd wanted to tell you how your offer to accept a poem I'd written for publication in your press made me feel more alive than I'd felt in all of my life up until that point, and how declining your offer is one of my biggest regrets. I'd wanted to tell you that creative writing is what sustains me when little else will.

I'd wanted to say all of these things, but you died last year.

So, instead, I will whisper my thanks to the bitter winds and hope that they carry them to the tattered, late-winter puckerbrush where I know you live still.

With regards and profound gratitude,

Domonic Potorti
UMaine Class of '02

The Five People You Meet in Hell: A Return to the 'Blog.

2007-02-26T21:12:00.000-05:00

*and by "Hell" I mean "The Erman-hay Ells-way Library during midterm/finals weeks"

Libraries - once upon a much more innocent [read: naive]time - represented to me everything that was right and beautiful in the world. I can remember how my barely pubescent husk would tap a lively, albeit grim tattoo in my chest cavity when I broached the sacrosanct interior of the library, the high perfume of books causing what was left of my base humanity to quietly rejoice. They were sanctuaries, both in the "maybe if I go in there that young lad with the brass knuckles, poleaxed by his inability to decipher those funny things on those bound pages, won't follow me in to trepanate my skull" as well as the "let's immolate an ungulate carcass on an incensed bier in the presence of a brooding chryselephantine statue" kinds of way. Anything you wanted to know, why, it was there for the borrowing, and the only thing separating you from the ability to reach forth to caress the very countenance of the divine was a little white card. I guarded this card with the kind of rabid fervor that one generally associates with crocodilians holding keep over the putrid mounds of decomposing vegetation that conceal their vile clutches. I would often check out so many books that the librarian would peer over her horn-rims to ask if I planned to carry out human functionality for the next three weeks; a polite young Domonic would usually reply sweetly that, no, he intended to promptly slip into the sweet comfort of some dignity pants and begin a regimen of intervenous nutrition. She'd usually titter nervously then while painfully obviously reaching for a letter opener or, as a last resort, one of those ridiculously tiny golf pencils. But by then I'd have gone, whistling a merry ditty as several discs in my spine telescoped under the weight of dozens of books.

Six years later

Nowadays, I don't ask for much from a library experience. I'd been repeatedly brutalized during my undergraduate career and, more freshly, in my Master's program by endless, Mountain Dew-and-desperation-fueled study sessions under humming flourescent lights that revealed in their blinding harshness only the bitterest truths. You could almost hear them humming out ghastly portents of your academic demise.

yyyyyyooooooouuuuuuuaaaaarrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeggggggggoooooooo
iiiiiiiiinnnnngggggggttttttoooooootttttooooooottttttttaaaaaaaaaaaa
lllllllllllllllllllllllyyyyyyyffffffffaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiillllllll

Gone were the leisurely strolls through the shady stacks in a vain attempt to slake my insatiable thirst for...well, the bizarre and, more frequently, the macabre. Visits to the library became wee-hour death marches in the futile, yet tantalizing hope that someone had flourished a pen to some paper to write a lengthy tome about the very thing I was researching. Failing this, I was often to be found thumbing through volumes I would have assumed would be close to the topic while weeping quietly in a heap on the floor. It wasn't immediate gratification I sought, I will hasten to add; instead, I sought the freedom to read what I wanted, when I wanted. This freedom had been stolen from me by none other than two insidious degree programs which, while lowering me into an early grave wondering about selling my retinas so that I can repay my unrelenting loans, provide me with little but the succor of possessing patently, fantastically useless information.

Out of the kind of sheer desperation displayed by rabbits when cornered by slavering canids, I found myself requesting time off of work so that I could, oh, finish writing the thesis I'd started five months earlier. However, because I would be writing on days when I couldn't use my office in the belfry of Franklin Hall, I had but two, harrowing choices:

1) I could remain at home. This has proved, in the past, to be equivalent to moistly extruding time into the Golden Commode of Utter Oblivion.

2) I could [crack of thunder] go to use the Information Commons at the Library.

9: 30 AM Tuesday, 02/20/2007, the Erman-hay Ells-way Library: The Portal to Hell is Opened

Spending more than twenty minutes in the Information Commons - or, for that matter, any open-access computer cluster at IU - reveals that, essentially, five types of people spend any appreciable amount of time there willingly.

1) International students.

2) Surly, goth techies in trenchcoats clutching two-liters of Mountain Dew.

3) Sorostitutes.

4) Ranting, foaming-at-the-maw homeless men.

5) Random people who you hate.

As I blankly beheld the mass of humanity that rankly oozed its way around my workstation while I logged in and took off my coat, I became intensely concerned about my ability to survive the experience. As it was, within ten minutes of my arrival I'd managed to ascertain that nearly all of the 3,600 international students (whose immigration issues are my bread and buttah) were there, and Lord strike me dead if they didn't look edgy. As one of them settled himself into an adjacent workstation, I made a grand showing of lowering a headset onto my skull, proclaiming with impunity that I was, indeed, not approachable.

Twenty minutes later

I stood stock-still in 20 degree February delightfulness as hundreds of students poured out of the bowels of the library in the wake of the - you guessed it - fire drill. I figured: Hey. If you stand really still, maybe the international students won't see you. From within a small group of Parliament-chaining Asian international students near the entrance, a young woman made eye contact with me and detatched from the group, Ugg-ing her way across the courtyard to where I stood mutely horrified by what surely awaited me. I pretended that I was engrossed in watching a kitten-sized squirrel eating what appeared to be a frozen piece of watermelon Bubblicious in the hopes that she would realize that, yes, he's not at work and yes, maybe he's a student too and is just here to get some work done.

Of course, I might as well have wished for Komokwa to fuse my legs into a mer-appendage for all the good it did me. She delicately removed her iPod earbuds and giggled.

Ugg-Clad Asian Woman: Hi!

Me: Hi.

UCAW: I have one question.

Me: Look, I have to level with you; I am here working on getting my Master's thesis done and I am not 'on the clock' right now. I'd be more than happy to talk to you at great length later, but right now I am focused on this work.

UCAW: [giggles but lowers eyes; looks cresfallen]

Me: [sighs] Fine. Whaddya want?

Of course I relented; while I am, indeed, completely dead inside, I didn't want her to think I was a total monster. She did, miraculously, only have one question, and when we reentered the building (after fifteen minutes in the cold), she was smiling. Of course, rather than have her or her friends know the location of my ultimate ensconsement, I hid in the men's room for a few moments as they passed in a largish herd.

[they passed down all the roads long ago and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints]

Once safely back at my station, I became aware that the Asian male international student who'd taken the nearest workstation now had a companion, and good Lord were they fixated on whatever was on that screen. Every time someone walked behind them, they both looked up in that "holy shet, that was a close one" kind of way that led me to firmly believe that the young lads were, perchance, up to something. A few minutes later, as one of the gentlemen pulled the cuff of his jeans above his sockline to release pent-up man-heat, I put two and two together: softcore porn must be playing on yonder computer. The reflection off of one of the chap's glasses confirmed this for me, and I spent the rest of the afternoon scaring the dump out of them by unnecessarily getting up and stretching my legs by wandering slowly past their porn-portal.

By 2:30, I'd just begun to really feel that I had finally boarded the ass-reeking Greyhound bus to Accomplishment City when a new group of people began to settle into the workstation directly across from me. Rhinestones glinted cruelly off nearly every surface of their bodies and tiny babydoll clothing revealed carefully tanned and pampered midriffs adorned with tiny belly-button piercings. Hair that could easily deflect small caliber weaponry reached high into the heavens, becoming perilous for low-flying craft. Designer perfumes mixed together into a nearly visible toxic fog of fashionability.

So, like, ohmigod. Real, honest-to-goodness sorostitutes, and there they were in what I'd previously assumed would be their anti-habitat: a place with knowledge.

While fascinating in their own right, sorostitutes are - and I will be brutally frank - so fecking annoying that it isn't really clear to me why I haven't relinquished my pathetic Judeo-Christian upbringing simply for the pleasure of betch-slapping one so hard that her brain reboots. As they began to settle in - and, by this time, there were at least six of them - I became aware that I would need sedation if I was to remain in this particular workstation. Peeping like alligator whelps that have begun pushing out of their leathery eggshells, they began a grueling process to determine the most important part of what I assumed was a business-school project: whose name should be first on the front? Should it be, um, like, alphabetical? Or, like, by age?

After ten minutes of this, a largish vein in my temple began to swell to become approximately the width of a carrot. The song of my pumping blood carried clarion instructions to my awaiting ears:

slapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemall

Enter Stage Right: Homeless man with obvious erection.

Simultaneously, the homeless man realizes that the sorostitutes know of his presence and they narcissistically assume that, eww and ohmigod, he's boned up, and probably by thinking about us! Like, for eww! Now, you and I know that the wretched vagrant may have been thinking of anything - like a wheel of brie, for example - or nothing at all, as, in general, peties do not often obey mental commands when they are being naughty. However, before the drooling hobo could lope towards the dumbstruck whores, a greasy trenchcoat-clad IT techie dude stepped in and politely escorted the man outside, gently provided him with a Camel Light and bid him a fond farewell before returning to an evening wherein he could play all 998 levels of Doom on the University dime. Thanking the sweet Jesus-man for their fortune, the she-skanks gathered their goods and departed for locales unknown to lesser mortals, their hideous pink boots clopping like Clydesdale hooves over the unanticipated still created upon their abrupt departure.

Several productive hours later, I happen to glance up momentarily while pausing between two thoughts. A man was gimping towards me and, in the waning natural light from the window behind me I could clearly make out that it was

[bwamp]

You all have a person in your life who, when s/he speaks to you, all you really want to do is scream and scream until your throat shreds itself into gory filaments resembling angel-hair pasta covered in Prince spaghetti sauce. A person who, when you see him/her, you scuttle like a roach under the fridge when the lights come on for a hiding place - any hiding place! - so that you don't get forced to interact with him/her. No, you want to shriek, I don't want to hear about the sundry Eastern European Jewesses you've seduced into almost schtupping you! No, you cry, I don't want to hear about how you got US government funding to spend the summer in Poland in language training, where you proceeded to not learn the language at all and, instead, stalked an Aryan star-fecking lesbian for three months! And, least of all, I don't want to be reminded of how you earned a Master's degree from Berkeley by, basically, extorting a degree from exhausted faculty members who graduated you out of sheer pity!

Maybe I am being too specific here.

Anyway, I hide like no other. He lurches past and, recognizing a slower and perhaps less visually acute victim, he descends upon her like a hagfish on a bloated whale-shark carcass and begins to feast. By the time he started saying things like "hump" and "Gdansk" and "novacaine", I'd become slowly aware that I was

finished

writing

thesis

and, with little hesitation, I saved to my little datastick thingy, collected my detritus and, fairly skipping, I departed into the start of a new life.

I remain, as always,

Domonic (soyes,thismeansIwillbeabletoblogseveraltimesaweekagain) Potorti

The place where hopes go to die.

2007-01-16T12:14:00.000-05:00

Date: December 29th, 2006
Location: Seal Harbor (Mount Desert Island), Maine
Purpose of trip: Hypothermia and, ultimately, death.

I'm not entirely sure why it is that I, two years ago while home in Maine over a portion of my winter break, decided that I would be flinging myself into the unforgiving North Atlantic at the completion of each calendar year. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The first year I swam it was a very cleansing ritual of momentary, symbolic death from a dismal and heartbreaking year previous and rebirth into the hope of what was, even at that point, shaping up to be a good year following.

What a load. I did it because it was weird and I wanted to see if I would survive.

When I awoke on December 29th, I knew that 2006 - and several layers of skin - would be sacrificed to the churlish sea. However, there was a little bit of a tickle in the back of my throat and I, momentarily fearing for my own mortality, regrouped and reconsidered. I wasn't flinging my pallid carcass into the midwinter ocean to prove anything to anyone, least of all myself. I knew that the shock of bathing in seawater that had dropped below freezing would compromise my immune system and, in a particularly special development, I'd not gotten my flu shot this past year.

And yet, as I found myself later striding briskly into the brine, I felt compelled by a force that was greater than me. Was it the lure of the deep itself calling me back to my ancestral mer-homeland? Was it a s elkie beckoning me to an aquatic demise? Or was it the half a can of Pam I'd huffed earlier in the day?

I was submerged for four seconds, tops, when I began to feel my life slipping away. As I raced onto the beach for the succor of a dry towel, my chest began to hitch a little. This can't be good, I thought. I stopped screaming long enough to evaluate my physical condition and dress myself in clothing that wasn't going to freeze.

Yep. Still there with that chest thing.

Awesome.

31 Hours Later

It's insanely difficult to pen your memoirs while simultaneously creating a durable will that adequately expresses how each of my 80+ masks would be given to the people in my life who a) don't bite it and b) wouldn't recoil in horror from the gift. The bucket beside my bed was nearly half full of a substance that resembled, in consistency and color, pistachio pudding, which I had been hacking up all day and night long. To make matters worse, I began to lose the hearing in my right ear and my right eye began to swim lazily in the socket in a lake of my own eye-brine, unbidden and coal-hot.

Maybe, I thought, I ought to see a physician.

By the time I arrived at the PromptCare facility, I had begun to speak directly to Guanyin, the Chinese goddess of mercy.

Me: Deng tian fan guo fan xiao ting, Guan Yin xiao shen ma?

Guanyin: What the hell? Is that s'posed to be Chinese?

Me: I was trying to meet you halfway so that you would intercede on my behalf while I battle a dread illness that I believe will verily take my sweet, young life. Apparently I didn't need to. Do I detect a Bronx accent?

Guanyin: Mmmm girl, you know it, a'ight? [giggles] Wat'choo want, foo'?

Me: I'd like to live.

Guanyin: That it?

Me. Yes.

[Guanyin's cellphone rings; the ringtone is Destiny's Child's 'Survivor']

Guanyin: [attempting to whisper] Girl, I ain' playin', I got this white boy who wants to survive his ches' cold. Bitch no, I ain' playin'! Here, you wanna talk to the foo'?

My doctor set upon me, probing me with his fleshless little fingers for swollen glands and inserting a splintery caber into my throat to check for strep beasties, who are apparently wont to throw their unspeakable block parties on ones uvula. Once he was finished, be began to write prescriptions with a pen I have to assume was fashioned out of the melted golden teeth of death squad victims. He told me what I was to take and when and began to leave the room before turning to me.

"Um, you also have a highly infectuous flareup in your conjunctiva."

My mind's medical Rolodex spun quickly. Conjunctiva, conjunctiva... yes, filed under "conjunctivitis."

As he was halfway out the door, I put two and two together and shrieked at his retreating white labcoat.

"You mean I have pinkeye?"

"Um, duh", he said. I vowed then and there to speak with some of my more shadowy relatives to arrange for a very special little activity for Mr. Rich Bony Doctor-Man; this activity would likely involve a liter of Sambuca, a lawn dart and intense amounts of sweat.

In the meantime: pinkeye? Apparently it's not just for the kiddies anymore, and there it was, clouding my vision and nearly palpably spreading vile contagion.

Did I mention that this happened the day after Spring Orientation for all of our newly-arrived precious ones had begun? Indeedy-o.

I spent the better part of four days waiting to die, waiting to live, waiting for a nostril to free itself so that I could take a decent nap before I began to choke to death on my own effluent. The eyedrops cost $90 and came in a bottle the size of a coke addict's pinkie-nail and I got to take an antibiotic so strong that it is used routinely, in conjunction with shots, for the treatment of The Big S. As I lay in bed, my face half-paralyzed, my chest filled with what I must assume is Satan's toe-jams, and with my eye slowly cooking in the crockpot that had become my eyesocket, I had a great many hallucinations. I won't go into detail here, but suffice it to say that I no longer have to wonder where Jimmy Hoffa is interred.

It was also then that the question of whether all of this had resulted from my ill-advised splashabout in the drink. In the spirit of a particularly American model of assigning blame to anyone other than oneself, I assured myself that, while I may not have HELPED an incipient condition, one does not get a cold from being cold. It's medical fact.

Lathing ones tongue over an airplane pillow, though . . .

***

Keith and I recently entered our home after each enduring a harrowing day of work that makes one pine for a handful of Xanax to find that, of course, nothing even remotely edible existed in our home. Upon brief consultation, we agreed upon a local restaurant to patronize. This establishment shall remain nameless [doowneerg ni s'yelrahc'o] to protect the innocent and those who, until proven otherwise, are presumed so.

We settle in with drinks and begin to notice that our server - a thirtyish creature - is whipping around in our section like a child's toy that had been wound one click more than it should have been. The primary focus of the activity was a nearby booth where a really nasty, cruel and porcine family of four had crammed themselves in for a nice dinner out. She would stop there, apologize for some perceived slight, and scuttle like a hermit crab on crystal back to the kitchen. By the time we were ready to order, I'd come to understand that this particular evening would be replete with the unspeakable.

Keith ordered a burger and I ordered a bowl of soup and, in a moment of desperate insanity, a plate of some chicken fingers that were to be tossed in a Thai chili-peanut sauce. She teleported away after our order was complete and kept repeatedly fecking over the people in the booth behind us. At one point, she whipped away from their booth with a part of an incorrect order - a bowl of soup - and saw me alone (Keith was 'washing his hands' in the bathroom). She drops the soup in front of me and asks if I "want a free bowl of soup." Considering that soup had, uh, already been a part of my order, I grunted a bewildered "yes" and consumed it with gusto. Five minutes later, our food arrived. Keith's burger was exactly like he'd wanted, but my Thai chicken tasted and smelled as if it had been coated in diaper-dump. I choked down as much of it as I could before my throat began to clamp shut in protest; my gorge rose merrily and I began to cramp. After the spasms died down, I began to reckon that I'd made a bad decision, but hey: that's life. I took a gamble and would come out of the experience none the worse for the wear - well, except that I would have to pay for the meal, and by "pay" I mean "with money, and, uh, with precious time astride a porcelain receptacle."

It was at this time that the manager slithers over to our booth and sidles up to me.

Untidy Manager Man: So, how was your meal tonight?

Me: [lying] It was fine, just fine.

UMM: Well, we've got a new cook and whatever happened tonight wasn't your server's fault. We're really sorry that it took so long for your food to come out.

[Keith and Dom exchange glances]

UMM: I'll be taking care of your dinner tonight. Again, we apologize for how delayed your food was.

He departs to draw the contents of a sooty Erlenmeyer flask filled with Greenwood's finest methamphetamine into his lungs behind the Dumpster out back. In our booth, Keith and I stare at each other. A free dinner. For no reason whatsoever. What the hell? Should we say something? Should we protest and pay? What, exactly, was going on? We got our check - a formality, considering that it was a balance of $0.00 - and sat, numb, wondering why on earth our $25 dinner was on the house. As the incessantly bitchy manatees at the booth next to ours prepared to compensate the establishment for their ghastly fried meals, I thought: hey. Were these the people who should have gotten a free meal? On the tail of that thought: Feck that. How often does this kind of thing happen? And, uh, aren't we pretty motherhumpin' poor?

It was at this moment - faced with paying nothing for a meal in a fairly nice restaurant - that we realized that we had no cash. Nothing to tip the waitress. I had to ask the manager - fresh from his Dumpster excursion - to charge us for a dinner roll (24 cents) so that I could charge and leave my tip on my credit card. Again, he apologized for any inconvenience that we might have experienced and, still completely baffled, we left in great haste.

That evening, as I gave great thanks that I didn't have to pay for the meal that was going to keep me awake all night, I wondered again what had transpired. Did we look famous? Did he mistake the tables, giving us the free ride that the dugongs across the way should have gotten? Or, as I surmise, was I the first to try their new secret recipe Thai Baby's Undercarriage Chicken Strips?

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (mydinnercamewithnapkinfoldedlikePampers) Potorti

...[gasp]... holidays?....

2007-01-01T22:36:00.000-05:00

Indianapolis, Indiana: 5:30 PM: 12/22/2006

The elderly gentleman checking me in at the Continental counter tutted softly under his breath and slowly shook his head, as one might when watching a news special about a promising teen football star who, on his senior prom night, managed to impale himself with the steering wheel of his brand-new Impala while swerving to avoid a tot who'd lunged into the road after her lost puppy. He picked up a red phone that didn't, to the best of my knowledge, have a dial, and began to speak softly into it in what I must assume was Khmer. He grew quiet then, and resumed the tutting and the head-shaking, his jowls jouncing under his chin. He handed me my boarding pass as if he were handing me a Mason jar filled with warm, freshly-expectorated brownish-yellow Skoal sputum.

Continental Ticket Man: I'm sorry to have to do this to you, buddy. I'll say a prayer for you.
Me: [taking boarding pass] Why?
CTM: [eyes widening slightly] Just one word, bucko: Newark.
Me: What's wrong with Newark?
CTM: [laughing like a diseased bonobo on crystal]
Me: Alrighty then.
CTM: [hands over a rosary] For the dead travel fast.

Four hours later

Three rows in front of me came the sound again, and this time I was able to hear it well enough to clearly discern what it might be. We'd been planted firmly on the tarmac of Indianapolis Airport for forty minutes at that point and, as I watched an elderly woman in the seat next to me begin to pleat a noose to hang herself with out of holiday-hued yarn, I began to envy her. The sound was - oh yes, I couldn't make this up if I tried - a tiny "dog" approximately the size and weight of the cotton ball to be found inside a new bottle of aspirin.

Some woman.

Thought it was a good idea.

To bring her Mexicali Special dog.

On the plane.

In a carry-on bag.

It was at this precise moment that the eighteen-month-old in the seat behind me came utterly unglued. Lunging-out-of-caregiver's-arms, foaming-at-the-mouth, soiling-foundation-garments, shrieking-at-a-threshold-just-below-supersonic unglued. A woman in my row across the aisle began to then speak directly to the Lord and Savior then, addressing him casually as though they were eating at an impromptu cocktail brunch. In unison, they formed the Symphony of Abyssal Insanity, which went something like this:

Unhinged Toddler: MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOO

Obscenely Fragile Fur-Bearing "Pet": Yipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyip
yipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyip

Potentially Speaking to Jesus Lady: Lawwwwwd Jesus, I'd lahk to take this oppahtunity to thank you for Your graces. But hey, who am I kidding, a'ight? Can you just make it so that the wings on this thang don't fall the hell off, y'know what I'm sayin'? C'mon: help a sistah out; it be Your burfday.

The flight attendant winked at me and disappeared behind that Limp Blue Curtain of Abundant Apartheid that separates the haves from the have-nots to serve the first-class "guests" their highballs and their milk-fed veal cutlets. The postage-stamp-sized bag of mini-pretzels went down a little more bitterly than usual.

And the woman with the "dog?" As she was getting off the plane, I noticed that she had some weird wirey thing jutting out of her hair - a wirey thing that was ultimately attached to one of those devices that allow to deaf to hear from their skulls. Yes. She was deaf.

That lucky bitch.

Newark, New Jersey: Two Hours Later

What the kindly wattle-necked gentleman in Indianapolis had been alluding to when providing me with my star-crossed boarding pass was that Newark, NJ, had become - in the span of several hours - the Airport Where Flights Go to Die. With Denver almost completely unusable in the wake of a giant Mother Nature slow-sheet-snow and sleet-enema and what with everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, you know, wanting to go home to awkward family gatherings lubricated by gossip and Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum, nothing was moving out of the self-proclaimed Armpit of the Northeast without at least a nominal delay.

I, however, did not know this. When I got off my plane, I looked at my Newark-Bangor boarding pass and saw that I had less than twenty minutes to get from point A to point B.

For those of you who have been to Newark International Airport - in the hallowed shadow of the Big Apple herself - you know that, at any given time, more people are in that airport than the entirety of one of those former Soviet republics. None of them know where they are going. None of them speaka-da-English. And all of them will, if need be, tackle you to the ground rather than allow you to pass them on the movey-sidewalk things. Since I know that only two flights go to Bangor from Newark a day, and since my flight was to be at 8 PM, I was pretty well certain that I was going to either have to catch that flight or spend my night trying to avoid holding a conversation with a schizophrenic Orthodox Jew with a dolphin sock-puppet named "Schlomo." And, if this meant that I would have to elbow an elderly Cambodian woman in the face, I was willing to risk the karma.

20 Minutes Later

While attempting to extract half a Cambodian woman's dental arcade from one of my arm's many fatrolls, I breathlessly scampered up to the counter of my flight and attempted, through the wheezing, to ask if I was too late. "Honey-baby-chil'-o-mine", the woman said, straightening her h'ar with a single, seven-inch polyresin jungle red talon, "Yo flight not goin' till eleven. Go getchoo some." She motioned to a smallish bar near the gate with another talon as she braced herself to deal with yet another self-righteous, travel-weary, hang-himself-before-fifty, chancrous businessman who was hell-bent on making a woman cry. From the looks of those hooks, bud, you'd better move on this fine evening.

As the three hours crawled by - punctuated every ten minutes with "helpful" service announcements that warned us to, oh, I dunno, not take packages from people we didn't know or leave our bags for any length of time lest they be taken out to an abandoned runway and detonated - I became slowly aware that one of the people in the waiting area was a forty-something Mainer man who had become irresponsibly drunk. I know this because he began to argue VERY LOUDLY with the voices coming over the PA system.

PA Lady: This will serve as the final boarding call for Flight 2506 to Tegucigalpa. All ticketed passengers should now be on board the aircraft or risk seat loss and baggage removal.
Drunken Mainer: OH- YOU THINK YOU'RE SO FRIGGIN' SMAAHT LADY, DON'TCHA? WELL LET ME TELL YOU SUMTHIN'. BACK HOME UP CALAIS WAY, WE DON'T NEED TO GO TO THEM FANCY TEGOOSEE-WHATEVER PLACES, NO WE DON'T, SO SHUT YER FRIGGIN' CLAMHOLE.

The rest of us were Mainers-in-exile, returning home for holidays from the wider world, and we cringed a little every time he drunk-dialed one of his buddies ("FRANK, YOU AIN'T GONNA BELIEVE HOW MUCH A FRIGGIN' BEEYAH COSTS OUT HEEYAH"; "WHEN I GET HOME, SWEETHAAAAT, WE CAN WATCH THE DUCKS COME IN F'THE NIGHT AND GET HAMMAHD"). However, the part of us that pines - no pun intended - for our little Northeastern corner of paradise knows that we should be so lucky to once again fall alseep with the loons crying over the lake - or to watch the ducks come in with someone we love, beer or no. Because each time I go home, coming back gets a little harder. Don't get me wrong: I love the corn, and I have no intentions of leaving it at this point in my life. But Maine is a beguiling enchantress, and she has her ways of making even the most hardened return, aching for her sweet succor.

And by "succor" I mean "a decent bowl of clam chowder."

***

As for the holidays themselves, they found my sister producing volutes of mucous out of her tear ducts from some raging sinus infection, my mother with laryngitis and me, attempting to battle a crippling addition to Grey's Anatomy *, which I'd never seen before I went home. Pretty much on par with the usual Tinsel and Tears festivites. Before getting on that Bangor-bound tin-goose, I'd made my mind up to spend what little time I had in Maine with my family instead of making my usual 10,000 social calls to friends who'd stayed in the area. So, if you are one of those friends and you read this, I am sorry. What? Do you want to make my mother burst into ragged tears about seeing me once, maybe twice a year, you monster? Do you?

It was the best trip home I'd had in years. When I was tired, I napped. When I was hungry, I ate something. I got a Coffeepot sandwich and chowder and yes, I got to fling myself into the icy North Atlantic (pictures to follow). I did some shopping and, yeah, did I mention that I got to sleep? Because I did.

And not once did I think of my still-unfinished thes*s. That in and of itself was priceless. But the end of that goddamned document - and that particular chapter of my life - is in my grasp. I won't tell you what I fantasize about after my thes*s is done, but rest assured, it involves a whole lot of deep-cleaning, a gigantic box of old pictures, and learning how to tan a cat's pelt.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (twentypagesisnothing) Potorti

* I am not a vagina.

Once again, Ozarkland.

2006-11-22T15:29:00.000-05:00

Once again, I find myself blogging from what I have to assume is the Midwest's most profoundly tacky store. There's country on the radio and, softly in the distance, I can hear their discount windchimes tinkling, powered by a nice boxfan that keeps them moving.
The heavy stench of $5.95 fudge hangs in the air along with the heady reek of my own expectation:

What will I find this time?

If you haven't guessed, I am on my way out to the wheat to visit the paternal unit for Thanksgiving. I have been assured that I will be, upon first light on Friday, finding myself on my father's roof stapling Christmas lights to his home.

The fact that copious amounts of beer have been purchased will surely factor into this equation.

When I am able, I shall return.

Until then, I remain,

Domonic (perhapsthereisanicepolyresinSt.FrancisofAssisitobefound) Potorti

candle...burning...at both ends...

2006-11-17T07:39:00.000-05:00

Little-known fact: Edna St. Vincent Millay is a Rockland, Maine, native.

I still live, but in what misshapen, soulless form? Every moment of every day has been corrupted by thoughts of my thes*s and my impending academic demise.

Wake up to wretched Stevie Wonder "song" on clock-radio alarm: think about thes*s.
Barely-woken urination: think about thes*s.
Drive forty miles to work behind tractor trailer and Asian woman with parking brake on and right blinker flashing: think about thes*s.
Work all day: think about thes*s.
Drive home behind man with car that is rolling on four spares: think about thes*s.
Eat ghastly dinner: think about thes*s.
Attempt to corral unruly, neurotic pets: think about thes*s.
Writing thes*s: think about thes*s.
Pass out from exhaustion: think about thes*s.

It's been a good time - and, to answer, no, it's not done. Don't ask.

In the interim, please browse my 300+ entries, which are archived by month on the side here.

For those who have been faithfully following for the past two years, post a response and tell me what your favorite blog was. I will remove the hyperbole varnish and tell you the REAL story behind it if there is one. I say this because I always endeavor to speak only the truth.

*snort*

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (prettymuchprayingtobeimmolatedbyathunderbolt) Potorti

'Tis I, Crown Prince of Profound Disappointmentland.

2006-10-31T18:02:00.000-05:00

Mere moments after I discovered that anyone, anywhere, could find my little piece of cyberspace with a mere Google crawl, I did what anyone else who'd written the things I did would do: I shat myself.

I didn't think I had ever said anything incriminating - well, at least anything that would be admissable in a court of law - so instead of choosing the privacy option on Blogger to make my blog non-searchable, I became actively interested in how it was that people were arriving at this little slice of "wtf." In doing so I inserted that little counter thingie at the bottom of the screen, which not only gives me an idea of how many people come (pitifully few) but also where they are logging in from (mostly the corn). Most interesting, though, is that it provides me with an opportunity to see if someone has arrived at my site by way of a search, or "referral." THIS is where the gold is, my friends. Whist scrolling through, I began to laugh out loud - laughter which was soon followed by sepulchral silence. People were finding my blog because it, at the very least, contained some semblance of the bizarre, horrifying things people troll the 'net for. While they, in most cases, left profoundly disappointed, I must concede that it is I who am a monster. I mean, c'mon - take a look at these - and may I be eviscerated by Charro's needly lizard teeth in the dark of some dread night if I am lying about a single one.

shet bag
This one is easy enough to explain, and I can do so with one word: Shoes.

MUKDUK
Mukduk is, for ye who didn't endure 10,000 anthro lectures, whale or pinniped blubber and skins that is consumed by the Inuit peoples of the Canadian northlands. I have heard that Westerners who try it immediately evacuate their stomach contents and bowels simultaneously at the wretched smell, taste and sensations that accompany the gnawing of frequently raw whale skin and fat. Mentioned in several of my "Domonic is getting to be quite porcine" blogs.

Ike and Tina Turner whiteface watermelon photo
This one makes me a little uncomfortable for two reasons: one, the association of Ike and Tina with watermelon and two, this isn't just any watermelon: it's whiteface watermelon. And someone wants to see this. They found my blog instead, mercifully - but I can honestly say I have no idea why.

"catholic school" nun "i study" mass
Huh.

origin of NapTown
Let me tell you: Someone - and I have to presume that this was one of the do-rag wearin' white-as-hominy fellas who loiter about the Greenwood Park Mall - probably thought that calling Indiana's capital city "Naptown" was "chill." Or "hep." Or whatever people with misguided social patternization say in this situation.

"why are ships female?"
Because they, as ballast, take on a shit-ton of water-weight.

[feminists sharpen machetes while listening to Ani DiFranco]

"suffocation takes coordination"
Indeed.

indianapolis ghetto apt
You mean, like the one complex we go to only in broad daylight to heave our putrid trash into their Dumpsters because trash pickup in Greenwood costs more than cable TV per month?
incirlik tattoo
I have a tattoo. Two of them, matter of fact. And I am probably one of maybe three hundred Americans who know where İncirlik is. [did the funny "i" just then give you any clue?]

locust keeper
That would be me.

Greek sodomized small boys
Goddamn. OK, great, so pedophiles are finding my site. Well, I will tell all of you right now: you shan't find this happy horseshit around here.

Houston apartment complex guadalupe apparition
There is nothing in the world I love more than a good Virgin Mary apparition story. After attempting to find the origins of this search, I was unable to locate anything. Perhaps yet another miracle - maybe involving an Eggo waffle or a water stain - is in the works?

noodle town Bloomington
Where there's crack in the sauce, sreepies in rice and the heady stench of base divinity all around - ah, Bloomington's finest dining establishment.

levrek
Some Turk is looking for bass (the fish). Keep looking, my Anatolian buddy.

amount of education needed to become a cryptozoologist
You will still die hungry. Father Bielen says so.

" I hate Indianapolis"
Well, that's not as true as it used to be. I have come to appreciate how close the airport is and how quickly fine dining and entertainment and shopping can be had. Still, whenever I go I pack heat.

dr chi hackettstown nj
Is he still alive? He was in his fifties when I was nine. Please give a shout out if someone finds him alive.

Urban heat island, Singapore saw the hottest day
Um, what?

gorrilla legs
Just like I like 'em: covered in dense, black and nit-ridden hair.

g1 license practice teat
Someone mistyped "test" as "teat" and, through divine intervention, found my blog.

hand gestures boy scout shocker
A Boy Scout displaying the shocker? Never! Two in the pink, one in the stink? Oh, the humanity!

IK ONKAR TATTOOS
A Sikh is getting ready for some body modification.

underarm hair french german women armpit
I get that one a lot. What can I say?

***

I will be taking a blog hiatus from today, the 31st of October until such a time as when I have finished my goddamn thesis.

In the interest of time: PLEASE STOP ASKING ME ABOUT MY THESIS. IT IS NOT DONE. IT PROBABLY NEVER WILL BE DONE. STOP ASKING OR I WILL HAVE TO DRILL A HOLE IN YOUR THROAT.
Not that I am bitter. Or weary. Or poised on the brink of academic failure.

I shall return to thee in two month's time, if not sooner.

I remain, until then,

Domonic (don'tcryforme-sendmemoneyinstead) Potorti

Points to ponder.

2006-10-17T13:56:00.000-04:00

Question One: Which is the worst?

a) Waiting, freshly sodomized and stripped naked against the autumn chill, hunched over a hand-dug grave waiting for a drunken death squad cadre to finish taking a leak so that he can properly dispatch you

b) Listening to the sickening crunch as you gnaw through human sinew and gristle in an effort to glean scant sustenance from fellow passengers' pathetic flash-frozen remains following a mountainside plane crash

c) Watching in mute horror as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie savagely bring down and dine upon the cooling carcass of an unsuspecting tot

d) Going to renew your vehicle registration at a BMV

Question Two: 'owruggedahyah?

You are 5' 10", 260 lbs worth of a bearded Mainer. Let's just say that, theoretically, you are alone in your office on a lovely Sunday afternoon (because it's the only place on the goddamn earth where you can write your thesis in peace) and you happen to spy a roach scuttling across your floor only to disappear into parts unknown.

You shriek. Like, really loudly.

What does this mean?

a) You - concerned about vermin-borne contagion - had made the alleged shrieking sound to ward off the offending beast. The fact that it merely gazed upon you, feelers twitching, with only mild curiosity does not factor into this equation.

b) You have become, magically, a pre-pubescent girl.

c) It never happened. Nobody was there. Nobody can prove it. Your word against the roach's.

Question Three: WTF?

You are given a "cat." This "cat" is, at best, savage; at worst, mindlessly feral. Like, people at work think that you're a cutter. Additionally, this "cat", due to feline asthma, can only use litter so expensive that it is coated with platinum. When it isn't mowling (combination of mewing and howling) for hours on end to be fed at times of the morning generally reserved for gentle slumber or attempting to eviscerate/sodomize the dog, it amuses itself with creating a warm lair by shredding the material out from under your boxspring and burrowing into the hole like one of the creatures in Alien.

What can be done?

a) Bag of lime. Shovel. Rope. Swiss Army knife. Holy water and monstrance.

b) Leave the pilot light on and set off twelve silverfish fog-in-a-can apparatuses before departing for work.

c) Swaddle the beast and leave it in the big empty field where that Romany caravan stops.

d) Upon advice from your own sainted mother, "put the damn thing to sleep."

e) Wear long-sleeve shirts and love it anyway.

Question Four: OMFG, right?

You are working on a graduate thesis and time is running out for you to meet a completely irrational deadline put forth by your retar- uh, developmentally-delayed - department. You meet one of your committee members at an unrelated function and strike up a conversation. At this point, the committe member, despite signing your forms, approving your topic and speaking with you at length several times about it, asks: Do I know you?

What choices have ye?

a) Death.

b) Academic humiliation followed by paralyzing despair, then death.

c) Send dead parakeet on a bed of chrysanthemums anonymously through Fed-Ex with a note written with a "crayon" of dog feces; note to say "Every breath you take..." and only that.

d) Swallow your ego like a mouthful of putrid, week-in-the-sun cottage cheese and move on.

***

Needless to say, my few, it's been a fantastic week.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (Ineverenvisionsavoryoptions) Potorti

Look what your God has done to me - again.

2006-10-10T13:22:00.000-04:00

Last Friday afternoon I sat myself down over my lunch hour (lunch: Sheep medulla with a creamy snot-rocket glaze) and decided that I would write out a shopping list so that I wouldn't, um, do what I usually do and just wander around Target like a Bedouin for hours on end. After several minutes of careful contemplation I had managed to produce what I am forced to assume is

The Most Depressing Shopping List Ever.

It wasn't intentionally created to be as such, but while evaluating the reasoning behind each potential purchase I found myself reaching for a Valium and a hearty gin chaser.

Corn cat litter. Why corn, you ask? Well, let's see. My cat cannot use clay-based litter because it causes his FELINE ASTHMA to flare up. That means that ninety-five percent of commercially-available litters are out. THEN, he refuses to use the pine litter and the reconstituted newspaper litter, the weird crystal stuff is $18 a box and I refuse to buy it and finally, the wheat litter does nothing to absorb the smell of catpiss, causing our home to reek like a hobo's undercarriage in July. The corn litter is - and this is fantastic! - only to be found in ONE local store and they appear to not be restocking. When they sell out I will just have to leave the little bastard out in the field where I saw that gaily-colored Romany wagon last week. This is entirely beside the fact that I find it amusing and fairly ironic that I, who love the corn dearly, an forced to allow my cat to ceaselessly defecate on it.
Nose-hair trimmer. I'm not sure how this happens, but every couple of weeks I'll be looking in the mirror and I will notice what I assume to be an errant moustache whisker. When I go to yank it out, I - based entirely on nearly-unbearable white-hot pains from within my nostril - come to discover that it is, indeed, a tendril - nay, a tentacle - of nosehair that had begun the migration south.
Healthy Choice microwave lunches. This is because I am - and let's be frank here - beginning to attract the attention of rusty Norwegian and Japanese harpoon-vessels.
A paper shredder. Nothing says "entry into that really dull stage of your adulthood" like firmly believing that you should shred all of the paper that comes out of your home. Before you know it I'll be eating oatmeal to lower my cholesterol and wearing pressure hose.
The sixth season of The Golden Girls. Depressing for two reasons: one, it's not out yet and two... well, yeah.
Sanitary napkins. See above.

I'm secure enough with myself to purchase The Golden Girls on DVD. Yes I am.

Oh, hold on, someone's making me a mimosa - be right back.

***

Until later, I remain,

Domonic