One Thousand Eight Hundred Ninety-One Dollars And Thirty Two Cents

"D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I finished telling you about. I didn't know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it. I'm sorry I told so many people about it.  All I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about....Don't ever tell anybody anything.  If you do, you'll start missing everybody."    -from The Catcher In The Rye 


My passport has run out of usable pages.  My remaining clothes are torn and stained beyond recognition.  My pack is in need of repair.  My copy of Siddhartha is being held together by packing tape and faith.  My sleep schedule is a mess.  I'm sitting on a comfortable leather chair sipping a perfect double-espresso.  I'm back in the United States of America.  In all honesty, it feels pretty good.

There is the fact that everyone speaks English and I can understand the conversations of nearby strangers and I'm understood when I ask where the tofu is, and there's the odd single-color currency, and there's the outrageous prices for everything and my barely-suppressed horror in the face of pervasive consumerism.  Of course in a few weeks or months I suspect that none of that will seem strange anymore.  But as I scan the internet for employment and read job descriptions that use the word "vacation" and ponder the notion of travel, not as a lifestyle, but as a short break before returning to a well-defined collection of constants, part of my consciousness rebells and I realize that I already miss the road and I wonder if that feeling will ever go away. Or if I want it to.

That's all I'm going to tell you about.  The balance will continue to decline but I assume I will find a job before it reaches zero.  In any case, my travels are over and so this journal is finished.  It's been fun.  Thanks for reading.                        



    

Hornets! Hornets!

Three days ago I attacked a nest of wasps.  I was hacking out a trench between two mounded planting beds that, by appearance, hadn’t been attended to in several seasons, when the world suddenly receded to the distant background and what can only be described as a sting, bright and urgent, flashed through the muscle between my thumb and forefinger.  For a few seconds there was only me and the hand, which insisted on my undivided attention.  I never saw my attacker.  I responded by voicing a randomly selected profanity, stepping away from my work, and rubbing some mud on the painful spot.  Then I stupidly went back to hacking at the same location.  Ten seconds later, I simultaneously saw at least 5 wasps fly out of the brush, felt another intense sting explode on my cheekbone near my ear, and another on my calf near my knee.  I looked down and swatted one of the combatants away from my leg while clumsily jumping out of the trench and through the mud, away from the source of the pain.  I stayed away from that trench thereafter and spent the next thirty minutes flinching away from dragonflies.  About two hours later, my hand looked like the hand of a giant baby; pudgy and lacking knuckles, and I had difficulty making a fist.  The hand continued to look ridiculous for two solid days and it still doesn’t look the same as the other one.

     

Today, after one more day of work on the farm, I’ll pack my bags, get some dinner and try to sleep for awhile; then at 2am I’ll get into The Captain’s Honda, where I’ll ride as a passenger to Bangkok Airport, from whence I’ll take a series of flights that, over the course of 32 hours, will chase the sun, bringing me to Boston on the same calendar day that I left Bangkok.   It will be my first time on U.S. soil since July of 2009. 

Several travelers have asked how I feel in anticipation of this event and after answering vaguely a few times, I have come to realize that I look forward to it without reservation.  After almost two years in Dubai and almost a year on the road, it feels like an adventure of sorts to return to the homeland for an extended period.  I am anxious to see friends and family and I am equally anxious to see how it feels to be there, to examine myself and notice subtle or dramatic shifts between my current self and the self that left, or possibly to find that I’m still exactly the same.  Although I doubt the latter.   

See You Soon Nice Tomorrow

I am a man and Nui is a woman and so of course I drove the motorcycle home, in spite of the fact that she knew the way, I didn’t, it was dark, and she didn’t speak much English.  Later she told the group about how “sloowwwly sloooowwly” I drove and that I flinched when the dog jumped out of a blind corner, barking furiously.   She pantomimed the whole trip in an exaggerated fashion, and everyone laughed and then they poured me another shot of Thai whiskey.

I was up with the sun and had finished my first cup of coffee, made, as always, with a packet of heavily-sugared Nescafe, so with breakfast still a distant prospect and plenty of packets available, I had another.  Toon walked into the dining area, looked from me to my cup, raised his eyebrows and held up two fingers.  I said, “Yep.  This is two.”  He said my name, laughed and used his thumb and forefingers to make “open wide” motions around his eyes.  The next morning, when we ran out of coffee, Nui was all over it.  “Stanleee!  Twooo!”  I told her that was yesterday, but she insisted, with gestures, that it was both days.  I told her, half with gestures, that I believed it was she who had taken two and she laughed.  This became a running joke which we repeated every morning. 

Nui asked if she could come with me to America.  I showed her my wallet and told her I had no money.  She tried to give me 60 baht (2USD) and then she stuck out her lower lip and pouted when I told her it wasn’t enough.   She was joking, of course, but then again not completely. 

Toon asked, with some difficulty, if I would transfer some music onto a flash-drive.  The drive in question was only 1GB so I gave him about 20 songs that DJ Nik had sent me.  He plugged it into the DVD player and soon Ida Maria was belting out “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked”, loud and clear from the formidable speaker system.  Toon and a few of his Thai companions busted out a few dance steps.  A moment of embarrassment passed before I glanced over at the 13 year-old girl in her Sex Pistols T-shirt nodding along with the rhythm while she studied English and I realized no one present could understand one word of the lyrics.