Hang On Saint Christopher

"I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right." - Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

China is a blur. I don't know whether I've been here 3 days or 10. I see flashes of activity that I have difficulty connecting in my memory. Two blond girls, one American and one Dutch, with whom I shared two, separate, intimate conversations on a rooftop bar while surrounded by revelry seem relevant (although the details of the
conversations bleed together), as does a movie discussion with an American who has taken on the extra challenge of living outdoors during most of his travels. There seems to be an image of a Chinese Michael Jackson impersonator singing in an unbearably loud, but deliciously weird club while the Dutch girl sat across from me awkwardly. I know for sure there was a serendipitous meeting of Spaniards along with a Canadian Of Chinese Heritage and some wandering the streets of a metropolis together, each unsure where we were, each asking strangers to look at our maps and repeatedly getting conflicting advice in the form of directional pointing. I tend to doubt my recollection of the Canadian sobbing in our shared-for-price-not-romance two-bed hotel room after I advised her (since she asked), at 1am after a few drinks, to end her two-year, long-distance relationship with a Frenchman - who in spite of her desperate pleading has stated that he doesn't want to marry her - knowing as she did, with painful clarity, that this advice was obvious and she should have done it already but now, at age 37, she was terrified of being alone. I am almost certain that the one of the lesbians, the one who spoke Mandarin, and the same one who beat the Spaniards and I at Texas Hold 'Em, declared that she had a crush on me when Regina Spektor, The Shins, and Joni Mitchel came up consecutively on a playlist I had made. I am painfully sure that I vomited in my bed that same night, managing at least to lean out and deposit my half-processed soup and hideous Chinese liquor on the floor rather than the sheets, although I have no recollection of the act. A man named Ray may have sang a rock song in Chinese in front of a glowing fireplace in a town called Shangri-La. I know I have climbed mountains (or perhaps hills) with my head throbbing from the elevation. I have helped to turn the largest prayer wheel I have ever seen. I have exited a bus in fog and rain, stepping into a muddy mountain highway, 4 hours from anywhere, because the driver was uncertain if he could both get the bus moving and keep its four wheels in contact with the precarious ledge while it was loaded with passengers. All these things most likely happened, but I can't help feeling there is a strange momentum at play here that has packed this short time with moments which I can barely accept as reality, much less make into any coherent sense. But I love it all. I know that much.