Running haiku

Urination

Brown men in a line
watching the rising river.
Admiration, or...

That was a long ride

The bus trip from Vientiane back up to Luang Prabang was almost comically bad. Every Lao person on the bus, of course, had tuberculosis. The man in front of me couldn't bear to put his cans of motor oil in the overhead containers, and instead stuffed them under his seat, taking up all the room for my feet. (He also apparently needed to push past me every time we got off or on the bus. Rude little prick. He spat on the floor of the bus at least once.)

The three German girls whose row I punctuated like a comma, not a period, had brought a feast of croissants, papaya, cookies, and other snacks for the twelve hour ride. They divided these up periodically and passed them over me to each other, never once asking if I'd like some to share. My seatmate, however, continually offered me tissues, making me paranoid about things hanging off my nose. My seat had one position: fully reclined. The air conditioner worked only off and on and when it did seemed to fill the bus with white, powdery smoke. The "toilet" on the bus was instead the action of stopping every three hours, sometimes at restaurants and shops, sometimes simply by the side of the road, where you could choose to relieve yourself in pitch blackness on a muddy slope behind the bus, or bathe your white ass in the light of the headlights in front.

I know I slept some, because I don't remember checking my phone and seeing a time between one am and three am (roadside piss break!) and then again between three and five. When I woke up at five, however, I couldn't quite accept that the incredible grayscale scene out the window was actually real. The black trees sketched against the receding gray mountains had to be--I rubbed my bleary eyes--a painting on the side of a building we were scraping? I didn't want to believe it could be a real place and the have it taken away from me. But we rounded a bend and it became the actual landscape: black peaks rising up out of silvery pools that looked like mercury lakes but were actually cloud. We skirted around the sides of mountains, barely above the low-lying clouds, and then the sun started to rise and the thick, white mist turned orange and the black mountains grew green and we plunged down into the fog and then up out of it again and I would have signed on for another night, and another, and another, just to see it.

Things it is difficult to find in LP

hairbrushes
eye drops
contact lenses
picture frames
oranges

In abundance:
puppies
pollen
pineapples
clouds
the color green

Essays of the day: art deco, klezmer, kitsch, Alphonse Mucha if I have any energy left.

Question of the day: Why do I suggest topics like "Kitsch" for these bloody books of essays, knowing I'll have to try to cram a discussion of democracy, popularity, quality, Kant and the western definition of art into 350 words at a sixth grade level?

Siem Reap

The baby--she looks two or three--can already say "phone." "Phone" and "you" and "give" in English. Also "dad"--she grabs my iPod with her sticky fingers and says "dad phone!" (I don't explain that mine is not, in fact, an iPhone; that I'm much more down to earth than that.) She expertly slides through the screens and is totally unimpressed with the photo I take of her.

Her brother, maybe six, joins us. He's much more into the camera. He also tells me "my dad has this phone." Then he tells me his dad "isn't coming." He jumps from that comment to his name, spelling it for me in the air. "The one that goes like this"--making a very fast, very dramatic swoosh in the air for an artistically huffy C. He asks my name. Periodically, he reminds me that "my dad isn't coming."

My bus, however, is coming, and I have to go suddenly in the middle of our kinetic spelling. "Are you listening to me?" he calls after me, as I run for the door after several quick goodbyes.

I think I'm wearing his mother's shoes. Someone took mine in the night.

People, please

let's cut back on our use of the word "decimate".

Sight of the day

Two grown men walking down the street, leaning on each other, holding hands. I bet you ten bucks they were straight.

Three cheers for public displays of affection.

I have left the garden and its incredible adjacent soup stand. I've traded it for a room with a balcony and comforting street noise. The soup on this block is just ok, but the Vietnamese rice pancakes? Fantastic.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

John Donne
Devotions upon
Emergent Occasions, no. 17
(Meditation)
1624 (published)