Cult of personality.

"I tend to think of myself as a one man wolf pack. But when my sister brought Doug home, I knew he was one of my own. And my wolf pack, it grew by one. So there.... there was two of us in the wolf pack. I was alone first in the pack and then Doug joined in later." - The Hangover


This post could have been written from Poland, back in late August. But back then it was too vague to be even a theory, just an educated hunch.
These words nearly came from Jordan, when in my five days I experienced this pretty strongly, and my beliefs were solidified.
I am writing this in my last few hours of three weeks in Southeast Asia, just before I walk down to the Mekong River in Vientiene and wash down some phenomenal laap with a Beerlao. I am writing it now because that cloudy theorem of months ago has proven undeniable.

I spent six days in Estonia. Far longer than I probably should have, far longer than the glorified village of Tallinn probably warranted. But while I was trying to get my stomach right again from the parasites, I met some people that weren't merely fun to be around, but that I clicked with surprisingly quickly. Same sense of humor, similar personalities even though we came from different backgrounds and opposite pinpoints on the globe. Leaving for Riga, Latvia was the first time I had to surrender friends at the border. It would become a pattern.

I met Ricardo and Paul in Lithuania, but we didn't hang out until two cities later, when we found ourselves once again in the same hostel (Ricardo and I even again in the same dorm room) in Krakow, Poland. Something like four days together and we three experienced Krakow's Old Town, the leaden grounds of Auschwitz, and the quirky salt mines of Wieleczka in a rotating 30 foot bubble of conversation. Not to mention the bars, restaurants, and clubs. To find people you've just met that you can be around all day, discuss heavy issues in Twentieth Century history, politics, and religion with, then still want to hang out with later for seemingly endless glasses of vodka is rare. Unless you know where to look.

The theorem that shed its mist, the central social lesson of my travels: Certain types of places draw certain types of people. As a traveler, when I've deviated from the commonplace, I have felt the most camaraderie. I have felt most at home.

In my first few hours in Amman, Jordan, I met Cindie from Vancouver and Til from Hamburg. This was when our hostel owner Ali was trying to get us to pay something like $80 each to take the sightseeing route (the King's Highway) from Amman to Petra. Together we found a separate way that only cost us a quarter of that. We traversed night markets together, stocking up on food and supplies for the next day, tackling everything together with a recurring sense of collaboration. It felt at times like we were solving a riddle that individually may have stumped each of us, leading to higher prices, shadier travel options, but together was different entirely. The Voltron approach to travel. We made it down to Petra, did the same shopping around and negotiated an equally good deal back up to Amman, where we parted ways once again, Cindie to Istanbul, Til to Damascus, and I to Qatar. We clicked instantly, not always perfectly and we're not in constant contact now, but we each still talk, each pass along travel advice for our next destinations. Because we're still unified, still feel that precious overlapping of our Venn diagrams that is shaped like the Jordanian border.

The moment these thoughts became granite was two days ago, in Champasak. It's one thing to go to Laos, let alone a tiny village in the remote South, so of the seven other backpackers of all ages on my cramped sawngethaew that held another 15 Lao locals, I had seven easy conversations, seven faces that looked back at me with the identical determination and small but still present sense of adventure that fewer and fewer places on this Earth are capable of giving you.

For all the grandeur and impossibly complex historical tapestry that is Western Europe, I'm in no rush to go back. I did meet some awesome people there, in Scotland and in Berlin especially, but the vast majority of other people at my hostels were weekenders or permanently attached to their copy of Lonely Planet. You can be somewhere for just a few days and not be a tourist. Then again you can travel around the world and still not see a thing. The experience can easily change you, alter your perceptions- if you're open to it. And that seems to be the dividing issue. One that cuts across the European continent like the Maginot Line.

If you've traveled a good deal, seen various parts of the world and Western Europe is still for you- awesome. That's you. I loved what I got to see while I was there, the life lessons I came across in Barcelona and Naples are no less profound, but Europe is domesticated to the point that I'm in no rush to go back. It will always be there, and be more or less like it is now. Places like Laos are disappearing. In the few hours I've spent on the patio outside my hostel in Vientiene, I've seen maybe 30 groups of backpackers get turned away because there's no room. I've seen the same groups an hour or so later still wandering hopelessly with their backpacks still on because the entire town, which has a large number of hostels and homestays, is full. The older travelers I've met that were here a decade, even two years ago, speak of how vastly it has changed, how modern and touristy it is now leaning. So far this is just some of the northern cities; in the south you still run in to incidents like my forced hitchhiking in Ban Mueng. As shitty as it was at the time, I'll take that over a stamp on my Eurail pass any day.

It takes certain personality traits to look at a map and say "Lithuania. I want to see what's there." Or Jordan, Phnom Penh, rural Laos. The night before I left Los Angeles, my best friend told me that I had a something of a gift, a strange mixture of stupidity, balls, and guile. Maybe this is what he was seeing. This personality trait, this product of curiosity and desire for adventure, it is probably the most unifying single social characteristic I have ever come across. Even though we've only known one another for days at most, sometimes as short as the span of shared tuk-tuk ride, these people that I have met and clicked with understand an aspect of my personality that people I have known for years have never approached. Because it is burning within them as well. Paris is beautiful, but keep it. We'll take Petra. We want to see places other people didn't even know existed, let alone thought of going to. I don't know what it is in the others that catalyzes this quality. For me it is a sense of discovery, the awakening of the frontier spirit that quickens the beating of my American heart.

That's the feeling I get when I think about the next places I want to go to next. Syria. Bhutan. Tibet. Nepal. The Trans-Siberian in reverse. I read an article that a British company is doing small guerrilla style tours of Iraq. Something with six or seven people that is less like a tour group and more like a cadre. How could I turn down a chance to go to Babylon? And of course my last continent: South America.

When I started this trip I was a little annoyed that traveling in the E.U. you don't get new passport stamps at the border. Now I'm grateful for that. Because each box I do have stamped in there is something that I feel I've earned, its pages are like a table of contents for the short stories that have comprised the last four plus months of my life. This little beaten blue and gold book in my pocket is more than a government identification for me now. Its obvious heavy use, that it is now noticeably heavier with ink and stamps- this is my badge of honor. One that I plan on always keeping in close range, always at the ready for the next adventure.

One for the grandkids.

"Me and my friends are like
The drums on 'Lust for Life.'
We pound it out on floor toms.
Our psalms are sing-along songs." - The Hold Steady


The moral of the story probably isn't Try Hitch-hiking in Communist Countries. Probably.

There's a difference between stupidity and desperation, in cause but not effect. I've been vigilant to the point of being wary for almost four months straight. I've had to be. People might know what city I'm in from status updates or email, but when it comes to being more specific than that, I'm the only person in the world who knows where I am at any given point of the day. And with a useless phone-turned-digital watch in my pocket, if anything goes wrong, it's pretty much going to stay that way. Before yesterday, I had slipped up twice, and only one of those was really avoidable. What happened yesterday wasn't exactly preventable either. Aside from maybe me putting even less faith in Lonely Planet next time.

I took a day trip to Champasak, a tiny town in the southern Laos countryside. One that buses don't reach (even though the guidebooks claim they do). To get there, you either drop a pretty large amount of money on taking a tuk-tuk (in Laos' case basically a motorcycle with a wheeled-bench sidecar) for the forty bumpiest kilometers of your life, or you negotiate a ride with the owner of a sawngthaew, a pick-up truck with two benches in a covered truck bed. I did the latter. So did 22 other people (7 of them fellow backpackers). It was easy enough getting out to Champasak, even if we were crammed in to an impossibly small space, and had to wait a good while for the auto ferry to carry us over to the tiny village that held the ruins of an 11th Century Khmer temple. But by the time I was ready to get back to the biggish city of Pakse, all these drivers' runs were evidently done for the day, even though it was only two o'clock. I was supposed to have another hour and a half of breathing room, but maybe because it was a Friday afternoon, or maybe because it's me and I do things the near-impossible way, there wasn't a ride to be had.

After some brokenly communicated negotiations with a shopkeeper in town, for a little over two dollars she offered to have her husband drive me to a crossroads only five miles from Pakse, a distance I could then easily get a cheap tuk-tuk from. I hopped in the back of another sawngthaew, this one smaller, this one solo, and got ready for the thirty kilometer ride. We got less than three. We hit a larger road, at which point her husband demanded more money. An absurdly larger amount more. Considering it's Laos, this was still fairly affordable, but on both principle and logistics (if he dicked me over once, why wouldn't he do it again another mile down the road...) I got out. 31 kilometers away from where I needed to be, I started walking. Eighty cars must have passed going in the opposite direction. Going my way, in four minutes I was able to futilely outstretch a thumb at only one motobiker that sped past. I plodded on a little farther and turned back around to see a mini-bus surrounded by the town-children way back at the crossroads I had hopped out at. Assuming it had to be one of the promised but never delivered tourist buses back to Pakse, I sprinted back as much as my exhaustion would allow and ran up to the driver side panting. Getting a peek inside as I rounded the windshield, I knew it wasn't a tourist bus, but tried to explain my situation to the Lao driver nonetheless. I didn't ask for a ride back the full way, just partially, whatever would fit in their travel plans. Hesitantly, very hesitantly, he agreed.

Entering the side door to youthful screams of excitement, it was the matching shirts I noticed first. A flood of stark Fruit-of-the-Loom white with an orange bubble on each. I got distracted by the raw vegetables they were all snacking on before I was able to read what those bubbles, and the increasingly familiar logo said. "United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.... We Combat Human Trafficking." I had managed to flag down a van of Lao UN students. I was given a screaming welcome of confusion as well as some raw vegetables of my own (turned out to be really good jicama) before they resumed their singing and makeshift percussion that must have been going on for their whole trip. I was asked by their nine smiling faces and waving arms to join in, which I managed to in the form of clapping but not singing. That wasn't good enough. They urged me (though none of them spoke any English) to sing something of my own. But the shock of the entire situation, coupled with nine high-pitched early-teenage voices screaming playfully for me to start, as well as the thumping of sandals on a small bongo drum as the one boy did interminably, and I blanked. I couldn't think of a single song, let alone the lyrics for it.

It did come though. Halfway through one more round of their chanting, I was able to think of it. I have no clue why this song specifically came to mind. With my ipod being stranded in London, I haven't heard it in months, and even before then it wasn't one of my most played, but as soon as it popped in to my head out of absolutely nowhere, I knew it couldn't be any other song. That it couldn't be other way. I charaded an apology for my bad singing voice and started in:

"Hey Jude, don't make it bad.
Take a sad song, and make it better.
Remember to let her under your skin,
Then you'll begin to make it better,
Better, better, better, BETTER,
Na.... na na, Na Na Na Na.... NA NA NA NAAAAAAA..... Hey Jude....
Na... na na....."

We pulled in to the bus station in Pakse two minutes later. If I had waited another round or two of their traditional Lao sing-alongs, I probably would have saved myself a good deal of embarrassment. But that right song at the right time doesn't always come around just for observation. Sometimes it's about expression. Declaration. It doesn't come around for just you. Sometimes it's not about the memories you take back for yourself, it's about the memories you make for others.

"For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder..."




Laos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2116554&id=35804394&l=beadba0ff1

This is why i don't do christmas.

"All are punish-ed." - Romeo and Juliet. Act IV, Scene iii.

I don't get to tell you about watching the sun rise over Angkor Wat, that that was how I began my December. I don't get to discuss my musings from the back of a moto outside Battambang or sailing down the Tonle Sap to Siem Reap while listening to "The End" by The Doors. Not yet. Because first I'm forced to talk about trying to do the right thing and looking like an idiot in the process.

I woke up at 3:45 AM to get to Angkor Wat in time for sunrise. For the next eleven and a half hours I wandered throughout the most gorgeous thousand-year-old buildings on Earth, spread out over a 26-kilometer area. I took over twelve hundred photos. That's more in a single day than my first three weeks on the road. I bought my bus ticket for tomorrow afternoon after shopping around for the best deal, found the Cambodian history book I've been searching everywhere for at an equally cheap price, and completed all the other errands I set for myself today. Felt like I'd accomplished a good deal, so I figured I'd treat myself to some ice cream at a place my friend Whitney had recommended to visit while I was in town. I was lazily strolling along the riverside from the Old Market back to my hostel, enjoying a scoop of ginger and black sesame, about a third of the way back when a girl of maybe five ran up to me. She begged and pleaded for two blocks for a dollar, which broke my heart not to give her. Then she asked for the rest of my ice cream cone, which I gave her immediately, but felt a little guilty that it was such a quirky flavor, one that a child definitely would not enjoy, and even if she did there wasn't much left of it anyway. I don't really know why, but after I left her, I turned back around, walked back to her and, crouching down so she was almost as tall as me, I told her that I still couldn't give her a dollar, but I would buy her a real ice cream cone, not my seconds, in any flavor she wanted. There was another place just 20 meters back and I walked out with a blueberry cobbler cone for me to replace the less-than-satisfying one I'd given away, and a large chocolate peanut butter one for her (she didn't understand when I tried to ask her what she wanted, so that was my best guess that any kid would like). It still cost me a dollar, but this way it felt a little more personable than empty charity, that in giving one to her I was saying thank you to the hundreds of beaming Cambodian children that had waved as my boat, or tuk-tuk, or moto passed them. It took all of two minutes to get the cones, but when I came back outside she was gone. I walked a good distance in both directions and couldn't find her. Asked the tuk-tuk driver she was sitting with when I met her but to no avail.

And there I was. Lugging a shopping bag around my wrist, craning my weather-beaten and sunburnt face in all directions with a defeated look upon it, and holding an ice cream cone in each hand. Not even one two-scoop cone, that would have been somewhat socially acceptable, but double-fisting fattening dairy like it was about to be outlawed. I looked like the fat German kid from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And I don't even think there was a fat German kid in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but you'd pretty much have to invent a simile to describe how stupid I looked. Walking again towards my hostel, I didn't see another Cambodian child that I could give her cone to, but I did pass a tourist bus stop full of backpackers who looked from one of my hands to the other, then at my face with an almost insulted look of disgust.

That's it. No deeper moral lesson. No waxing poetic on what this says about me, or my trip, or the world around me. Not even going back over this one to proofread it. Too embarassed. Just me looking stupid. And gluttonous. And feeling like no good deed goes unpunished.

And not wanting to eat ice cream again in the forseeable future.

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(post-script) For those that read my last post about not giving money to the probable Khmer Rouge victim outside S-21, here in Siem Reap I found another victim of their torture. The Khmer Rouge cleaved off both his hands at the mid-forearm, but he still manages to operate a steet cart selling bootlegged Xerox copies of books and Lonely Planet guides, so I bought one that I didn't really need for Laos. Still nothing to assuage the pain he has suffered, but it's reassuring that there are alternative ways to be constructive than simple handouts.

The ruins of Angkor:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2115132&id=35804394&l=123eb2365f

The red and the black.

"I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." - Jack Kerouac


I didn't see a single one that had front teeth. Top or bottom. I don't know if this was from malnutrition, or they had been knocked or yanked out by the Khmer Rouge during beatings or torture, or if that's just one of the first steps when bodies decompose. But I looked somberly and carefully at several hundred human skulls today, and not one of them had its front teeth in place. When surrounded by atrocity, sometimes it's these little details that distract you enough to get by. Because when I focused on where exactly I was, what had occurred in these fields and these cells thirty years ago, my normally granite stomach turned over and I nearly vomited. I wouldn't have been the first.The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, sixteen kilometers outside the center of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. When the Vietnamese liberated the country from the Khmer Rouge, this small area of six or so acres was found to contain 129 mass graves. Just under nine thousand corpses. Most of those remains are now piled in to the 17 tiers of the bone stupa memorial. Level one is a pile of clothing. The next eight levels contain nothing but skulls. The lower three of these were some of the ones I was able to look at, where only molars of their smiles remained. Skulls don't tell you all that much about a person's life. But they can scream sagas about their deaths.
The Khmer Rouge, not surprisingly, had very little money. Whereas their Nazi predecessors in genocide chose not to shoot their victims because it was too inefficient, too slow a destruction when attempting to wipe out an entire race of people, a good deal of the Khmer Rouge cadres avoided bullets simply because they were too expensive. They instead turned to methods of murder that were cheap. Repeatable. Hammers. Wooden stakes. Garden tools. Many of the skulls I saw today had a large, uneven hole in them from these instruments. One had a large slit. Could have been anything from an axe to a garden hoe, but while my mind will never be sure, it certainly visualized all the possibilities.
The killing fields were impossibly beautiful. Jade foliage broken up only by the mirror surface of ponds reflecting the most pristine of skies above. Not S-21. In horror movies and campfire stories, the wise elderly character will speak of places with an inherent evil, where venom is palpable in the building itself. It sounds like bullshit, and the places described in those stories actually are, but I wandered a complex of horror today for two hours. Its walls exhaled hatred. I legitimately felt the violence from those few decades ago still churning in the air I walked through. The air I had to breathe. Its proper name is Tuol Sleng, "Hill of the Poisonous Trees," which is fitting, but S-21 is even more appropriate. Those who entered this high school turned military compound in central Phnom Penh were unwillingly stripped of a name and reduced to a number, so why should it not be afforded the same courtesy. Security prison 21 was the epicenter of the Khmer Rouge's strategy of barbarism during its reign. This was nothing like Auschwitz, then or now. Then it was not a straight death or work camp but a place for political prisoners, even when that classification made no sense. Interrogations were conducted here to gain confessions, admissions of guilt and expositions of names of others just as guilty. Except that none of it made any sense. When you interrogate the same person for several months, you're going to run out of information to gain. What deeper knowledge are you going to acquire from the sixth fingernail you tear out, the thirty-eighth time you water-board somebody? (yeah. they did that. congratulations, we're in the same league as them). What you get is not accurate information, if that even existed to begin with. What you get is the names of everybody they have ever met, every grade school bully they can still recall and describe. What you get is a fuller prison, when all these new people are then brought in for interrogations, the further naming of names. And meanwhile the cells get smaller, are more hastily constructed, and walking through them now, today, it's not just your body that becomes claustrophobic. Looking around, you get a vise clamped on to your soul, your capacity for love, hope, faith in humanity.

This was not Auschwitz. Here you have solitude and space for the crimes to sink in. Because it was death manufactured on a smaller scale, you also have nuances that Auschwitz did not because of its sheer size. At S-21 I walked up and touched a bed-frame that just a few years before I was born a mutilated body was found on, covered in and hovering above a font of congealed blood. The broken plastic jug that held gasoline that was poured on the victim is still there. It was not to burn their corpse, but to get them to speak.... once that fire had been put out. In Building D you see the torture racks. The rooms of manacles that held the screaming in place. Still visible bloodstains.

Needless to say, I was not very successful at being distracted. You can only count a lack of teeth for so long.
****************************************
The first time I saw the tree, I frowned and took a picture. The second time, I cried. Because my only other option was to vomit.

English is a quirky language; the word "set" has somewhere around 150 different definitions. So I guess it's understandable not to get things right on the first go-round, even for someone who has studied history, specifically Twentieth Century warfare. The sign read "Killing tree against which executioners beat children." This sounded hideous, deplorable. I pictured toddlers being whipped, kicked, punched- desperate to keep their hands submissively on the tree's cutting bark to avoid further torture. Minutes later and a few hundred meters away, inside the Choeung Ek museum, I read the brief history of the tree and gagged. Because I wasn't even fucking close.

The tree itself stands next to one of the 129 mass graves found within Choeung Ek. This grave alone, when exhumed in 1980 after the Vietnamese defeated the Khmer Rouge, was found to hold the corpses of over one hundred women and children, most naked. The first time around I said I pictured toddlers, but I think that would be inaccurate. The soldiers wouldn't have the arm strength. Certainly not to get the proper torque or velocity. You see, what they did, what that sign is actually telling you, is that soldiers would grab children, infants, by the calves, or by the ankles and swing them, as you would a tennis racket, a baseball bat, and slam their heads in to the bark of the tree to kill them. In front of their mothers. "Killing tree against which executioners beat children."

Maybe it's reassuring that I didn't comprehend that upon my first reading. At least I had 26 years of peace not knowing human beings were capable of doing that. Not simply to other humans, but to their own innocent people. That peace of mind of mind is gone now though. You don't get something like that back.
****************************************

Last night I went to sleep still thinking of the gorgeous girl I saw in the Bangkok airport. Tonight I'll be trying to convince myself that I'm not a monster.
It probably would have been worth the three or four shitty dollars not to feel like this. To break my rule of not giving to beggars, one that exists not out of apathy but equality. I can't give to all, so I shouldn't give to any. And what's a Band-Aid to a bullet wound anyway.

The first time he asked me, on my way in to S-21, the prison camp museum, I mumbled a "Tay, sohm toh (no, sorry)" out of pure instinct, still struggling to see my camera's playback screen in the glare of a noon sun. I glanced up and didn't realize what I was looking at right away. The first thing I noticed was the amputation, high above the left knee, condemning his genetically skinny legs to a lifetime of fragility. When I scanned up I saw the too-smooth flesh that comes with years-old third-degree-plus burns, these covering the left side of his entire head. I don't know how many years ago, but considering who he was and where I saw him, I would guess between the years 1975 and 1979. I would guess it was done by a man wearing loose-fitting black clothing and a red and white checkered sash around his head. What kind of a fucking prick says "no, sorry" to a genocide victim......

I said no on the way in, then spent the next two hours of my life wading through the most morally depleting site I've been to in my life. I left in a state of shock. I wasn't thinking clearly (still am not, that's why this post is in 3 incoherent parts) and simply said no to everyone, the several tuk-tuk drivers trying to get me to go with them, the women selling food and cheap wares by the gates, and the four or five beggars there as well. The burn victim/amputee included. Literally a blur of humanity to me at a time when I just trusted my feet to get me somewhere that my brain could catch up with later.
I realized only when I was somewhere across town that I had said no to what I can only assume was a victim of Khmer Rouge atrocities. For hours, I couldn't fathom my own self-disgust let alone express it. Typing this I'm still seething, but the loathing is waning in favor of something more promising. Determination. I have more in my arsenal than Band-Aids. When this five-month journey ends and I move to New York, it will be in search of the same type of job that I had in Los Angeles. I make documentary television. If I can't change the world, I can help enlighten it, and however small a fraction of the population it is at a time, at least it's forward movement. Writing this helps me for now. While some parts of this are graphic, and my photos in a few weeks time will be as well, it helps tremendously that for the few minutes you're reading this I feel like I'm catalyzing thought, maybe even discussion. No amount of money I could ever give would bring that man's ear, face, or eye back, bring back the years of embarrassment or torment that he has endured. But my effort to bring his story, Cambodia's story, Poland's story, the stories of guerrillas in the Spanish countryside, anti-Soviet demonstrators in the Baltics, environmentalist politicians in Scotland silenced by the Thatcher regime, Catalans vying for independence, Russian prisoners of the Gulag who died building trains to nowhere.....
This effort can really achieve something.

Phnom Penh and Battambang:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2115845&id=35804394&l=bee6341c00

The revelation will not be televised.

"I'm on the verge, just one more dose,
I'm traveling from coast to coast.
My theory isn't perfect but it's close." - Red Hot Chili Peppers


It started as a joke. I didn't realize why I'd done it, even when it was staring back at me in careful black block letters. Years ago, when Kelly gave me the artisan-crafted leather journal that would contain my travel writings, I wrote out the steps of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth, the Hero's Journey, front and center on its first page.

Maybe it was my lingering sense of only-child self-importance, or just a way to see if patterns hold true no matter how small the quest one undertakes. Admittedly my life is not an epic. It does not hold its own in comparison to the fictional heroes whose fabric was cut from this pattern, consciously or sub-consciously by their creators. But the brilliance of Campbell's theorem is its commonality. It not only finds a way for stories throughout history to overlap, but for the readers and viewers who have breathed them in to find mutual ground too. This is why we are drawn to such stories, because the protagonists are just us in a different environment. Neither my life, nor this trip fits the carbon-copy of the Hero's Journey. But there are undeniable elements within it that certainly apply.

The Abyss: "Regarding sharks in motion."
Atonement With the Father: "Two weeks notice."
Refusal of the Return: "The revelation will not be televised."

The way a deep sea diver resurfaces is in stages. After hours of isolation, of wading through darkness and heavy, salt-laden water, the change in pressure is so drastic that their return must be gradual, calculated. Those who rush back to the surface get the Bends- bubbles form inside your body, and symptoms range from headaches and queasiness, to paralysis and death.

I knew that my good friend Kelly meeting me for 10 days in Thailand would be more than simply two friends re-uniting after a long separation. With one month left in my travels, it was my first step back towards the vague concept I have of home. And coming from the Middle East and then India, it was also a return to a more Western world where American fast food chains aren't aberrations breaking up a foreign landscape, but merely more neon-colored Legos constructing a post-modern metropolis like Bangkok.

I know there are ways to which I've become accustomed, backpacking grooves I've worked myself in to that are incompatible with life in the States. In the first ten minutes of conversation, I got a little reprimanded by Kelly for some of these- describing weather in Celsius, distance with the Metric system. I'm not trying to be pompous, or Anglophilic, I've just thought in these terms, without interruption, for months. At some point I stopped doing the mental conversions back to the American system, at some point this became how I measured and broke down the world around me. And while I know it sounds arrogant, and gets old quick, it's hard to tell any new stories about my life that don't feature phrases like "The second time I was in Munich..." or "This guy I met in Lithuania..."

The ten days of her visit didn't dwell on these things. We were too distracted by the gorgeous architecture of wats (temples), the impossible hue of the water near Ko Phi Phi, hour-long massages that cost less than $5, getting lengthy rides down a mountain and in to town from incredibly kind Thai strangers (if you haven't seen the video on my Facebook page, feel free to check it out). But even if it wasn't foremost in my brain, this incongruity with life back home did creep in. Often.

This first step back, the inching closer to the surface, more than anything it made me realize that I'm not ready. But that's not a negative realization. I touched on something in Chiang-Mai, in one of those gorgeous wats we visited, this one in the middle of a forest compound that had an unavoidable déjà vu to something Colonel Kurtz ran in Apocalypse Now. Most images of the Buddha in temples are the same. They are generally either the meditative or reclining one, usually gold and androgynous, with a nearly robotic smoothness to his body. These are so prevalent because they depict him either near or (in the reclining position) at the exact moment of attaining total nirvana. It is the miracle upon which the dogma of Buddhism is based, why he is worshiped at all. But in the middle of the woods by the large chedi of the Wat Umong forest temple sits the life-sized black statue of the still-very-human fasting Buddha. Each rib is visible, as are veins that weave across the top of them. His eyes, still peaceful, are bulging from his emaciated face- his stomach nearly caved in upon itself. More than any other gold-leafed or jade carved statue in Thailand, more than any image of Christ I saw in my twenty years as a devout Catholic, or in the cathedrals of Europe since, this image permeated me on a spiritual level. Vitally, I think I began to understand. I've complained about my muscle and weight loss on this trip because it eats away at my outward self-image or how I think others will view me, but maybe it just means that I'm on the right track. I've spent nearly four months wandering three continents, but I've spent that same amount of time journeying within myself. It's not that one is more important- they're interlaced. I could have taken this same amount of time and wandered just India, or South America, or even the United States. But I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the same results. It's the comparisons that I needed. I read Dante at the Vatican, faced Mecca on my knees at a mosque in Bahrain as a Muslim man talked me through the steps of prayer in detail, walked through temples and shrines dedicated to Ganesh and Vishnu in New Delhi, and I visited Wat Umong in Chiang-Mai. I know which spoke to me the deepest, which eternal voice resonated most profoundly.

This does not mean I'm now Buddhist. Upon returning to the States, I am planning on reading the holy texts of each major religion, more out of an academic's curiosity than a pilgrim's devotion, and we'll see what decision I make from there, if any. But for now it does underscore to me the fact that I'm not ready to come back yet. And it's not the depression that a return to the American workforce, or to more consistent surroundings will probably bring. It's the fact that right now I feel close to something I cannot define. I said that I touched on something in Chiang-Mai. It did not fully impact me, not to the point that I think it is capable of. And while I can't logically describe it, I feel something beckoning me from Cambodia, from Laos. Of everything I was to see on this trip, Angkor Wat was always the most anticipated. But there's more to Cambodia than a complex of temples, and I need to explore what that is. And I will. Beginning tomorrow when I land in Phnom Penh. A step back away from a more Western world like Thailand. A step back away from home.

One cannot anticipate an epiphany, and the most profound ones happen when totally unexpected. But I feel like I know myself vastly more now than I did four months ago. The dream I had in Berlin about meeting myself, the one in Istanbul that predicted my father's death days later. This is proof to me that I'm gaining a greater wisdom about who I am and what I am capable of, and maybe even that I'm reaching some deeper level of knowledge in the world itself. And in going to some of the rural towns in Cambodia and Laos that I am planning to, I feel like I'm capable of finding there elements of existence that are raw. Not primitive in civilization, but primary in our humanity. I feel like I can just make out the outline of a lesson, maybe my lesson, hanging heavy in the shadows before me.

There's one last step in the Hero's Journey that I think applies to me on this trip.

Approach of the Innermost Cave.

Probably just that lingering only-child self-importance. But just imagine with me, for one second:

What if it's more?

Bangkok, Chiang-Mai and northern Thailand:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2112162&id=35804394&l=e005427d01

Phuket and Ko Phi Phi:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2113946&id=35804394&l=041eb13e8a

A passage from india.

"An endless string of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle." - Sports Illustrated

I was half asleep on the way there. Lyrics from "Fake Empire" by The National tumbled lazily in my head as my bleary eyes looked out the taxi window. I was in my third country in as many days, and had slept less than ten hours during that span. This on top of the general road weariness that I've been feeling since Istanbul.

I paid the small entrance fee for my fourth Delhi sight of the day and robotically took photos of the exterior gates of the Humayun's Tomb. No audio guide; time was short if I was going to squeeze all of Delhi in to a day, so I figured I'd just wikipedia it later. I passed through yet another identical looking gate, this one the West Gate, the modern-day final entrance way. I walked through it distractedly, my gaze still turned up at a rusting light fixture hanging above me. I finally looked straight ahead.

"Holy shit."

Loud. Loud enough for the nearest dozen or so people to turn around and give me judgmental looks. I mumbled a distracted, unaffectionate "sorry" without shifting my locked eyes. It wasn't just its beauty that shocked me, it was its unexpectedness. Its context. Aside from the previous few sights I'd visited, for hours I'd been surrounded by absolutely nothing but decay, in both buildings and bodies. For an afternoon I'd almost forgotten that wonderment was possible.

I've seen a good deal of destitution, especially on this trip. I mentioned the eyeless elderly woman crawling backwards in Lithuania, just one of many penniless beggars in Eastern Europe. Small Egyptian neighborhoods, especially outside of Cairo, were the worst kept I had ever seen. Then came India. In Delhi I thought it was just the scale that shocked me. Poor people packed as far as the smog allows your eyes to see. That every single time my car stopped children pounded on windows for money, or little girls dressed with absurd pigtails and inked-on black freckles did backflips in hopes of charity, their appearance distantly chasing an ideal so forgotten, so anachronistic it seemed like parody. A mother helped her daughter shit on the street in front of a UNESCO Heritage Site because they conceivably have nowhere else to take her. But Jaipur's desperation sunk so much lower. The first five minutes I was there I walked past a dead cow on the sidewalk, its eyes already mostly cannibalized by insects. (Mostly. That was the worst part.) Dozens of people urinating in the middle of the street (I mean middle), countless people with glaucoma so heavy it looked like cotton growing from their sockets, severely crossed-eyes, anorexic limbs twisted backwards: the tolls of malnutrition. Homeless men whose feet and ankles were the purest shade of black from dirt and soot from never owning a pair of sandals that a block away cost less than a dollar. Dozens of people molding flat cakes of manure with their bare hands so they can burn it for warmth. This isn't poverty. This is an economic holocaust.

Seeing all this squalor doesn't break your heart. It slowly drowns it in syrup. All the success and comfort that we strive for as Westerners works backwards, potently resonating as guilt when you have to turn away little girls tapping your legs and arms for a few cents. Men who walk beside you begging nonstop for the length of a full kilometer, in the unfathomable hope that after refusing fifty times, you'll somehow change your mind.Then look up from this to see phenomenal architecture. The Hawa Mahal, Qutb Minar. Jaw-dropping works of exotic beauty, close enough to complexes of squatter's lean-to's that they cast shadows. Or would be able to if the pollution didn't block out most of the sun.

If this sounds like my experience in Egypt, it shouldn't. At all. At no point in India did I ever feel in bodily danger. These people did not want to see me injured, maimed, dead. Their never-ending insistence, the flocks of dozens of potential cabbies my white face attracts when it steps out from the train station- it is all borne of need. These people need to survive and have very few realistic options. And despite all this tragedy, despite the weight of my sodden conscience over our economic divide, the occasional episode comes along to sweep my mind away, albeit temporarily.

I entered the Gandhi Smriti, the house in which Gandhi spent his final days and that contains the courtyard in which he was assassinated, rolled my eyes and sighed. Schoolchildren. Hundreds of them. Visit a museum at the same time as them and you'll be stuck there for hours, or at least so annoyed that you skip half the sights just to avoid them. Wandering the hallways meant I had to compact myself and tiptoe past a whole line of them. Just about all the boys turned their heads as I did this and around forty of them broke off from the end of this line to start following me around. When I hit a dead end, they cornered me.

The bravest one approached me timidly.

"Picture?"

"You.... want a picture..... with me?"

Bobbleheads can't nod that fast. And he handed his cell phone/camera to a friend, and several other boys slyly jumped in too. Not just this picture, but the seven or eight more that I was asked to take before I finally had to tear myself away. Back at Humayan's Tomb, the sight that blew me away to the point of public profanity, I encountered another battalion of schoolchildren, this one from an all-girls high school. I left the main chamber where the symbolic coffin lies to go into a side room that, it turns out, held nothing. I heard a clamor behind me and saw that fifty or so of these girls had evidently picked me over the dead famous emperor. The echoes of their giggling and catcalls filled the monument with a deafening roar that brought their less-than-amused old chaperon running, waving her walking stick in anger. Since this is a long post to write, I just took a break to grab dinner at a local open kitchen. The nine year old boy that brought me the menu stared at me for the next ten minutes, and shyly scurried away gushing when I simply asked his name. All this to say, even if it's for a few seconds, even if it's across the world, and for reasons I don't totally understand... it's pretty fun to be a rock star.

And it's not just these moments of flattery. Though I talked to them only briefly in my two day stay (been busy with sightseeing, errands, photo albums, blog posts), I could feel such incredible warmth from Arvind and Shoma, the 40-something couple that ran my small homestay in Jaipur. A genuine desire to know me and hear about what I had to say, what I had to talk about, as well as the others staying within these four rooms. I didn't just sign the typical guestbook with the necessary info. Shoma asked me tonight to write in a personal notebook, where travelers leave their well-wishes, the url's for their blogs so she can follow them long after they've stopped walking down the alleyway from Purohit Ji Ka Bagh, thru the gate and up the steps to the Explorer's Nest. The two of them have never been out of India, but in this way, yeah. They have.

Of everywhere that I told people I was traveling to on this trip, India was the place that the most people were jealous of, that they were dying to go. That confused me, I didn't understand the common thread, why that stood out over 29 other countries, especially when it wasn't even in my top five. My best guess is that it's the lure of the beautiful unknown. For all the current world tension the divide has created, the roots of Islam and Christianity aren't that different from an outsider's perspective. Hinduism on the other hand is magnificently rich, infinitely fascinating, and a total world apart from the ideology that most of the West is used to. The people that come back from India raving about the land, having experienced something profound, my guess is they've left their known world completely behind, they've wandered around this country giving it the depth and attention that it deserves, but doesn't often receive. Not the six days I can spare, not the two weeks you can get off work, but at least two or three months. You cannot attain any desired epiphanies by visitation, but by immersion. Life can only truly change via doorways, not windows.I am in India long enough only to be an observer, not a participant. The cows wandering the streets still attract my attention and even though they're just about everywhere, I get a jolt with each swastika I see, even if they only still wish its ancient, original meaning of good luck and protection. The doorway I'm walking through is not India, but rather the column up top to your right. My overall journey is the opportunity for change, something long enough that it has the capacity to shape my life. My season of wet cement. Some of the first words I wrote on this blog were that I preferred microcosms, not mosaics. I didn't realize that one can breed the other. Moscow, Manchester, Omaha Beach, Valencia, the Isle of Skye, Berlin, Amman... so many others, and now Delhi, Jaipur, Agra. For now crystal shards still settling, shifting in the fluid mortar. Still unsure of the final pattern. Not ready for display yet.

Soon.


Delhi:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2110582&id=35804394&l=c2834e4f17

Jaipur and Agra:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2111247&id=35804394&l=8899150aaf

Two weeks notice.

I was eight years old when I met my father.

He was not a bad father, not intentionally, not when we were speaking. This assessment may be cutting him a bit too much slack, a halo effect in reverse, but I can only assume that learning how to be a father for the first time at age 57 is not easy. Certainly not when your arthritis keeps you from playing basketball with your son with any agility. Certainly not when you're playing a video game for the first time with a child that is half a century younger than you.

To clarify, "when we were speaking" means from that day in 1992 to late 2002. We bonded mostly over court-ordered weekend visits, Dodgers, Kings, and Lakers games, buckets of balls at the Wilshire Country Club's driving range and cups of gazpacho in its clubhouse. These things I remember clearly. But for the life of me, I can't recall just what the fuck happened to start our silence, the one that would rob us both of seven years of one another's lives.

That's actually a lie. I remember quite clearly what it was, but not why it had to happen that way. The child of parents who are no longer together, I lived holidays twice. In this decisive case, it was Thanksgiving, and I was 19. I'd just been initiated in to my fraternity, just filmed my TV-MA episode of Dismissed, and to say I was cocky as shit would be a complimentary understatement. I spent the afternoon of Thanksgiving at the house of one of my mother's friends, got wasted before the meal began with that friend's son, and drank a few more glasses of wine at the table on top of that. Then I got behind the wheel of my car, maybe triple the legal limit, and drove drunk at 19 years old the 45 minutes up to Thousand Oaks on one of the biggest police checkpoint days of the year. I did this idiotic act so I could see my father on Thanksgiving. I got there at 7pm. He had already gone to sleep. And this was despite the fact that I'd phoned when I was leaving so they'd know I was on my way. That's when I stopped talking to him. The five minutes I saw of him early the next morning before I had to rush back to my Black Friday retail job in Orange County would be the last that I cared to see of him. But considering that Christmas came and went without so much as a phone call from him, the decision was evidently mutual. That was the part that I never understood. Never will. But now I no longer care to.

For six and a half years after that day, I couldn't think of any positive memory of my father. I didn't want to. It was easier to vilify him, to listen to "Styrofoam Plates" by Death Cab for Cutie, convinced that that song epitomized how I would feel when I found out he died. This morning is when that moment happened. And sitting in my hostel in Delhi, I just re-read the lyrics to that song and nearly threw up, literally sick that I had let such vitriol ferment within me for so long.

Those six and a half years of silence ended not today with his death, but in June, less than two months before I left for this trip. But the truce that ended it was asymmetrical, because it had come too late. When I walked in to the convalescent center that was now my father's home he had been wheelchair-ridden for over a year by a series of strokes. His extreme dementia (think severe Alzheimer's meets cerebral palsy) left him incapable of speech other than gurgles and moans, left his body folded in upon itself like melted plastic, left a once athletic and later a stout 260 pound frame withered down to about 140. His femurs and forearms were like Q-tips, and on my first visit his own sneeze prompted a look of absolute terror in his eyes. That was how deteriorated his mind was at times.

It took until my third visit to tell him that I forgave him. I refused to say it unless I meant it, until I was sure that I did so out of true understanding and not simple pity. But I did forgive him. Because he was no longer an abstract to me. No longer hubris personified..... he was just human all along. He fucked up, a lot, and put my mother through deep, deep shit, multiple times. It was out of selfishness, but more importantly it was out of weakness. And I saw that in some ways, he was frail long before the illnesses overcame him. But that's what human beings are. We are weak, we give in to temptation and our id, and put ourselves in situations where we'll act first and just get around to worrying about the consequences later. But if we expect forgiveness from others, we too have to be forgiving.

My entire life, it's been really difficult for me to accept that I was one of those worry-about-it-later consequences. That in a world where fidelity is universal and lovers do not lie to one another- that in this perfect world, I would never have been born. I still don't think that I have dealt with this properly, because I have a recurring recklessness borne of the inescapable feeling that since I shouldn't be here to begin with, I'm really just playing with house money. That's a big reason why I'm typing this from a hostel in Delhi and not from my old apartment in Los Angeles. And ironically why I'll be over here, missing his funeral, just as I missed the funeral of my grandmother (his mother) while I was in Australia. The compass needle and the damage done.

For years I always pictured myself absent from my father's funeral. But never once did I think that I'd want to be there and simply could not. I feel..... I can't describe how I really feel, awful is too weak of a word (maybe abhorred?)..... that I won't be there. But not because I needed to say goodbye. I was able to do that before I left, and to achieve the inner peace and closure that had eluded me for so many years. And the email my cousin sent me that announced my father's death came not as a surprise. Really it was two weeks overdue.

The last post I wrote, the letter to my friends, was in a very different tone than any of my other entries. This was because of the reasons that I expressed within it, and because it came at a time in my travels when the road felt interminable, when I saw myself standing on a bridge so long that I could not see either bank, neither its beginning nor its end. The bridge itself was the only thing that existed, and land on either side was merely an assumption and not a certainty. But the bigger reason that I wrote it, the one I didn't talk about, was that I had had several nightmares that morning. Ones extremely vivid, like negative exposures of the one in Berlin, and they affected me to a point that I was convinced that they weren't just dreams. For reasons of sanity I'm hesitant to say that I was seeing the future, but I awoke convinced I was seeing reality that just had not happened yet.

The last dream, the one that woke me up. I was in a car with someone that I used to feel was maybe my best friend in the world, but who now I haven't spoken to in months. We arrived at the care center to visit my father, and were sent to a theatre that served as a waiting room where an old film was playing. I left her there to find out what was taking so long, left to find where my father was. As I wandered corridors, a man in a Fedora came with me, his face covered in the shadow his hat cast, his footsteps silent though I didn't realize why. We wandered around and around, hallways in basements that never existed, corridors that led to identical corridors. I tried to go back to the theatre to find my friend but got just as lost, and I realized that I would never see that person again, that our bond was lost for good. I turned back to my initial task, an increasing desperation to see my father, and all this time the man glided along with me. I turned to him for help and saw the face of my father as he raised his head. I alone spoke.

"You're here. That means you're not with your body."

His face was placid, but vitally it was less than solid. His feet hovered above the ground.

"It's because you're already---"

I woke.

Miguel wrote me the email less than two weeks later. And while I wasn't looking for it constantly during that time, I knew without a doubt that my return flight to Los Angeles on December 14 would be too late.

"You should stay a full week [before coming back to Pennsylvania], that way you can see your father a few times," my mother wrote as we planned out the itinerary of my return. I realized oddly that that had never even crossed my mind. How can something be a priority when it's not even an option?

I won't get to say goodbye at his funeral. But I said before that wasn't the part that upset me. Because I had already said goodbye, more in fact.

On my next to last visit with my father, I was extremely choked up. Having already spoken my forgiveness, there was one thing I hadn't expressed yet. One more resurrected truth left to tell. Which is silly really, because anything you say to a person in a vegetative state is really for your own benefit, not theirs. We'd made eye contact a few times over the course of my series of visits, and one was prolonged enough that I thought he might have started to recognize me. This had been the highlight in the rekindling of relations with my father so far. The best I could bring myself to hope for. For my own benefit, for the final release of my burden, I knew I had one more thing to say. Holding his hand, I leaned over and kissed his sunken, overly smooth cheek, and then whispered slowly in his ear, enunciating each syllable.

"Dad. It's Joshua. It's your son. Joshua. I want you to know, Dad...... I love you. It's Joshua. Your son. I love you, Dad."

It was on the first time that I said it, not the second, that the limp hand I was holding seized firm, with a ghost strength that had not existed in years. It gripped mine for ten seconds, more, I didn't think to count. And as I moved away from his ear and sat back down, our eyes held contact again for a short while before he returned to staring in to the nothingness of the calm-colored wall.

Saying goodbye to my father before I left was possibly the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. Because I wasn't just saying it for my own sake anymore. I can't be at his funeral on Monday, which tears me up to think about. But I can always live with the knowledge that the peace of mind I feel, the absence of animosity... it's mutual. I didn't just get to say the goodbye that I wanted to say to my father. We were able to say goodbye to each other.


Kenneth William Woods
10.24.1934 - 11.11.2009


---------

(post-script) This is probably too much information for a lot of people, but writing this has been extremely cathartic. I will not be at my father's funeral to give his eulogy, so in this way at least I feel I'm paying tribute to him in another way. Admittedly it is not a glowing one, but an honest one (and yes, the dream happened, exactly as I wrote it). Another reason to write this is that a few people have given me the honor of telling me that my writing has helped them. In trying to be open about something so personal, I hope that maybe others who relate to a bit of my emotions or my experience in this entry can be helped a bit by it.