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Our Trip Was Different Part 3

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Years of driving past billboards with tiny lethal doses of Fentanyl on them next to piles of cocaine or whatever, years of that and the fact that I had two kids who told me to ‘come back’ whenever I left for a few days had me kind of worried about the drugs aspect of the trip. But the fear and anxiety and all of that were secondary compared to the fact that no one seemed to have access to any of this shit. Everyone said buy it on the dark web, but it felt too traceable.

Robbie, who in years past was always holding, was no help on this front. His connections had either washed up or he had burned them all. He probably burned them, because he was in the process of burning his crew since I had met him. Nothing personal, he was just slowly circling around meeting this girl. The same thing had happened to his brother. Like all girls, Robbie’s girl wasn’t into Robbie’s friends. Like most girls, she wasn’t all that into drugs, either. Around the time that she moved into Robbie’s apartment, the last of the fake-ecstasy-slash-meth somehow disappeared. Robbie started eating mushrooms when he went out to clubs, because girls, even Hunter’s girl, are somehow more comfortable with ‘natural’ drugs.

We hit up old friends we hadn’t talked to in years and asked them for drugs. It was embarassing, but we had no alternative. I considered buying a Bolivian Torch cactus and shipping it to my brother, John, to figure out how to get the mescaline out of it. I looked up how to make DMT. We got nowhere. Two weeks before the trip, it looked like we were going to eat dinner and drink wine and go to a show like civilized people.

A week before we were set to leave, I was on the phone with the New York State Police. They were looking for a project manager to implement some crazy thing and they were having no success with it and the county police commissioner was yelling at me. It was strange. I felt a kinship with him. I felt he was angry at incompetence, and I was highly sympathetic to that. The recruiter, being an incompetent recruiter, which I’m sorry to say is the norm in my experience, had failed to mention that I would be working for the police in this role and that I would need to take a drug test. It was pretty funny, because the role paid twice my salary at the time, and I was worried that they would offer the job to me right before the trip started.

I hung up the phone with the police and my phone vibrated and there was a text from Hunter, ‘One thing’s for sure…there’s a whole lotta drugs in here…right now.’ There was a picture of capsules full of little crystals and ten tabs of LSD.

A few days after that, my brother John scored some magic mushrooms down in Delaware. He came up and we ate a couple grams and watched Fear and Loathing. At some point we stopped the movie and went outside to smoke weed next to a stop sign.

“The philosophy of this sign is merciless,” I said. I felt it was telling me not to go on the bachelor trip, that I should stop everything because it was clearly a bad idea. And then I thought it was telling me to stop thinking about things like that. And then I thought it was telling me to stop figuring out what it was trying to say to me.

After a while, Hunter said, “I don’t think he likes this stop sign,” and moved our smoking circle to his bright-as-hell front stoop. I tried to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was upset that no one was enjoying my clearly mind-blowing stop sign revelations. 

I think we finished the movie, but I’m not sure. I think the TV was still on when I laid on the floor in the fetal position and tried to go to sleep. I was freezing cold and Hunter put some kind of long weird skinny drape over me.

I woke up three hours later and got the kids out of there. We went back home and brushed our teeth. I got the one on the bus and the other to the daycare. Then I went to work.

I was glad we had done the mushrooms together because I was thinking I had better shut the fuck up about stop signs in the future. I felt I had talked too much and what I needed to do in the future was just blast music. My family’s tendency is to talk about everything endlessly. It’s the thing we like to do. Especially my dad. But with these drugs, it was best not to talk.

A week or so later, I needed to go to Walmart to pick up random stuff for the trip, like a pair of briefs that I could stash the molly in so that I could get into the club. You just never knew how hard they were going to search you at the Brooklyn Mirage.

Hunter had found a strain of cannabis called White Widow at our local store, which was strange because my brothers and I had been looking for that strain for years, ever since I had first smoked it with this half Asian half Jewish chick on a bench in SoHo. It was the one strain I ever smoked that hadn’t immediately put me onto a time dilated hell path leading straight to sleep.

So I decided we should test that out, too. I smoked it on the way to Walmart. It was only once we hit the parking lot that Hunter said to me, “Smoking weed and going into Walmart is not the move.” He said it was  something about the fluorescent lighting.

“Well, shit.”

We went in there and started looking around and we were walking down this one aisle full of men’s clothes and suddenly it flipped into the women’s section. It was trippy as fuck. We were walking down the aisle and the whole store just flipped around us. I don’t know.

It took us like 20 minutes to find out where they kept the underwear, and come to find out they had it all under lock and key. Which totally made sense because back in the high school cross country days, my friend used to go into Walmart and take tank tops out of their packages and toss them over his shoulder and walk out. He always had fresh tank tops and my shit was always dingy.

So we started looking for an associate, and they were all acting kind of strange and not looking a hundred percent like employees. Hunter found out about twenty minutes later that the store had been closed for half an hour. So we left, which was bad, because I didn’t have another time when I could get all this shit and the trip was coming up fast.

I ended up going back to Walmart the next day while talking to a coworker on the phone about this crazy project that was going to be due in a few days. Kids were arguing over shovels and I was pacing the clearance aisle, talking about SFTP servers.

The work deadline was really fucking with me in the beginning. Not only that, a friend’s girl had called me out of the fucking blue that morning, the same friend, in fact, who used to shoplift tank tops. The last three times she had called me, people had died. I’m sure this was no exception to the rule, but honest to God I just didn’t have the space for it then, and I still don’t, and I am to this day letting that shit ride.

Shit. Let’s start over. Where the fuck were we. Good Christ, how did a structure sneak into this document? The point was there we were, wearing blankets and shit like that, standing on a Ford Bronco. How was it a Ford Bronco and not a Jeep? I don’t know. The back seat was sick because you could look up at the sky, but the seats weren’t comfortable, like to the point I didn’t even know how to sit. Or was that the drugs? At that point, I could taste MDMA on my face every time I licked my lips. And I had never put MDMA on my face. I don’t think. Shit. Anything’s possible.

And that was the point, man, that’s what I learned. Anything is possible. Shit.

For a couple thousand dollars and a million text messages you could get ten guys together in New York, walk into a 200 year old steakhouse and make fun of the rich. We tipped the waitress $600 and went outside passing baggies around and jamming them in our underwear. Like I was telling you, I bought these technicolor high-waisted briefs for the occasion. I got them at TJ Maxx the day after the failed trip to Walmart.  One of the best purchases I made. And shit, I made a lot of purchases. A dash cam for $99 off eBay so we could have evidence in case we got into an accident. Bear spray. A fire pan off Amazon so you could have a fire where there is no fire ring. If you don’t know about camping in the desert, well you’ve got a lot to learn. I mean you don’t, because for instance, we saw a girl walking in the desert with barely any clothes on and not carrying any water and I assume she survived. In the middle of the goddamn Mojave they have a visitor’s center. But for some reason you have to go to Barstow to get anti-venom for Sidewinder bites.

Shit.

When I came home from the trip I wanted to lay in bed thinking and thinking. Then I wanted to write this memoir and go out and do it again. I saw my kids for about ten minutes and I was ready to go again. It’s true I had missed the fuck out of them. But shit, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone and they are still here. The work deadline was looming only a few days away at that point. It was an incredibly useless exercies, but it was also a puzzle. And puzzles are kind of my thing. I always say Drugs, Music, and Driving. But I should add puzzles in there. But then again I don’t even know how to do a Rubik’s Cube.

But let’s start over. Shit. Jesus. I’m wilding tonight off this coffee and coming down from that work deadline and immediately planning my parents 40th anniversary party that’s happening this weekend. I’m going to get a bullhorn, just like Hunter S. Thompson. Start yelling at people. But what was I saying?

Shit. I’m in a loop. Our friend Mike was in a loop for a very long time. We’re all in a loop, I guess. I told my son he shouldn’t be scared of dying. Look at the plants, I said. They die in the winter and they’re reborn in the spring. It’s the cycle of life. He asked me if a human’s life cycle is to die and then come back, as if he was asking me about a caterpillar or some shit. I said how the hell should I know. Sure. Why not. Everything really is a loop. He told me death would hurt because all your bones would break.

So I always wanted to write some dumb shit like this, but I didn’t have anything to say, really. Naseem Taleb blew my mind when he wrote that most writers write their whole lives trying to find something to say. I think I stopped writing for a decade after I read that. Like Truman Capote’s critique of Jack Kerouac, I felt that really I just enjoyed typing. But I also read a book about Jack Kerouac called, The Voice Is All. Apparently, Kerouac would go around writing things as if he was sketching scenes in a sketchbook, where you normally would keep sketches, only it was words in a notebook, which is where you keep notes. And he just really got good at capturing the essence of a moment off the cuff and that’s how he would write. And I read On the Road maybe a hundred times you know. I didn’t find it until I was…Jesus how fucking old am I now. But I didn’t find it by the usual route, the old summer reading list. I found it in a bookstore called ‘Books for America’ off Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. Jesus fuck I am old.

That bookstore was the fucking shit. It is gone now. It died before Covid. Fucking hell.

So yeah. I wanted to write some shit about my life, but I didn’t know anything, really, and nothing had happened. I couldn’t seem to explain anything new about being a dad. Sure, my kid says psycho shit that would make most parents, I imagine, curl up in the fetal position and call in a shrink, but I mean on the whole he’s fairly normal. Not to me of course. But he goes to school and comes home and his teachers say he’s a joy to work with and he tells on his classmates if they do something wrong, like use a tissue for a napkin or whatever the fuck. And yeah I got this job at an ad agency after working in restaurants for decades and everyone was like, holy shit you are really good at working in an office, which was because I had read a bunch of books about management and shit like that when I was a young kid so I could be good at Amway. 

It all seemed interesting enough. But it wasn’t compelling. Like if I could explain it in a way, maybe it could be interesting to someone else. If anyone ever gave me a drink and asked me questions, which did happen every five to ten years, actually, I would go on and on about my whole life. And those were the times that I realized I was my dad. Shit. So yeah it was interesting to talk about, but not to write about and/or bother anyone else about.

But then shit man, we pulled off the craziest trip I have ever heard of. It was so crazy, that when I was sitting at a restaurant called Nacho Daddy in Las Vegas watching a music video, the only thing I could think was that these rock stars didn’t even know what it meant to take drugs. Vegas itself seemed like a Busch Gardens version of a German village. It was a fucking joke. Sure it was cool and we had a great time. But the idea that Vegas wanted to steal our money and chew us up and spit us out and all of this shit I had heard while researching for the trip…was a fucking joke.

We pulled that shit off with, well there’s no other way to say it, with aplomb.

Shit.

And then suddenly I felt like you know what, that’s some shit I could hang my memoir on right there. The goddamn universe had given us a message, and I could count myself among those people able to type and think in a somewhat straightforward way and remember shit…what the fuck am I saying? I could bring back a message of some kind. And of course that was folly and I knew it all along when I was there. I knew there was nothing from the experience that I could bring back. 

But maybe I was wrong. I hope I was wrong.

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correspondence 5.14.24

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From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Tuesday, May 14 at 21:10
Subject: Shit

Caffeine in the afternoon while listening to Tool in the coffee shop that’s playing Taylor Swift. They’re planing Taylor Swift all over the goddam world. Goddam Taylor Swift. Goddam caffeine in the afternoon on a lopsided couch with the goddam internet out. You ever heard of a ledger board? My wife said ours was rotted and no one believed her. Goddam house is falling over with no internet in it. Goddam caffeine in the afternoon and in the gap between Lateralus and Disposition you hear Taylor Swift. SEO’d mother fucker god damn shit. I was supposed to get a birthday gift for this kid. I just remembered. Shit. Talk to you later.

From: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Wednesday, May 8 at 13:00
Subject: low volume days

Coastal town, down south of Thailand: A young man in his late twenties is having breakfast with his father. The son holds up his phone and takes a video to send to someone back home. The father smiles at this someone. I have my earpods in, so I don’t hear what they say. They could easily be Swede or German and I wouldn’t understand a word. But I imagine the son’s saying, say hi to mum, and the father says, hello love. We are having a lovely time despite the heat. The water is warm, like a hot bath, and hordes of jellyfish wash ashore. Everyday the beaches are strewn with translucent sacs. Scientists say it is the hottest year and the weather is off by 3 or 4 degrees.

The world that our children will inherit is unimaginable. So read him Cervantes. Even when he howls.

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Our Trip Was Different – Part 1

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Who would have imagined that you could drive a rented car into the desert with a head full of acid as a father of two. Hell, as two fathers of two, when it comes down to it. That’s what we were. Our children were young. We were modern day fathers, too. Responsible for all the compassion and tenderness hitherto assigned to the womenfolk. And damn good at it, too. Or good enough, perhaps. Who could say? The world was cold and unconcerned with compassion for children. Compassion was for the marginalized. And I have to admit, we didn’t have enough to go around.

Maybe he did. My brother, Hunter, seemed to be able to face the world on simpler terms. He had faith in people. He was an optimist. He smoked a shit ton of weed.

I had the idea for the trip based completely on nothing but driving, drugs, music, and pure Gonzo journalism. I had idolized Hunter S. Thompson my whole adult life, from the time that I finally understood that the rapture and armageddon were metaphors. I remember the first time I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I didn’t understand it. I was in college. it seemed like a disjointed, piece of shit film about nothing. In those days, Gladiator was unquestionably the best movie I had ever seen, followed by Dave with Kevin Klein.

Then I smoked my first joint at Trevor’s house and I knew I would die. I couldn’t stop laughing about it. I played Come As You Are by Nirvana, the studio version, over and over. And then I watched Fear and Loathing days or weeks later. On the air mattress that I leaned up against the wall like a ghetto Murphy bed during the day. I was laying there with my girlfriend who would become my wife, with an expensive, fucked up Dell laptop on my chest. There were cockroaches on the other side of the bar of light under the door. My roommate, whom I had seen maybe three times, was an olympic figure skater. Or maybe just on the figure skating team. He ate chicken with mustard. Molly, my girl, fell asleep before the end of that version of These Are a Few of My Favorite Things was over.

I had only just learned about Johnny Depp from the movie Pirates of the Carribean and I thought his name was Orlando Bloom. Holy shit. I was greener than Tobey Maguire in Fear and Loathing. I was finishing up a college career not much more experienced than when I had started. But shit, I had found Molly. She was the key. Imagine if I had gone to strange, quiet parties and joined the rugby team with my best friend Emmanuel. It was more like a club, actually, I don’t even think they were a sanctioned team. But yeah, he’s had a life and a half. He went to Kandahar. He grew up with role models that were honest with him.

Jesus Christ.

I watched the movie many times. I was sensitive to weed, so I would basically have life altering trips based on one toke. And sometimes I would have two or more tokes. If I wasn’t doing that, I was blacking out on Goldschläger at the pool hall with Emmanuel. It was a strange time. I had spent the first few years with Molly sober as a stone as she took me to parties with her honor fraternity and played flip cup. My friend, Trevor, had this house near to the college with this immense basement. My other friend, Kathleen, was always on the verge of showing up there with psilocybin mushrooms. I would listen to Tool outside her apartment sometimes and we would go eat lunch. She never did come through with those and it would be almost two decades before I ate my first one.

So, fuck, that’s one of the inspirations I had for the trip when I planned it. Driving from LA to Vegas all fucked up.

I might as well just tell you now that I drink and I drive a lot. I understand that it’s wrong. Even I am scared to tell you. I just feel that I am a better driver than you. Or anyone. I am the smartest person alive. I can do it. I’m not sure. One of my other brothers, John, has a few DUI’s. One time a cop had to pull in front of him and slow down until John’s car crashed into him. I love that story. I am very concerned that innocent children could die in that story, even though it already happened. But God help me I love that story.

I fucking love driving, you know? And we all do, in my family. My father is a truck driver. We drove to Florida and back to Delaware a hundred times as kids. My friend, Eric, says that a road trip on an interstate is a commute, not a road trip. But I disagree. To me, there’s nothing like zoning way the fuck out, staring dead eyed at the road, driving as fast as you can get away with for as long as you can. Straight down 95 or i-4 or whatever the fuck.

So when it came time to plan my brother’s bachelor party, driving was important.

Second on the list was music. Intense, soul fucking music. God’s music. House music. Psychedelic music. Rap music. Whatever the fuck. Fucking choral music. Loud as fuck, that’s the key really. Loud enough to shake your breastplate and make you feel a little bad for people at the red light.

My brother and I were introduced to real, loud house music by my cousin-in-law, Robbie. I don’t know, I guess I had listened to a ton of Deadmau5 and some others before going to that first fateful All Day I Dream event on Governor’s Island in 2016. Robbie took me to church that day. I guess, fuck, shit I guess I had had Molly (the drug, not my wife) on the steps of my Boston apartment back in 2012 or 2013. Jesus Christ I have been alive for a long time. But that didn’t prepare me for the pill that Robbie passed me at or around 1 PM on that epic Sunday. Shit. Jesus. That show reorganized my priorities.

Of course I understood at that point that all of humanity needed to go to church, and what we called church at that time was a complete mockery.

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correspondence 4.23.24

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From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Tuesday, April 23 at 21:10
Subject: Cervantes

Hey Babe. That guy was the one my son didn’t care for when he was an infant. I read him Candide first, and he liked that. I always remember how he cried when I started Don Quixote and he just never took to it. He was fine with Robert Frost. When he was one, we would sit in bed drinking beer and reading On the Road. Years later, I read my daughter Hamlet for about twenty-two seconds before she smacked that shit outta my hands.

From: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Friday, April 19 at 10:20
Subject: writing

ah, but writing is such a terrible thing. Didn’t you say that once? Give it up, if you can. I tried, Flanders, because writing I was a person at sea who never found her sea legs. I suppose I could have written a travelogue or self-help but the steel, they winked. I was a saner person not writing. Still… Maybe at fifty, I am less worried about survival.

Let’s give it a shot, shall we? Like that guy who ran at windmills.

B.

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Are Diaries Killing the Earth

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If I’m not going to publish what I’ve written, should I not then delete it, since I won’t likely read myself what I don’t see as valuable for others to read?

Sometimes it’s good to have a diary. Like if you want to look back at what you were doing a few years ago and all. But what if you have too much diary? Like I have hundreds of thousands of words about how I was feeling on whatever particular day. Similar to how I have thousands of pictures that I have yet to look at. I guess for most people writing a thousand words is not something you would normally do but for writers with computers it’s just too easy to type shit and store it. Like if I was surrounded by stacks of notebooks I’d be like ok some of this shit’s got to go, I guess. I wouldn’t do anything about it but I would see that it was a problem.

Back in the old days, writers would write letters to each other. Then sometimes if the writer was really good some of those letters would get published. But the original intent of the letter was to communicate with someone else. What is the purpose of writing a shit ton of words in Evernote that you are never going to look at?

On the subject of taking photos that you are never going to look at, I saaw something recently that said, “For Tammy, photography was the way she saw the world.” Or something like that. So looking at the photos afterwards wasn’t the point it was framing life in some kind of…frame. But I also remember watching Exit Through the Gift Shop and Mr. Brainwash was just filming and throwing the tapes in a closet. That can’t be healthy. But then Mr. Brainwash made a lot of money. Money is always a good indication of value. Every time.

ChatGPT says:

Remember, the essence of diary writing isn’t always in the reviewing but in the act of expressing oneself. Whether you ever read it again or share it with someone doesn’t diminish its value. The fact that you’ve dedicated time and energy to reflect and document your life has intrinsic worth.

ChatGPT

Maybe so. But what about all those server farms full of all those notes. Wouldn’t it be better for the environment if I expressed myself and then deleted the note, or expressed myself over the old note? But I can’t even delete anything even when I’m editing. I have to copy and paste the whole damn thing into a new note before I can bear to delete it because I’m a hoarder in every sense.

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Relaxing All the Time

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I went back to my novel in the works last night and spent like 2 hours writing and organizing. I hadn’t looked at it since 2021 or so. I tried thinking of what success would look like.

My son told my wife that she is tired because she works all the time and all I do is relax.

I thought what if he thought I didn’t relax because I have finished a novel and he can read it if he wants. When he’s older and can handle learning why betrayal is the evilist of all the sins.

My wife spends eight hours a day at work at least and another hour or two talking about work. She is the breadwinner because she makes fourteen thousand dollars a year more than I do and she will probably get promoted before I do. I watch the kids when they’re not in daycare or school. I do the yard work and clean the pool. I clean the pool a lot.

I thought what would the book need to look like to make my son not be ashamed that I am sitting around writing potboilers that don’t sell. I thought maybe it would have to be published by a major publisher and that would make him feel like he could tell his friends that his dad was an author.

But then I thought about how dumb people in my company are, and how people in publishing companies are probably collectively dumb as well. So just getting published wouldn’t guarantee that I would be objectively not a deadbeat.

So I guess I will have to just continually invite his friends over to see how clean the pool is.

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The Disapproval of a New Friend

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Flickering lights above the panty store. An irreversible march towards summoning a black car T6 something something something. So many thoughts you can’t separate them, you can’t even pick a handful. A damn shame the weather so nice and why you sitting there quart container full of acid reflux in your lap. Alone. Waiting to help out a friend with a fetish. 

You’re not clever, you know, when you speak like that. You’re not clever, you know, when you talk to yourself like that.

Wouldn’t have noticed the battery on edge if I didn’t pull up Spotify looking for Travis Scott. Never heard of this dude till the other night, I swear. I swear I never did! I don’t watch what you watch, everyone. I don’t do the things everyone does!

Hahaha fuck it. Yeah I do. I’m a classic man. I’m an average man. I’m a man in a bench with a stomach ache and cartilage in my teeths.

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Tired

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I am really tired of posting every day. Who can do this? On the surface it seems simple. Just fucking write something. I love writing so it should be easy. But some days just seem meant to pass without writing anything. Or at the very least not writing something for other people. Plus my wife doesn’t know about it so I can’t be like oh I have to go write my blog for a minute on our days off. Right now she’s showing me pictures of sea monsters and I’m pretending to be doing nothing. 

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Correspondence 22.03.17

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From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Wednesday, March 22, 2016 at 12:36 PM
Subject: The twisty sounds of piano-fortes long forgotten

Oi mate, you ever been to a deli? It’s a place with a counter. Maybe there’s some weird rolled chopped animals hanging from the ceiling, they might be caked in white rocks from the ocean. In the deli sometimes there’s a red machine that you pull a ticket from and it has a long number on it and eventually someone will yell out one of the numbers on the ticket and boom it’s time to order your boiled pigs and processed simulated cow’s milk product.

If you look at the digits of a year, 2017 for example, in a certain way, you can see that it’s kind of like that ticket from the deli. You pull one out, you throw it away, you hope you got everything you needed.

What I been doing at The New York? I been doing it to death, my friend.

I used to think: I better not post every day; I don’t want people to have to read every thought that comes into my head; eventually they will get tired of me and unfollow.

You know what, I don’t know at all what people feel. What I do know is that search engine traffic comes from content content content. You can game the system, and I wish I knew how, but if I increase the amount of content on my blog, I figure someone is bound to look at this shit and give me a million dollars.

In 2017 I have not worried about the fact that I’m obsessed with money. I have given up on the dream of a utopian society, of having Tescos. Every empire falls at some point, all I care about is having enough reading material to ride out the apocalypse, and as long as I have one good book, I’ve got that.

I suspect that the more dreams you give up the more you know which ones actually even matter at all. Sure, you can think too small, but you can certainly think too much, and I have found so far that it is better to think nothing at all than to think big some days and on other days berate yourself for not thinking big.

I’m fighting with my cat to type this, and it’s cute like, “oh he wants to type things, too!” but I also can’t fucking focus for one fucking minute god dammit it’s like I have a kid or something. I play with this mother fucker all the time shit I love him but then I try to pet him just now and he bites me. He wants what he wants all of the damn time and that is it. The only time he’s nice to me is when he’s half asleep. If he was a human that’d be a fucked up and very common relationship.

I’m writing all of the time now writing writing writing I just love writing and maybe if I post enough times all over the damn place maybe I can just keep writing. I’m revising a story a little at a time and letting it take its course. Fuck it, you know? But people love to say that. And it’s pretty meaningless. Fuck what? I don’t know.

I know you’re not writing as much these days because you are a more complete person than you were before, but I miss your writing nevertheless. Don’t feel guilty, I don’t know how that makes you feel, but I wouldn’t want to feel guilty about making you feel guilty.

Ha! Feelings! Fuck ’em.

Love ya

G

From: Babe <listenotothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Friday, September 9 at 11:00 AM
Subject: 21 days with no incident

It is ten o’clock where I am, at a cafe, on an island down south, where a Thai cook is watching television, having already prepared my breakfast. It is low season, and in the course of the day, I am the only one he will see. Perhaps I will pass by again in the afternoon, for tea and to read my novel. I am reading John le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor, which is intriguing though not quite as intoxicating as The Little Drummer Girl, which remains my favourite.

It rains lightly in the morning before the sun punches a hole in the storm clouds in the early afternoon. In the evening, strong rain and winds frustrate the hotel’s efforts to provide al fresco dining. This is a pattern that repeats itself the entire time I am here. I am not bothered. It is perfect weather for someone convalescing. While this is a short jaunt– a mere five nights– it is still the longest I’ve been away from home. Two days I’ve been on the island and the vastness of my horizon makes me almost seasick.

I want to read your brown leather book. It’s barenaked and shows straight through to the bone like a leper dead six hours in a pool with a distracted piranha. Ha. That’s brilliant. I could never write properly by hand, but I like my typewriter. I ran out of ribbon though, and as I don’t know where to get things that nobody buys anymore, I may have to resort to Amazon.

***

I started this email on the island and now I’m back in Bangkok, and my pores are clogged up with pollution too. I feel my leaves slowly curl up around me. I have never liked living in cities, it has always been something of a necessity. I need to be located near a bookstore. Yet I am contemplating packing my life into boxes, moving into a smaller place in Bangkok, and going on the road again. Living out of a suitcase two months at a time. Why? The world has gone mad, have you noticed?

You must be lost somewhere in Asia by now. Are you intoxicated by the alien life?

B.

P.S.

I can’t conceive of distances either.