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.