Crap! I Have a Blog!

Found a journal entry from a bus ride some months back. Better than nothing I guess.

15 June, 2007

.

8:11am

I’m on my second bus of the morning, headed for

Phnom Penh

after stagnating in Siem Reap for two weeks too long.

This isn’t such a bad bus. It reeks of communist mimicry of Western comforts – like a time machine fashioned out of an 8-track player and it’s eating the tape of the space-time continuum. It’s got the big bulging hexagonal shape of 1970s Soviet-era vehicles – the inspired designs of central planning. The design gives it a cavernous feel but all the extra space is in the ceiling. I’ve still got as much elbow room in a mosh pit. The color scheme is dull dirty beige like it was upholstered with a hundred rolls of masking tape. Seats are the shiny grey of Dirty Harry’s sport coat. Curtains are cherry red. Blood red. It’s got the ambiance of a welfare office on wheels. A DVD player is mounted in the dash and connected to a 17-inch commercial NEC TV over the driver’s head so the front three rows of the bus has been watching a half hour of opening credits of a Cambodian movie. A digital alarm clock mounted next to the TV tells how much of your sentence you’ve served. But it’s not such a bad bus.

Like every bus in every developing country the driver has mounted on the passenger side sun visor a print of his favorite deity or spiritual guru. This time it’s one I don’t recognize but it appears to be some sort of Buddhist superhero – a lean, good-looking guy with red skin and red robes, a walking staff and wearing some sort of white feathered skullcap drawing down to a point between his eyes. He’s some sort of bird-man, I think. His superpower is to barf out half-digested worms at bad guys. A more useful bus-God would be Geckoman as the bus is full of enough mosquitoes to have scrapped the

Panama Canal

.

The squat young Cambodian woman sitting next to me and who helped me jam my small water bottle into the too-small pocket in front of me has curled herself into a ball with her ass taking up a quarter of my seat and went to sleep. She’s readjusted now and has her head buried in my armpit like a puppy.

Two seats up and across the aisle is an intriguing young goth-lite woman. Her entire getup – from her hair to her clothes to her leather bag – is brown instead of black. She’s got full sleeve tattoos on both arms. They’re nice work too – with life-like Asian faces tangled up in a soft tribal pattern. [My seatmate has readjusted again and now her ass cheeks are biting my thigh again.] She’s got full bangs and a ponytail. Hot. Like every other girl with this particular style, (which I don’t know how to identify because I’m too old and too lame), she’s got big brown eyes and a biggish sharpish nose and thin bird-like face. It’s a look I find beyond beautiful – I find it fascinating. But the women with this look never find me fascinating. She’s probably unusually intelligent, creative, and charmingly cynical and would be bored with me before I finished my first sentence. I did, however, muster the balls to touch her arm and say “I like your ink” when I went outside for a cigarette. We’re both surrounded by locals who don’t apparently speak English and have nobody to talk to. So close and yet… God I’m lame.

This “movie” turns out to be some sort of Cambodian “Hee Haw”. It’s a live audience variety show with people talking, telling jokes and singing awful songs. Right now there’s an older woman lecturing a young man and woman on a small set of bleachers next to a wagon wheel prop. She’s very stern and sometimes angry with the man but the audience is laughing. I assume she’s telling him he sucks at dealing with the woman. That’s always and everywhere a crowd pleaser. Now they’re doing a skit in front of a backdrop of wood plank houses and the actors are carrying their microphones and acting a scene in Hawaiian shirts – the same thing as country western plaid in

Asia

– and there’s a beautiful young woman in a formal party dress scolding the men and flirting with them at the same time. Now she’s broke out into song. The two women across from me are loving this. Oh shit! The middle aged woman is back on the stage and she’s rapping in Khmer. The horror! Now the men are angry and depressed because of something to do with the young beautiful women. Universal truths. I’m waiting for the fence to swing up and smack one of the men in the ass for making a bad joke.

These hard seats are making my ass sore and it’s only

9:41

according to the digital alarm clock.

We just had to swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid the two fattest oxen I’ve ever seen. I want to lean forward and take some pressure off my ass but I’m afraid I’ll put it back down on my neighbor’s head. They passed out barf bags at the start of the trip. I haven’t seen that since

Yemen

. In

Yemen

though, somebody would have used theirs by now. I think we’re stopping for food. Praise Jesus!

No food for me. I bought a miniature Red Bull and lit up a cigarette and notice Inky wandering in my direction. Not sure, I moved to heard her off. Sure enough she came up to bum a cigarette off me. She seemed a bit younger and more innocent than my previous assumptions. She got the ink done in

Seattle

. She moved around a lot and when she goes home in a month she’ll be living in

San Francisco

. She’s been working as a dive master in

Thailand

the last three months and is just making a quick trip through

Cambodia

before going back home. She’s homesick, I determined and told her when she seemed reluctant to find a way to make a living and stay overseas. But maybe the truth is she’s as lazy as I am, if it’s possible. She said she’s “not ready” for the commitment of studying to be a diving instructor.

The breakfast stop turned out to be more of a bathroom break. We finished our cigarettes and noticed the other passengers herding back on the bus in a hurry. All I could do is look back at the concrete pen of the roadside restaurant – exactly like those in every other country I’ve seen – and get back on the bus in mid-conversation. Inky and I gave each other “Hey. Whattayagonnado?” looks and took our seats two rows and and aisles apart. I’m left staring at the solemn Asian face staring at me from her tricep. She’s stuck next to a young Cambodian guy who nervously stares at alternating parts of her, (much as I’m doing), but doesn’t have the English to actually talk to her. I’ve still got the restless napper who’s now going through the fourth course of the meal she just bought. The fruit she just offered me a piece of was horrendous. It’s had its skin removed but the fruit inside tastes just like orange peel.

What I thought were long-running opening credits for a movie was actually a really boring music video with subtitles for karaoke sing-alongs. For the first time this bus ride scares me – imagining a five hour mobile karaoke sing-along!

We just came about a foot from killing a guy on the other side of the highway. All the way on the other side.

These bigger towns we pass through alongside the highway could be in

Yemen

, in

Egypt

,

Jordan

or any other country I’ve been through. With their packed markets full of fruit and cheap electronics, three-story colonial storefronts and hotels, perpetual stagnant puddles, huge packs of bored motorcycle taxis drivers, all operating on a thick carpet of trash. These anonymous towns are at once intimidating and intriguing to me like an old west town. I’ve always wanted to explore one, but I just know I’d find only trouble.

She’s sleeping off her meals in my armpit now. I’m glad I collected her barf bag for her.

Passing another market town a 12 year-old Cambodian kid in a Spiderman t-shirt had someone put blond highlights in his hair. Globalization at work.

If we make it to

Phnom Penh

without killing somebody I’ll punch myself in the face for how much I hate this driver. Maybe it’s not his fault. Maybe nobody told him the bus has breaks. Maybe he has to fantasize that he’s Mad Max in order to keep the karaoke music dripping sweet like cheap honey from the TV above his head from putting him in a diabetic coma. But with his camouflage cap, gold-rimmed black aviators and the way his horn unmistakably translates as “move or die” I’m assuming he’s just an ex-military asshat with less regard for human life than he has desire to get to Phnom Penh early enough to hate-fuck his favorite bus station hooker before the return trip.

I’ll use “PS” to represent a picturesque scene seen out the window.

PS – A downed palm tree curving into and out a small green pond in front of a driftwood hut.

PS – White ox grazing in a pond full of lily pad.

PS – Someone fenced their property with stacks of used tires and two teenage boys sitting shirtless on the stilted porch talking.

PS – Just the backs, noses and horns of 8 black oxen on the surface of a duck pond.

PS – Boys up to their armpits in a lily pad pond. Why? Are they in there for work or for play? Are they bathing? Does the warm life-giving water of the pond feel like escaping to another world free of the dangers and pain of their own? I shall never know. I am on a bus. So why ask? What do you mean? Why ask such dumb questions if you’re just a guy on a bus? I’m just journaling my thoughts. No you weren’t. You were trying to sound clever and deep by pondering the thoughts of some kids in a pond like some rich hippy douche bag making pretentious art films about the beauty of a plastic bag dancing with you high on peyote and wine coolers. Fuck off. It’s my journal. I was writing my thoughts to myself. Bull-shit! You already decided an hour ago that this bus ride diary is just so awesomely clever that you want to put it on your blog and show everyone who reads it (no one!) how awesomely clever you are. So what’s wrong with that? Nothing, until you veered into the art-douche voiceover shit. You’re lucky I didn’t just shank your ass. Yeah. Uh… thanks.

Who the hell are you anyway? Huh? I’m writing in my journal and all of a sudden you’re here giving me shit. Who are you? I don’t know what you mean. You don’t know… I’m writing in my journal. You’re writing in my journal WITH THE SAME FUCKING HAND! How does that work? Oh. I see your point. I don’t know. Maybe I’m a voice in your head? I don’t have voices in my head. Oh, you don’t? So who picked out those underwear you put on this morning? Is she hot? OK! Ixnay on the antiespay!

So what’s with the dialogue without punctuation or paragraphing? What? You showed up in my journal – blog – whatever. You showed up as dialogue but you don’t use quote marks or separate your speech from mine with paragraphs. What’s your point? It’s a cool style. If you’re Cormac McCarthy it is. Are you Cormac McCarthy? If I was, I wouldn’t be hanging around in YOUR head now would I? It’s a clean well-lighted place and all. Good acoustics. But it ain’t exactly the New York Public Library, if you know what I mean. Good one. But you’ve never even read Cormac McCarthy. Who says? You’re in my head. You only saw that that was his style when I was checking out his Wikipedia page the other day. You ripped off his style and you’ve never even read any of his books. What’s your point? Art-douche. Watch your ass, Holmes. What are you going to do, Huggy Bear? Shiv me? … Oh. It’s cool. Write your journal.

It’s

11:24

and my neighbor’s face and my armpit are starting to sweat on each other. She doesn’t seem to mind.

OK, she does. She put her face back in the curtains and her ass cheeks around my thigh. I still feel there’s a bond of trust growing between us though. Something about how comfortable she is with some tourist who she can’t speak a word to makes me think she’s going to make someone an excellent wife.

Flying by the window is a green blur of countless species of palm trees, grasses and sex pools for swinging mosquitoes, navy blue and white school uniforms on bicycles, other bicycles being used to haul farm products to market, huts and shacks raised on stilts to heights according to the optimism of their owners, ducks and geese, oxen and cows, goats and communist party headquarter buildings about every 500 meters – all of them fortunate not to have been creamed by my piece of shit driver.

We’ve stopped to let people out and there’s a woman offering bags of that awful orange peel fruit along side one offering cooked crickets or grasshoppers from a big metal tub. I can’t decide which one I’d start with.

Every so often I see the driver twitching in his mirror.

Another stop. Another cig with Inky. This time she abruptly ditched me and got back on the bus.

Kids are hard-selling to us the things we might buy – pineapple and mango. Women ignored us who were offering tubs of huge fat crickets and tarantulas deep fried in oil and the orange peel fruit of course. I think they only pick them to help sell the fried arthropods. I had some fun with the little girls and their bucket of live tarantulas next to the platter of fried ones.

I bought a jar of Jacker – a Pringles knock-off I used to buy in

Yemen

. It took the vendor a couple minutes to come up with the price – so I knew I was about to be jacked. I threw out “one dollar”, the going rate in the cities, just to keep him from asking for four. Just as he said “two” an eight year-old kid came up behind him and demanded three. I tried to use this to seem offended and ask for one again but the man forgot his English numbers at that moment and just stared at me. I gave him two. Of course he’s had that can on the counter there since Angkor Wat was under construction and they’re horrible.

These curtains are Communist Red. And Sleepy closed them now and I can’t look out the window any more except the barest sliver.

The kid pushing the pineapple on me the whole last stop was wearing a Ray Mysterio t-shirt. He would put this awful pout on his face when he said “two thousand” (50 cents) and held the bag of skinned pineapple up at us. I bought one from a little girl already but he kept trying to sell us another one. We’d refuse and he’d stand there smiling and waiting to get in on our conversation. Then he’d pout all pitiful and say “two thousand” again. I asked him who’s on his t-shirt and he smiled big and said proudly: “Ray Mysterio!” I asked who’s that, (I had no idea but I could see from the shirt he was a pro wrestler). “He’s a wrestler!” he said proudly in good English. A pause. Then he switched to the pout again, held up the pineapple and whined “two thousaaaaand”. I laughed at him for his obvious shtick and he laughed back. A pause. He put the pout back on and repeated his line. I pouted back and said the price making him laugh again. After that I’d just mock him and make him laugh each time he’d do his thing. Even so, every time I saw that forced pout it tugged at some string inside me. Not necessarily my heart or I would have bought another pineapple, but some string. It’s more economical to be jaded here but I’m not sure it’s justified. A very skinny old woman approached me pleading and pointing at her three teeth. I refused her twice while she held onto my bicep and pointed. I knew I was going to give her two thousand right away, and I did eventually, but you can’t give to everyone and you get an instinctive resistance. You have to. Sometimes there’s someone who destroys all doubt immediately and you just say “Oh yes, of course. Here you go.”

I wonder if the driver’s Bird-God flies over his enemies and craps on their windshields. I wonder if that’s why he drives like he does – he knows his Bird-God is angry with him and he’s trying to outrun him? Twitchy just twitched again. I’m pretty sure he’s on speed. I wish I hadn’t read that Wikipedia page listing the worst auto accidents in the world. I think about 1 in 10 was a bus accident in

SE Asia

that killed 20 or 30. Then there was the article in the Bangkok Post about the prevalence of methamphetamine among bus drivers. I miss qat.

Sleepy is swapping sweat again with my armpit.

We just passed a row of brick factories so I know there’s a low child unemployment rate in this region.

Inky’s got a hell of a tan to go with her pants. It looks good on her. I wish I was the guy next to her so I could stare at more of her parts. She’s got a thick two-inch scar on her forearm that looks good on her too.

“Thanks for the cigarette,” Inky said as she ditched me. I’m not sure if I bored her, creeped her out or a little bit of both. Is it possible to do both at the same time? Well if anyone can, I can goddammit! If we stop again I should try to work a third type of repulsion into my repertoire. Let’s see… what else have I got in my personality arsenal? Anger? No. I don’t think I inspire that so much.

Jesus! Someone just had a real nice boat in their front yard! Somebody pulled off an American business-class luxury item like that in this neighborhood?

1:13

– I can’t confirm any kills but I’m going to assume there were two or three school kids I didn’t see.

I don’t know how I’m going to read this little exercise seeing as I’m writing on a moving target and I can’t read my own writing when I’m stationary.

Despite the bus’s air conditioning I’m starting to sweat all over – especially my right thigh. And I just got really sleepy.

Crossing over the

Mekong

River

(I think) now. I should have taken the boat here. I could have taken pictures instead of scribbling my nonsense all over these perfectly good pages of my overpriced notepad. If I’d have met another tattooed love girl I could have actually sat next to her for 11 hours and possibly driven her overboard. That photo would be my all-time favorite.