But not for much longer, it’s been a week already, it’s SO time to move on.  Not the least because this town will bankrupt me if it’s the last thing it does, with it’s avenues of tailor shops, silks and suedes and drifting cotton.   Row after row of sweet little ladies just begging to whip up the dress of your dreams.  Though I don’t really dream of dresses, to be honest.    Given unlimited funds I’d wind up with one or two, I guess, but mostly it would be vivid wool coats with floppy hoods and wicked pants made short enough to not require amputation and magic badass shoes that straddle the incredibly fine border between Awesome and Practical in Dawson Fuckin’ City.    Ok, maybe there would be a dress in there.  Something blue with a sweet little waistline and big white buttons.

but dear lord, I have to keep eating, too, Hoi An!   So quit your siren song, sweet tailor ladies.   I have other plans. 

Like… going… Home.    Homehomehomehome.    Sigh.   It’s calling me, my god, I can’t help it.   I thought I’d want to stay out here until MARCH??  my god, who did I think I WAS?    Y’know, we meet these people on the road here who are doing their one-year ‘Round the World type trips.   Actually, we’ve met an astounding number of them.  And they all… seem…  just… Tired.   They don’t seem jazzed or enthused or lively and thrilled about their next or last destination.  They seem exhausted, lonely, and express only the most token appreciation of the trip they’re on.

“Oh my god, Mongolia?  What was That like???”  We ask the french guy in Udomxai.    “Um… it was ok.   Y’know.”     Shrug.

It doesn’t make me jealous, let-me-tell-you.

So as lovely as this is… as much fun as I’m still having… and that’s a lot, don’t get me wrong…

I’m still feeling that thing.    I miss friends, and home, and Bed – the same one every night, no matter what it’s like it’s the Same All The Time and I swear, that’s something to be appreciated.  I miss cheese, my god in heaven I miss cheese.    And I miss Dawson.  It’s sweet little streets underfoot, I miss the old familiar juke joints and friendly faces.    I’ve begun thinking longingly about the frigid winter streets and silent white hills all around.   I just want to head down to the Pit and have beers with the lovely folks it would be a cinch to wrangle for just such a thing.   I want to wake up in the morning, brew an enormous pot of coffee in a quiet house, and read the morning away with my feet in Freddy’s lap and the smell of frying bacon coaxing us sweetly into the waking world.

I love the road but it’s a long, hard thing.     Being woken up every single morning to the cacophony of honking horns – used here like reverse sonar – announcing the constant position of every single moving vehicle on the road.   “I Am Here I Am Here I Am Here”    Most of the buses have horns that honk three or four times per honk – in a descending scale – “HONK honk honk honk…HONK honk honk honk…”      And are used at all times, always, constantly, by everyone.

I have become uncomfortably familiar with the smell of my own, undiluted urine.    Ick, I know.   It’s the toilets here – I realise that we, as North Americans, are used to peeing into an incredibly large volume of water.   God, there is SO MUCH in a normal toilet!   Out here, there’s like, a couple inches max, and without that extra fluid to dilute it, maaan oh man it smells!   I’m not even saying you leave it there long, just enough time to wipe and flush – and still, it’s enough to dose you with the distinctly warm, acrid stench of it.    And then you’re just throwing your T.P in the trash, which I’ve gotten used to but still feels distinctly distasteful.     And I swear to god I do not understand how one is supposed to use a squat toilet without the pee ricocheting and splashing off the edges of the basin and splattering your feet.   I have tried EVERY angle, every possible squatable height, wide as my feet can go, it doesn’t seem to matter – also a stream of pee is not exactly a constant thing, so I mean, you have it one moment so it’s fine and then the volume lessens and your angle changes and suddenly you’re peeing on your feet again – Jeusus Fucking Hell, man.    I came out of this insanely dank alleyway squatter one night – a Bia Hoi night in Hanoi, a lovely one – and look down at my boots and my left one has the inner side of it fully darkened with splatter marks.   Like,  Fock.   And Eww!    But that’s still better than when you’re in sandals and shorts and it’s just on your FEET.

You boys, you have it easier, way up there standing, but squatting ain’t easy…   let-me-tell-you.

Yesterday we were kicked out of our Guesthouse, after they somehow booked our room out from under us, thanks a lot.    And what might be termed “service retrieval” in a staff orientation seminar back home, well, the extent of it here is pretty much giggling and blinking and waiting for you to just give up and leave.     So we moved to a different place on a nearby block, which was a little nicer…  and we rented a DVD player and stayed up all night mainlining Game of Thrones…   finally went to sleep at two A.M… only to be woken up like a shot at six by the sound of water shooting at mach ten out of some kind of faucet or pipe very nearby.     Turned out a hose had suddenly, somehow, come off something in our bathroom and there was a seven foot jet of icy water spraying across the room.   First time I’ve been thankful that instead of shower stalls  they just have drains in the goddamn floor.     Freddy found the shutoff valve and we managed to cap the hose and in the morning we didn’t even care that the shower water wasn’t hot, just a trickle of cool water in a cold and rainy town.

Whatever, man.    We’re on a sleeper bus to Nah Trang tonight, hopefully for some warmer weather, if that hurricane that just kicked the Phillipines ass doesn’t have much left in it for Vietnam.

And we don’t have much time left.  With our tickets re-booked we’ll be back in Dawson within a month.   We get to see rad friends in Siem Riep beforehand, which is awesome, and then a few days in Van, and then…  home.   Home, home, home.

I’m not sad.   It’s going to be great. 

Is way lovely.    Nam.  ‘Nam!!!  Gad I love it here.   Am so glad to be back.  Knew I would be.

Hanoi is definitely one of the neatest cities I’ve ever been to.  It really is like if Vancouver and New York got together and had a little asian baby.    It’s green, it’s bustling, it’s old.   It’s lively and modern and cultured and it’s also a thousand years old.  For real, a THOUSAND.    Makes our weeny bicentenicals look prettttty dumb, heh?      Like, Hanoi pats Vancouver on the cheek and said, “you’re two hundred?  Awwww, how cuuuuute!  Do you have a Boyyyyyfriend yet?”

We got to Vietnam about a week ago.  Spent a night in Dien Ben Phu, up north, then headed south to Hanoi on a grotesque 13 hour bus ride/milk run.    Like, the bus was dropping off people and stuff – bags of rice and oranges with no people attatched – every few kilometers.  And by watching the mile markers it was evident that we were averaging 40 kilometers an hour.  FORTY.   So that thirteen hour bus ride?  Yeah, could have been done in like…  six.   UGH.    And the day before, we’d had ten hours or so from Laos to Dien Ben Phu… where instead of going retardedly slow the driver went retardedly fast, screaming around hairpin turns on cliffside dirt tracks.   The trunk underneath Freddy and I – we were seated in the back – was clearly open to the air, as the red, talcum-powder-fine dust billowed up from behind our chairs as the wheels kicked up fifteen foot clouds of the stuff.  The entire bus was filled with dust, swirls of it, for hours, silting up our mouths and sinuses.   When we stopped at the border – thank god for Vientam and Paved Roads – I blew my nose, and out came MUD.   A….  LOT…. of mud.    For the better part of twelve hours, in actual fact.   It was, well, rather revolting.    My cough was deep and resounding that night, as well.    Ech.   You really get the thing where locals here are always wearing cotton face-masks.   Like…. oooooohhhh.   Duh. 

But then Hanoi.  Lively, vibrant Hanoi.   I ate pasta and sandwiches and – oh travel gods, forgive us, KFC.  K-F-Fuckin-C, and maaaaan was it goooood.   I don’t care, I don’t, I loved it, it was amazing, and the grease dripped off my fingers and the cola burned my throat and the ketchup was vinegary and I don’t even care.    It was utterly satsifiying.     Figure, most of ‘Nam here we’ll be eating cheap, it’s a month of delicious Pho ahead of us, Hanoi was a really good place to glut myself on comfort food before buckling down to a Noodle Life.   Which is still rad. 

We drank loads of twenty five-cent Bia Hoi – at twenty five cents a pint – MY GOD – what is a girl supposed to do???   We met a rad brit (full of extremely facinating stories, I hope he writes the book, if he does I’ll definitely buy one…)  and if we got alltogether gloriously drunk then, well, that explains the next day’s Fried Chicken Binge.    I also bought rad knockoff converse (black and white plaid, brand name “Chi Yuan”) for about twelve dollars that are currently making me very happy.  

And now, Sapa… after a glorious night bus, on a sleeper, gad they’re so rad…  three rows of beds.  Just… beds.  Well, if you’re taller than me, they’re too short I suppose.  But barely!    I slept very well, except it rained and there was a leak right above my face, so to avoid waking up to the regular icy drips on my cheeks, I just slept under my blanket the whole way, and it was fine.    My bag ended up soaked somehow, and Sapa is a mountainous rain cloud right now, so I probably am not going to dry out wholly for days.   But it’s ok…  I like this sort of climate.   Fresh air.  Pine trees.   Rain.   It feels natural, and freeing, and wholesome.   

There’s a lot of touristy-feeling stuff here – but the market is AWESOME and full of rad noodle and rice joints, and I expect we’ll eat nearly every meal there.   There was this fake-looking market… it’s on the map, as “market”….   but it just didn’t feel right, was just too empty, too much like it was trying to accomodate old white people.    So I said, nope, let’s keep looking.  This… is NOT the “market”.    This might be claiming to be a market, it’s about as much a market as the Landsdowne Mall.    So we kept looking, and found the real market, all twisty and dark and bustling and covered over with tarps and makeshift roofing.   There are silver bowls full of live fish and tables with forests of dead chickens feet sticking straight up, and row after row of noodle stands.   Now THIS – is the market. 

My fingers are cold.  It feels neat.  I got a hat in Hanoi, it’s knitted and warm.  I bet if we could see off the mountaintop we’d be impressed with the view… as it is, I just feel closed-in and safe, and sort of at-home.

Mountains.  Rain.  Pine trees.   

And, earlier than expected, though extremely pleasent all the same… a plane ticket… home.

Also you could go with  Rural.   Or  Cliffy.

I can’t believe I’ve been here twenty days now, without writing.  It just all piled up on me, and the days kept rolling by in a red-brown dirt-blown haze, and it just never happened.   I guess the country itself hasn’t excited to me the sorts of extremes that lend themselves to narration.   That’s certainly the case.

It’s lovely here, but underdeveloped in the sort of way that lets the place just tick by outside the bus, without sneaking under my skin and making me tingle, or even itch.

It is, however, the most intense landscape I think I’ve ever seen.   Limestone, maaaan.   What a trip!     It’s pretty surreal, all sky-high cliffs and carving rivers and stalactites dangling from the walls.   THAT’S pretty neat.   Also helpfully full of caves to go live in when the U.S. bombs the hell out of you for no good reason except that you might be supplying your neighboring ‘Nam with, like, stuff.     Can’t have that, now can we?!    Pfft.   Poor Laos.    There are, like, giant bombs all over the place, they use them as decor and lanterns in bars.     They all say Made in USA.     It’s kind of impossible to keep thinking of us as the good guys in these places.

So Vientiane was first – the teensiest capital city I have ever seen.   It’s like… Abbotsford.   Basically.     It’s lovely, and we liked it there, and we ate a lot of really good soup by the riverside.   But there wasn’t really much to see – just the silliest little museum EVAR, and a half-finished Arch monument with an official sign on it letting you know that they agree that it’s sort of a giant concrete eyesore.     The museum had many large dioramas that looked like they were made by sixth graders with plaster and finger paint.   I kept expecting somebody to come out and pour baking soda and vinegar into one of them to “make the volcano erupt”    Also a lot of guns.   “These were the guns used by the Hero _____ ______ to Fight The Imperialist Invaders”.    and “These were the guns used by the Imperialist Invaders against the peaceful citizens of ____ ____.”      That was pretty much it.

Then Vang Vieng – which was actually sort of awesome, even though it’s COMPLETELY been taken over by college boys in Beer Lao wife-beaters and bikini girls ignoring the big signs everywhere telling you that it’s culturally innapropriate in the extreme to walk around in your bikini.     It’s a few dusty streets full of bars playing Family Guy and Friends on repeat, 24 hours a day, shops selling bathing suits and dry-bags, and mattressy patios on stilts hanging out over the green river that runs past town.

The river is the thing.  The Nam Song.  And you tube on it.   It’s actually completely lovely, despite the drunken college party-fest that it’s a part of.   It just costs you six or seven dollars, and they give you a big yellow tube and drive you out of town.   You then spend 2 to X number of hours floating back to town…. the X relates to how many of the bars you stop at along the way.   Most of them are confined to the first hundred yards of the river.  There are seven or eight of them crammed together, and the staff bombard you with plastic bottles full of water attached to ropes, so that if you want to go to their bar you just hang on to the rope and they drag you in.   It’s a very efficient system, but it seemed to me that they were mostly enjoying lobbing heavy projectiles within inches of my head… as they continued this lobbing after it was very clear that I had passed their bar up and was no longer a potential customer.   The grins on their faces had a vague twinkle of Evil and Revenge as thick wet ropes thwacked across my head and bottles hurtled past.

However:  The river is clear and green and the precisely the sort of soft, delightfully cool temperature you want around your body on a scorching hot day.  The jungle hillsides are lovely.  And once you’ve run that first gauntlet, the seven kinds of cacophonous top 40 rock music fade away and the remaining bars are scattered, quiet, and lovely.

We did this three days running.  We even stayed an extra day so we could do it that third time.  It was just too lovely, too cool, too nice a way to spend your day.    We even drank some Buckets.    (Mark of the college travel scene in Asia:  a glass or a bottle is not enough, they must serve you your booze by the bucket. )

From there to Luam Prabang, which is a UNESCO world heritage site, and deserves it.   It’s gorgeous.   Also tiny.   Lots of french architecture and bread.   And so many old white people it boggles the mind.    The main drag in LP could be somewhere in San Fran, you wouldn’t know the difference.    And the kind of old white people who you just KNOW aren’t BUSING there.  Good god no.  They’ve got their fanny packs and six inches of ankle showing above their sock-and-sandal feet.   They get driven around on these lux -style tuk-tuks, with wooden railings and forward-facing bench seats, ooing and ahhing out the sides and clicking their cameras, loudly demanding absurd specificity from Lao servers.    Freddy and I were sent into fits one day by an old british man behind us at breakfast one day, who went on and on, in the firmest and most patronizing of tones, about how he wanted his fried eggs “hard, but not too hard, you understand?  Hard?  But not TOOO hard.  Still a BIT SOFT, yes?  You understand me? Yes?”   – to two separate  staff members.   For a period of no less than four minutes.

Y’know, there’s a THING.  Where, y’know, you’re in a foreign land.   And these people – being LAOS- have merely a rudimentary grasp of your language.  And be grateful for it, too, because what if you were Dutch?  You think they speak any Dutch?   No, they have the English basics, some more firmly than others.   Beer Laos.   They know that one.    Soup, also, or Fried, or Eggs, or the very very basic things represented on the English menu you are lucky to have.   You start getting all finicky and detailed in your ordering and it looks to me like you’ve forgotten where you are, thank you very much.    You order the eggs and you’re lucky to have ‘em, and if you don’t like the way they come you go somewhere else tomorrow.    And get over it, by god.

Anyways, we stayed there a number of days and liked it.  There was nice coffee and good sandwiches and clear air.

And then… the last five days.   Six, I guess.  Have been a litany of places, one day, maybe two, a boat ride, another boat ride, a night under a mosquito net, another boat ride in the morning.    I keep getting all the names mixed up, the mish mash of random syllables that mean nothing to me.  From Luam Prabang. to Nong Khiaw, sitting in the back of a truck on a bench for six hours.   Two nights there, then a crammed-like-sardines boat ride two hours upriver in a low-slung wooden long boat with a claustrophobic roof that made me very nervous, as the lawnmower motor, large rapids and thirty passengers made capsizing seem like a real possibility.   Freddy tells me after he’d immediately run through the “how he would save me” scenarios.   I admit, I had only run through “how I would save myself”.     (terrible?  I hope not, I have great faith in his ability to take care of himself, and an awareness of the likelihood that he would immediately concern himself with me – though hopefully not at his own expense.  Therefore, if I take care of myself quickly he needn’t look to me at the detriment of his own safety.  See?)

Then a night in Muang Ngoi Neua, a village with electricity only from 5 pm to 10 pm.    We took a boat trip to a village where the french ladies who came with us embarrassed us most completely with more Finicky Detailed Ordering.  This, in a setting most eminently rural, a cluster of huts in the dust on a hillside, half-naked children running barefoot, staring at us, no electricity or plumbing whatsoever.    And these women seemed to think they were somewhere that could offer you more options than “veg-e-ta-ble…. wi rii  (rice)…. or noo-dle soup”   It was so bad I had to walk away, and look at the weaving looms and silks the women were working with under their stilty ramshackle huts.  So rad, though!   Rainbow silks winding onto spinning wheels made of sticks,  loom contraptions made also of sticks, houses made of larger sticks.     And you expect a widely varied menu and that these men care that you already had soup today?    Come the fuck on!  

We stayed up late that night with a pile of random folks, including some members of a cool Swedish family I’d met hanging outside a cave the day before.  We had found wild ripe grapefruits and eaten them while sitting on big jungle leaves in an old rice field.   Which was pretty awesome.     We found out that the boat out of there only leaves when there’s enough people, and it was leaving the next morning and so who knows when the next one would be, so we got up early – again – and left town right away.

To a place that was supposed to be nice enough.  Muang Kuah.   Except… it was a HOLE.  Just, jesus, an absolute HOLE.    The first guesthouse we looked at had a naked woman tiled onto the bathroom wall.  WAY weird.   the whole place was dingy, rocky, sooty, smelly.   And there wasn’t even anything THERE… to make it nice.  No sweet bungalows, no nice market, no electricity half the time.  No internet.   And we were supposed to be killing five days there before our Vietnam visas kick in and let us cross the border.    We’d only been there a few hours when we decided that we had to leave.   So next morning, we got up and caught the 8:30 bus out to Oudomxaia, a BIG lackluster town of 88 thousand, which at least would have  a decent place to stay, some decent places to eat, and decent internet.   I mean, if we have to kill five days, I want at LEAST a decent place to do it in… not what is probably the ugliest, least-appealing town I’ve spent any time in whatsoever.

So here we are.   Eating yummy Chinese food (lots of Chinese in this town, we found a place that makes the most UNBELIEVABLE sweet and sour crispy chicken with roast garlic and peppers)   and late-night pringles while watching silly movies on the tv in our room.   I mean, if you’re GOING to kill five days.

Really I just can’t wait for Vietnam.

Like last time, after a month in Cambodia… I’m tired of dirt roads.  I’m excited about lovely, tidy markets and a bit of civilization.  A more well-developed infrastructure, more history, more…. life.  

And like last time, I find myself…  unconnected to the people, and the culture, here.   Maybe because I don’t care about a homestay.  Don’t want to live uncomfortably in somebody else’s family home, feeling extremely weird about the whole thing.   Maybe because I just don’t find connection to a culture so focused on speaking softly, not displaying emotion, affection, or body parts.   Being polite in the face of being screwed.

I like passion.  And zazz.  And not taking things seriously.   I like wicked humor and places that aren’t rife with Taboo.    I like putting my feet on things.

I’m stoked for Vietnam.  There’s so much more there I loved, last time.  But I don’t belong here.  And I never will.

It’s as though you’re really trying to piss me off,  now.   With your constant uppity nose-in-the-air text about “authenticity” and what I should or shouldn’t be fucking eating.    Telling me I ‘simply must” try a homestay, asking me “what am I learning about the locals, and what opportumnities am I giving them to learn from me?”    There was a whole huge boxed text looking down it’s nose at anybody who eats an “english breakfast” on the road.   “Isn’t”,  the text asks snottily, “the whole purpose of travel to try new things?” 

Yes.  Of course.  DUH.  But sometimes after trying seventy-four new things it’s not out of the fucking question to want something familliar, NOW, IS IT?     

All the while levying half-baked assertions about places they’ve had, what, all of three days to check out?     Udon Thani, it tells us, is “too large to be charming, too conservative to be fun”  while also telling us that it sees vast amounts of sex tourists (which is, um, conservative?).    Then Freddy and I roll through town last night in the back of a tuk-tuk, on our way from a 12 hour train ride to a final hour on a bus after nearly 36 hours of straight travel, and what is it we whir past?  A bustling, wide-laned city cleaner than Bangkok, less touristy than Chiang Mai.   FOUR lively-looking night markets.   Sweet tidy soi.   A spare few farang-laden girlie-bars.    Cool night air, fresh breezes, and stall after stall of well-populated, brightly-lit food stands.    The Tuk-Tuk driver was sweet, friendly, and rushed us directly to a bus we would never have known about, by the side of some dark road, with lovely air-con and not another farang in sight, which dispatched us for two and a half dollars (for us both) straight to Nong Khai. 

Sigh, Lonely Planet, SIGH.    It sometimes feels as thought they’re judging a place harshly for having, like, waste-management infrastructure.  It’s not “authentic” that way.    Which is asinine, if you ask me.  

And secondly, With All Due Respect to anyone who ever recomended The Red Tent to me….  I’m sorry, but you can go fuck yourselves.   Jesus HELL.    We picked up a copy on our last day in Koh Tao, traded some books for other books, and I started into that one… on the strength of much positive word of mouth.   And my god in heaven, I couldn’t get past page 64.   I was irritated by page seven.    Exasperated by chapter 3.    And frankly appalled and groaning every single page after that.  

Maybe I didn’t make it far enough in?  I tried, oh god I tried. But I’m sorry, can we please stop describing genitals as “his dear little sex”?   “Her delicate milky sex opened like a flower to…”  I’m sorry, I can’t even finish.   GROAN!    oh my GOD, groan!     It was thick with that sort of thing, with descriptions of loving woman-ness, holy like “sweet bread dipped in honey”   Prophetic dreams about future husbands, “a pomegranate split redly in two, with six bursting seeds inside, meant she would have six sons, which she knew to be true…”       blergh.     Groan.   BARF!   

*laugh*

Ok, so we know I just don’t go in for this earth-mother stuff.   I’d rather swing a hammer.   Directly into the skull of a man with six wives who doesn’t do much but “call each to his bed in turn”  and honor the family by raising fat goats. 

And this notion that it would be “beautiful” to go mensturate in the woods.   “just, like, bleed into the earth, you know?”       Really, are you thinking this through?   What, you want to spend four to seven days swatting over the garden?    You know it’s not like peeing, right?  We’re talking four to seven days of having sticky, bloody, dirt-caked thighs, right?    You think that sounds beautiful?  I think it sounds grimy, and I think we invented tampons for a reason. 

Being clean is not a matter of arrogant western privilege… it has very direct and meaningful consequenses to our health and the health of those around us.   Insisiting that it is somehow beautiful, or holy, or more authentic  to live in cramped quarters with lots of people, to maintain aspects of ones culture at the cost of public health, to “bleed into the earth” in a secluded, sequestered world because of the shame-dirty-unclean horror of ones “goddess rites, the river of life”…       bah fucking humbug.      

ANYways.    So I didn’t make it very far into the Red Tent.   There was too much dream-phrophecy, too much of “his sweet hard sex”, too much dipping of honeyed bread into sweet fucking tea.     Maybe I didn’t make it to the good parts?     Perhaps.   But I say, if you’ve driven your reader off by page 64, if you’ve convinced me utterly that a book is going to sound a certain way at all points, and then you intend for me to stick it out longer to find “the good stuff”?  I think you have failed.    I think that it was going to go on that way indefinitely.   And like I say, I just don’t go in for that whole Mother Earth Thing.     I would much rather have read a story wherein the strong central female character struggled her whole life against a cruel society where entrenched misogyny repeatedly denied her the opportunities her wit, skill, and talents would have provided any half-baked cock-bearer.     Where the holiness of womanhood did not overshaddow the fact that half of these sisters – literaly, half of them – were sold like cattle to the man their other two sisters were fighting over.   And expected to enjoy the sex.    “the mysteries of the goddess and god” . 

Yeah…  I lay a great, giant sack of PFFT on that, I’m sorry.  

So I have ditched that book, I plan to leave it on a table at a place by our guesthouse called “gaia bar” .  Somebody there will like it, I’m sure.    Instead Freddy and I went halfsies on a history of London’s sex trade.   A very well-reasearched, hillarious, written-by-a-woman-historian book on prostitutes in London, from the first Roman slave girls in Londinium through the riotous Restoration on up to – well I don’t know yet, I’m only halfway through.   Since yesterday.   Which beats the pants off of an excruciating 64 pages of the Red Tent, struggled through over 20 hours on a boat and a night bus. 

YEESH. 

PS.  Nong Khai is darling, and the air is clear and sweet, and we’re going to Laos tomorrow.  Everything ELSE is awesome.  Except for that fucking book.

Day….  nine?   Good lord, who KNOWS.   Beaches, maaaan.    They do that to you.    Can’t help yourself, just melt along into sandy sunscreened freckled surf,  blue waters around your ankles.  Ankles?   Mine could do with some improving.

I am a wounded kitten, these days.  Hobbling around like a granny.   It’s the scuba diving’s fault.   But I don’t hold a grudge.

First we were on the other side of the island.  Tanote Bay, a teensy little cove of clear teal waters, with just a spare few resort-joints speckling the sand and hillsides with bungalows.  Steep green mountainsides, huge tumbling granite boulders, coral reefs so close to shore you step on them just walking into the surf.     We had a rad bungalow about seventy feet up the hillside from the sand, a porch overlooking the ocean.   Not a hell of a lot of places to eat, but the sweet ladies who ran our place whipped up very nice thai food for a mostly reasonable price.   We spent several days just lazing…  snorkeling… swimming…  reading on the porch with our feet up, sharing rapidly warming beers.    Napping in the afternoons, just for kicks, just because.   It was glorious, especially after days and days in Bangkok, that sweltering crash of stink and crowd.

Poor Bangkok.  On our night bus out of town we drove through the incipient flood-waters, watching tensely as our bus navigated two-foot-high water at an intersection we could see was recently populated with police.    Freddy claims he could see the water actually rising up one particular street, towards us.   It was tense, but we made it out easily enough.   Looks like we’ll be able to head back through town – Freddy’s visa is running out soon, and we want to get to Laos.   So tomorrow begins a several-day bus journey Vientiane.   Woot!

But we got bored with Tanote bay about a week ago, and headed here to the more populous side of the island, Sairee Beach.   It’s lovely here, and chock full of divers and dive schools.   And seeing as how it’s been years since I’ve strapped a tank to my back and headed under… we knew we pretty much had to.   I mean, it’s not cheap, but we would never regret the experience.

So the last week has been lovely and exhausting and full of fishes.   Fishes!  They are so adorable!  You don’t really think that when you see them on a TV screen, I find.  At least I don’t.  And I tend towards cuteness-finding, as a rule.   But maaan, you get under there, swimming around awesome coral reefs with huge schools of teeny rainbow fishes, and they turn out to be the cutest things.   Little faces and bright colors, and shiny shiny sides.    I found myself swimming around under water with “Under The Sea”  stuck in my head, like, every single day.   up on the shore they work all day, out in the sun they slave away…   How can you avoid it!     You get to play mermaid!   Bahhh!  It’s so so so so lovely.    Clear blue water and all kinds of magic underwater life.    Aquariums can blow me.   THIS is the real deal.

Thing was, my fins didn’t fit me quite right.   And so after three or four days, two dives a day, I have wound up with these awful…  deep… terribly un-nice looking… well, they aren’t blisters.   They are holes.   They are worn-away spots on the heels of my feet, right down through my epi-, down to the dermis.  The puffy-looking shiny white underside of what is definitely NOT regular skin.     It’s pretty revolting.    They’re the size of squashed nickles.   They’re making me limp.    I got iodine and I’m dousing them regularly, and keeping sand out of them is a constant nightmarish struggle.    So yesterday was ordained as my Final Dive Day.      Which I knew in advance.     And then was driven home by the first and only unpleasant dive experience I’ve ever had.

The thing about diving, it’s SO unscary.  It’s amazingly unscary.   Your air is right there and you just breathe it in and nothing gets in the way and once you’re done with some awkwardness in the training phases – they make you do the uncomfortable, just-in-case stuff so that if you need to you can, but it’s not stuff that happens often at all in Real Life.   Like taking your whole mask off underwater and putting it back on.  I hate that part.  Water in my eyes.   Sort of makes me freak out and feel like I can’t breathe.  I hate that part.  Good god I hate that part.   But once that’s over with you just get to swim around with fishes, breathing happily.

Well, then, so, yesterday.   First dive of a planned 2.    I should have known the mask wasn’t right.   I have a small weird face apparently, because I always have a hell of a time finding a mask that doesn’t leak like a sieve.    We were going out with Rachel, who we’d dove with for a few days.  So we know her now, and she knows us, and knows we’re competent and stuff.   So we begin our descent…   and right away, things start going wrong.    My mask starts flooding right away.  The water rising up around my nose and towards my eyes, right away.   And then my left ear won’t equalize, and I’m clearing my mask and trying to get my ear to sort out, but it’s not working and it’s starting to hurt very seriously, and I can’t see very well, and I look down and the other three are descending… fast… without me… into dark blue murky water, disappearing fast.

And there, with my mask flooding fast, the pressure in my ear peaking to an excruciating whine, I felt for the first time in my whole life the unquenchable sensation of Panic.   You can’t call out, you can’t alert anybody, and descending was an impossibility.    I felt like I couldn’t breathe – even though I patently could.    And so there I’m stranded, ten feet below the surface of the water, frantically trying to get my panicked breathing under control.   Because I know I’m fine – really – even though the LAST thing in the WORLD I felt was FINE.   They were leaving me and my nose was full of water and never has the ocean seemed deeper and darker and less like a place I should actually be.   But I was also forcing myself not to shoot for the surface, as one knows deep down inside that you must – at all costs – never do that while diving.   Even though I was close enough to not risk the slightest of Bends… you KNOW.   DON’T FUCKING DO THAT.

I’m sure one of the things that dive masters are trained in is the way a panicked diver’s bubbles look like.    Rachel, of course, spotted that I wasn’t descending, and immediately swam up to help me.   Lacing her fingers in the front of my B.C, she locked her eyes on mine through the masks, and that lifeline, that calm, reassuring presence, instantly began to steady me.   Through sign language I told her what the problems were.  She nodded and signed her understanding, somehow communicating an incredible calm and control with just eyes behind a plastic mask. I clung to the eye contact with every fiber of my being and felt my breath slowing, at last.   Slowly we ascended, and I cleared the surface with an excruciating sense of relief.    My ear seemed to be stuck at all the wrong pressures, and no amount of jaw-wiggling or gentle blowing eased the pain.   I felt terrible, embarrassed, and extremely emotional.   But eventually I got a half-whistle of clearance from my ear, and we decided to give it another shot.   This time, Rachel descended with me, directly in front of me, holding my BC with our eyes locked, and me re-pressurizing my ear every four seconds.   It worked – in fact, it fixed what surfacing could not – and we continued with the dive.

Which, as dives always are, was lovely.   But I couldn’t completely quell the feeling of impending sobs.   The panic, the strange and silly shame, the pain and the disappointment in myself – for panicking at all, how dare I, how dare I…   and then the Fear, feeling the Fear like that and the sense of darkness and drowning and danger – having looked over that edge and into the abyss, I couldn’t shake the sobs.   But there’s no crying in Diving.    For one, your mask will flood.    For another, I wasn’t about to let that goddamned emotional collapse feeling anywhere fucking near me while I was underwater, doing  just fine.

So we dove.  And I controlled.  And I concentrated on the lovely fishes, the tumble-down boulders encrusted with corals and anemones and little rainbow fan worms.    And then when we surfaced, we ended up having to swim an exhausting against-the-current twenty minutes back to the boat.     Which would have been a lot easier had it not been for the holes in my heels.

So by the time we got back to the boat… well, rarely have I been happier to leave the ocean.

I opted out of the second dive.

I didn’t want to – but then again, that’s not entirely true.  I didn’t want to want to.  But I knew I had not one scrap of strength left in me, emotionally or physically, to tackle that.  Also, I was in serious pain.    So I went up to the top of the dive boat and the tears came, with my forehead pressed against the carnival-yellow wooden railing.   I let them, just stayed with my back to the other divers emerging from the water, and tried to keep still and quiet.   Freddy let me lean my head against his chest and reassured me that I had nothing to be ashamed of, that I was thinking about it all wrong.  Which was true.   And I needed that.   But still, the emotions, sometimes they just need to escape, y’know?

He went off on the next dive and I spent an incredibly rejuvenating half hour laying in the sun on the top of the now-empty dive boat, drinking tea and eating banana cookies.    It was completely the right decision.   Even if it hadn’t been for the mask and the ear, my heels are unremittingly painful now, and wearing deeper into my skin would have been a patently bad idea.

It was a very intense experience.  I’m glad I went back down though.   I’m glad my last sensation down there wasn’t panic.  It was overcoming panic.   That’s the thing about diving.   You just can’t do that down there.    And mostly, that’s not a problem.

So we got our passport photos today, and we head out for Laos tomorrow.   Well, Laos is the endpoint on a multi-stage journey involving boats, buses, and trains.   So I likely won’t be heard from until we’ve crossed the border into lovely, sweet Vientiane.  I’m so excited for that.    The trains are awesome and the seats turn into beds.   I’ve read about seven books already.  Have to get some more.    Got to replace my smelly canvas purse with the broken zippers.   Pick up some more band-aids for my heel-holes.   Find out which ferry we’re taking.   Shit, this list is getting long…    Better go now, it’s some day of the week, some hour of the day, I don’t know what or which, but it’s All Happening out there….    right now.

Here we go again.

This… is interesting.   Here I am, back in a place… that for a while, I sincerely figured I’d never return.  Sin-fuckin-cerely.   And yet, somehow, between this summer and several years I ended up – not only thinking it was a good idea… but thinking that it was the BEST idea.   Somehow!   How?  Well, love.    Really.  To be honest.   Love….  and finances… and the creeping nostalgia that comes when enough time between yourself and the bad stuff has built up to cushion your landing.    Like soft pads of memory-heather.

The Love is the real part.  The finances, secondary.  Also there’s a trailing hint of last winter’s boredom….  Vancouver… appartment dwelling…  and it was what I wanted, but also Not.   Same same, but different.   The way places always are when we go away for long periods, live different lives, and then return.   The first week, it’s always great.   You see all the old people again and everybody is thrilled and excited and it’s new but also fabulously famillar.   But that eases away.   It trails off and then you’re left with What Is Really Happening.   And last winter, what was really happening… was just simply not enough.  I didn’t want to be working (the conceit lingers, that I needn’t work year round.  I know it’s magnificently luxurous, but I can’t help myself.)   Also i didn’t really want to be partying that much.   And as much as I still love the people in Vancouver who I love, well, things… change.   As always, like forever, will never stop happening, and it’s good, but it’s A Thing.    I failed to feal the gripping thrill I used to feel there.    The sense of being in the midst of a cohesive circle of exciting, inspiring, new-enough-to-feel-perfect friends.    That went, well, away.   And what also went away was my own mid-twenties On-Top-Of-Everything urge to manufacture that sensation, either by drumming up large and exciting-sounding parties, or by inserting myself into a yet-new group of people to re-conjure the feeling.     I think this means… that I’m getting old.    Or that I was never that interested in being in the midst of a wild and posturing crowd, forging ahead with the trappings of Cool.

Really all I want is to have nice times.  But to not have to work at it that hard.   And all I need for a nice time is, well, days off, cups of coffee, mornings in the sun, bacon, books, and a small handfull of people who I don’t have to get drunk with every weekend in order to maintain our connections.

Either way, Vancouver felt too much like a past that didn’t exist, and too little like the present I wanted to conjure.    It was clear to me by this summer that in order to feel that, what I wanted was to travel more, or at least to live in a new city.   For a long while I thought it would be moving to Toronto with rad girls I’ve met in Dawson, living cheap in a big old house and discovering a brand new place.   Or maybe going back to Portugal, to Lisbon,  a place I’ve felt wistfull for since the hour I left town.   Hell, before even, since the drive to the airport with Gonsalo the Gorgeous, hanging my head out the window and drinking in that breezy Lisbon sunshine.

And then…  then came Freddy.    Something inexplicably special and utterly Different.   He came out of nowhere, at a time I figured I had some great period of singledom ahead of me.  But Freddy… he changed… everything.   Without effort or strain – it simply became clear that this was something not worth letting go.  And right around then, maybe even a bit before, Asia started looking like a thing I could see myself doing again – in this context, with this company.  Knowing, this time, exactly what I was getting myself into.   Knowing, this time, what I did and didn’t want from this sort of trip.  And – glory of glories – finding out day after day, more and more, how unbelievably similar we were, and how fantastic a travel match this fellow might just be.

And so here I am again.   Bangkok.   Asia.  Many months ahead of me, and enough money to likely see me through rather nicely.   Certainly longer than it would take me to blow these handfull of thousands in Vancouver, or Toronto, or Europe, for sure.   And in much more luxurious fashion.

It feels… incredible.   To be back.  To be here again, with the heat like a coating of warm damp fabric on your skin.   The inescapable smells of sewer, charcoal, strange food and warm flowers.   The filth, the grime, the crowds, the ubiquitous wooden frogs croaking at the passing farangs.    Tuk Tuk?  Lady Tuk Tuk?  Ten Baht, anywhere, Tuk Tuk?  

It begins.   It feels both mind-bending and utterly thrilling.   Also here and there I feel the presence of myself, in Older-Brother form, standing arms-crossed just behind my shoulder.  He gives me an exasperated crack on the back of my head. “Really?  You’re doing THIS again?” 

But that’s just the fear talking.   You gotta knock the rose-colored glasses off somehow, and a crack upside the head is as good a way as any.    Without them, I still feel like I’ve made utterly the right decision.

Ahead of me are days – months – of bliss.   Laced with stress and annoyance, sure.  But such is the varied heaven and hell of the road.   But this time, I’m doing it different.    No need to show off.  No need to live up to a type of traveler I simply dont’ want to be.   This time, it is all about….   books.    And hammocks.   And eating whatever I want, even if it’s a goddamned cheese sandwich, without feeling guilty or judged.   And lively discussions about fantastic things learned or felt or assessed or intuited.    Enough beers to quench my moderate Thirst…  but not enough to leave me acheing in the mornings, learning to drink away a hangover – a very real pit-stop on the road to Alcoholism.    This time I won’t feel guilty for a day spent inside eating pringles and basking in A/C, in order to soothe my worn-out Bravery Muscles.    This time I’m doing it all for Bliss.

We’re heading out of town real damn soon.  South, to Koh Tao,for beaches and bungalows and hammocks.   Swimming in blue waters and reading all afternoon.     The river is too high for comfort’s sake, this city’s smells are too coating to the insides of my fragile, yukon-air-spoilt nostrils.  Freddy’s been here for a week and a half now, spinning his wheels waiting for me to arrive.  The dear sweet boy, he picked me up at the airport, (via the new rail line! So rad! Takes you so far into the city that a teensy tiny cab ride gets you to the hotel district, and you save a real bundle).     He had a hotel room waiting for us, having scouted many while he waited for me to arrive.   It’s lovely, and a weeny bit of a splurge… but by splurge I’m talking like eight dollars apiece a night.   For a double bed, hot shower, private bath, Air Con, private balcony, right on Soi Rambuttri, which is a sweet tree-laden brick-paved section of the tourist district that is actually distinctly non-horrid.   It’s quaint and pretty and shady and lined with shops and food carts.   So it’s not the grittiest most authentic street in Bangkok…   but so what?    I’m here to enjoy myself, goddamnit, not test the limits of all patience and bravery.

Where we’re going, we’ll hopefully be paying something like five dollars a night each for a thatched-roof hut on the beach.  THAT’S what I’m talking about.

Either way it’s time to go.   Somewhere blue water whispers against white sand.   The kind of place your greatest danger is falling coconuts.

I feel a sense of infinite possibility stealing over me.   The feeling of extreme freedom that I have only, ever, ever-ever, experienced on the road.   With the funds and the time to do nothing but seek your pleasures as you may…  and this, most excelent addition, of a partner I feel no need to hide myself from.   My fears or quirks or shynesses, weaknesses, what have you.   No need to edit my vocabulary – indeed, a chance to ply my skills as well and adeptly as I can, and an audience who will appreicate each new nuance, every well-turned phrase.   A partner who will support me, even on my darkest days.  No, most especially on my darkest days.   And who’s interests and preferences miraculously fall so closely to mine as to have erased almost all need for discussion, debate, and conflict.

Oh sure, it’s the rosy begining.   The road is nothing if not hard.   A test of wills and resiliance unlike any other – except perhaps parenting.

But this…

is Just Different.

The summer is pouring past me so fast.    So fast so fast.     Summer itself is gone, gone, gone.      The leaves are turning, the nights are getting dark, the lights are coming out.     Darkness.    Every year it’s this mind-blowing thing, when it starts to happen.   You have no idea how much you can get used to just being able to SEE all the time.     Suddenly it starts getting dark at night and you find yourself walking into walls in your own house, or coming hard off the edge of a three-foot boardwalk drop, straight into a muddy pond you couldn’t see.   In your brand new Tony Llama cowboy boots your mum sent you.      Because this is Dawson City, Destroyer of Shoes.

I know that back in the Real World, in the Outside, it’s still summer and all y’all are like “I don’t know what you’re talking about Sherry, it’s ninety-five degrees under my porch right now” and sticking to your vinyl couches and drinking Sloe Gin Fizz in your negligee’s.     I know, I know, I get it.    But it’s just different here, ok?

It’s been a glorious summer, one I’m not particularly anxious to see the back of.     Really I’d take this one twice over if they’d let me.    (they won’t.  I asked.  they’re jerks.)     People keep talking about how it hasn’t been that sunny and the weather has been crappy all summer long and O the rain the rain  and I swear to god I have no idea what they’re talking about.   As far as I can tell it’s been One Long Summer Day since halfway through May.    I guess it’s rained but maaaaaaan I sure haven’t noticed!

Naw, my summer was just chock-full of hot golden drippy days in the sun, drinking beer and laughing at blue skies.   I don’t know what they’re talking about.     My summer has been night after night of clear air and good friends.   Endless glories, really.     From the beginning months when I was spending more time at Staff Accom, with the lovely crew we have this year…    the hilarious Thunder Blades Era…    Oh Yeah.  Thunder Blades.     I created an animal, and it lived to reproduce.    Makes one feel distinctly Godlike, that does.     To toss off a made-up descriptive phrase about something – naughty I suppose – and to have it launch itself, unbidden, into the local lexicon?    Brilliant.    So go to the Keno Lounge.    Order a Thunder Blades.      Do it for me.      And I’m sorry Mr. Blades, but I’m pretty stoked now that you did what you did, that you kicked me to the curb so quickly…     Even if at the time it stunned the goddamned hell out of me.    *laugh*     Truly, a more timely fizzle could not have been planned.    So I thank you, and you may take your new moniker,  it’s head-swelling kudos implicit in the term, and go.   Go my lad, out into the world with the title I bestowed.    I Dub Thee.     Have fun with that.   It’s cool that we’re still friends.    ;) 

Nope, suuuuuuper glad THAT happened, now !

‘cuz lately I’ve had the distinct pleasure of sharing my time with, just, the neatest guy.   (he made a brief cameo here, once, did you notice? )  It’s his house I am typing from, at the moment.   He’s gone off to work, it’s just me here.  I guess I could get up and go home, it’s only a few blocks away after all.   But.. not yet.     There’s fresh coffee brewing.    With a shake of cinnamon and a pinch of salt to cut the bitterness, I can drink it black for the first time in my life.   Pro Tip indeed, good sir.    I’m in a dress, also, after last night’s dinner date, and my hair is a catastrophe of tangled red flames.      So I’m just in no rush to pull my bare feet off the edge of his desk and stop writing.    I have greek leftovers in the fridge if I want them, and there’s still the birthday cheesecake I baked him last week.     The desk is an utterly familiar clutter of coffee cups and books and crumbs and lighters and pokey things.    The house is full of books – good books.     And it’s an apartment…   over an old shop…    with windows that look out over a busy street corner…   just like Denman St.  

The first time I came to this place, in fact, was well over a year ago.    And it struck me immediately, the familiarity of it and my instant ease here.    The hardwood floors and cluttered bookshelves and how you’d never know this place was up here until you climbed the steep old creaky stairs.      I don’t feel right living on ground level.   I want at least one flight of steep creaky stairs to fly up and down.      thumpthumpthumpthumpthump—–thump!    Stairs are fun.

And it sure doesn’t hurt, the mornings here, with the sun coming in and CBC radio playing, or Chopin.   Reading Harper’s or the newspaper or one of the many books.   Black coffee.   Fried eggs.     Pausing for a moment with furrowed brow, to then look up and read something aloud, and discuss.    A hand lightly on my ankle, my fingers gently on an arm.

Yes, truly this is fabulous company I’m keeping.

And so the future begins to gleam more brightly still.     I’m headed to Asia, again, this winter.    I’ve banked a nice little roll, and it seems like half the people in Dawson are going over there this year.   I’m excited to try this Again, but Different.    I’m excited about going in knowing what I’m getting myself into.     I’m excited to be in Asia and to know how to ride a fucking bicycle.    I’m excited about beach bungalows and Ha Long Bay and Pho at tiny tables and Long Hot Nights.     And I’m fucking thrilled that I’ll be able to continue keeping this aforementioned lovely company…  while also doing all those other things.

Sparkling horizons, indeed.

Oh and Tom Waits?

Releasing a new album in fucking October.    !!!!   It’s once every ten years I get to feel this feeling.   And with characteristic Waits panache,  his first single sums it all up… rather nicely.

http://www.wat.tv/video/tom-waits-bad-as-me-41qxp_2flz3_.html

(can’t get the video to post, straaange…) 

That’s the morning after Music Fest, every year.   The crowds and tents and cars have drifted off, down the road, back to Atlin, back to Alaska.  The day dawns with a wintry chill.  The fireweed on the hillsides has begun to bloom all the way to the top.

And Dawson, lovely, darling Dawson, begins it’s early slide into Autumn.

It’s a three-day hangover kind of feeling, an end-of-vacation sort of day.    It’s so funny to think that back in Vancouver, the fireworks haven’t even happened yet… and they’re the summer “halfway mark”.    Again, it presents itself:   Up Here, Things Are Different.  

What a weekend.   What a weekend.   Vanessa and I vended Friday night, and all day Saturday and Sunday, from 11am to about 7 pm or so.   I got up early Saturday morning and made more feather earrings… having sold so many Friday night…  But by Saturday afternoon I was down so low again I raced home for an hour and threw together another five pairs or so, used up the very last of my crimps and findings.      Within an hour I was nearly out again.    I quite literally could not make them fast enough.  

By Sunday I had nearly nothing to bother with, but Vanessa still had her lovely soaps and bubbles, and the sky was blue…   and all weekend there had been these girls running around with feathers… in their hair.    Like an extension.    I guess this is all the rage back down south these days, and somebody at the Atlin music festival had been doing them.    And because I was the feather girl, people assumed it was me.    Well, out of findings and out of earrings, I googled the procedure and figured out it was pretty goddamned easy, and decided to give it a shot.

You use metal crimps and feed long skinny dangling feathers though with a bit of hair and then smash ‘em down, clamping the feathers to a few strands of hair.   You do it near the scalp, out of sight, so the feathers poke through but you can’t see the crimp.   You can shampoo them, blow dry them, curl them with a curling iron.     Just, please, please don’t ask me to get them OUT for you.

THAT is the hard part.    And it can lead to, like, hurting Vanessa.    If you aren’t careful.    Sorry hon.    *gulp*

So I tried it out on the available Guinea pigs; myself, on Vanessa, on Laura.    Got the hang of it – and began to feather the crowd even further, turning my meager supplies into yet another cash crop.

All in all, with that as a suppliment, I made $800.00 this weekend.

So… worth it?   YEAH.  

And they were just such lovely days.   Lazing in comfy chairs in the sun, laughing with Vanessa, shooting the shit with festival girls,  heading to the beer garden or the burrito stand or Bonanza for sandwiches whenever you like.   Raking in the goddamned cash.   Everyone comes to visit you.   I sold my rainy-day fimo earrings to a gorgeous girl from the band Chic Gamine.   She was wearing this amazing high waisted military kilt thing and a rad plaid shirt unbuttoned just far enough to be alluring… made me wish for one of those tiny-waisted figures where you have angles and lines and bone structure instead of all my little roundnesses.   I would have looked like a pudgy bucket in her outfit.

Saturday night I went out, painted the town.    Wore that faux fur vest mum gave me and felt very rock ‘n roll about it.    Went to the rad party at Capri’s house, listened to Mr. Something Something play in their living room.   Wicked looking girls danced all 1960′s jazz, in striped boatneck shirts and skinny jeans and ankles.    We danced, drank, laughed,  rolled around in it all.     Reuben and I still walk faster than everybody else in town.    Maria is fantastic.    We ended up at Johnny’s place around four, five a.m.    Ate leftover hamburgers and hot dogs around a table of strangers.

Music Fest- the only time of year I have to defend my right to enter Johnny’s fucking house.

It makes sense, of course, you need a  bouncer at parties this weekend, or else things get all kinds of out-of-hand bad.  But for god’s sakes – me and Maria Sol?    We have to provide proof of citizenship to enter Johnny’s?      I beg your goddamned pardon!    Me, Maria and Adam moved Johnny INTO this house!     Without his help!! 

Still, it was rad.  By that point Reuben was drumming on the porch.   Reuben, my Reuben,  drumming at five in the morning on Johnny’s porch, home of Couch Island and all those fabulous winter days with Adam.

My world is collapsing in on itself, it seems.    Folding in like origami.     Reuben in Dawson.      Don sends me emails from Japan,  he is in love with someone,   and breaks my heart.       Well, cracks it open along pre-determined lines.    We always knew it would happen, after all.      That day the mountains rose up larger than before.   It really spun me, it was incredible.      It formed a singularity, compressing ten years of love and adventure into a single moment.   A single, flickering, breathing thing cupped in the palm of my hand.   A tiny thing with enormous gravity.   Just looking at it took my breath away.

I wrote him a love letter about it, of course.   To get the words out while the sensations were still coursing through me.   The exceptional joy, and a deep bruising emptiness.   That’s when the magic happens, after all…   when you capture the thing alive.    That’s when you bottle the firefly.

And so there it all is…

The green hillsides, and New York, and California.     Dawson City.    A place I love more and more with every passing year.     Swirling youth.    New love and old lovers.

The day after music fest, and feathers in my hair.

Three beers.  Four beers?   Just enough.   One burrito.  One burrito too many.      Not enough earrings

Not.  Enough.  Goddamn.  Earrings.

I should fucking know better.  

What I have here is a cash crop.    When you have a cash crop, do you just plant your garden with like four rows?    noooooo.

If Cousin Matt’s super hero name was The Embelisher, and Jeremy was The Justifier, then I think I’ve got to be The Procrastinator.      Sigh.   Sorry.   It’s still goddamn true.      I DID try, I did make a lot of earrings.  I sold  a lot to the Dancing Moose a month ago.   But this is music fest, dummy!  

We were open from 8 or so to 1o.  I sold about a quarter of my stock.   Now I have to get up early and make earrings as fast as I can until 10 am…  I’m running a booth for twelve hours the next two days – I need a hell of a lot more stuff to make this thing worthwhile, to make it make any sense at all.  I may have already made my money back, but  I have to start being a trifle more confident here, I think.

But it’s Music Fest, and so there are a million things.    Beer gardens and everybody, and all kinds of parties, all the time, all the time.

I can hear the bass thumping.   I’m currently sitting in bed.    It sounds a bit like a headache – tonight’s band is randomly techno, in a town full of hippies and plaid.  Also drugs, though, this week, come to think of it.     This town is, for three days out of 365, flooded with drugs, cops, and hooligans.

Imagine the Fireworks in Vancouver came to a town of 1500.   That’s what Music Fest is.

It’s a fucking hoot and I”m Loving it – more and more – even though I hate the completely foreign violence and rowdiness and noise and commotion.      But no!  See, it’s also amazing!    It’s a zillion people we’ve never seen, and the’re all dressing up like it’s fucking Coachella.   It’s hysterical, and often utterly misplaced.    Like the girls who show up in high heels.    We have exactly five kinds of possible terrain in this town and precisely none of them are hospitable to high fucking heels.    (Grass.  Mud.  Gravel. Dirt. Boardwalk.)

There are bands and music all the time, all over town.   Everybody volunteers, gets passes, runs around town seeing bands and wearing shorts and getting drunk in silly places.   The streets are filled with people, filled with cars.

I can hear cheering.   I’m sitting in bed, with the door to my wee backyard open.   I can hear the closing act saying goodnight.    Soon I will hear the droves going home

Dear god -

That’s why I like this.  That’s why I can handle this.   Why it’s making me jazzed while it makes so many people irritable and clannish -

It’s the goddamn Fireworks, in Vancouver.   It reminds me of fifteen years spent living on Denman Street, when exactly this would happen to my house.  

Halfway through the goddamn summer.   Jesus.  How could I be so stupid?  Of course that’s why I’m liking this!   Why it feels so right and summery and delicious.   Instead of just invasive and obnoxious.   It’s because I’ve done this before, because I did this for years, at home, at 1076.    And because…  Dawson…  is starting to feel

like home.  

Ohmygod, I am SO.  Fucking.  SORE!!!

And bruised.  I am fully, completely bruised.    Battered.   Mauled.   I’m as covered in bruises as I was in mosquito bites two weeks ago.

A bunch of us went canoeing before work one day this week.     It’s the easiest thing, you go to Front Street and the guy at the trading post has canoes and paddles and dry-bags and you pay him twenty dollars to drive you twenty minutes down the freeway and drop you off with the Canoes.   Then you paddle back to town – it’s only like a two hour paddle.    I’ve been here four years and never taken advantage of this.     Never had the time, and it’s…  It’s a Serious Goddamn River.      The Klondike is a river that Takes People.    Every year, it seems.   Locals as well as tourists.   Winter and summer.   Through the ice, under rapids, and down, and gone.

That being said, any joe who wants to can rent these canoes, and drunk people do this all the time.   Really, you wear your life jackets and don’t be dumb and you will be fine.  You might loose all your shit, but you’ll be fine.

Well, I AM fine – despite what my legs may look like.

We were having so much fun!   There were four canoes.  Nine people.   Lots of paddling experience  between us.   (with me it’s all kayak, but it still helps).    And we were all doing so well.    The swift, clear river was at a perfect level, it was fast and deep but not crazy deep,  and Richard in the stern of my boat was excellent at guiding me in what I should be doing.  I now know what it means to Draw!     Everything was green and lush and sunny, and there was a hell of a lot of laughing.     Bound and determined to not be a Lilly Dipper (not paddling my own weight)  I dug in so hard I could feel my shoulders bunching and straining and heating up, it was awesome.

Well, as we were headed around the last fast bend of the river, the 3-boy boat overturned.    We were in front of them – they got swept around just the wrong little bit, slammed the nose of the canoe into the bank, jolted the boys and crash-splash-under.    So of course, like IDIOTS,   Richard and I try and grab onto the bank to stop ourselves – to make sure they are o.k!    Which – yes – is a good idea, you would think.  Except that we were just as vulnerable to that sweeping, swirling, rushing torrent of water as THEY were, and trying to stop a canoe halfway around a sharp bend – is stupid.    This I know now.      We almost had ourselves stopped and one thing went wrong and that’s all it takes – the water rushed into our canoe so fast I can’t even remember it.

And this water

Is the coldest water you ever want to be in.   Ever.    It is hypothermia cold.   It’s knock all your wind out of you cold.  It’s atrophy your muscles in a matter of minutes cold.    This is a serious river.  

So I come up, gasping, and grab onto the willows and scrub on the steep bank, too steep to climb up,  stop my lighting-fast progress downstream.    Becka and Erica had managed to stop their canoe, and by dint of sheer bullish will the three of us dragged me half up the bank, half up the side of the canoe, up and over and into their boat.     But Richard is still in the river, and he’s clinging to the canoe, trying to stop IT from heading downstream.   And our canoe – now riding rather low in the water with three of us – is being swept sidewise straight at a log sticking out into the river.    They tried to stall the canoe on this log, but – bad idea – we bump up against it and immediately the force of the water tries to push us under the log and tips us, under and over, and the water rushes in and before I know it the canoe is flipping on top of me, and under the log.

I could feel it falling.  I could see it heading straight down onto my head, upside-down, scary-scary-scary-land.     But I’m good in the water.   I know how to maneuver  underwater without panicking.   So with a huge thrust I kicked myself out  from under the boat and the log,  surfacing again downstream, and collided solidly with another log sticking out into the river.      I wrapped my arms around it and – well – the idea was to haul myself up the log onto the bank.    But…  this river.    It was just so fast, and so cold.    So there I am, clinging to the log with my arms, my entire body being swept under it, downstream, pulling me harder than I can resist.  The water thundering against my back.  And I can feel the strength leaving my arms.   I can feel my lips slipping underneath the frigid, churning water.     Erica meanwhile was clinging to the same log, just out of reach.  I can remember her looking at me, her eyes wide, as  I gasped at her that I was going to let go, go under,  and then I did.    Took as big a gulp of air as I could and shoved myself down, let the current do the rest.

I surfaced just seconds later,  and right there was a patch of slow water, a shallow spot, and I kicked like the dickens for it.    Got there.  Broke free of the current and hauled myself onto the mud and logs.    My entire body was lobster red, and shaking.

We didn’t lose a single canoe.   Richard performed Festivus-quality Feats of Strength saving the canoe, the dry-bag, my wallet, our clothes.      We had everything strapped to the boats.     We lost three paddles, my running shoes (loose in the bottom of the boat)  and Brian’s favorite sweater.    And half a bag of Lay’s Salt and Pepper chips.

So really, nothing.    We overturned three canoes in three minutes.   And all we really lost were three paddles.      We all got back into our boats (with just enough extra paddles on board to get us all home)   and spent the rest of the short, now-easy journey down the river shivering, warming slowly, far less interested in any of it.    Nearly all of us had to work almost immediately after landing in town.    I had just enough time for a steaming hot, life-alteringly good shower.    I got to work and Jaq caught me staring at myself in the mirror just, y’know, making sure I was still alive.    My pupils were oddly dilated.

And now – my legs.

Are so battered, so bruised, I can hardly believe it.    The last time I was this bruised, I had fallen off a three-story balcony onto auditorium chairs.      And I really couldn’t tell you where and when it happened – which part of the scramble, which part of the swirl.     There is a foot-long purple and black exclamation point running from my left thigh to past my knee.    There is a deep violet thumb-print looking bruise on my right inner thigh.   My arms are bruised, my knees are bruised, and I have a very deep indigo rectangle just above my pubic bone.    they are astonishingly violent looking bruises.

But, y’know, the whole time we were really o.k.   There was not one of these moments that was truly a “This is It”  moment.     Uh-Oh moments, maybe.   But what it is, is the knowledge that this is such a serious river.  It is knowing that things can go terribly wrong.     And knowing that, in the Uh-Oh moment, where you are not truly in immediate peril, you are flooded with the Knowing that Peril is, truly, closer than you want it to be.   It is not knocking down your door, but it’s a close fucking neighbor.

I was shaken.   Not horribly.    I’d get in those canoes again.   I’d just… do it different.    I learned good lessons.   We all did.    And I have Adventure Trophy Bruises.    And a good story.   And  all of us are probably a little more bonded than we would have been had we gotten to town without event.

so that was… Tuesday?    Tuesday.    Wednesday I recovered, and went to Shipwrecks with Skye who is visiting from out of town.

Thing about this place, you stay here long enough and you always want to come back.

And then last night I went to the Pit with Dieter (ostensibly, though, knowing that he was going to peace out early most likely)   to see Amy’s band play.  I don’t know what they are called!   But Amy is our Diamond Tooth Gertie, and she has a set of pipes like you ain’t often heard.   Damn she is so amazing!   And so this is a fabulous thing, because this way you get to hear her singing the things she WANTS to sing!        She started out with some killer 90′s girl singer power ballads – Amanda Marshall!   Alanis Morisette!  Alicia Keys!     So rad!   It’s like being fifteen all over again!!   And then as the night progressed they moved into belted-out, unbelievable, dancy-as-all-hell covers of the Doobie Brothers and Loverboy and Tina Turner and Janis Joplin  - though 30 Rock has forever ruined “Piece of My Heart” .

I could not listen to the song without hearing the Jackie Jormp-Jomp version “Chunk of My Lung”

Lucky for me, I was stationed next to a rad guy who knew the episode, and sang along with me;   You know you’ve bought it, when life makes you sweet food… 

So I danced my ass off for hours.  It was amazing.   Rad Maria Sol was there and danced her ass off along with me.   Staff showed up.    The rad guy danced.   Everybody danced and danced and danced.

And afterwards, there was a bonfire by the river…   a crowded, sparkly, day-lit 2 a.m. bonfire full of hippies and music.   A guy with a push-broom mustache, a guitar, and a harmonica sang into the wee hours of the morning.   He looked like he had fallen straight out of 1967.     Red-gold sparks flew off the fire and into the bright sky.

Later on, there was a fully radical interlude in the wicked playground, in this two-story tower with a slide coming down from it.    I lost myself in kisses so fabulous I think I ceased to hear the rain, forgot there was a world.    All I remember having were lips, and a tongue.  The rest of my body vanished into the kisses.    It went on so long the following day arrived, breathless and grinning ear-to-ear at us.

I did not, I think, get to sleep until after eight in the morning.    Though I couldn’t promise anything about time after the campfire, and the river.

after all that smoke and all that rock ‘n roll