I Mimic Sibelius in a Desperate Attempt: Hannah Kirsch, Will You Love Me? I'll Throw in a Draft Pick.

I spent much of my free evening in Tallinn reading, not schmoozing, or picking up girls, or going to strip clubs (maybe in Riga, nos vemos). At my hostel happened to be a copy of a recent trip Paul Theroux took, the guy who wrote that Harrison Ford-River Phoenix movie in...Mexico, was it? One of them thar countries. The first part basically covered ground I had covered. Unfortunately, a 24-year-old as unconnected as I was could not meet Orhan Pamuk, but I took notice of the presentation of Romania and Hungary as uniquely depressed places. I like the former, not so much the latter (admittedly, I've only been to Budapest), but the presentation of these countries seemed very out of touch. Also, the handling of certain political questions seemed to be a little amateur.
I have not spent much time in the Baltics. I have a wireless connection on a bus (!) from Tallinn to Riga. I also have an electrical outlet, so after I get through this dreary business of writing, a world of possibilities will open up. Shall I conquer the world in my usual guise as Albania in Civilization IV? Be frustrated at the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV? Be aroused at whatever the Internet has come up with to make the Sims 3 more sexual in the month since it's been released? I have four hours to Riga. On a video game note, I will say that I appreciate GTA IV for its focus on the Balkans, although with a name like Bellic for the main character I would have expected him to be Albanian (the name isn't possible in Serbo-Croatian but is in Albanian). Anyways, go Balkans.
My first experience round these here parts was in Warsaw. Undone by a Swissair flight on which I watched Inside Man twice (Albania!) and slept none, I ended up spending my one day kind of as a vague translator for a Russian girl named Nastya who made food for grocery stores and a dude from Schenectady, NY, who, although I didn't bring up the subject, was clearly in Poland at the displeasure of many (how so lucky). The Russian girl really only spoke French and Russian, both in which I am passable. Though I was deadset on taking the bus to Vilnius, I noticed a strange phenomenon which I've noticed other places. Being the guy who understands the girl, speaks the same language despite being from a different country, you'd think it would work, but, eh, not so much. I really don't understand what is that's alluring about being a monolingual putz, but it seems to work more than whatever it is that I do. Yeah, so, we're having lunch for three, we're speaking in a language completely unintelligble to one member of the table, and you want him? Do you think I'm also Russian? No, no! Cuban! Spanish! German! Czech! Come on, I just learned it for kicks!
I went to Lithuania next. Passed some time in Druskininkai, which has a park I remember from teenagerhood as being labeled StalinWorld. A disappointment. There were some statues, some buildings recreated to mimic Soviet life, but honestly, if you've been to many of the free parks and or cities that haven't really cared to change their outlook from Leninism/Marxism to capitalism, it was a severe disappointment. Unless you have a thing for obscure Communists from the World War I era in Lithuania. The souvenir stands themselves were even disappointing. Go to Kiev, pick up your medal signifying how you yourself occupied Kuban or the Crimea as a Nazi soldier in WWII and be happy.
One thing that time as a limiting factor has not allowed me to investigate is the possibility of souvenirs that would intrigue me. I took a ferry to Helsinki yesterday. Honestly, I think people who collect action figures are lame. If you have a figurine of Spiderman wearing the uniform of all 30 MLB teams, well, you know what should happen. But I was vaguely interested in the notion of action figures from the Kalevala, Finland's national epic. Especially in the crossover sense. I don't own a Scooby Doo action figure, but I sure would buy it, if I could set up a situation in which Scooby Doo stole the Sampo and was attacked by the forces of Pohjola. Same with Estonia, man. Where were the Aarvo Part action figures? I'm an advocate of unorthodox things, so I would have crafted myself a figurine of Aarvo Part conducting his own symphony from a Segway. But, no. You just sell matryoshka dolls, Estonia. With football players instead of babushki. And you don't even have the cunning yet to paint yourself a Brett Favre Viking matryoshka (he's totally coming back)? Man.
I should cover somewhat interactions with people. Because I am a man of limited Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and limited time to go to bars, I have more interacted with the various owners of shawarma stands and doner kebabs, that is, Middle Easterners. In Poland, I was offered the treasure of going whoring with a guy who promised girls that, for 100 zlotych ($35) would do anything in an hour. Real Polish girls. Not a bad price. As I write here, I entertain notions of spending my night in a Riga strip club. I've never had a lap dance. And sure, I'm curious. No morality issues. It's my second to last night of freedom, so why not?
Riga sounds really exciting. How could a city whose main attractions are shooting ranges, strip clubs, and no less than 3 Central Asian restaurants not be? Ta'al ma'ani, nosotros vamos a descrubrir Riga esta noche.

Abstinence: My Human-Sized Condom Against Pain

On the lack of updates: I don't know why, really. But I'm back. Currently in Vilnius. Expect something on the Baltic states in a few days.

Maybe it's inappropriate, but one way I look at religion is in computer terms. I grew up an Episcopalian, baptized a Roman Catholic, and know something of most common religions. To me, Western Christianity is a PC, Orthodoxy a Mac. The latter is shiny, all about aesthetic value, but as a practical way to God, I don't know what looking at a bunch of pictures of saints I've never heard of in Greek is going to get me to Christ. Evangelism is Windows Vista, this unfortunate familiar-seeming abomination that hassles you all the time asking for administrator privileges you should already have.
I've run into evangelicals in almost every country I've been to. In Central America, one conspicuous thing is the number of menorahs painted on buildings and other explicit connections to Judaism. In the smallest towns of Guatemala, one finds Restorante Shalom, Cafe de Ahava, what have you. It's really odd. Ask the locals, to them, they're symbols of Christianity. No, dudes, they're Jewish. Pretty exclusively. Peace to us is paz, pax, never shalom. I climbed a volcano, Izalco, in El Salvador. Unfortunately, a German and I were the only solo travellers. The twenty other people were a Christian group from the University of Texas-Austin doing some do-gooder bollocks. I was among the trailers in our hiking group, and some chick fell down. Obviously, I had to stop, but this was one of the situations where I wished I could've used my Get Out of Common Decency and Chivalry Free Pass, as I had to be subjected to these people praying to Jesus for a minor sprain to be healed and for this girl to be able to make it up this volcano. Jesus is supposed to be answering my prayers about getting me laid and bringing back basketball to Seattle, you dicks with minor trifles. In Teotihuacan, there was a group of American teenage kids. American teenagers are one of those groups that you don't want to associate with, like cannibals in Irian Jaya or such, so I asked one of their Mexican "buddies" what was going on. They were a group called 24/7, and they were from Colorado Springs. That says everything.
Or maybe it doesn't to you, fair enough. They were a group shielding Christianity under the cloak of family values. How can you hate families and morality, you know? I felt really bad for the Mexicans who were getting sucked into this web of crap (evangelism is fast on the rise all over Central America). Also, Evangelical Christians: you're an embarrassment to our faith. The following is how I see you people.
"Well, Mr. Popeil, we're offering salvation for just three easy payments of 9.99." "Wow, what a deal." "And wait there's more, we're throwing in the Amazing Pasta Cooker, a $70 value, for free. And you can try, money guaranteed." "Well, you've really sold" "And we've got some knives here we're adding to the package, just like the ones used in the Battle of Sekigahara, only now you dumb suburbanites get to use them to cut pork rump!" "Terrific!"
On that matter, you really want to sell the New Testament, you've already gone so low, and you've already re-written it to a large extent in the form of heretical "editions," why don't you just take a page from your beloved mass media and re-write the whole doggone thing. There are so many ways you can take this. Does anybody care about the Gospel of Matthew, anyways? Wouldn't it be better as "CSI: Jerusalem?" And Christianity, we'd be doing ourselves a favor and our beloved Republican party one too if we just wrote new parables, "The Parable of the Fallen Ensign," "The Parable of the Appalachian Trail Hiker," to explain how Republican politicians' behavior is saved by Christ's death. I'm all for a postmodern re-interpretation where Jesus' wanderings predict future sites of the best shawarma in the Holy Land, or Isratine (tine like teen, I think it would make things more peaceful if these people's country sounded like Ovaltine) as I call it.
One time in Yemen, where apostasy and proselytzation are more serious crimes than murder, I ran across a girl. She was cute, studying Arabic, from Virginia. Seemed like there was potential. But at one point, she asked me "What team are you on?" Are you asking me if I'm gay? My favorite sports team? The Seahawks, but I kept analyzing the question. Do you mean it in the ridiculously stupid way that places like Office Depot consider their peon college student employees who clearly hate their jobs part of a team? Well, it's a stretch, but I'll tell you what company I work for. Nope, not what you mean, ese, um, Team America? "No, what missionary group are you with." And we're done. It amazed me to see these people talking relatively openly about their efforts to convert Muslims, many of which had taken years, among not necessarily friendly company.
Muslims, you're not that much better. Two particular attempts at conversion stand out in particular. One is really common. It's the "We've got Noah, Abraham, Moses, Isaac, Ishmael, Jesus, Mary, Joseph...why can't you just add Muhammad, it's just one more guy" approach. This smacks of some NBA GM trying to sneak a player into a deal who might have big implications for the team he's trading with, "Well, we're giving you all these players, just take him, you can put him at the end of the bench, not worry about him, you've still got Jesus and those other guys, still the same good team." Doesn't really work. People in Yemen didn't understand a thing which is fundamental to their society. Religion is tribal. Everybody in Yemen is a Muslim because their mother and father and tribe is. So my tribe is Christian. All of my family is Christian. They wouldn't approve of conversion. Most of the girls I've dated wouldn't. My friends wouldn't care so much, but they'd be cautious. Certainly there are employers (you know) who would care.
The second, and singular approach that I'll cover is one hilariously bestowed on me by a Sudanese born New York resident who had attended a junior college in Denver. He had come to Yemen to marry a girl from village (as one friend I had described it, the perks of dating these girls included "placing their hands over the buttons of a cell phone and teaching them how it works"). His argument was the polygamy approach. I personally have no problem with polygamy. But his argument was great. It involved this mythical city called Atlanta, Georgia. I knew of an Atlanta, Georgia, where I had dated a girl from Georgia Tech, a school which had maybe 30,000 students, 70% of which were males. So, at least 21,000 guys. And this Atlanta, I knew from statistics to have a population of 440,000 (city-approximated). So, assuming that the guys from Georgia Tech were the only guys in the whole city, roughly 420,000 to 20,000 or 21 to 1. But this guy, who had lived in America, for God's sake, told me of the problems of this Atlanta, where there were 30 females for every male. Well, by Jove, Islam, which generally allows four wives to a man, isn't doing enough! He admitted he'd only read statistics on Atlanta, but in Denver, where he had lived, it was about 8 to 1. Been there too, dude. I mean, I get it, a lot of American guys really look like chicks with their long hippy hair and nose piercings. But polygamy and me taking a couple of effete males as concubines to two real women wives isn't going to solve any problems.

Credit to Ryan Westbrook

I’ve done about a 2,000 mile day trip. Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, has all of one current operating hostels and it’s booked. Apparently, there are only buses out of this town on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. As I have neither camping gear nor gumption to spend another night homeless, or really to just hang out around here until Monday, so with the bus I go.

The bus ride, along the Alaska Highway, is one of those scenic drives that one’s supposed to take in one’s life. I went from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse, and will subsequently go back. It was a Nazi wildlife enthusiast’s dream trip: like eight bears, ten buffalo, a couple moose including one adorably wading through a creek, some big horn sheep, zero Jews or Gypsies. Lots of Germans. My book says there’s a direct flight from the Frankfurt Flughafen. There are a fair amount of tourists here, and since this Starbucks in which I am sitting is obviously an excellent sample size from which to generalize about the population, no First Nations/Indians/whatever. That’s been one odd thing about Canada, dealing with the reality that there are still Native Americans of the kind that doesn’t embarrass itself in the World Series every twenty years or so. They’re kind of poor, some of them were harassing people in the Edmonton Greyhound station, but I guess I wasn’t that intimated since they’ve been so marginalized in caricatures like Chief Wahoo or Ike the Illini. I can’t really think of them as the vicious crime lords that my childhood taught me to think of Gypsies/Roma as. Somehow I think my favorite genre as a four-year-old reading was cautionary tales about Gypsies babynapping; although, the only titles I remember reading around that time were Hardy Boys; perhaps there was a hidden meaning.

The bus ride featured characters, though not of the frightening decaying sort that fill up the buses on U.S. Greyhound buses. The most audacious character could be described as an over-the-hill Metis (Canadian for “mestizo”) poor man’s Rashida Jones. Unfortunately, she was around 40 and well, a mentally retarded female. She lifted her arms up towards the bus ventilation system to pray to Jesus to see “the biggest grizzly bear ever,” that aside from her various shouts about this dream to people other than Christ on the bus. Any animal was met by childlike glee and perhaps her best moments were encouraging people seated next to her to use her torn, beat-up pillow, which she foisted upon the seat next to any person who would have it, followed by continuous demands that they actually use it. She had a kind of cute flirtation with this First Nations guy in the seat in front of me. He was a rugged dude, in his late forties, seemed clearly unmarried, and at first seemed miffed by her innocuous and often repetitive questions. He clearly didn’t want that ratty old pillow either. But, thing was, she wasn’t that bad for him, and as I imagined it in my head there was some dilemma in his head about the her being completely slow vs. relatively attractive for what he could get. As the bus trip progressed, he played along more with her vacuous frivolities, “let me take a picture of you…you me…me you! Yay!” “Let’s sit next to each other and talk about ponies!” But he got off at Watson Lake, and got none.

Apparently there were like some foreign girls on the bus, foreign girls traveling alone, even. This is usually something I like, but I didn’t notice anything outstanding, although I did eventually help out the bewildered Chinese tourist who didn’t seem to understand why people were going into a building that clearly stated “restaurant.” They were about my age. At 5:30 AM, I was entrenched on the couch of the lobby of this hostel (more just like a house’s living room, from which I would eventually be dismissed for lack of room at 7:00 AM), and one of the foreign (?) girls from the bus showed up outside the hostel. I could have helped, but I was pretty tired and didn’t want to go outside, and made one of those what I’m told are unfortunate decisions. Yeah, if she were hot, I’d totally go out and help her and go search for actual accommodations, but this is not the case, so screw it, I’ll take my chances on my own. There are times when you’re willing to be everybody’s hero, and there are times when you’re only willing to be the hot girl’s hero. I guess that puts me on the fringes of actually being a nice guy, but whatevs.

So, I’ll walk around Whitehorse a tad, and go back to Dawson Creek today. I have another bus possibly filled with foreign travelers. I’ll end up back in Edmonton, maybe Vancouver, heck maybe back in Saskatchewan. Could end up going to Yellowknife too. I have a 20 hour bus ride to make that decision. Since Saskatchewan has been glossed over, let me state my opinion about it and again perhaps reflect what I’m stupidly focusing energy on. I thought Winnipeg was bad, but dang, Saskatchewan is the Unfortunate Female Piercing Capital of the World. So many people my age had crappy piercings and stupid tattoos. It’s my stated belief that any piercing save the ear looks really terrible, unless it’s a cultural thing (you’re good, South Asia). And don’t overdo it on the ear, ladies. I don’t want a chip a tooth nibbling that area. It was just, every coffee bar, oh, you look cute, maybe you’re about a 0.8 on the (Anne) Hathaway scale, but what is that thing on your nose, down to 0.3. I want to go to a costume shop, gray up my hair, put on tattered clothes, and nail my old timey prospector impersonation and start making like it’s 1849 on some of these women. I learned how to pan for gold as a child, I think. Getting these piercings takes like what, three hours? Making a comparison for which I also have no idea the real time value, girls, couldn’t you have just baked a meatloaf or something? You needed the piercing? That bored in Saskatoon? Nobody’s told you about shopping?

Next post:

I get right angry about religion, so maybe something on that. I’m still traveling, interesting things may happen. Who knows.

The Old Nightstick in the Balls Trick

Ukraine's most disturbing problem is its laughable collection of Beagle Boys impersonators and hapless beer-seeking criminals known by the peculiar Russian word of "politseiskiy." Go out to a cafe with your dark-skinned Arab friends and faster than you can say hick Shoney's in the middle of Florida, they'll be outside of that cafe, with their demands for dokumentiy and pivo ready. Well, yeah, sure that's a valid visa, but well, um, everybody knows that that one chick guard, what's her name, bro, like Alexandra Sergeyevna, she totally stuffs passports down her pants, and well, I don't smell her. Yeah, brat', that distinct flavor of rhubarb and allergy medicine does not reek from this passport. You must have snuck in illegally.

I walk around. Pace about. Lollygag, even. Don't ever do this in Ukraine. Earlier this same day, I had been bounced from a bookstore. By a seventy-year-old woman. I was browsing, just looking. They didn't understand the concept, and saw that my Russian was faltering. I knew the two or three able-bodied menfolk in the city were being at that moment called to remove me to the leper's colony or local Pale of Settlement; "you don't know Russian, how can you read?"

Um, you have, like, some books in English? I walk around, and the babushka Cheka is on me. For ten minutes our game of walking speedily through aisles continue as I hope one of them passes out and I can actually leisurely browse the book shop. But, alas, they win. Really, you get paid to do this? You bounce people at a goldurn bookstore? Or is this just a pregame for a highly competitive night of the Soviet equivalent of bingo?

At the bus station in N(M)ikolae(yi)v, I buy a ticket for a bus departing soon. I want a soda, but nothing's open. So I am committing the aforementioned crime of walking without committing to a destination. A guy who could partake in a furry convention as Hooch from Turner and Hooch without even getting into costume comes up to me. He's "oxrana," or security, which means he holds a job which doesn't even have a Paul Blart figure to rally around. He yells at me loudly, convinced that I speak awesome Russian. I don't. He gets more mad. What am I doing out of the Pale of Non-Russian Speakers? Did the Tsarevich give me a permit? Oh, let's go in my beat up Lada to settle this.

This fifty-something man has a rape-crazy face. He's so pissed, anything could go. Could he in some sort of messianic way turn the local (Southern) Bug River into urine and drown me in it. At 11:30 PM in a surreal outremonde, I'm not ruling it out. Stranger danger. Oh, you want to go behind that bus, do you, sir? I've committed a crime, I don't know what it is, but I'm sure not going to fall for various invitations to date rape. I'm being pretty uppity, I guess. This is why within five seconds this dude's night stick whacks the heck out of my testicles. Shit's getting serious. For a few seconds, I stand there stunned at what has happened, before losing any sense of speaking Russian and going on a long cursing spree brought to a climax by me putting two middle fingers within inches of his eyeballs. The nightstick made a dramatic return, this time positioned to club my head. The people who are with my bus company with whom I purchased tickets are like "Get on the bus, get on the bus." I agree and do so. I spent the night alert, paranoid about the possibility that this guy had radioed ahead. At 1:00 AM, we stop as a policeman pulls our driver off the bus. Oh shit, I think. I look at the unmarked over-the-counter sleep medication I have in my bag, it's as good as opium here. After this false alarm, I took some of the sleep medication, and dispensed the rest in an outhouse in a place called Yuzhno-Ukrains'k.

I am a victim of awkward pacing-related bus cop brutality. Tizkorni, b'vakasha.

The Great Trans-Siberian Pillowcase Robbery

Like Billy the Kid, various rivals of Deputy Dog, and others, I am great thief of the frontier. My frontier is the Russian Far East. In 2005, I undertook to achieve the single greatest linens heist in Russian train history. Story below.

Former Soviet chairman Leonid Brezhnev was a pioneer in AIDS and STD’s prevention. Before Jacob Zuma and Yahya Jammeh had ever heard of thoroughly attacking those pores with a loofah and green goop, Brezhnev knew how to stop venereal diseases. The obscure Georgian scientist Nikoloz Bradzinashvili had convinced Chairman Brezhnev that STD’s really existed in the polluted minds of the female species. Relying on knowledge that the great Kazan cooties scare of 1957 had come purely from the imagination, according to Soviet psychologists, he realized that other plagues involving touching girls also came from this mind, which he had heard was located in the head. Brezhnev, a hypochondriac of epic proportions who had been hospitalized six months for NBA Fever forty years before the first reported American case, used Bradzinashvili’s cure-all: the head-condom.

Or, a pillow case.

Brezhnev being the powerful man that he was, that pillow case got put on the heads of numerous personages of note in the 70’s. Charo, Ryan O’Neal, The Bear from BJ and the Bear or maybe even both. A classic TV fan, he had had the car from My Mother the Car imported from the States to cross off number 2 on his MILF’s list. Brezhnev, who had received immortality several times thanks to his various Dungeons and Dragons avatars, eventually retired from public life to ride the rails. At a spry 75, his application for employment was conspicuous, since it would have made him the oldest man in the Soviet Union by 22 years. So, with a couple of A’s the provodnitsa or cabin attendant Leonida Stalineva Brezhneva was invented. A dress was all that was necessary to pull off the switcheroo, as Brezhnev’s 1973 General Order on the Appearance of Babushkas helped him out. Using a technology later used by Steve Urkel on Family Matters, Brezhnev made all women of forty or older enter a machine that changed their appearance to Brezhnev’s second favorite noctural companion, himself.

Given freedom of movement, Brezhnev rode the Trans-Siberian allowing him to pursue lifelong pastimes. Extorting money from drunken vomiting Belgians for breakfast, orgies with Mongolian smugglers for lunch, and twittering about his Virgin Lands Program for dinner. With him as always was his trusty pillowcase to keep the carnal scurvies away.

I met provodnitsa Brezhneva on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in July 2005. Not speaking a word of English and gifted with that melodic yell of all Russian senior femizens, she hated my Yankee tuckus from the start. At first, I didn’t see much of her. Reports were she was in the midst of a .135 10-game slump and wasn’t seeing many passengers off to Nizhny Novgorod. A luddite, she didn’t know my extensive online reputation, and that I desired her pillowcase.

Getting it was a trick. I knew performing a sex act on a former Soviet leader would not look good vis-à-vis my groundroots alternate historical campaign to represent the state of West Cuba in the Confederate Congress. Remembering Brezhnev’s hypochondriac past, I went to the provodnitsa’s room and told her that I had a medikalnyy diseasovich. I didn’t speak Russian. Stunned and sympathetic, Brezhnev knew that loss of limbs would soon follow this queer case of leprosy. He left the cabin to get me the only thing which could revive my health: spaghetti with mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together with a dash of smetana (sour cream). Taking the pillowcase while I could and surviving my trial of error, I emitted a faint do svidanya as I left Brezhnev’s company.

The Russian-Mongolian border is at a town called Naushki. Some highlights of my trip were a great mural in Krasnoyarsk’s train station, not seeing Lake Baikal because of incliment weather, and just being in Ulaan-Ude. Naushki was a dump. Brezhnev entered my cabin to begin the border proceedings and the game of strip Hungry Hungry Hippos which would see which passengers would make it to Mongolia. My team, Dynamo Long Beach beat Lokomotiv Johannesburg by a pair of underwood to some botched boob jobs. But Brezhnev knew what I had done. I had stolen the pillowcase, that one. The Russian border guards were altered, “Thief! American! American!” I was on the precipice. Nervously fingering through my dictionary for words like extortion, blackmail, and bribery, and probably saying some ethnic slurs against Tajiks instead, I defended myself. Brezhnev presented an ultimatum. I was going to Naushki Prison.

Brezhnev had an advantage. He knew that the Virgin Lands Program and Soviet Russia’s great power had so crippled the economy that money did not exist. He knew this from his American Internet friends, a group of twelve-year old boys from Enid, OK, who told him of their various currency switches from pogs to Pokemon cards to Yugi-O cards. He gave me an out. I could pay money for the pillowcase. He set his price. Three hundred rubles. $10 for an old, ratty Soviet pillowcase in a world where status was determined by card games would be too much for an American traveler. I could see Brezhnev not recognizing me as a human being, just a head-condom and a torso. He waited for me to ask how many Jigglypuffs were there to the long-dead ruble these-a-days.

I saw the most beautiful sunset in my life in Mongolia that night. Imagine this story dramatically ending by government soldiers carelessly putting away that precious pillowcase in a storage cabinet in an Orange County retirement community.

Somebody, please, buy Leonid Brezhnev an I-Phone with Internet access. I don’t want to see him sell his silicon implants for $2 because, as is the case, he believes that money went obsolete in 1988 in the same year as went obsolete the vagina. Help a tovarish out, yo.

Ms. Dushku, Your Country Isn't So Bad

I was a huge fan of the first Survivor so much so that I actually watched the season finale of that show in a hospital. Plug. A character on that show named Dr. Sean had this strategy for voting people out alphabetically based on their first lines, and like Branch Rickey integrated the major leagues, I too have integrated that into my life. It has kind of hampered my social life to have every meal be a complex process of eating 26 food products starting with each subsequent letter of the alphabet (33 on my trips to Russia, thank God I don't play that Cambodia game). Especially frustrating is what to do with "x." Do I wait 20 minutes for the takeout Chinese, or do I do the lazy man's way, which is whipping up some SPAM, putting it on a frying pan, adding a sauce with a splash of Red Bull and a little bit of spray-on Right Guard Extreme deodorant so it can be Xtreme SPAM. Life's dilemmas. This is just a ridiculous way of saying I'm going to talk about Albania.

You might know it as Shqiperia, if you could take your eyes off my asymmetric and misshapen nipples down towards my pants, no, not there, honey, I see you likey, but a little to my left, and read it on my pants. I'm a fan. Albania's a nice place. Tirana, the capital, is crossed by the Lada River, and as always, I faced that big decision we all face when crossing rivers, whether to ford the river or caulk the wagon. I caulked the hell out of that shit and lost only 15 pounds of pemmican. On the south side is the Blloku, the former Communist/Stalinist/Maoist...wait, shit all those people are revisionists, Albania needs its own term. The people who were honchos rolled there. I've been to Albania twice now. Most of my memorable experiences have been on Albanian buses. Of course, these buses are lamentably slow. You could probably get from Gjirokaster (in the south) to Tirana faster in a three-legged race with notoriously slow former Japan baseball star Cecil Fielder than in an Albanian bus. One time, I broke up with a girl, got back together again, and probably some other stuff happened. My most recent time was crossing from Pogradec to Tirane. Albania has like one two-lane road. When snow happens, it's a kerfuffle. For reference, it took us five hours to pass a small creek. But it was awesome, because Albanian buses have Albanian girls-mostly college students coming back from Greece. So, five hours of bliss for me. Plus, I got to learn how to say in Albanian "The womenfolk need to go to the bathroom, stop the bus."

Albania's most famous features are its concrete bunkers. They are most prominently found along the eastern borders with what used to be Yugoslavia. Now, they're fake countries like My Big Fat Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Montenegro. The Albanians were terrified of a land invasion from Yugoslavia. Tito, he was a revisionist, the most capitalist of all failed communists, and a great threat. Albania has a proud military. In Skanderbeg Square, you can see an army of tanks designed by the company that makes Power Wheels which makes up the 2nd Armored Division of the Albanian Army. Children drive them helter skelter in parade procession that would be something like if the city of Scottsbluff, Nebraska, had an army (which would still probably beat the Italians!) You laugh, but those determined eight-year-olds totally cut off the Italians' left flank at the Battle of Sarande. But, what most military historians who laugh at Albania's wasteful building of hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers are ignorant buffoons. They forget that Albania wasn't expecting an invasion of infantrymen bearing guns and tanks and howitzers and the like. Yugoslavia has spent billions of dollars building up its basketball playing branch of the Armed Forces. Anybody who knows anything about Albania knows that, good people though they are, they can't defend against the pick and roll, post up, and you try to pump fake, they'll fall for it every time. And one if you can knock down the shot.

Sunset at Shkoder Castle is really beautiful. Enough for sentimentality. A trip to Durres on the coast was uneventful, riding the bumper cars at a dilapidated amusement park, shooting people who I was not sure were threats to the Communist Party. What came of you, Albania? Now, you're just attractive beaches, kitschy Stalinist architecture and a modicum of normalcy. You may put up your facade of dangerousness by the omnipresent Gypsies vs. Albanians melees at every train station in Europe, but you've gone soft. Yeah, sure, I was subject to an attempted and not particularly well executed attempted robbery, but when did you forget about fun? No jolly youths invited me to steal Italian cars! I was ready to be convinced into a pyramid scheme, because really, when you think about it, hey thanks for the vodka shot, I could totally turn this 1000 leke into a million. When I grew up in the Seattle area, all the young street thugs were sifting through their copies of the Economist and copycat Tosks were capping makeshift Ghegs all over the place. And now, where's your Tupac Shakur? That's right, he never really existed. Step it up, Shqiperia.

Starting Things Off Properly

A long time coming, and refusing to do blogs for so long, I give up. I need to write about me, because, well I'm interesting, I hear, and if I don't write about me, well, what with my complete lack of ambition, I'm going to end up going to Bolivian. Which wouldn't be that, I suppose. Any of you who actually will read this probably will know me. I like to think of myself as an eccentric who plays by his own rules; mind you, these rules are almost verbatim copied from the USGA's Rules of Golf, which makes my life unfortunate in a lot of ways. Playing it where it lies with a nice young, preferably Central Asian lady, well not always a turn-on. Two-stroke penalties for drip-dropping Uno mean I have to hydrate myself by my good friend Bruce Arthur's tears-Bruce, you keep on crying, so I don't die.

I am currently back in the States, in Idaho, to be exact. I've always fancied re-enacting, and am currently doing some spot work re-enacting the War of the Bavarian Succession. This, of course, is for any girl reading this blog, because it's a pretty damned clever way of saying I'm a migrant potato farmer. The Bavarian Succession War was called the Potato War, for the unerudite. It's not the best way to pass my time as a night school educated, able-bodied 24-year-old man, but I remember the song "Looking for Freedom," and if I recall correctly one of the ways Reichskommandantsturmkoenig Dieterolfling Hasselhoff looked for freedom was hard manual labor. Don't know if he ever found it.

What this blog will contain. So, I've traveled a bit in the past eight, nine, years. It's mostly going to be a memoire of journeys, all those orgasmically adorable moments I've experienced, some opinions I have. I really don't live the whole My Private Idaho (this reference would be embarrassing if that movie was about a schizophrenic Keanu Reeves imagining that wartorn Iraq was the plains of Coeur d'Alene) glamorous lifestyle that I claimed above. I write now from a room in my parents' condominium, in a place called Leisure World. I just flew here from the Rzeczpo, or Poland as absolutely nobody sensible calls it, and it's kind of strange. People always talk about cockroaches surviving the great swine flu holocaust that will come upon us, but it's here it's like that, but switch cockroaches with old people. And their minority caretakers. This isn't the glamorous California with raisins and other shit that we've all picked up from being force-fed the literary oeuvre of William Saroyan all our lives. Old people and large industrial megacomplexes. It's actually quite like one of my more recent destinations, the Ukraine. Let's ignore the menfolk of the Ukraine.

They have their own problems. There are two basic stereotypical girls in Ukraine. And as we know stereotype comes from the Akkadian root "shtrtp," translated by scholars as "doggone true," or "absofuckinglutely"-the Assyrians first discovering tmesis in a game of telephone at the palace of one of the Esarhaddons, "tr" puts the fucking in absofuckinglutely, as you will. Anyways, true. There's the young ladies. They could be really attractive-their Polish sistas (I'm not being racist, you can't blame those people for wanting anything to have to do with the calamity that was "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit") and to a certain extent Western Ukrainians are good examples. But. Get within one feet of them, and your Louisville Slugger will be covered in eyeliner, your areolas encircled by lipstick in a formation reminiscent of Hannibal's at Cannae. They try too hard. The second group is the babushki. Yes, the old broads. The strained groinpull which Communism experienced in the early 90's, which has left it day-to-day but available for pinch hitting stints has not brought MILF's to this land. It seems that hairstyles are culled from fashion magazines, wait no, that's not a fashion magazine, is that a group photo of the Chelyabinsk Soviet in 1950? It sure seems like those guys are having a good time. But 1950 Soviet party officials should not be fashion trail blazers for women in the "aughts." They are. I've heard about a babushka bomb, this theoretical device by which Russian women, many of whom are gorgeous in early age, suddenly around 35 or 40, turn into fat peasant women as represented by those iconic matryosha dolls. There is no bomb. This is a myth. Bust it, people on that channel I don't watch.

You see, Russian/Ukrainian/Belarussian women face a great dilemma at that age because of this thing called marriage. Because, a 35-year-old Russian woman, she'll realize at some point, I'm married to...a Russian man. Yeah, time to stop caring. But that womanly passion for fashion doesn't go away, thank God. It gets turned to the overly made up canines they trot around. Russian dogs don't get $500,000 Kabbalah bracelets but they do get primped up pretty good. Even if their dog outfits are Belarussian. You see, the thing is, Ukraine is a country where signs actually advertise "Kostumy iz Byelarus." Yeah, that Belarus. The one next to Thief River Falls. I think. Not so hot on my Minnesotan geography. Supposedly, Ukrainians buy them because of their cheapness. Knowing that tight jeans are popular, well, I hear among homosexuals and Europeans, I'd like to distinguish Ukrainians who buy what one might call tight clothing made in Belarus. Because tight doesn't really capture the sense. Ukrainians, in my opinion, wear "oppressive jeans." Because it's a nostalgic feeling going into a bar with jeans riding up on your crotch so much that you feel the bartender's going to call the Cheka and rat you out for that "Aleksandr Lukashenko, Vonteego Cummings, and Khloe Kardashian walk into a bar." Well, stumble for the latter. Lexy and Teegs, to arms!

So welcome to this time machine which will go back and forth between my recent travels and well, let's just forget about the whole doing nothing for now. Talk about it later. And quit telling me to read, Leon Powe.