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.

October 10th 2:21pm - Massage & Indian Suitor

Over the following days I wavered between regarding Ammu as an angel with a pure heart and an Indian with a hard-on.

Most people are attracted to the foreign and the exotic. Not me. I like white men. Preferably not albino.

After Ammu bought thali dinners for me and the Scot and drove the Scot to the train station on his motorbike, I agreed to get a massage the following day for "Indian price."

"White people" (gora) price for an hour-long massage is between seven hundred and twelve hundred rupees.

"Indian price" spans between two hundred and three hundred and fifty rupees. Ammu charged me three hundred rupees (about six dollars) for an hour-long massage in his Ayurvedic healing center. On our first encounter, Ammu accused me of possessing a too-short leg and crooked back. He prescribed coconut oil drops in my belly button and eating two almonds a day. A disabled sheep would have had the intelligence to refuse his massage offer.

However, the previous massage I received in India cost nine hundred rupees. I was craving a three hundred rupee massage as much as monkeys covet bananas.

When Ammu entered the room, I was appropriately stripped for the occasion and lying on my stomach feeling like a dead fish.

He clapped his hands in delight."You have fifteen-year-old-body!" he pig-squealed.

The Ayurvedic healing massage commenced conventionally with my back, arms, and legs. When I turned to lay on my back, Ammu belly-button-raped me with the aggression of a Chinese foot lover.

After five minutes, his pointer finger prodding into my belly button felt like a fire poker thrusting into flames.

After ten minutes, I determined he was envisioning his pointer finger into my belly button as paralleling sexual intercourse. I assured him it had probably been an hour, and thank you, but I had things to do.
"Cushy happy?" Ammu liquid chocolate eyes asked.
"Ya, Cushy happy. But Cushy needs to leave."
"Massage good, Cushy?"
"Ummm, sure, massage was fine."
My remainding few days in Udaipur, Ammu paid for my meals and arranged for me to watch an Indian mutton dish being made in Rainbow Restaurant's kitchen. He passed me a joint while I stirred the concoction. He paid for henna tattoos to be drawn into my hands, and brought me a bottle of wine after I mentioned I missed wine. The wine tasted like fermented fart, and I was as interested in a relationship with Ammu as I was with one of the homeless cows hopscotching down the streets.

One night, Ammu sang love songs to me on a night paddleboat ride. Udaipur's hotel and restaurant lights radiated over the lake and fireworks discharged into the sky. I celebrated the romantic ambience by ceremoniously throwing up over the side of the paddleboat into the lake.

October 8th 4:49pm - Indian Wedding

Drinking chai is as essential to Indians as sex is to nymphomaniac rabbits.
After our boat ride, Ammu monster-truck-towed me and the Scot to the rooftop Rainbow Restaurant for chai.
Ammu steamed through his camera-phone and showed us photos with mother-pride for baby pictures. Every photo was of him. There were photos of him with his arms crossed in front of his motorbike, in front of a boat, a lake, a house, his ayurvedic shop. He wore identical Mexican thug expressions in all. His elephant-sized gold chain clung to his neck in every picture.
After viewing the thirty-fourth photo with the feigned interest I demonstrate towards hairy backs, we asked him where a good thali restaurant was.

"I take you there! Come on!" he said with Oprah enthusiasm.

The three of us boarded his motorbike. Indian motorbikes are intended to carry three to four Indians, not two giraffe foreigners and an Indian with a Texas-sized gut.

Ammu spiraled through streetlight-less streets writhing with rickshaws, bicyclists, motorbikes, cars, trucks, and cows. The Scot and I elevated our legs and held on to each other with the terror I feel whenever I hear rumors Sarah Palin is running in the 2012 presidential election. Ammu chatted on his cell phone and then to another motorbiker as I sat with a smile as frozen on my face as my breast size has been since I was eight years old.
The Scot yelled into my ear how much he had been craving thali.
Ammu took us to a wedding.
It was day two of a three-day celebration. White Christmas lights enveloped every surface.

The women's saris and salwar kameezes shone in a kaleidoscopic range more colorful than a transvestite's wardrobe. Hair was as immaculate as in a shampoo commercial, faces were make-up painted, and clothes were Mother Teresa-flawless. The Scot wore Jesus sandals, khaki pants dirtied from a hot day in India, and a sweat-blemished shirt. I wore floppy black pants, sandals, and a stretched-out shirt that I had been perspiring in for eleven hours. We looked like ragged whiteys in a lake of impeccable Indians that might as well have been going to the Oscars.

Ammu introduced us to his ninety-eight relatives, referring to them as brother and sister. His mom must have been annually pregnant with twins throughout her fifty years of life. I later discovered the term applied to sister-cousins and brother-cousins.
Ammu's two-year-old niece showered into tears every time she glanced at us strange white beasts. The six-year-olds trailed us like we were Mr. and Mrs. Clause.
After eating a luscious cocktail of fiery dal, rice, aloo gobi, vegetable masala, chapatis, and Indian desserts, Ammu transported us out of the expansive lawn swimming with Indians. We shook hands with the bride's parents as we exited, said, "Namaste," clasped our hands together, and were ushered into the parking lot.

Ammu's brother-cousin sat inside his car rolling a joint. He looked as inconspicuous as a deer wandering through a tiger's cage at the zoo.
Ammu's brother-cousin explained that he is a bus driver and needs at least two joints to get through any drive.
"That explains Indian driving," the Scot said.

October 7th 5:55pm - Crooked Back and Too-Short Leg

"I'm telling you, crazy shit happens to me," I informed a Scot as we sat overlooking a glossing sapphire lake in Lal Ghat Guesthouse in Udaipur, India.

Later that day the Scot and I bought tickets for a sunset boat ride. As we waltzed away, a small Indian man who looked like a cross between Jesse James and Chris Brown materialized like Merlin and hooked my hand. He wore all black, his ebony hair slicked back, and an obese gold chain hovered around his neck.

"My name is Ammu. It means love. Come inside my shop! I give you free exam."

I shrugged at the Scot, he smiled, and we followed Ammu into his Ayurvedic shop as submissive as prostitutes.

Ammu monkey-latched onto the area between my thumb and forefinger with his thumb and forefinger.

His eyes wavered like a bisexual's carnal preference. I couldn't decide if he looked like he was having a seizure or being possessed by Casper the ghost. The Scot's face creased into mirth. He looked like a child had just asked him if his wife had two breasts because one produced hot milk and the other cold.

"I know what wrong with you!" Ammu exclaimed five minutes later, eyes shining like a bald man's head and lips slowly spreading back over beetlejuice tobacco stained teeth. He released my hands, leaned back, and clasped his own like a sixty-year-old professor.

"You have crooked back, and one leg too short. One leg longer than other."

I choked on the water I was sipping.

"Oh no no no, I'm actually very healthy, no problems."

"You have pain here?" he asked, pointing to the right leg on a body chart hanging on the wall.

"No, no pain."

"Here?" this time to the lower back.

"No, I told you, no pain."

"Here?" to an arm.

"No."

"Here?" to the neck.

"No no, I told you, no pain."

"You have crooked back and too-short leg. I know how to fix. You eat two almonds in morning and two in water glass. Cover glass. Next morning, take off outside of almonds. Then you crush and put in glass of milk. Drink milk with almonds inside. And every day, two drops of coconut oil in... what's this?" he asked.

"Belly button."

"Yes. Belly button. Two drops coconut oil in... what's this?"

"Belly button."

"Yes. Almonds and coconut oil fix back and make leg grow," he said, chocolate eyes brimming and his face as serious as the plague.

We levitated to leave and he kidnapped my hand again.

"Your Indian name is Cushy!" he announced.

"Cushy? But I'm not fat anymore!" I five-year-old whined.

"Yes, Ksushi. It means happy."

"Oh great. Cushy. That's just fantastic."

For the next three days he would banshee-shriek "Cushy" and rush over to me like I was Ghandi.

As we paced towards the door he rocketed into song. If Dr. Seuss sang and was a robust Indian man, he would be Ammu.

No thank you no sorry

No hurry no worry

No chicken no curry

No clock tower full power twenty-four hour

No toilet no shower

No woman no cry

No sugar no chai

Only tiger.

This melody was as cryptic as the Bible.

"Where's the tiger?" I asked.

"Ammu tiger."

October 5th 3:35pm - Chicken Fight in a Waterfall

When I was eight years old and had bigger breasts and a Homer Simpson belly, my friends and I would divert ourselves with chicken fights whenever we went to the beach or pool. We weren't eight-year-old psychofants and masochists conducting cock fights. Two people settled on the shoulders of two others and each team tried to topple the other. With my Godzilla thighs and sumo wrestler stomach, I was the base with a friend on my shoulders.

From McLeod Ganj a Brit, German, Dane, Aussie and I walked twenty minutes along the coiling road to the Bagsu waterfall. Variegated posters and jewelry and clothes stands swayed to jade forested ridges. We mounted steps with sloth speed and arrived at the waterfall as elated as Wile E. Coyote would have been if he'd ever ensnared the Road Runner.

The Brit poked his pointer finger in the water, rocket-launched his appendage back, screeching, "Fucking hell! It's glacial water!"

The water felt like it had one ice cube in it.

After twice scrambling up rocks with the grace of a cow walking up five stairs, I suggested chicken fights. The Dane agreed but the others refused. Too much physical activity on vacation. We persuaded two Indian men to combat us. The Dane was the infrastructure, I was the grappler. Within thirty seconds I had catapulted the Indians into the water. They were both a head shorter than me and weighed as much as my little sister.

The five of us were the only whites. In a male-dominated country with twenty-five Indian spectators, Naruna and Navaj were not baby-happy that a gori had wafted them into the water. They requisitioned a rematch.

Navaj's hands locked on my arms. My hands clamped onto his arms. I bucked him to the right. He pitched me to the left. I boosted him to the left. He wrapped his arm around the back of my neck for leverage. I ducked under his limb and strong-armed him with dwarf strength into the peacock-colored water.

The bystanders grunted. To display their displeasure, two Indian men resembling Cheech and Chong fired a gun into the sky.

I maintain it was a cap gun. The Brit persists that it was a real gun.

October 2nd 12:20pm - Indian Post Office: Is It Ready Yet?

I had bucked a bag around India for two and a half months. The bag was more a weighted weapon than traveler's luggage. Days ago I boarded a bus and a man elevated my pack for me. He fell on his back from the weight of it. I needed to send a package home.
Indian post offices make as much sense as the Kardashian sisters' fame. The offices are not equipped with boxes, tape, or pens. They accept packages only at certain times and often don't have electricity. Weeks ago I had overheard an exchange between two travelers, I was a latecomer to the conversation, and asked if they were talking about jail conditions.
"What are you on about? No, not jail, Indian post offices," a Brit had replied, smile lines creasing the corners of his eyes.
The presents I had accumulated for people added rhinoceros weight to my luggage. Shawls, jewelry, journals, elephants, scarves, white marble, silver tea strainers, sequined clothes, Tibetan music, yak wool socks, and a gluttony of Indian marvels combined in a formidable force of florid weight. I had more present weight than Santa Clause.
I located a box and walked to the post office. I was told that though I did have a box, a tailor would have to prepare it for me. The Indian government is apparently under the impression that packages can only be sent in beige, sewn coverings with child marker writing. Boxes, tape, and paper sender's forms do not exist. A Looney Tune cartoon package is wrapped more efficiently than one through the Indian post.
I went to a tailor. Two tailors taped the box shut and covered it in plastic wrap and tape. They sewed a beige pillowcase and shoved it around the box. A seamstress stitched two of the sides with string large enough to accommodate blind people.
Instead of tying knots at the ends of the string like someone with six-year-old sewing abilities, Seamstress burnt a tampon-sized slab of red wax, dripped the wax onto the untied ends of the stitching, and compressed it with a handheld metal presser. This was as logical as the swine flu.
What had started as a box now paralleled a boxed pillow.
"Is it ready to send now?" I inquired, as I surmised the only further possible alteration would be to sprinkle fairy dust on top.
"No, you need to write the addresses."
When I requested a pen, the tailors said no. When I asked if the post office down the street had a pen, they said no. I purchased a pen and wrote my mom’s address on the plastic-covered and taped box bordered in beige cloth and red wax.
"Now is it ready to send?" I asked with the patience of New York.
"Ready? No. you need your address on the box."
"I'm homeless and traveling around India. I definitely don't have an address."
"You need Indian return address."
"I don't have an Indian address! I'm just traveling," I informed them with the whine of a spoiled seven-year-old.
I used the tailor's address.
"Is it ready yet?"
"The post office only accepts packages from nine in the morning until one. Today is three o'clock."
"The post office doesn't just accept packages and hold them until they're picked up?" I asked with the confusion of a frog towards it's sexuality.
"No. Only nine to one."
Clearly arguing would have been as effective as an ostrich's wings.
"Okay. So I'll drop this off at the post office tomorrow morning at nine."
"Tomorrow the post office is closed. Go the next day."

October 1st 6pm - Pillow Fight

In certain facets of life, I'm Rocky Balboa-competitive. Pillow fighting is one of them.
In Dharamsala, a German, Dane, and I shared a room that was more a house with five-year-old triplets than a haven for transients in their twenties. It had more rooms than I have brain cells. The primary chamber boasted three couches, a coffee table, and single and double beds. Adjoining it, a kitchen with two tables, counters, a sink, wooden shelves and cupboards. The kitchen was as effective as Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky denial. It had no stove or oven.

In addition to an over-sized bathroom, we also had an extra room that, aside from a pile of cat shit, was vacant.

One night we watched a movie and afterwards lay down. The Dane and I shared the massive king-sized bed. It was large enough to comfortably sleep three Goliaths. I was more tired than a narcoleptic and my eyes shut as gently as a one-year-old on opiates. As I yawned the yawn of the weak and weary, my skull cracked into my pillow. The pillow was as plump as an anorexic flea and my head shot back into the mattress with the speed of a cracked-out Kiwi. "What the hell?" I banshee-shrieked. My eyes gaped to see the Dane laying back with the calm of Jesus, a Judas smile frolicking across his face. His right hand gripped his pillow like it was the meaning of life. His aquamarine eyes oscillated in the moonlight, emanating mirth like a zoo monkey who had just catapulted primate excrement at spectators. I rabid-dog-attacked him. Within seventy-four seconds I had succeeded in swiping at him twice and my skull had been cudgeled so many times I felt like King Kong had headbutted me. At seventy-six seconds the Dane's eight-pack and Viking body straddled me, pinning me against the mattress. I was as helpless as if I had been handcuffed and blindfolded by drunk bandits.

I maneuvered my legs for leverage and my Shrek foot connected with his ass skin.
"Are you naked?!" I screeched.His laughing confirmation sent the German into hyena hysterics.
"Why are you naked?" I howled in the same eighty-year-old woman panic shriek.
The Dane launched a blanket over his lap and withdrew laughing.
"I just always sleep naked. Sorry, I didn't think you'd respond to a pillow hit like a deranged bull."