December 24th 12pm - Bonkers and Birthday

My twenty-fourth birthday was on December 22nd. It was an epic rager. If the definition of epic rager constitutes playing Trivial Pursuit until five o'clock in the morning with three friends, my brother, and his friend Bonkers.

Bonkers was in my kindergarten class. The following year he was in my brother's kindergarten class. Over the years he has:

* Entered class after lunch break with his shirt off because he was hot.

* Purposefully lit his hair on fire inside the white molester "family" van while my mom drove.

* Snuck through my bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning so I could zombie-awake to him orchestrating my stuffed animals in various pornographic positions. I was eleven.

* Locked the sloshed babysitter (my uncle) in my parent's bedroom. This resulted in Drunk Babysitter (my uncle) stabbing Bonkers with a flagpole. The metal eagle topping the flagpole ruptured into Bonker's ribs.

* Demanded I remove my shirt to stifle the smoke alarm when I set our kitchen on fire. I was twelve. My breasts were the size of a three-year-old male's.

My twenty-fourth birthday party was as eventful as a church sermon delivered by my God-preaching recovering drug addict uncle who currently flaunts his sexual prowess through exhibiting photos of twenty-something skankasaurus breasts. My eighteenth birthday party was an epic rager.

My friend Pakistan hosted the social lubrication.

By seven-thirty my friends began tallying marks on my arms. On my right arm, each tally represented a consumed beer. On my left arm, each mark represented a consumed shot.

By nine I was belching, staggering, groping others, groping myself, and urinating in the yard.

By ten-thirty my memories plummeted into the abyss of oral diarrhea, liquid legs, and draining a cocktail down my throat constituting chew spits and cigarette butts. I thought it was a beer.

By ten thirty-two my hippocampus ceased functioning. I blacked out.

The next morning my brain became cognizant of life when I sat up and smashed my head into the bunk-bed above me.

The host's car had a shattered window from some delinquent guests.

When I saw my brother, I verbally assaulted him for not coming to my birthday party.

His response: "I held you up for an hour. You stood because of me."

December 23rd 11:10am - Glass in my Foot. Again.

At thirteen, I tore down the stairs pretending I was Batwoman. As I rounded the corner my foot collided with a glass cup. I had glass in my foot for five minutes.

At seventeen, my mom hollered that dinner was ready. I exploded from my stationary position in my bedroom staring at the wall. My foot mutilated a sheet glass picture covering. The ER surgeon sutured the slash shut, suppressing the blood parachuting out of my foot. I had an inch of glass in my toe for two months. I like to think that I don't have King Kong hands, but the glass extended the distance between my pointer finger joint and the finger tip.

At twenty-three, after five months in the land of the holy cow, I muddled down my friend's San Francisco apartment hallway to the bathroom. Russian Vodka barraged my bladder.

My friend Fi-Town had returned from Russia with a three liter bottle of Vodka. The bottle was the size of a giant panda. It required a pump to dispense the spirits. My body ricocheted off the hallway walls as I shuffled faster. I didn't want Noah's Arc urine flood gushing from my vagina, a discharge wake illuminating on the wooden floor.

I strode, my footsteps resounding off the ceiling. My right foot thundered into the floor. A piece of glass clashed into the bottom of my foot.

"Not agaiiiinnnnn," I wounded-walrus-bellowed.

I extracted the glass shard with my fingers.

It has been two weeks. I don't have health insurance. The free clinic is as functional as a down syndrome child at a spelling bee. Every time I walk, the glass in my foot taunts me.

December 22nd 2am - Navy: Out. Au Pair: In

I'm as gifted at talking my way out of situations as Angelina Jolie is at acquiring children.

My college English major required three semesters of a foreign language. I have the foreign language capabilities of a fruit fly. In my third week of Spanish I traipsed past the disabilities office. I got an idea. I walked into the office.

"Hello. How may I help you?" the receptionist asked.

"I have a foreign language disability and desperately need to talk to someone about it."

I administered my champion wretched look. I have since been informed that my champion wretched look resembles that of a two-year-old taking a poop shooter.

Leftover Queen looked at me like I had asked her what gym she belonged to.

Two weeks later, after affirming that I lost sleep over the class, didn't comprehend anything, cheated on quizzes and tests, and was suffering emotionally and physically from a condition I invented, the University of San Francisco waived my foreign language requirement. I love private schools.

When I embarked on compiling quotes for an unwritten twenty-page Shakespeare final essay due in two days, a friend called and informed me I was going to Reno with two of our friends. After internally protesting for one point two seconds, I agreed. I went to Reno. I brought my laptop with the intention of writing the essay. The first night, I exploited it's jukebox aptitude. We got plotzed off Jager and rum. My laptop's second occupation for the night was as a shield in a pillow-fight. The screen ruptured. I turned in the final paper, worth twenty percent of my grade, eight days late. My great-grandfather died, I was emotionally and physically encumbered from a situation I invented, and received an A in the class. I love private schools.

In June I signed up for the Navy. In July I "depped" in. As a DEP (Delayed Enlistment Program), they tested my eyesight (right eye: 20/400, left eye: 20/FC - I couldn't read the one large letter at the top of the chart), asked me questions like do I have any scars, withdrew blood after missing the vein three times, had me sign contracts, and get sworn in by an all-mighty uniform man.

In December I established that being caged in a five-year military contract was as appealing to me as eating a baby. My great-aunt was dying from the swine flu, my family needed me, and I was grieved mentally and physically from circumstances I invented. The US Navy dropped me from the program.

Instead, I'm going to be an au pair in New Zealand for five young terrors aged nine weeks to nine years.

December 19th 2:30pm - December 2009 Quote of the Month

BG: "Hey you guys, I will no longer be saying racist jokes. Racism is a crime and crime is for black people."

December 16th 8:45am - December 2009 Photo of the Month

Location: Santa Rosa mall, California

Apparently people on the roof is enough of a problem that they needed to erect a ten-door-wide sign?

December 15th 8:00pm - Ya, I Did It

I returned to California without telling anyone. The resulting hysteria was comparable to the time my friend's mom unearthed a black dildo while helping her unpack for university. It was called the Cock Locker Monster Dildo and flaunted twelve inches of black fake penis glory.

When I surprised them one of my friends almost fell down. Two cried. All screeched, shrieked and shouted. My mom had a conniption in a peacocky hotel in downtown San Francisco. Security discreetly arrived and then ebbed behind oversized sculptures and paintings when they realized nobody's fingernails were being torn off.

One of the first stories my friends told me involved an airport, a jersey, an old woman, and assault.

A male named Whiskey maintained his ardor and devotion for Michael Vick regardless of the eighteen months he spent in prison for an illegal dog fighting ring transpiring on his Virginia property. Whiskey sustained his support for the football quarterback based on his "athletic achievements." Like a douche bag, Whiskey sported a Michael Vick jersey at LAX, LA's airport, soon after Vick had served his felony charges, was released, and resigned with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Whiskey stood in line, the name Vick mounting the top back of his red jersey. Whiskey's mind was as blank as a whore's sexual slate when she's decided she's a born-again virgin. And then he heard a spitting sound behind him.

"What the..." he ejaculated, turning around to look behind him.

Mildred, an eighty-year-old woman, looked up at him with the rebelliousness of a preacher's daughter who drinks, smokes, and has sex.

"Ya, I did it," she replied, her white hair staggering.

Whiskey punched her in the face.

Both Whiskey and Mildred were detained at the airport, but ultimately released. Punching someone in the face is assault, but so is spitting on someone.

December 12th 11:15am - India Insights

India is as predictable as a bipolar schizophrenics disposition. In Rajasthan's Pushkar, I couldn't walk onto a ghat because I was "too sexy." I hadn't showered in four days, hadn't worn make-up in seven, and was attired in shapeless clothes more befitting a bum than a middle-class traveler. But my shoulder's weren't covered.

I have had my breasts grasped by Indian men while walking, sleeping in an overnight bus, and seated by the window inside a moving train. In Hampi, when a male friend and I rode bicycles, a throng of twelve-year-olds abandoned their cricket game to accost us. He rode ahead as they high-fived him and shouted their love for him. One lifted my dress while another seized my breasts. I have had bug bites larger than my boobs. However, I am white, and white women are whores.

In ninety-nine percent of India, women and men do not demonstrate signs of affection. Men commonly hold hands while walking on the streets and beaches, and while seated in trains, buses, or restaurants. During movies, walking, conversing, or smoking, men caress and cuddle each other. On motorbikes and scooters, women sit sidesaddle and clutch the bike. Straddling a man or gripping his waist would denote slut.

In Goa, I purchased a silver anklet. An Indian man informed me two months later that wearing one anklet denotes prostitution. All Indian women wear an anklet on each ankle.

On trains, chai and coffee sellers will awaken you. It is not unusual for the vendors to rape your eardrums at four in the morning with foghorn cries of, "chaaaiiiii, chaaaiiiiiiii, chaaiii," "cooffeeee, cooffeeee, chaaiiii, chaaiiii." Train peddlers sell everything from newspapers, food and drinks, to fake gold watches, CD's, children's stickers, batteries, and gluttonies of items you couldn't invent uses for even if you were Santa Claus.

Price is always negotiable. Accommodation, material purchases, and even food can be bargained. What starts at twelve hundred rupees can often be bought for five hundred.

On buses, trains, or waiting for public transport, Indians do not read books. It is as common to see someone reading a newspaper as it is for a bear to trundle around hugging humans. A white woman reading a book does not indicate said woman being busy or engaged. Indian men will attempt to absorb you in conversation regardless.

Cows are everywhere - with a few minor exceptions. Cows triumph the road hierarchy. Then come trucks, cars, auto rickshaws, motorbikes, bicycle rickshaws, bicycles, man-powered rickshaws and carts, and, last, pedestrians. Oftentimes, as a traveler, when walking or bicycling, you need transportation as much as a fire hydrant requires a dog. Walking on Goan beaches, you will be asked ten thousand times if you need a rickshaw or taxi. If you're in a city and a rickshaw driver has seen you wave on the previous fifteen rickshaws, he will still stop and ask if you need a ride. If you answer no, the Indian head wobble surfaces.

The bobble-head appears in answer to every question. If you ask a restaurant if they sell beer, you'll get a head wobble. When inquiring if the transit halts at your destination: bobble-head. Result of asking a street vendor if they sell talking white tigers: head wobble. The head bob translates as yes, no, maybe, alright, greetings, and every other humanely possible use. The head wobble is as cryptic as my bra size.

However, everything is possible in India. Thus, there is potential for whatever you're attempting to accomplish.

Especially in the south, cows and squalid dogs are as common as bicycles. Arambol boasts a pig dog. Literally, a pig bred with a dog. Watch out for rabies. Additionally, cows adorn Goa's beaches. It is almost inevitable that you, someone you're with, or someone you meet will traipse through the sand and step in cow shit.

December 7th 10:45am - No Officer, I Don't Have Any Weed

In Manali, India, travelers wade through marijuana to access their guesthouses. Manali locals pick leaves for you with specific detailed step-by-step drying instructions: they thrust it at you in handfuls and motion towards the sun. In Goa, India, weed is illegal.

After traveling for five months, I returned to Goa, my final destination before a three-day train ride to Delhi, a five hour hiatus, a six hour flight to Hong Kong, a twelve hour layover, and a fifteen hour flight to San Francisco.

Throughout India I traveled with people who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, drug abusers from the British circus, and those who were more concerned with public displays of affection then they were with public ganja devotionals.

A Swede, German, and I settled in the sand at Arambol beach accompanied by brew nectar as the easy December heat traced our faces. When we sprawled in the sand and sipped our beers I felt like Superwoman. The waves licked the shore. A dog yipped in the separation of tangible and ostensible. The Swede prepared a chillum, an oblong cannabis smoking device. When two men shrouded in shadows approached, I didn't notice them until they were two steps away. They were policemen. I felt like a four-hundred-pound Superwoman with diabetes of the eye.

"Cops!" I whispered as emphatically as possible without sounding like a lunatic.

The Swede garnered his eight grams of hash together with the speed of a twelve-year-old's feet at a Dance Dance Revolution contest and slung the pouch overhand into the nearby bushes as the cops slithered up.

"Arrest him, arrest him," a fossil of a man wheezed.

The other officer elevated the empty chillum and snatched our backpacks from the sand. I prostrated myself, sipped beer, and regarded the new addition as I perceive a soup can's lid when it persists in falling in every time I open it.

"He was smoking. Arrest him!" Fossil hissed before a whooping cough convulsion struck his throat and his body rippled.

Other Officer wrenched Swede's hands behind his back. An antique gun daggered in our direction. At this point I converted to the slightly concerned.

"He threw the hash bag into the bushes. Arrest him!" Fossil ordered, slanting his pointer finger in the Swede's face and his flashlight into the bushes. Stories of tourists imprisoned or blackmailed into paying thousands of dollars raped my brain, and my heartbeat increased to a speed that I imagine can only be achieved by a coke and coffee cocktail.

"I don't have any weed, I was just using the chillum for tobacco," the Swede said soothingly. The German was mute. Hallucinations of the three of us shipwrecked in a jail cell addled my cerebrum.

"You have weed. Arrest him," Fossil repeated.

"I don't have any weed on me, I didn't smoke any, you can't arrest me," Swede asserted, monk-calm.

The policemen searched the bushes with a flashlight for ten minutes. The Swede and I made eye contact. My savage eye vibrated with visions of starvation and deterioration into skeletons. I gave him the run-like-hell-escape-side-glance. Swede blinked tranquility.

Fossil and Other Cop returned without the incriminating weed. They apologized and retreated into the shadows.

Swede said that was his fourth encounter with police officers.

"Just get rid of the weed and they can't do anything," he said.

This seemed as logical as consuming warm beer, but I accepted it. Just like I accept the fact that I will never have a penis and the ability to urinate standing up.

December 5th 5:05pm- Trance Party and Illegal Substances

The Flintstones should live in Hampi. Indian jungle interspersed by lakes and rivers mirroring the jungle's barbarian jade vegetation straddle colossal rock formations and archaic ruins. I continually expected a stream of tyrannosaurus rexes and brontosaurus' to ramble out of the emerald brush and eat me. I subconsciously carried a stick with me for protection. Protection against nonexistent Jurassic beasts.

One night a Dane, German, Swiss and I staged a dance party in the Dane's room at Laughing Buddha Guesthouse. After three minutes our twenty-something unaccustomed dance muscles atrophied in paroxysms of resistance. Sweat spiraled down our faces while wheezes and chokes strangled us. A South African female named Tits McGee entered our room demanding to know what we were doing. We looked like we had just completed a hopscotch marathon. We told her we'd danced for three minutes. We joined her drum circle and joints.

Hampi's nightlife is as sensational as Saturday night in a Mormon priest's house. After experiencing bars closing at midnight for four nights, Tits McGee and I resolved to take action. We decreed to throw a trance party.

Five days later the Dane, German and Swiss had left. I hung out with Tits McGee and a professional hula hooper. Hula Hoop and I were born in the same hospital in Long Beach, California. We went to the same college, lived in the same area in San Francisco, and our parents possessed the same occupation. We were basically the same person. Except that she had an awesome skill like hula hooping. I can't hula hoop, sing, juggle, do card tricks, or the splits. My eyes are as competent as Helen Keller's. I am extraordinarily gifted at getting lost though.

Our trance party venue was Whispering Rocks Guesthouse, a twelve-hut guesthouse as remote as the North Pole. A sprawling open-air restaurant sat thirty people, and a clearing large enough to accommodate a sumo wrestling convention swaggered with speakers procured by Whispering Rocks' manager. Tits McGee discovered two Israeli DJs.

Because the party was a billion football fields from the guesthouses, I tried to motivate people. I told them there would be a drunk tiger. Tits McGee seduced people to come with her chest cushions.

By ten at night, twenty people had arrived, three of whom were Tits McGee, Hula Hoop, and me. The highlight of the ten o'clock hour was when I saw a thirty-something Scottish male wearing a shirt that read, "Dog and wife missing. Reward for dog." By eleven, Whispering Rocks had seventy travelers. Of the seventy, three danced. Four if Hula Hoop hula hooping comprises dancing. By midnight, the numbers had dwindled to twenty. An Israeli who relocated to India to be a drug dealer supplied the masses with elephant tranquilizers.

The last Jeep returning to the guesthouses transported three Aussies, six Brits, and a South African at four in the morning. Two of the Brits and one Aussie prostrated themselves on the Jeep's roof. One of the Aussies fell off and landed in a thorn bush.

At five o'clock, Whispering Rocks' manager performed a marriage ceremony between a giggling Tits McGee and an Indian employee of his. Tits McGee, Hula Hoop and I ordered Husband to get us things, like beer, rum, and a drunk tiger. He never complied. We laughed passionately at everything. Our stomach muscles throbbed when a bird flew by. When someone inquired why we were laughing, grins commanded giggles and giggles bred hysterics. We dissolved into mirth when one of the employees said the moon had turned into the sun. Conversation topics as depressing as an AA meeting kindled frenzied chortles. We resorted to systematically shouting, "Why???" amid a stream of crippling convulsions.

By seven in the morning, Tits McGee, Hula Hoop and I craved our Laughing Buddha Guesthouse hammocks. When Whispering Rocks' manager offered to get us a taxi, and three minutes passed without arrival, we deduced walking was a good idea.

Five minutes later, having staggered one hundred feet down the road, howling "Why???" and hee-hawing in merriment, we resolved to accost the next vehicle for a ride. Tits McGee stated that she'd resort to flashing.

We did flag the next vehicle. Thirty-five minutes later. What we didn't comprehend was that the truck was driving in the opposite direction of our destination. Four minutes after we boarded, we drove by Whispering Rocks. We fractured into laughter as we retraced the bushes we had just trudged by and the dirt we had slogged through. "Why??? Why God why?" I wailed, arms in air, head back and retarded by chuckles.

"Where are we going? And whhhyyyy?" Hula Hoop replied, stumbling on words and peals of hilarity.

An hour and a half later, after looping through jungle, rocks, and ruins, Savior delivered us to Laughing Buddha's doorstep petitioning one hundred rupees for the ride.

"I'll pay you, but only because you're magical," Hula Hoop announced. We dissipated into delirium.

November 27th 1:08pm - November 2009 Quote of the Month

Brighton: "I just fell in love with a dog. He has huge bollocks and sperm dripping from his penis."

November 25th 10:15am- My Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving was spent en route in Bangalore, traveling via train from Trivandrum to Hampi. The twelve hour stopover in Bangalore was as memorable as fornication between a porcupine and a cat. I left the group I'd traveled with to convene with a Dane and German that I'd wandered with in the north. As I rambled around the streets alone, I envisioned my twenty-five relatives congregating around a candlelit wine-splashed dinner of roast turkey, succulent stuffing, cranberry sauce, cornbread, and pumpkin pie. I could almost detect the wafts of spices. I love American traditions, like Thanksgiving dinner, and fathers chasing their kids around with power tools.

As I paid for a Limca soda, an Indian man in line behind me crouched around my feet. I looked down to see if I had developed elephantitis in the past four seconds.

"Ummm, excuse me? What are you doing?" I asked.

"You're only wearing one anklet? Where's your other anklet?" he asked, still groveling. I felt like the offspring of an ogre and a giantess.

"I only ever had one anklet," I replied.

"Only prostitutes wear one anklet," he informed me.

I had been wearing one anklet for two months.

Three hours later I sat on the sidewalk reading outside the train station. A man wearing Joseph's colorful robes shambled towards me. He carried two sticks in arms that looked like they had been compressed by a ThighMaster. His bloodshot and wandering eyes bucked into mine as he asked me for a cigarette. I - truthfully - told him that I didn't have any. He bellowed in Hindi and shook his sticks at me, cursing me like I had just crossed the path of a black cat, broken a mirror, and walked under a ladder.

November 24th 9:45am- You Know You're Drunk When...

Four Brits - Manchester, Leeds, Brighton, and Brighton's Boyfriend - and I cavorted to Alleppey, Kerala for an overnight houseboat excursion through the Keralan backwaters. Depravity between us five shmammered adults mutated our communication skills and coordination into six-year-old competency. The trip was awesome. And we were champions.

You Know You're Drunk When...

*You, a male, place your nipple into a glass of tea. You attempt to milk yourself and acquire the nickname Milky.

*You break a bottle of Apple Vodka. Since smashing the taxi window you have become a calamitous individual climaxing in the breakage of two beer bottles, three glasses, and three bottles of Apple Vodka in five days. You replace the Vodka and then break the bottle before consumption three times. You are not pleased at the bank account deficit.

*You let a girl who has never shaved heads shave yours.

* You bite a hairy man's bare ass.

*None of you smoke but send the chef out into the Indian jungle in the middle of the night to buy cigarettes. He returns with three packs. The next morning four cigarettes remain. The chef steals two of them.

*You pretend to be pirates.

*The following morning, you don't remember half of the pictures taken.

*Your girlfriend refuses to let you shave your ginger hair, just leaving a filthy Mexican mustache. You don't speak for five minutes and then go to bed sulking. You ultimately share a bed with Milky while your girlfriend spoons with a male Brit and female American. The next morning, Milky announces that you grabbed him the entire night. He continually yelled, "I'm not your girlfriend!" but that didn't deter the intoxicated groping. You don't recall going to bed.

November 20th 6:25pm - Run Over and Bottled

After the Palolem headphone party where Brighton got ruffied and Leeds awoke the next morning with a blue whale hickey on his neck, we had an evening as civilized as the Puritans.

As we gorged ourselves on pumpkin squash and beetroot smoothies at an organic vegan restaurant, rain tramped the tin roof and a city-wide blackout emanated.

With two flashlights between nine of us, we tip-toed through two-foot deep floods over the juiced concrete to the nearest bar we could find. We wanted hot chocolate. Cuba, the bar, didn't have hot chocolate. We sedated ourselves with chai, India's diabetes in a glass.

An hour later, two Brits headed home on foot while Tarzan, Tarzan's girlfriend Jane, Brighton, and Manchester flagged down a taxi with contortionist dexterity. The cab shuddered to a stop two blocks later. It didn't restart. Blackness soaked the street. The moon sprinkled light as effectively as a mentally handicapped child with an iPhone. Another taxi tripped by. Tarzan and Brighton vaulted in. Manchester stretched to open the taxi door. Jane ducked to get in. Genius, the taxi driver, accelerated. Jane flying-frog-leaped away to avoid head collision. Manchester's hand, fumbling for the door, connected with the window. His hand went through the window with sloth speed. The cab shrieked to a stop as Manchester withdrew his blood-sprung hand. Genius emerged a neurotic Indian man on a rampage.

"You punched my window!" he bellowed.

"I didn't punch your window! Why would I do that? You drove away and destroyed me hand!"

Twenty spewing Indian men surged from all directions and stormed towards the offensive goras. Vocalized Hindi rants and gesticulations erupted like the swine flu over their heads. Tarzan and Brighton exited the cab. Within seconds thirty men surrounded the four foreigners. They backed towards the bar, and candlelight. Arms raised in surrender, one streaming blood, Manchester repeated, "I didn't punch your fucking window! You drove off, smashed my hand, and almost took Jane's head off!

Twelve Indian men eye-raped Brighton.

"Run!" she screamed, as panicked as if the government released a study educating parents that socks can kill children.

The four sprinted down the sloshed street followed by a mob of rabid raging Indian men.

Two Aussies and I sat in Cuba Restaurant and Bar playing Connect Four when we heard a commotion as loud as a chorus of gorilla farts.

Tarzan stood in front of Jane at the bar's entrance facing a sea of irate Indians. We cheetah-raced to them.

"I didn't fucking do anything!" Tarzan yelled.

"Come into the street. Step into the street," one of the mob demanded.

"Fuck you! I'm not coming into the street," Tarzan responded.

Asshole fired a glass beer bottle at Tarzan's face. The bottle punched his cheek but ricocheted onto the concrete. The Aussies and I plummeted between the Indians and our South African friends.

Jesus surrendered a cell phone for Jane to call the police. The horde grew. Tarzan and Jane told us Brighton and Manchester were across the street at Cheeky Chapati, an English-owned restaurant we had patronized the night before. They then snuck out the back with robber stealth. The rickshaw mob raged at our Cuba entrance as well as Cheeky Chapati's.

Manchester, the gushing hand handicapped by the English owner's personal gauze supply, was blitzkrieged by enraged Indian men.

"Will money help? Can I pay you to leave me alone?" he asked with five-year-old wisdom.

The owner demanded two hundred rupees, equivalent to four dollars, as compensation. He paid and the forty-person posse dispersed.

Ten minutes later Manchester, Brighton, the two Aussies and I sat in Cheeky Chapati with quieting beer and cigarettes. Brighton was still in hysterics. She commanded her boyfriend's presence. We called him.

"Manchester got run over and Tarzan got bottled," she hysterically sobbed into the phone.

"Oh my God! What the fuck?" we heard his voice exclaim through the mobile.

We ruptured into laughter. Manchester wrestled the phone away from her and assured Boyfriend that we were fine. Boyfriend and Leeds returned and we unreeled from frantic pursued sober foreigners into tipsy blockheads. Upon Brighton's insistence, we slept seven in one room.

The next morning we found out a cyclone was headed for India.

November 19th 4:15pm - November 2009 Photo of the Month

Location: Palolem Beach, Goa, India

November 17th 1:55pm - Headphone Party

Noise ordinances agitate me. However, I'm twenty-three, not ninety-four. I'm unmarried and don't have thirteen children bounding around wreaking wreckage by choking on marbles and eating crayons.
Palolem's Silent Noise thwarted the midnight noise curfew by implementing a silent disco, or headphone party.

Last weekend myself and nine others strengthened our destructive synergy with beer, Old Monk rum and Bagpiper whiskey. The females expounded our sexual prowess by donning droopy clothing. The males resembled middle-class-bums in shorts and t-shirts. By entrance time, we had attained beer goggles, or imaginary optical aids through which average-looking members of the opposite sex morph into supermodels. Playboy Bunnies rimmed us and Grecian gods ringed us.

We ordered drinks at the circular bamboo bar and whooped the shrieks of the bombed and blitzed. Brighton, a female Brit, absorbed four sips of her cocktail before stumbling to the bathroom and then upstairs. Her conversation capabilities resembled that of a drugged kitten.

She joined us on orange seat cushions, head lolling and limbs as insurgent as Che Guevara. We slung her silly putty arms around the shoulders of her boyfriend and Tarzan and they trucked her back to our guesthouse. Our consensus: her drink was slipped a date-rape drug. Manchester was with her while it must have happened. He endured jokes for a week about drugging her.

We pitched downstairs to the debaucherous dance floor, headphones strapped to our ears and arms monkey-flailing.

Two titan screens flanked the three DJs. Tarzan's girlfriend Jane and I used our ninja tactics and dodged past non-existent security to strategically position ourselves behind the screen. We performed a Sound of Music routine, our black silhouettes projected onto the shit-housed masses dancing to different songs.

The headphones boasted three stations to choose from: pure house music, electrotech, and filthy funk. A midget colored dot on the headphones illustrated which station we listened to. One listening to the green station rabbit-bounced while another on the red swayed, and yellow dirty-danced with anything moving in the vicinity mirroring anyone of the counter-sex.

Upon removing the headphones, thousands of voices mumbling, singing, or shouting to conflicting songs enticed the eardrums.

The next morning the ten of us convened and recounted varying degrees of rat-assed inebriation.

After many of us had retreated to the guesthouse with crossed eyes and sloshed babbles, Leeds asked Manchester to escort three girls back on his way home.

"Don't you worry, I won't molest you tonight. I have a girlfriend," he informed them, as serious as Hitler.

When Manchester returned to the beach hut he shared with Leeds, he raped his pockets for the room key but was as successful as my ballerina vocation while a pumpkin-shaped eight-year-old. He beat the door of the beach hut of the drugged girl and her boyfriend until they answered.

"It's okay with me if you have sex. I promise I won't watch. Have sex. I won't watch," he repeated like a three-year-old girl desiring a walking, talking, life-sized Barbie doll.

When Leeds returned, their room was locked and Manchester was as absent as my intoxicated what's-appropriate sensor. Leeds slept outside on a wooden beach lounge chair and awoke the next morning with a bite on his neck that looked like a blue whale had given him a hickey.

Manchester awoke with their room key around his neck.

November 15th 7:43pm - A Kick and a Punch

One of the female Brits we traveled with, Brighton, had a passion for dogs that rivaled my rum rapture. She hijacked food off fellow traveler's plates to bestow on stray dogs. She cuddled rabid dogs and caressed those with Lyme disease. Stray dogs dominated Goa's Arambol Beach.

Multiple independent sources testified the existence of Arambol's Pig Dog. A pig - or dog - whose parents were a pig and dog. He had the pig snout, potbelly and short legs, as well as floppy dog ears and tail. I never beheld Pig Dog.

An Aussie couple and I sat on the beach as the dilated neon orange sun sunk into the ocean. The female was a nurse and someone I mentally referred to as Jesusa. She was one of the most compassionate people I had ever met.

A fully-dressed fifteen-male beach gang strutted past on the sand, holding hands and donning shoes and picture phones. As we were Brighton's comrades, her dog posse lay strewn about us in a six-foot radius.

Indian men are sexually repressed. Parents arrange marriages. Public displays of affection between Indian heterosexual couples are as common as an Army grunt wearing a ballerina too-too and carrying a pink plastic wand. The men take pictures of bathing suit-clad white girl whores with their camera phones and pokers out.

One man who resembled a taller, fatter, human version of Pig Dog scowled at one of Brighton's dogs as he paraded past. When the dog rumbled a low-throat growl, PigDog Man removed the phone's camera lens from three inches in front of his face and three feet from us white-woman-prostitutes. He retracted his right leg behind him. Defender Dog crouched, head down, eyes raised, body weight slung back in warning stance. PigDog Man football-punted the canine. His foot pulverized the dingo's chest. Defender Dog punched the sand with his side. His bawls and whimpers barraged our ears.

"Jackass!" I screamed. PigDog Man ignored me. I would have made as much an impact if I were a deaf mute mentally handicapped patient in a psychiatric hospital requesting alcohol.

The female Aussie vaulted from the sand and stalked after the perpetrator, courteously verbally assaulting him.

PigDog Man ignored her.

"I said, that is not okay. You can't kick dogs!" she screamed, clawing at his arm and turning him around to face her.

PigDog Man laughed in her face and u-turned.

She punched him in his right scapula.

Badass dove back to us shuddering and shaking, caged bull heavy-breathing.

"I am so sorry you guys. I don't know what came over me. I've never punched someone before. I am so sorry. I can't believe I did that."

"You're shaking!" her boyfriend vocalized.

Jackass and his beach gang strode off, laughing and holding hands.

Brighton congratulated Badass.

November 12th 10:05am - Scooter Gang

I awoke, vomited an intestine, and staggered twenty steps to Residensea's restaurant to join the heavy drinkers and demonic drunks that comprised our impending scooter gang: four Brits, two Aussies, two South Africans, and my solitary American self.
In America, four dollars could buy you some thread. In India, four dollars fetches a prostitute. Or a day-long scooter rental.
The saffron sun seared and the Indian jungle barreled by as we caravanned from Arambol in north Goa to Old Goa. We laced through pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and cars on the spiraling streets. I almost hit a cow.
We toured colonial Portugese architecture in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, the chapel of St. Xavier, and the Se Cathedral. Outside St. Francis' church, a street peddler sold karma sutra books and cigarettes.
Our excursion terminated at a spice plantation. Ambrosial saffron, ginger, nutmeg and coriander violated our nostrils. The tour guide dribbled water down our backs.
Seven minutes into the return ride, the wind cuddled my face and the sun's rays stroked my shoulders. Harmonious nature echoed in my ears, enveloping me in bucolic song. That ended as rapidly as my spell as a religious guidance counselor. I believe in God as much as I do in cyclopses. A sound similar to fingernails scraping a blackboard combined with a baby shriek volleyed my eardrums. My scooter shuttered like a vibrator.
I perverted street-side and stopped. Two of our scooter gang pitched past me. The inferno of an exhaust pipe had cracked off and drug on the ground. After a scooter-gang-options-conference, we tied one of the Brit's shirts around the damaged goods, hoisting the exhaust pipe from the ground. Tarzan, the South African, offered to drive it back if I would take his girlfriend on the rear of his scooter. This was a good idea. If good meant ghastly. My track record with motorized mechanisms was as successful as the Vietnam War.
Normal people (Americans) drive on the right side of the street. Indians, under British rule from 1765-1947, drive on the left side of the street. I, Einstein, turned onto the right-hand side. Tarzan's girlfriend Jane sumo-wrestler-death-gripped me and I swung to avoid oncoming cars and cows. We careened towards a motorbike carrying a nine-month-old baby and it's father. He skewed to his left, I slue to mine, and we were on the correct side of the street again.
The scooter gang progressed down the highway when a car drove by, rolled down the window, and howled like a Satan-possessed being, "Your friend crashed! Your friend crashed!"
We arrested progress on the side of the freeway. The female Brit cried. A few of the males doubled back. Eight minutes later, Tarzan arrived, the scooter sputtering and stammering like a drunken whore.
A water truck had exuded a stream, Tarzan drove over a white painted speed bump, the water-slicked paint projected the scooter out from under him, he stoned his body off the bike and landed on his feet. The scooter's paint job and a sprained Tarzan ankle were the only casualties.
After negotiation with the owner, us saying he rented us a death trap, he saying we crashed it, Tarzan and I split the bill: two dollars each.

November 10th 12:20pm - Camera Toss

After traveling together for three days, Rob Awesome bequeathed the two Brits and myself with nicknames. One of the Brits was MK Ultra, the other, Polly. I was ComeBag. The combined ethanol of his Kiwi accent and booze pronounced it Comeback in my infantile Jesus mind.
It wasn't until we met fifteen other travelers at our Residensea Guesthouse and Rob Awesome introduced me as ComeBag that I caught the pronunciation like Bill Clinton snags STD's.
One day I floated in the ocean's fluid matter when Rob Awesome's voice accosted me across a soccer field-sized expanse of sea.
"Can you catch?"
"Of course I can catch. Can you throw?"
"I am a powerful man. You're a woman. You sure you can catch?"
Upon my repeated assurances, he rocket-launched a black object at me from the shore. It tore ten feet over my head before hurtling into the ocean with the speed of a black man bolting from the cops carrying a television.
I waited for the ball to surface. Rob Awesome scuttled through the waves and asked me where his camera was.
"I don't know. On the shore? Is this like let's guess locations? I'm only good at this game if I'm detecting male body parts."
"No no no. I threw my camera at you!"
"You threw your camera into an ocean? I thought you threw a ball."
"I thought you said you could catch!"
The waterproof and shockproof camera was not waterproof and shockproof after being hurtled three hundred and sixty feet through the air, pulverizing the ocean's face, and settling on the sand-shrouded floor for fifteen minutes. Shocking.
When Rob Awesome departed the bamboo beach hut we shared, he left me one knuckle duster, a bottle of whiskey, and male deodorant.

November 8th 1:12pm - Rob Awesome

Mumbai: Day One: The city was on a beer drought and served no alcohol.
Mumbai: Day Two: Bollywood, and we were told by a restaurant as well as by a bar that playing card games in public is illegal.
Mumbai: Day Three: We left.
By our arrival in Goa, the Kiwi was on his second Bolivian Marching Powder binge in sixty hours. He hadn't slept in forty hours.
As he referred to himself as Rob Awesome, he decreed that the day necessitated getting Rob Awesome in henna across his deltoids.
The Brits migrated to a restaurant for beer and lunch. I read and supervised the henna headway. Rob Awesome lay on his stomach, arms at his sides, while an Indian man administered the henna. Rob Awesome compelled me to cater cigarettes to his mouth. I commanded inhale, he inhaled. The Indian man's eyes told me he thought this as mystifying as my dad motorboating a transvestite in a restaurant on my twenty-first birthday. Henna Man finished. Rob Awesome's body gyrated with gorilla snores. I woke him up.
"Hey, I'm heading up to the restaurant. You want anything?"
"Gagurrr."
"Sweet. I'll get right on that. Don't roll over though, alright?"
"Grmph."
"Right. Just don't roll over. You hear me? DO NOT ROLL OVER. The henna won't be dry for another twenty minutes."
"GGmmmphy."
"Yep, exactly. Just don't roll over. You CANNOT roll over. You'll ruin the henna."
"Gphmph."
I returned thirty minutes later with the Brits.
Rob Awesome had rolled over.

November 5th 5:15pm -The Kiwi

After I had a cerebral aneurysm from being a Bollywood extra, the Brit and I stood on a Mumbai street corner with five hundred extra rupees in our pockets. Five hundred rupees equates $10.70. In the US I could get a meal at McDonald's. In India, $10.70 paid over five nights accommodation.
While we discussed where to eat dinner, the other Brit joined us and the Kiwi's ejaculations from down the street drumbeat our ears. He stammered up to us, stuttered some words as bizarre as birthing two daughters in China, bucked his bag around my neck, and swung into the street. He had the brain capacity of one who had just teetered out of a goat orgy. He disappeared. We shrugged and went to a Chinese restaurant with some other travelers.
The two Brits and I returned to Seashore Guesthouse at four o'clock in the morning after going to a club that looked like a cross between a Japanese tea garden and a Vegas nightclub. Seashore Guesthouse is on the fourth floor of a five-story building. The Kiwi's sandals sprawled on the second floor landing. We found him in our guesthouse in the room he shared with the Brit from Manchester.
The next morning, he awoke Manchester with a credit card corner of coke in one hand and the remainder of my Old Monk rum bottle in the other. His mad cow eyes and four-foot-long dreadlocks were as nonsensical as nipples spouting vodka. Manchester responded correspondingly. He beamed love and tenderness, sniffed and sucked. Manchester and the Kiwi then woke me and the other Brit up and we whirled to Leopold's restaurant for some beer.
The Kiwi recounted his night over a cigarette and a beer pitcher at ten in the morning. Bagpiper Whiskey caused his coarse memory, but he recalled purchasing two grams of coke from a street drug dealer. He had never tried coke in his life. Fueled by Special Olympics in a bottle, coke seemed a good idea.
Hours later the Kiwi returned to our guesthouse. He walked up the stairs but couldn't find the hotel entrance. The different levels with varying hotels, shops and signs confused him. He wobbled outside and noticed scaffolding near the building. His six-foot-four-inch body with four-foot-long dreadlocks monkey-maneuvered up the scaffolding until he was outside our floor. He assaulted the window with his fist. A man we had slurred to earlier while waiting for the Bollywood jeep opened the window. Asshole refused to let the Kiwi inside, telling him that there was a gap and it was too dangerous. Kiwi coerced a window open and tumbled into the worker's sleeping room.
"Sorry mate. I'm just sorry. Sorry love," he apologized to a two hundred pound woman sleeping on a broom.
The Kiwi's body pinball-machined the hallway. It took him seven minutes to open his door. He lay in bed for twenty-five minutes, soaked in silence and eyes as wide as a prostitute's legs. A European girl screamed at him, "For God's sake, keep it down!"
"I've been fucking silent for twenty minutes, Bitch!" he related in Leopold's restaurant, permeated with families and young children consuming breakfast.
"You daft cunt!" Manchester exclaimed. "You were probably still making noise."

October 30th 2:12pm - Bollywood

I'm as much an actress as Lindsay Lohan is a rocket scientist.

Thus, when a man approached me in Mumbai who looked more like an Indian squirrel than a talent agent and asked if I wanted to be an extra in a Bollywood film, I laughed so much I snorted. When he said the three guys I was with could also be extras, I considered it as much as I would pregnancy. When he said it paid and included free food, I said yes please.

A white molester van picked us up at one in the afternoon. We had been drinking since eleven. The Kiwi entered the car cradling a bottle of Bagpiper whiskey. He and one of the Brits boozed in the back. The van echoed with our screeches of Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall and You're Drunk You're Drunk You Silly Old Fool. The driver and six other passengers looked at us with the disdain I feel for pigeon poop in my hair.

Twenty minutes into the thirty-minute ride, the Kiwi decided he didn't want to be a Bollywood extra. He wanted to drink on Mumbai's streets. He opened the back door and he and one of the Brits tumbled out like drunken Santa Clauses, Bagpiper whiskey in hand.

The other Brit and I continued to Bollywood and our impending white-person fame in the Indian film industry.

The Brit, myself, and six other Westerners sat at an outdoor restaurant for an hour and a half while women resembling fashion models served us chai.

When the administration recognized that some of the extras were smoking a joint, they encouraged us to go inside the building. While waiting another half hour, I talked with the Germans and French comprising the whiteys. Their English was as fluent as my Spanish. And my Spanish manifests as a Spanish/French fusion. Our roles constituted speaking English into microphones while video clips danced across the screen. Our voices would fashion background noise in a movie entitled Fired.

The Indians on the sound boards didn't seem to recognize that many of those speaking English sounded like it was their sixth language.

Synopsis of movie provided to us: the executives of a company called HWLS - largely Joy - are firing employees, thus the employees are agitated. Go!

One of my favorite conversations:

Thomas: "It's all fair in HWLS under Joy Mittal. He is cursed, the son bitch he will suffer and he will die the worst ever death. Maybe by stoning."

Cheryl: "Let us get that bastard... this office needs some security... not a Joy asshole."

Milind: "He will suffer... I know... we know don't we... we know."

Mark: "Sure deal mate... that wanker needs to be buggered up."

Thomas: "You can't fire us Joy. You can't get us easily out of your life. DIE... DIE... DIE... DIE A SLOW DEATH."

October 29th 7:25pm - October 2009 Quote of the Month

Brit Physicist: "I was surrounded and attacked by dogs. I had to kick one to escape. I was on acid. It might have been in my mind."

October 27th 11:18am - Ahmedabad Cesspool

When traveling, I plan as much as a walrus balances his checkbook.

I decided to go to Mumbai, but somehow ended up in Ahmedabad for two nights. Ahmedabad was once the capital of Gujarat and is two hundred and eighty-one miles from Mumbai. I contemplated walking but realized that was as plausible as a future career as a rocket scientist.

I arrived at eleven o'clock at night. Rickshaw drivers circled me like tigers stalking prey. White girl, or gora, equates dollar sign. I located the one who spoke pigeon English and instructed him to take me to cheap accommodation.

First, he took me to a whore house.

Then he dropped me off at his "friend's" guesthouse. It was midnight and I would have been grateful for a cave infested with rabid flies.

The hallway I trudged down looked like an Indian prison, and my room resembled that of a hooker.

The blue sheets boasted burn marks, the mattress was as soft as bones, the pillows resembled Goodwill rejections, and the walls and ceiling were stained with what suspiciously looked like ejaculation.

A dead rat stench issued from the bathroom.

This was worse than finding blood-streaked sheets in a Peruvian guesthouse.

After raking through my bag, I located a water bottle of rum and one cigarette belonging to the German girl. I had never smoked before, but felt the circumstances required self-medication of rum and a cigarette.

After coughing like a horse with whooping cough, i threw it in the trash. It landed on pubic hair and the trash can erupted in fire. I dying-hamster-screamed, snatched the can, and doused it with water.

The next morning, while showering under a water stream as powerful as a man's urine, I noticed a box of used condoms called "Man Love" in an alcove above the door.

In the two days I was there, I didn't see any other tourists. I felt as comfortable as the time I flashed a roomful of strangers while playing Drunk Jenga.

October 24th 10:12am - October 2009 Photo of the Month

Location: Jaisalmer, India

Sand dune on a camel safari

October 22nd 2:47pm - Cankles

My first middle school crush didn't know my name. He called me Cankles.
After a pre-pubescent heart-to-heart with God, by seventh grade He had upgraded my life from Fat Kid to Soccer Player. However, He forgot to thin out my ankles. I have the ankle definition of a four-hundred-pound woman. In my youth people called me Klump Foot.

The German girl and I lay on our bed, talking with our legs in the air. She glanced at my ankles and wailed like a flying rhinoceros had shit on her head.

"Your ankles! So swollen! You must be bit or bruised or kicked or hurt."
"Oh no no, that's just my ankles. They're always like that," I replied, giggling like I had just skimmed a classified ad that read, "Illiterate? Write today for free help."
"No, ankles aren't like that. Too big!" German said.
Twelve minutes later I finally convinced her that I had monkey breasts and elephantitis ankles. As an apology for potentially offending me, she bought me a silver anklet. It didn't fit around my ankle.
She said she was as embarrassed as the time she was in the U.S., walked into a hair salon, and asked for a shampoo and a blow job.

October 20th 2:19pm - Diwali: The Festival of Lights

Diwali is the celebration of inner light awareness. It celebrates the pure and eternal beyond the mental and physical.
Translation: Diwali is the festival of lights, or, fireworks set off by babies aged three to five.
We returned from the camel safari by noon, met at one, and, after a meal and alcohol purchases, were drinking our coherence and consciousness away by four on our rooftop restaurant.
By five-thirty we were so bladder blasted that one Brit lit the book The Power of Now on fire and tossed it over the four-story ledge. His concern for what was below paralleled the interest blue whales have for Watergate.

By nine the other Brit disappeared like Harry Potter. He said he had to go to the bathroom. Three minutes later the Kiwi identified him Forrest Gump-running to his guesthouse. We didn't see him again until the next morning.

After five bottles of Old Monk rum, we were so futhermucked that I repeated, "I'm on the rum!" as often as I urinated.
As sly as a bald guy, the German girl asked us if the Irishman had a speech impediment. We Pillsbury-Dough-Boy giggled and questioned why she thought that.
"Because he says 'tink' instead of 'think.'"
"That's just an Irish accent," we informed her.
My success at keeping a straight face aligned with my nonexistent mathematical triumphs. We forayed the firework-strewn streets. In a Hindu-dominated country where cows are as sacred as the Pope, the Kiwi picked up a calf and rode a cow. He also held a lit firework that more closely resembled a rocket.

The next morning, I woke up fully clothed face-down and backwards on the bed in the room next to mine. I was so hungover I felt as bad as if I had dropped a baby on it's head.

October 18th 1:31pm - Leonard: My Camel

Aside from the German, Scot, Kiwi, and myself, two Brits and an Irishman were on our camel safari. My camel, Leonard, had the IQ of a fruit fly. While boomeranging around on the saddle, I would consume a bhang cookie, close my eyes, and fabricate flying. I envisaged spiraling sand dunes and a blushing apricot sunset. Leonard would tear into a thorn bush.
The other camels halted to eat. Leonard Iron-Man-propelled through them, knocked two back, who stumbled to keep their footing, and then stopped to eat three feet away.
When Mr. LaLoo veered to the right around a bush, Ivan and Julian circumvented to the left. Leonard thudded through it.

The camel drivers, sensing our aching legs and backs with a sixth sense fueled by our moans and groans, made the camels run. It aggravated the agony but abbreviated the time. We joggled in our saddles, faces pleated in pain. To combat the misery, the Kiwi and Scot passed a Bagpiper Whiskey bottle between them as if it was an alcohol ball. What they had purchased for three days, they consumed in one. They voiced their concern to a camel driver. Desert orbited in every direction as far as we could see. Within an hour he procured another bottle. It was cheaper than the one bought in the city.

Camels sit down two feet at a time. They lurch forward, fold their feet beneath them, and then jerk backwards, folding limbs and settling on their legs. When our camels sat for the first time, we egg-rolled off and crumpled on the sand.
"My internal organs are damaged," the Kiwi announced.
"My balls died," one of the Brits countered.

The first day, the camels smelled like burning cat poop. The second day, we couldn't smell them. The third day, even the flies couldn't distinguish between the camels and us.
By the third and final morning, the Scot had a shirt of flies and the Kiwi a halo. Flies mated on me.

October 14th 12:38pm - Camel Safari Organization

I've been wanting to ride a camel as long as one of my male friends has desired to be a Virgin Surgeon.

The German girl and I ordered breakfast on Fort View's rooftop restaurant, but it took longer to arrive than the first sentence of a President Bush speech. I temporarily left to meet up with the Scot at Jaisalmer fort 's second gate, as previously planned. The Scot has short chocolate hair and is six feet tall.

I returned with a six-foot-four-inch Kiwi law student with dark dreadlocks down his back who referred to himself as Rob Awesome from the asshole of the world. He loves New Zealand.

The Scot had told me and the Kiwi to meet him at the second gate at noon. Three hours later, while walking to organize a camel safari, we found the Scot. His train had been two hours late.

I entered Ganesh Travels with the Scot, German, and Kiwi. At the prospect of booking a camel safari, I experienced exhilaration previously only felt after I drunkenly announced, "Group Hug!" in a Vegas elevator years ago. Aside from myself, in the elevator were five people I didn't know. I enforced the group hug.

After booking a two-night safari, the organizer peeled through a suggested list. Sunscreen, a water bottle, pants, and sunglasses was followed by, "Bring soda, like Limca, Coke, Sprite, or beer," and, "You bring bhang cookies, but don't give to camel."

"Bhang cookies?" I asked with four-year-old innocence.

"Weed cookies," Organizer replied.
"Oh. Where can we possibly buy bhang cookies?" I questioned.
"At the government authorized bhang shop."

October 13th 4:02pm - Bus Ride Rantings

Indian bus rides can be as eventful as the fourth of July.
Last fourth of July, there were dry ice bombs, police, a three-some, swimming naked to a buoy at five in the afternoon watched by families with small children, and running/walking six miles to a store for a beer run when someone had offered to drive. The store was closed.
I entered the sleeper bus from Udaipur to Jaisalmer with the apprehension I feel towards owning a motorcycle. I have crashed both of the motorbikes I've rented.

The aisle was Lindsay Lohan-thin with two seats on either side. Coffins with tinted thick plastic sliding doors suspended above the seats. I clambered into my coffin-bed and, after upsetting Indian men with our Energizer Bunny-chatter, a German girl and I slid our compartment doors shut.

Every time the bus missiled over a rock or a bump, my head clouted the ceiling and my feet struck the wall. I felt like I was a five-year-old repeatedly being bopped on the head with a Bible by my great-grandmother.

I convinced myself that head cracking while sleeping was normal, just like Mormons established that Joseph Smith, Jr. digging up golden plates, translating them, and returning them to an angel was standard.
I had just submerged into the surface sleep of one whose head is box-buffeted every four minutes when shrieks volleyed into my ears with the force of a gay man's sex drive.

"Fucking thief! Fuck you! One thousand rupees!" punctuated through the Hindi jabber.
My partition pulsed with bellows and bruises from a fist pulverizing the sliding walls for emphasis.
"Fuck-ing-thief! Fuck-you!" repeated, each syllable rapping its anger on my plastic. His voice was pregnant with unshed tears.
"I didn't fuck-ing steal an-y-thing, sister-fucker!" answered towards the front of the bus.
I heard wails, whines, and roars. I fell asleep again.
The next morning, the German girl and I talked to an English midget on our bus. He looked like a brown-haired leprechaun and at his full height ascended to my belly button.
He told us that the bus had halted and a man had exited. The bus drove off with the man running after it wearing no shoes, struggling to hold up his pants - which were more around his ankles then his waist - and with a roll of toilet paper in his hand. When he entered the bus, he returned to his seat, looked among his belongings, and started screaming. His pants never were properly placed.