A house divided

I felt dizzy, disoriented, weakened, and somewhat removed from myself. Though I stood right in a thronging mass of people, no one paid any attention to me at all. The crowd parted to the left and right of me like waters, and joined seamlessly together again on the other side.

I took a few tottering steps back toward the train station, and though I could feel my head clear a little bit I got stabbing aches in my heart and gut. I almost fell as I turned back around, and there she was, holding onto my arm.

She was the 1950's vintage Eastern European babcia. The top of her head came only to my chest, and she looked up at me without expression from a ruddy, whiskered, deeply lined face set in the middle of a floral kerchief pinned over her hair. A shapeless, non-descript blue work-smock covered her from her neck to her black rubber gum-boots.

She pulled my arm and guided me over to the side of the wayfare, where the homeless and young miscreants were sitting in rows on a short wall. When they saw her coming they moved aside. Even the young thug, who'd been yelling at his lads scurried quickly out of the way, and the group of them made off for other parts.

It wasn't as though there was something in particular about her that repulsed me. She didn't smell, as so many older, poorer people in that part of the world do. It wasn't the flat sheen, the greasy-worn texture of her house-dress that bothered me, because I was dirtier than that. 5 months on the road had seen to that. It wasn't the shabbiness, or anything I could put my finger on, but her physical proximity seemed to project a poverty, a memory of suffering that enveloped me in a sick-sweet odour the nose would never detect but that stuck to the back of my throat like a milk-scum. I would have pulled free from her stubby, thick-fingered grasp and walked away, but I was too weak to do so.

I had known I was terminal for some time. No doctor had ever told me so, so I just stopped asking them. It was pretty obvious to me. When you go from feeling as strong as a bull to having tremors in your hands and aches and pains in so many places you can hardly keep them straight anymore, when you get winded walking from room to room, when picking up your briefcase makes you want to go back to bed, when you drop 20 pound in the course of 3 months, you don't need a doctor to tell you something is wrong.

After a while the sickness just becomes a fact, which you accept. The sickness makes you tired, lethargic, and maybe this is what allows us to accept the idea that we will die. No raging against the dying of the light here. I was content to let it go. It was just a question of how much time I had left to drag myself around before it finally blinked off.

With hardly the energy to eat breakfast, how I managed to leave home is a mystery, but they say as you lose things, the drives that remain inside you become clearer. And though I was fading out in many areas, one urge kept growing stronger.

It was photos in National Geographic, I think, that started it. Photos of city streets in Belorussia, or some satellite republic, of squat boxy cars parked at the base of old grey buildings, around which milled men in black leather jackets and ridiculous fur hats. I had to go.

Part of the motivation was a memory from high school. Her name was Marianne, and she came to our little town of cows and hay from the border of Moldova and Ukraine. Her coming had caused quite a stir amongst the male population of our high school, which her habit of wearing leather boots that came nearly to the knee did nothing to quell. I suppose outsiders, the exotic, the other, is always attractive to us, but high school boys are famous for being attracted to everything vaguely reminiscent of femininity up to and including door knobs, so it is not surprising that for the first two weeks of school the most consistently flogged topic of discussion in the boys changing room was exactly what kind of lacy things might be worn by Eastern European babes under their black skirts.

I should make clear here, because it is important - every boy I knew, and most I didn't, was hopelessly a-drool over Marianne. But I wasn't. Whether it was just my natural reticence to talk about girls in the vein the other guys seemed to, or the fact that I had a girlfriend around whom my earth moved, or the fact that she was certainly out of my league, I cannot say. But for me she was simply a willowy creature who never once swung her long blond hair around the way the American girls constantly did, who seemed to own an improbable number of black turtlenecks and whose approach and ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ was always marked by the click-click of the high heels of her knee-high boots. She was certainly beautiful, but nothing beyond that to me. I considered her little more part of my plane of existence than the poster my older brother had of Alyssa Milano.

Both she and I had study hall 5th period. I used the time to read - occasionally I did homework, but mostly I just read novels. Perhaps it was my obvious lack of interest, perhaps she knew what she was doing, I can't say, and perhaps even now I don't want to. Why she spoke to me I don't know. I found it shocking then, and even now I recall that first moment when she spoke to me as a small jewel of a moment that still makes my heart rise slightly in trembling nervousness.

What followed from that conversation was more conversation. And more. At night I could still see her eyes in front of me. She always held my gaze too long, and it made me nervous, twitchy, as though I'd had 3 cups of coffee. But I could not stop talking to her. After the very first meeting we talked through every study hall, non-stop, for months. I had never thought of myself as interesting before, but perhaps through the eyes of a foreigner I was.

In retrospect, I wonder now if I wasn't really that interesting, but rather I was the only guy who didn't seem sweaty-palmed at the thought of salivating down the front of her sweater. Marianne hadn't made a single friend amongst the girls, for obvious reasons, and between the boys hungrily watching her and the girls who unanimously hated her, she must have been very lonely.

Michelle, my girlfriend, found out within days of the first conversation. I explained to her with all the conviction that accompanies convenient truth - Marianne was a friend. We talked. That was it. And that truly was it. She might not have been happy about it, but she could hardly forbid me to talk to other people in the same room.

Maybe that was when it started. Maybe it started later. It is impossible to say exactly when the division began. I loved Michelle - we had been together for 2 years, which in high school terms is the equivalent of a 17 year marriage. She really was the glue that permeated and held together every aspect of my life. I woke in the morning thinking of her, and I saw every part of my day in relation to her. The walk to school was the part without Michelle. She would be waiting for me outside the homeroom, or occasionally inside. Homeroom she would doodle on my jeans, and then we were off together to the first two periods, which we shared. She would sit behind me, with her feet propped under my seat and I would let my hand go back behind my desk and wrap my fingers around her tan calf or ankle.

We spent every part of our days together that we could. Lunch we sat together, 3rd through 6th periods were defined in my mind by her absence. Sometimes in 4th period I would sit in a certain desk where I knew she would sit in 6th period, and I would scribble her a note on the desk. Afternoons we always spent together until her father made her take up sports so she would have some time away from me. It is fair to say that I spent the majority of my time thinking about her, and she was the prism through which I saw the world. She was my world.

As I said, it is impossible to say when the division began. It wasn't painful at all, at first. Just an odd tickle of a feeling, really. But sometime after Michelle asked me about Marianne and our conversations in study hall I became aware that while Marianne was talking to me, while she looked into my eyes, Michelle had left my mind. I realized one day as I was leaving the library that I had not thought of Michelle for the whole hour. It was a strange realization, especially when accompanied by the sudden rush of familiar longing and emotion that came when I did think of her. How could I love her so much on one side of the library door, and not have thought of her for an hour on the other?

I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it, but after a few months I couldn't help but be aware of it. Michelle was my very life outside of 5th period. But inside that library, in between those bookshelves, I had another existence. I wasn't the same person. Inside that library, as Marianne looked at me, day after day, hour after hour, I began to see myself through her eyes. I was no longer even the same person I was with Michelle. By her viewing me, I saw myself and I was transformed by what she saw. I became something new, something I had never known, something that was me, but was not me, because it existed in her, and only in this room.

I said things I would never have said. Thoughts came to me that were not mine, but were tinged by colors from a different world. I felt the division happening, and it did not hurt. It made me feel strange, when I realized I had two hearts beating inside of me, but it was a wild strangeness that pounded a new rythm, a new strength borne of being two people, and not just one. I sat differently, I began to speak differently. The words I used changed, as did my intonation. Like any communication between two people who know each other, our conversations developed a certain ebb and tide punctuated by slow intense silences in which we would look at each other, and during which, on the last day we were together, I took her hand.

It was the last day before exam week, and strange things always happened that week. I had never touched her before then, but it didn't surprise her at all when I did. Certain things have their moment, and when it is the moment it cannot be otherwise. She continued looking in my eyes as I held her hand, and then, laying down the pencil she had been toying with, she reached across the table, and put her other hand on my chest. She waited like that for long enough that I could feel rising in me what had been there a long time. The desire, the knowledge, the feeling that from now on the person who lived in this room would be the real me. As the desire rose, I reached out and touched her face. Her beautiful face that I had looked at for so long, and as I did so my two hearts leaped and quailed and her eyes drew suddenly narrow and she took her hand off my chest, and extracted her hand from mine.

She rummaged in her bag, and emerged with a small wooden box. I thought she was going to give me something, and later she did, but at that moment I must confess my mind was quite cloudy, and fogged by her in a way it had never been before. She opened the box, and inside, cradled on one side, was an egg. It was only when she placed it in my hands that I realized it was only the egg-shell. The feathery lightness and a tiny hole drilled in each end was the only evidence of the robbery that had taken place. In every other way it seemed perfectly whole.

She cupped her hands to her mouth, and in a gesture of infatuated mimicry, I did the same. She reached over and gently adjusted the egg so one hole rested just above my lower lip. I could smell her hands, and I wanted to grab them in mine. I felt the cool eggshell softly skimming my lip, and found myself staring at her lips, across the table.

"Now, blow." She said.

And I did. Without thinking, with a heart full of love and longing, perfectly divided and totally full I blew into the egg and it felt like when Jimmy Granger had kicked me in the stomach and when Joanna had held my hand in 2nd grade and when I had caught the look in Michelle's eyes as she arched around when I kissed the back of her neck. I don't know how long I blew into that egg, or if I took another breath that hour. I saw stars, and I felt sick with hurt and a desire and a love big enough to fill two worlds and she took the egg away from my mouth and placed it back in the box.

People were leaving, packing up their books and moving toward the doors. I did the same, the force of habit more powerful than my weak knees and a sudden sense of loss came over me and a strangeness descended between us as she walked ahead of me out the library door.

I didn't see her during exam week, nor anytime thereafter. When she walked out that door I didn't realize it was the last time I would see her. Perhaps if I had, I would have done something different. Perhaps not, as I remember feeling confused and awkward. As she walked away from me, her head held squarely up, her posture erect, those boots that were so incongruous in our country clicking away from me, I felt confused. I realized later it was the first time I had walked out of the library still thinking of Marianne, and not Michelle.

Michelle and I broke up at the end of that summer. Michelle never asked about someone now gone, and of course, I never told, for what was there to tell? But when we broke up, as I felt the rising hurt and indifference carrying us toward our breakup, sometimes for a split second I would speak differently, would see myself through foreign, strange eyes, and felt that Marianne was somehow still a part of me.

So it was that when I saw the pictures in National Geographic, they spoke to something wild and foreign, long dead or dormant within me, and knowing I would soon be dead myself, I quit my job and bought my ticket across the ocean.

I had always wanted to see Europe, and the cheapest flight was into Amsterdaam. I had never been a hippy, but having shed so much of the old, and having no new, I tried the hashish and found it helped to ease my pain, though it made the tremors worse. The tremors had got so bad one evening that I couldn't keep soup on spoon, and had to leave most of the bowl behind. I tried drinking it out of the bowl, but felt embarrassed. I wasn't very hungry these days anyway.

After Amsterdaam I went to Paris, then on to Munich, then Prague and Berlin, spending some days or sometimes weeks at each spot. I knew my money would run out, but it seemed as though my time would get there first, and I was ok with that. It became fixed in my mind that I had come here to die. The place it happened didn't matter much, but I generally drifted Eastward. I hit Gdansk, and then was turned back from Belarus by the steep visa fee, which forced me to turn south and go to Krakow.

The further I went, the clearer it became to me. I was moving toward Ukraine. The where didn't matter, and the only why I could find, deep inside me, was that I wanted to see where Marianne came from. I didn't know her town or village, but to see some of the sights she had seen, some of the sights I had felt in my heart when sitting with her, would be enough. We would have, after all these years, shared one thing more.

By the time I reached L'viv I had been travelling for 5 months, and I knew it would soon be over. I hoped the end would come on a sunny day, so I could stretch myself out on a park bench, or on the grass, and my last thoughts would be of the sun on my face, and that the world was not such a bad place, in the end.

The sun was shining when I slowly emerged from the tunnel into the crowd of people going this way and that and suddenly felt a numbness in my chest and a dizzy, slow disorientation.

When the old woman took my sleeve I wanted her to leave me alone, to let me die now, but she was stronger than me, her thick fingers telling of a life of grubbing for vegetables in the slick earth, and she led me to the small wall where I could sit, next to the grass, and I sat.

She looked around for a moment and then called to a well-dressed woman passing by. She came over, and talked with the old woman. Then she turned to me and addressed me in English.

"She says she has for you this thing," and as she said it the old woman produced an old plastic grocery bag, crumpled and dirty, and began untying it.

"I don't need anything," I said. "I will be fine, thank you." The old woman wasn't listening but was searching inside the bag, where there were a number of other plastic bags crumpled up.

Our translator was just beginning to translate this when, after a bit of feeling around the old woman produced a brilliantly painted easter egg, of the sort that old women sell to tourists for a dollar. I tried not to take it, because I was long past the point where I needed to buy souvenirs from impoverished grannies, but saying something to the younger woman, she forced it into my hand and I felt my heart move in and my guts churn in a paroxysm of fear.

"You very fool to give this." The woman's face was swimming in and out of focus as my stomach heaved and I felt a light sweat prickling my skin.
"She buyed this in the market, very much times ago. Is very bad for you what people do with."

I felt so close to vomiting and passing out at the same time that I feared I might do both. The egg inside my hand felt cool, and familiar as it had the first time, but strangely alive, and filled with a strange consciousness. The old woman made a disgusted sound, and took the egg from my hand, and in a hard, swift motion smashed it against my mouth. I gasped at the force of her slap, as I tasted a small squirt of blood from my weakened and fragile gums, and felt stale air slide past my teeth, and tasted the sweaty age of her hand.

I rolled over with a sudden urgency and strength that surprised me, and vomitted like I hadn't since college. I arched my back and heaved and then thrust my arms down to push my face out of the rising tide piling up beneath my face, a thick black and orange, foul smelling liquid that was nothing I had eaten but part of me. It went on in such a continuous stream that I wondered if I would ever get to take a breath, and when it stopped I gasped and it came heaving out again so strong that my back seized into a solid mass of sinews grating against each other and my asshole literally cramped. Then something hit the back of my throat, blocking everything, leaving me silently straining, writhing, open-mouthed. I had to open my mouth wider to let it out, but at that moment the old woman grabbed my head from behind, and poking and shoving her fingers into my mouth forced the mass back in, and down my throat.

She's killing me, I thought. I can't swallow, it won't fit. But I was wrong. The body can do anything it has to when life is at stake, and suddenly I wanted to live. I couldn't die now.

I swallowed and heaved and swallowed and heaved and choked on the fist-sized mass as I worked it, swallow by painful swallow, gasping, straining, back down my over-stretched esophagus till it came to reside next to my lungs, and I felt it settle.

I was covered in sweat, and strings of drool and blood ran from my chin to a pile of blood-black effluence on the ground. I watched in clinical abstraction as a gorgeous ruby droplet slid down a filament of black and then disappeared into the mess. I became aware that granny was still standing over my back, straddling me, one large gum-boot in each of my armpits. She stepped away from me, and then helped me to roll over, away from my mess. As I lay there, my heart racing, looking up at the sky, shaky with exertion and wonder, I realized that today I wasn't going to die.

When I awoke in the middle of the night with a throat so sore I could drink my wife's moisturizer, I began to cast around in the back of my head for what could have caused this new annoyance to enter my life.

Was it the 4 shots of vodka last night, that somehow inebriated my immune system sufficiently to allow a small virus past?

Was it that eating 5 meals of hamburger and chips in 8 days has left my body deficient on vital nutrients found in, say, pasta, which are necessary to stave of these small illnesses?

Could it be that right before bed I had drunk water from an unwashed mixer cup, still bearing the smeary remnants of a yogurt and raw-egg shake from the distant past? Could that somehow have caused a sore throat?

Then I remembered. The class I had taught Monday, yesterday, - one of the boys had said he had been sick on Thursday. Headache. Fever. Vomiting. The works.

I did a quick mental inventory, checking for any of the above symptoms.

Just because I didn't find any doesn't mean it isn't entirely his fault.

I poured the remaining orange juice into the filthy, smeared mixer-cup, then gave the box a last squeeze, which caused it to huff out a last wheezy blerp of orange juice. I crumpled the box without thinking , and threw it on the floor next to the trash. Two separate thoughts sat in my head, too lazy to form themselves into actual words.

When is my wife coming back?

That little bastard. He made me sick.

To sleep, perchance to dream

Last night an agent of divine retribution was dispatched from hell to my bedside. What I had done to attract the attentions of hell's minion I neither know, nor care to discuss.

It began with a dream - somehow I was making a video of a family, which was intended to be of a funny, youtube-esqe nature. During the filming of the family and their activities it becomes apparent that the mother and daughter (who are the only people I remember from the dream, although there were many more) typically spoke at cross-purposes, and were alienated from each other. The mother was around 50, a well-dresssed, well-coiffed suburbanite, who was meticulous about her house, lawn, and the pool. The daughter could be early to late twenties, or even early to mid thirties. It is hard to say, as something, be it hard living or a disease, or just a tendency toward chronic bitterness, had prematurely aged her. She had viciously short hair that may have been salt-and-pepper, but I couldn't really say, as she wore a kerchief over her head that reminded you of a cancer victim. That, combined with the drawn, bony face, and the downcast eyes, and the same dirty blue flannel shawl she wore every day combined to create an impression of illness, or at least some sort of deep discomfort.

Despite the appearance of physical weakness, or perhaps just mental exhaustion, the daughter would frequently, almost habitually, engage in activities which seemed miserably calculated in advance to demonstrate her as spontaneous, young, free and desperately fun-loving. Or to demonstrate that her mother's values were not her own. Whatever the driving force behind them, the impression I retain from them was one of awkwardness and slight embarrassment every time I bore witness to one of these scenes, in which the young skeleton in her kerchief and shawl, resembling for all the world one of the extras from Schindler's list, would by one of these displays grimly attempt to convince us all of something fundamental about herself.

The one scene that stays with me happened during a party out by the pool. It was night, and I recall thinking that the pool lights, working their way up through the water, made for a great diffuse lighting that shifted and slid over the subjects. I suppose this is my idea of what a cameraman-cum-director thinks about, though I really would have no idea. I was laying low, on my stomach, the camera practically on the ground, tilted up to catch the action, which in this case was the mother speaking of the mundane details of her impeccable existence. I don't doubt that such impeccability in household matters does indeed occupy a great deal of a person's mind and mental energies. In particular, she spoke of the pool filter, and how frequently it had to be cleaned. The words, typical of dreams, are no longer with me, but she gave the distinct impression of the tribulations she faced in keeping the pool filter free of clogging matter, all of which resulted from people's inattention to what they wore in the pool. Pieces of fuzz, lint, etc, that made one more bead in the cleaning rosary she worked daily.

It was at this moment that the daughter entered the frame, coming through the glass doors from the patio, and walked intentionally across the frame of my shot, and, removing her black leather clogs, sat herself down on the edge of the pool, right in the prominent left foreground of my camera-frame, and despite wearing heavy black cotton leggings, dunked her legs into the pool.

The sheer dream-like improbability of it, that the mother would have been speaking of clothing in the pool, and she should come from out of earshot, and immediately do exactly the thing her mother had been speaking of, seemed to lend something preternaturally sinister to the tension that existed between them. As I continued filming, she made every effort to appear that this was a thoughtless act of carefree pleasure in life, but the tension and rigidity in her back and around her neck seemed to belie this. Her mother came over to her and leaning over, addressed her as "honey," and asked her if she would be getting in the pool.

The simple presence of her mother beside her seemed to nearly push her into the pool by force of repulsion alone. As her mother bent over her and spoke, she reflexively gathered her strength, and pushing down with her arms, prepared to slide into the brightly-lit chlorine water, kerchief, brown-and-maroon plaid skirt, and shawl still in place. My last image of them was the daughter's neck and shoulders tensing to push off the edge, while the mother, still speaking, makes small frantic finger-plucks at the shawl around her daughter's shoulders, hoping to remove it, yet trying not to strangle her with it should she actually go, all the while trying to speak in a soothing voice that is only a thin veneer to the colliding forces moving inside and all around her.

But that was only a dream. I was pulled from the dream by the whining, small, high, screaming more loudly with every second with insistence possible only in machines of destruction boring down upon their targets or a mosquito bored at night. I waved him away with great vigor, wildly threshing the air around him, no doubt tumbling him (her) frantically about, sending her spinning, hopefully, out of range of being attracted back to me. Then I tried to go back to a restless and unhappy sleep.

I don't know if I succeeded or not - I may have, but it seemed not long when the intense, approaching sound of a dentist-drill came closer and closer to my ear. This time I could only muster a single wave at it - I knew it to be hopeless no matter what I did. You can't crush a mosquito in the dark - it takes two hands, anyway, and I could only muster energy to wave one. To vigorously churn the air like last time not only wakes one up unduly, but is completely ineffective. To wave one hand past one's ear may be equally useless, but it does have the advantage of less frustration at having expended lest windmilling energy into the ether.

She was back soon. I don't know how soon. It would be impossible to say. It would be impossible to say how many times I made a cup out of my hand, hoping to "scoop" her in a direction from which she might not return. I realized at one point that she had bitten my left pinky finger, and the persistent itch wound its way through my incoherent thoughts. My periodic dozing moments, if they were more than just simple tired dizziness moments, spun around options of putting my head under the blankets and sweating for a few hours, getting up and doing some work, and turning on the lights, hunting it down and killing it.

I got up after one of these waving incidents, turned on the hallway light, and got a drink of water. My plan was that the light would attract the mosquito out into the entryway, and then I could close the door, and sleep soundly. While in the kitchen I looked at the clock. It was 4:30. In a few hours I would probably get up anyway - why not now? But I didn't - I went back to bed. The next time it woke me (not many minutes later,) I grabbed my pillow, and one of the blankets, and went out to the living room.

I cleared the books off the couch, unfolded it, and tried to crawl under the blanket. It was not folded very well, and so I was cold, and my feet were not covered, and the space where the couch folded let cold air up from below, along my back. I sat up and arranged the covers more meticulously - under and over and stretching down to where it should, and closed my eyes, and began to dream again. I suppose I slept, for there was a period of blankness that I recall with a feeling of gratitude, that probably lasted a half hour before my alarm, which some days ago I had set to 5:30, went off.

I had no intention of getting up at 5:30 today, and how this alarm had suddenly got turned back on is a mystery to me. But experience does seem to show that when the universe has decided to array its forces against you, mysteriously turning on your alarm falls well within the reach of its powers. Getting up or not, I had to get up and go back into the bedroom to turn it off. I couldn't see the face of my wife through the gloomy half-dark, which was just as well. I went back out, and lay down again in the now warm blankets on the couch.

When the mosquito returned I was beyond amazed and demoralized. I had left it in the bedroom long before. Mosquitoes are not, to my knowledge, capable of cognition. How had it managed to find me in another room, past doors that were almost shut? What kind of hideous radar for misery did this creature have that made this feat possible? Did I bring it with me when I shut off the alarm? Had it set the alarm, as bait, so I would have to come back, and it could then follow me to my new resting place? Anything seemed possible at this stage, and I gave up entirely on sleep. I knew then, with the certainty of despair that the condemned has when he actually feels the vibrations of the descending guillotine blade, that divine agents were working against me, sending mosquitoes of supernatural abilities, arming my alarm, and cursing me with tension fraught dreams.

I arose and made the coffee, and washed my face, turned on the computer, and sat down with a flyswatter across my knees. Staring blearily at the screen, I would occasionally hallucinate a movement in my peripheral vision, that was most likely just the smear of sleep sliding across my yellowed vision. As it turned out, I didn't use the flyswatter. She literally rammed into my head, her whining going off in my ears suddenly like a klaxon, and I reached out both hands and clapped frentically once, twice, three times and saw a black ball and the end of a red smear across my hand, and felt a surge of joy that I had at last triumphed over one small gnat.

The summer never really arrived here, but suddenly, now that we are back at work, we get an Indian summer. So today, (Sunday,) we packed some sandwiches and books, and went out for a long walk, across the river, to another side of town, and around, to a hill on the outskirts of town, on which sit the ruins of the old town "castle." I don't know how big it was to begin with, but not very would be my guess. It was blown up as the Nazis were leaving, though no one is really sure why or by whom.

So we had a picnic there, and ate our sandwiches while looking over the river, and then went and sat on the ruins and read our books in the sun. After we had read for a while, we went to a beer garden in the town square, and sat outside, drank some beer, and kept reading and intermittently talking.

When we finished, and the sun was slowly sinking, we went for a walk around the town square, looking in all the shop windows. One of my students has a factory that makes women's bags, and apparently one of the stores on the square carry his products. So we went looking for them, and though we never found them, we had a good walk, and looked at lots of interesting designs in the windows.

Now we are home, and Cynthia is making a potato soup for dinner. It has been a good day.

Adventurous I ain't.

I have been on vacation recently, (more or less, meaning I work one day out of every two or three,) which has resulted in my sitting around far too much. Which has led me to question "what the fuck am I doing here? Why am I sitting around locked in my house when I could be out having "adventures"?

Which, of course, was the exact same question I used to ask myself at Gouno. Then I would embark upon an expedition, to . . . hmmm . . . hmmm . . . hmmmmmmm. The river! Along the way I would accidentally collect about 47 small boys who would attach themselves to me like burrs to velcro, and would proceed to spend the next 4 hours attempting to climb, swim, wade, fall-down and otherwise stumble painfully about, till I tired of the utter green magnificence, and realized that, while interesting, unless there was something more of interest to be found here, it really was Milo time. It never turned out to be much of an adventure.

So, in a similar fashion, I have recently repeatedly set out from the house, bearing with me a few items, and bravely went to . . . hmmm. A pizzeria!! A cafe!! A bar!! Well, in all honesty, I wander about first, looking for . . . something, until eventually it occurs to me that a beer might be in order. So, although I have made it out of the house, it really hasn't added up to much adventure. Until recently.

My wife and her friends, (OK, they are mine too, I suppose) decided to go to Szczawnica, (yeah, go ahead, try and pronounce it.) I agreed because it was "lovely, and so beautiful." When we got there, it finally came out, (what had been rather indirectly hinted at previously) that there really was nothing there unless we were to take bicycles, and pedal toward the old Red Cloister in the hills, on the Slovakian side of the border. Not willing to be a poor sport, (but knowing that bicycles often sense my unease with them and attack,) I agreed to rent this two-wheeled contraption, and we set off down the trail. It was fun for a while, but eventually the sheer rock cliffs around the river, the rushing brown torrent, the green forest and gently rolling hills began to merge together into a somewhat red-faced, slightly out of breath and lightly bespeckled with mud experience dominated by overtones of extreme hunger. Shortly after this fact had blossomed into full prominence in my mind was the exact moment when people began enquiring cheerfully about my welfare, and making generally pleased noises toward the surrounding plant life.

"Isn't it beautiful?" they would breathlessly enquire, looking off into the distance at something I apparently had not seen. "Look at the trees!" they would say, leading me to wonder if they were referring to something in particular, or just the fact that there were, in fact, a very large number of trees all around us. "Oooh, isn't the river nice?" Which comment led me to wonder exactly what the difference between a nice and not-nice river might be, and if I really wanted to find out.

It wasn't too long after this that a sort of semi-detached hallucinatory rationality set in, and I began to analyse what this scene required to really bring out the beauty, and make it a really pleasant, top-notch experience. And it occurred to me that if we could just knock down some of the trees, and build a really nice art-museum which could have a nice coffee shop/bar with large, plate-glass windows maintained spotlessly clean, through which one might stare at the nice trees,and the rushing river, while drinking a good espresso, and pondering the delicacies that the delicate young thing in the apron was carrying to other patrons every time you glanced up from your book or conversation, then we could REALLY have something here.

Now, it rather deserves mentioning at this point that sometime prior we had crossed the border into Slovakia, and sometime prior to that my bicycle had begun revealing its true nature. Whenever it was necessary to pedal hard, the chain would attempt to slip gears, resulting in your feet flying off the pedals, and your teeth flying toward the handle-bars. But, of course, as long as you changed gears, (which it could kind of, sort of, do) you could avoid this problem, unless you were going up anything much resembling an incline, in which case you were shit out of luck, and might as well get off and push.

As we progressed further and further away from the cluster of houses behind us which I mentally referred to rather wistfully as "civilization," my annoyance at the monotony of nature's majesty increased proportionally with my hunger, till it was difficult to refrain, when asked "How ya' doin, Matt?" from answering "What part of mud-spattered, out of breath, hungry and sore-assed would you care me to comment on?"

Then quite suddenly my self-pitying reverie was interrupted as my bicycle began doing a fair imitation of a drunk man on stilts. I slammed on the brakes, (to much cursing behind me,) and began fiddling with the front wheel, which was flopping back and forth freely, loose enough to be able to rub the brakepads on either side. I immediately could see that this was an emergency of the first order, and would require helicopter evacuation. To calm my sense of rising panic, I immediately ate my share of the lunch, which helped significantly. As my belly slowly filled with sausage and focaccio bread, I nourished myself mentally with thoughts of myself walking, pushing this damned infernal machine, suffering every step of the way, encountering pitying looks from passing hikers as I struggled up, and then down, one gentle incline after another, making my way back to civilization, where there would be beer and over-priced kielbasa.

My loving wife, eventually sensing that something gloomy was missing from her life, came back to find me. Despite all attempts to reason with her, she insisted that giving up was not the logical answer to most of the difficulties life presents one with, and suggested rather that we cast about for some tools with which to fix the problem. I half-heartedly tried the nuts with my fingers, and was delighted to find that they were rock-solid-tight. There would be no fixing it. Eventually the other members of our party returned, and after some debate, in which I felt I was doing well, and moving them steadily toward the idea that I must, for the good of all, begin walking back, Peter suddenly grabbed the bike, turned it back over (I had been enjoying the sight of the damn thing with its wheels in the air, like some sort of helpless beetle on its back) and pronounced he would ride it.

I cannot describe the humiliation of my defeat. After such a fortuitious turn of events, to be robbed of your martyrdom at the last second by someone who casually shrugs and takes your burden of suffering upon themselves and cheerfully soldiers forward was almost more than I could take. I fought back bitter tears of resentment as I watched him ride off, wheel wobbling like a wobbly wheel, while I was left with the better, still functioning bike. I was left with no choice but to follow.

As it turned out, the cloister was only another 10 minutes of muddy riding away, and as they had beer and over-priced kielbasa available there, they did a pretty good imitation of rudimentary civilization. After beer and kielbasa, I could no longer stomach the guilt of allowing someone else, (regardless of how brave,) to continue carrying what by all rights should be MY ticket to feeling sorry for myself, and so insisted that I would ride it back, despite the fact that he claimed to enjoy it, as it made the ride more interesting.

Which, it turns out, it did. The rubbing against the brakepads, the extra-hard peddling to overcome the extra resistance, the constant rythmic screech, and the side-to-side wobble were just the things for taking one's mind off the over-abundance of all things natural currently encroaching aggressively on one's person, among which had to be counted a fine layer of sweat.

The trip back seemed to take much less time than the trip out, which seems always to be the case. When we got back I forgot to dismount a little ways out and push it mournfully in, which meant we had to stand about longer, and stubbornly refuse to pay for some minutes before Rachel, for the benefit and better comprehension of the stubbornly insisting owner, did a fantastic impression of pushing the bike uphill and downhill, and sweating egregiously on the long walk, to the cloister and back. Which finally did the trick, and saved me 3 dollars.

On the busride home, before falling asleep, I pondered the whole concept of adventure, and finally came to the idea that adventure only occurs once one steps out of the zone within one's control, and allows chance and Mr. Murphy to play an unusually large role in determining one's happiness and comfort quotient. My final conclusion (which I suspect most people just grasp intuitively,) was unless one has a specific worthy goal in mind, (ie, we are going to hike through the woods to see an old temple in Cambodia) which will recompense one for the time, discomfort and expense, one really might be better off watching someone else's adventure on the discovery channel. Unless you just get off on mud and trees.

Or, alternatively, you can factor out the time and expense, add in extra pay for the discomfort, and set a price on the experience. At 30 zloty an hour, plus 5 zloty extra for discomfort pay, I have 35 zloty per hour over the course of 6 hours, (that includes time spent waiting for the bus) which is 210 zloty, plus 6.70 times 2 for the bus ride, plus 20 zloty for lunch, brings us to 233.40 zloty. Then, all I have to do is figure out how much satisfaction, monetarily speaking, I derive from telling the story. Roughly, I would say about 7 zloty worth. Maybe 8. Then it is just a matter of telling the story enough times to repay myself in satisfaction for the time and expense the story cost me in getting. Which means I only need to tell it another 28.175 times to break even.

Women are the answer!!

Intersections of any sort are fascinating. Intersections are frequently where it is at, (whatever it may be.) Intersections are the reason the blood begins to smear and the contemplation comes to a crushed conclusion. Take the intersections out of a story, and you will have one long, self-involved noun. Physics equations show the balance between intersecting forces. Crashes occur at the intersections. Boxing is nothing but dancing while looking for a good intersection between Fist A and Jaw B. If I were either the assassin or the detective, I would still be looking for the intersections.

The reason for this is that it is when two forces meet that eddies and swirls and counter-currents and whirlpools are born. Currents under momentum suddenly meet, are deflected, transfer forces to other parts, cross again, re-establish direction, and shoot out under greater momentum than before, moving with greater force as the new single, larger, mass establishes a new direction that synergizes the incoming force of both.

A week or so ago I wrote my brother an email in which I laid out, in not precisely exact order, the issues I would most like to see prioritized by our next president. They were:

Climate change
The health of our environment
The population boom crisis
World poverty
Education
Human rights
Women's rights
Civil rights/Political freedom
Employment
The international economy
Various domestic economies.

The order of importance, (rough and subject to change as it is) is based on my perception of the number of people who would be affected over the period of time the problem affects us. Thus, you can imply, I perceive the problems posed by climate change and/or pollution to affect a wider number of people for a longer amount of time than the overpopulation of the earth. Or, conversely, I view the beneficial by-products of one as being greater than the other - so it could be said that I view fostering education in an area as producing further long-term benefits for a greater number of people than fostering civil rights, or the local economy. However, Education is placed higher on the list than civil rights or employment because it will result in not only a better educated person, who calls upon a wider set of resources to formulate solutions to his problems, but results in a more employable person, who will in time promote his local economy. Thus some issues may be more important because they exert a "trickle-down" influence on others in the list. To go further, the newly educated person, who now enjoys greater employment opportunities, who is operating in an expanding economy, will most likely then begin to seek greater civil protections from his state, thus increasing his civil rights. So we see that some issues on the list could also exert a "trickle-up" effect.

Once one begins to consider these "intersections" it becomes apparent that the most critical issues may not be the most important, since some, ostensibly of less import, could effect greater results among a wider number of areas, at possibly less expense to resources invested. It is these intersections producing synergistic relations among elements which should most grab our attention, and to which we should direct a greater proportion of our resources.

Unravelling the ball of string from the perspective of intersections necessitates asking slightly different questions. Rather than asking which issues are most pressing, or affect the greatest number of people, perhaps we should be asking which particular issues affect the largest number of other issues. In other words, which issue enjoys the greatest number of intersections?

We have already belabored the quite evident symbiotic relationships between employment, economy, poverty, civil rights and human rights. It does not take much thought to establish a similar relationship between population growth, pollution, and contributing to climate change. The more people eating, drinking, pissing and making plastic, (barring the emergence of new technologies) the greater our collective carbon emissions. The less people producing babies who require plastic diapers and toys, the less people who will someday leave on lights, drive cars, and replace remote-controls for their numerous TV sets.

To my mind, then, the way to most effectively reduce poverty, grow economies, promote civil rights, reduce pollution and thus avoid worsening the effects of climate change are to A. promote employment, and B. discourage reproduction. The obvious solution proposed by the intersection of these two concerns is mandating a 17 hour working day for all males, with selective forced sterilizations where any remaining over-abundance of amorous energy might necessitate intervention. The main problem with this scenario, unfortunately, is the reduced energy levels brought about by the lengthened working day, so critical for reducing population levels, may cripple the ability of the individual to agitate for greater rights, thus short-circuiting the synergy of our cycle.

(The other problem being that governments employing forced sterilizations have a record of being taken out of power at the first opportunity. Apparently people resent them.)

Education has already been named as a factor which has an immediate and obvious bearing on not only personal efficacy, but employability, and economic growth. Could education also be used to lower the birthrates? Some agencies have tried the direct approach, educating the population regarding birth control, such as condoms and contraceptives. The main problem encountered is that men intuitively recoil from stuffing their most acutely concentrated collection of nerve-endings into a tight rubber bag with a constrictive rubber-band at the end, before engaging in something commonly thought to be "fun," simply because the woman is concerned about avoiding another pregnancy. Men are rather comparatively short-sighted at the best of times, and famously so as the moment of truth approaches. The pressing physiological concerns hardwired into their being to take precedence over rationality tend to override most other concerns for a thankfully brief period, which has been known to result in shortsightedness during, chagrin shortly thereafter, and offspring some time later.

Fortunately for all concerned, the reproductive process typically entails the presence of another individual, for whom the "oops" factor presents a slightly greater measure of inconvenience, and who thus tends to favor a more reasoned approach to reproduction, if at all possible. Unfortunately for all concerned, among the majority of societies, this cooler-headed half of our species is traditionally expected to bow before the wishes of her husband at home, is often credited with less native intelligence, and is endowed with less political power in the society at large. This results in lessened earning potential, as men are more favored for jobs, as a result of having been favored for more education. Thus the woman, who could naturally act as a brake on the reproductive rate, is, due to her lower social position, economic dependence and lower level of education, placed at a significant disadvantage when attempting to reason with her more physically, socially, politically and economically powerful partner.

The solution, then, to this particular confluence of unfortunate facts is general education for women. Reproductive education alone is clearly insufficient to act as a counterweight to generally held perceptions regarding reproductive roles and rights. What is needed is education for women which results in greater economic independence, higher social standing, and improved sense of their own legal rights. Thus a woman who does not wish to risk pregnancy could negotiate with her partner on firmer, more equal ground, to the long-term benefit of all.

Research upholds, and further reinforces this conclusion. Not only is women's education the single greatest correlating factor with falling birthrates, but an increase in women's education also leads to a greater improvement in the health of the society at large than an equal increase in education among men. This is because of the money which a woman earns, a greater portion is saved, and invested back into the family. A greater proportion is spent on household and collective needs, as well as on children's needs, such as clothing and healthcare. Contributing to the cycle is the fact that the lower number of births per family results in freeing up more resources to be invested into the education and advancement of of the already existing children, thus ensuring the continuation of the benefits onto the next generation.

So just as education has an impact on employment, the economy, and on one's perception of one's natural rights, so education of the world's largest marginalized group could have a direct impact on population growth and pollution, in addition to applying more hands to our economies, and more minds to our remaining problems. Education of women, and the furtherance of women's rights, is a key component to every issue listed above, from reducing worldwide poverty to promoting the health of our environment. And who knows, it could well be a woman scientist who eventually encounters the key to reversing climate change.

The America Second Party

I don't suppose there are many of my stateside brethren who are currently unaware that the US is going through yet another Presidential cycle. It seems every time you turn on the telly you are confronted with some aging patrician with politician's hair and smile and an indistinct air of oiliness about the way his shirt sleeves are rolled up. Sometimes you even get more than one of them on the screen at the same time, and I begin to weep and dry-heave for America.

In the midst of writing my brother a wandering email-almost-epistle yesterday, I had occasion to ask myself the question, "What are the issues that are most important to me?" And, oddly enough, "Domestic Security" didn't even come up. I didn't realize it till just this instant, but it's true - the main issue that is currently cornerstoning every Republican's platform never even entered my mind. Well, I suppose that just shows why I will never be president.

In fact, my whole list is replete with examples of why I will never be president. Frankly, almost everything on the list is horridly America-Second. I am an America-Seconder! Does such a designation exist? I must go check . . .

OK, not so surprisingly, the America First Party has been reborn, and surprisingly, I half agree with one-quarter of what they say. However the America-Second designation doesn't exist at all. The closest thing is America's Second Harvest, a nationwide foodbank. So now that I have finally found my true political designation, what are the philosophical underpinnings to this one-man movement?

Basically, the belief that the already best-fed can go to the back of the line for the buffet, and wait till others are served. Primarily, it is my belief that the already richest and most powerful nation should not place economic growth as the primary consideration for making larger decisions. It is not necessary that we, the rich, continue to grow richer at the expense of taking action on other issues.

Secondly, that power, true power, is only partially derived from having the biggest guns. When we see a large, overly-muscled policeman humbly doing his job, and assisting small children with finding their mommies, we feel a natural surge of goodwill toward those who protect the weak, care for the insignificant and small, and seek the good of others; how much more so when it is a person who could by right of force be overbearing and insufferable without fear of consequence? Yet when the same fellow swaggers, and appears to glory in his strength, his untouchability, and shows even the slightest disregard for the well-being others, we naturally detest him, and wish to resist him, for we see two of the most dangerous traits of humanity combined in one entity: selfishness, and a desire for power.

To those who say that they wish to restore American greatness, and American primacy, I say this - you can spend all the time you want trying to herd cats with a stick, and they still won't listen. But strap a sausage to your ass and start walking toward the milk dish, and every single one of them will follow you. When the rest of the world, (and there are some who are just too culturally blinded to see it even when it is true) sees that America is leading toward a better future for all, most will listen, and most will follow, more whole-heartedly and with less effort on our part, because they perceive that we seek a greater good.

I fully recognize that this sea change will not be immediately evident, that not all nations will be able to perceive this, or believe it, and that the great majority will continue to seek their own good as a primary goal. Be that as it may - the difference between a tycoon and a leader is the tycoon seeks his own good by whatever means are available, and the leader seeks the good of those who are led, often at personal cost to himself, by operating according to deeply held values. I leave it to you which word you would rather see applied to our country.

For the truth is this - as travel, exchange of information and transaction of commerce occur between ever further removed points around our world, we will find the common good ever more important. What issue affected only a region, a nation, or even a continent before, now comes to affect all of us, as everything from trade goods to market volitility to infestations and infectious diseases spread more quickly and widely than ever before. Whole labor forces move across borders en masse these days, bring with them the power of their sweat and the problems of their own country. Interdependence is the inescapable future, and the nation that recognises this and leads the way toward a more healthy interdependence will be the global leader, and will, on some level, earn the respect and admiration of those it assisted and led.

And that will constitute a greater power.