No Conversation

One frustrating notion I’ve gotten out of traveling is that, in regard to travel, anywhere is fair game.  This might at first glance seem liberating, but then how do you make a choice?  You’ve got a place to stay for the summer for free in Namibia, you’ve always wanted to go see Machu Pichu and–why not–all of South America, the Middle East sounds very enticing, and you have vivid dreams and memories of Asia–the smells of the markets, the motorbikes all over the place, and oh God the durian.  Tossing a coin or rolling dice is starting look like the only viable option I have.  I have to stop myself from reading too many things about too many places because then I just add new places to the list.  Of course, this never works, and the list simply keeps getting longer and longer.  I suppose a world tour where the sun never sets is the only acceptable way to go.

Filed under: Travel on June 19th, 2009 | No Comments »

Thunder is rolling like rocks on gravel, and as I write this the first few drops have begun to fall on the tin roof of the porch.  It’s 4 o’clock, as dark as 8, seventy degrees and cooling.  The smell of rain slowly filling up the air and wet breeze greeting my face.  The rain is showering now, making the meadow look like mist has come down and enveloped it.  Bits of hail intermingle with the rain like it often does this side of summer.  And then, within moments, the fury of rain and ice is disipated, and the clouds begin thinning in the southwest so light floods the falling drops of rain.  Droplets form and drip from the ends of the pine needles as the clouds open up fully and let the sun shine into the shower, turning the droplets into thousands of twinkling lights.  The summer rains aren’t due for another month, perhaps less, but the rolling thunder doesn’t usually accompany those showers, and neither does such cool temperatures, now down to sixty in just 10 or 15 minutes.

Filed under: New Mexico, Ruidoso on June 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

I spent a week and a half in Ubud on the island of Bali.  Most evenings I would be at the Deli Cat, a little restaurant owned by an Icelander located a few steps from my guesthouse.  The regular clientele was made up of artists and writers and musicians, most of whom were expats and had been living in Ubud for years.  The only regular Indonesian I saw there was a handsome, lean Javanese.  Tribal tattoos wrapped his biceps and long, silky black hair hung to his elbows.  Every other night he was with a different Western woman.  He would play guitar and croon to them, a fragile but masculine voice filling the open air restaurant.  He always seemed confident in himself around women, carried himself in a way that said he knew he was beautiful and that, darling, you too could have him.  He talked to them about his art and his music and about the love he had for them, each of them, as he held his cigarette in his long, feminine fingers.

A group of travelers plus the Javanese sat together one night, drinking and laughing and talking.  He pulled the guitar out first and played a soft, sweet Indonesian tune that, as always, melted the woman next to him.  He passed the guitar around.  I had played guitar for over a decade but always for myself or close friends, often terrified of a larger, more anonymous audience.  But that evening, half drunk in the middle of Bali, I decided I would go for it.  Nerves helped to amplify my voice and strengthen my strumming, quite a bit too loud for the small area.  The Javanese looked away from his girl and intently watched me.  I was belting out one of my own songs, Indonesia its debut country, when my heavy hand fell across the strings once more and snapped a string.  Laments went around the table along with laughter and applause.  The Icelandic owner sat behind me.

“You play too loud,” he told me.  “If you break a string, you play too loud.”  He downed some wine.

“I’m sorry,” I said, mortified.  “I’ll buy you a string.”

“The string is not important,” he said, angry.  “Music is important.  Music is not about how loud you can be.  Music is about the feeling you put into it.”

Embarrassed, I stayed away from the Deli cat for the next few nights until my last day in Ubud.  I walked home in the dark and saw the Javanese sitting by himself on the patio smoking a cigarette.  “Chris,” he called to me.  “Come, drink with me.”  I sat down across from him at his table.  Smoke from his cigarette and a mosquito coil curled around us.  “How have you been Chris?  You have been good?”

“I’ve been okay.  Yourself?”

He clicked his tongue and ashed his cigarette behind him.  “Maaan,” he said.  “This woman.”  He breathed out smoke in a sigh.  “Do you have a woman?”

“No.”

“Good.  Women are hell, Chris.  They are horrible.”

My beer came and I waited for him to continue.  He kept smoking, looking out toward the darkened soccer field beside the Deli Cat.

“Women come here from the West on vacation and they meet me, and the moment I meet them I am theirs, I love these women.  My first seeing them and I love them!  So we meet up and we go out, and we have passion and we have fun.  Then I’m sorry, they say, I’m sorry but I have to go back home.  I will come back, I will see you again.  So we e-mail each other, once, twice, a few times.  Then nothing.  Then a year later they come back, and they are on vacation, and they want me again for another week.  They get angry when they see me with another woman.  How can they be angry?  They want me to stay here waiting for them, not hearing from them?  They say I thought you loved me.  Of course I love them, I cannot help it!  I wish I could stop, but I see the woman and I simply love her.  My entire body and mind loves her, but then she leaves me, and what do I do?  This is where I live, I have to just sit in my home and wait?”

He stubbed his cigarette out and lit another.  “I am sorry Chris.  Lots of emotions tonight.  You haven’t been here in a few days, I thought you left.”

“Nah, I’ve been around.  But I’m leaving tomorrow.”

He nodded.  “I want to hear the rest of your song someday if you are back.”  I was surprised he remembered.  “It is true you were loud, what he said about that was true.  But you were loud because there is something behind it.  It wasn’t empty, you weren’t empty, you just have to learn to control it, to control the emotion.”  He took a drag and blew it out.  “Everybody does.”

Filed under: Indonesia on April 17th, 2009 | No Comments »

It had only been a few weeks prior in Indonesia that I had ridden my first motorbike, a 125cc Honda with a surfboard mount tacked onto its side.  Now I was in southern Laos, renting my second bike for a week.

“You have driven motorbike before, yes?”  The guy working at the travel agency was young, friendly, and nervous.

“Oh yeah,” I said.  “Plenty.”  I kickstarted the bike and it lurched forward.

“Oh!” the guy exclaimed.  “You are in gear!”

“Ah, yeah, couldn’t see that…the sun, you know.”

I got it started and waved goodbye, wobbling off the sidewalk and swerving to miss the pancake vendor.  I wondered if he often watched Westerners depart thinking he’d have to wash their smashed brain and organs off his boss’s motorbike when it was found in a ditch somewhere.

The motorbike was a 125cc blue Honda Wave with a yellow helmet too small for me. The headlight sometimes worked and the gears sometimes didn’t stick. It was mine for a week.  I couldn’t possibly describe to you what happened during that week.  Instead, I’ll just tell you what I saw.

A kid waving at me, then pretending to shoot me.  A blood splatter in the corner of my bungalow.  Many waterfalls, brown and white and power.  Many children looking very surprised to see me, mouth and eyes wide open.  Guys washing their motorbikes off in the floodwaters where a street had been last week.  An australian couple scared to death of That Muslim Indonesia.  A guy easily kickstart my bike after I’d been struggling with it for four minutes.  A mom and toddler holding hands coming back from a bath in the river, the toddler with no clothes and a shiny butt.  A guy laughing at me when I sounded my horn: pitiful, strangled.  Deep muddy trails my bike slipped and skidded around in.  A waiter come up to me after I order and say, “riiiiiii?!”  That means, “Do you want rice with that?”  Thousands of coffee trees.  A rat, after squealing above my ceiling in my bungalow, crawling through one of the holes in my bamboo thatched walls and scurrying across the floor.  A woman who tried to tell me the price of her noodle soup but spoke no English.  Instead she showed me five with one hand, another number with the other hand (I couldn’t make it out) and then smashed them together, symbolizing addition.  A guy throwing a 15 foot bamboo pole like a spear at one of his 10 cows.  I think he was just frustrated: when he saw me he stopped and grinned sheepishly.  A daughter jumping onto her father’s back and then waving at me after a long day harvesting rice.  A monk ignoring me after I said hello in Lao and the name of his temple, which I was trying to find.  He looked alarmed, then jumped on his bicycle and peddled away quickly.  Many goats and cows and water buffalo and dogs and cats that didn’t seem to notice that vehicles were hurtling toward them.  A family intently watching the World Wrestling Federation.  A 10 year old puffing a cigarette. Many primary schools, only one secondary school, and no high schools.  A little girl in a beautiful bright blue dress swinging a meat cleaver around her body with a blade as big as her head.

That’s the Southern Laos that I saw.

Filed under: Laos on March 30th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Welcome to a new No Conversation.  For about 10 years this has been a place to mostly read my fiction.  That’s all over now, as I haven’t written fiction in some time.  I’ve taken all my stories off my server and calmly tucked them away somewhere safe and dry.  So now I start from scratch.

I have no expectations, predictions, or hints as to what might come for No Conversation.  As before, it will evolve into whatever it needs to be.

So to start this whole thing off, I give you the Burn Hollywood dog from Berlin.

-chris.

Filed under: Berlin on March 23rd, 2009 | No Comments »