proposal

last night i had a dream where i proposed to this girl by telling every single person i knew except for her

it was kind of weird, actually. it was a very real dream.

train fight

i had an interesting dream last night. i was at this train platform that connected people to all parts of the world. it was a really dirty/dangerous place, and situated in northern africa, i think. it was bright outside, there weren't many trees, and the whole place (which i got the impression was acres and acres) was teeming with the worst people imaginable. everyone was trying to rip each other off and it was one of those places where a clueless white western dude would immediately lose the shirt off his back.

anyway the platforms were organized by how safe the destination country was. so if you wanted to take a train to canada or germany or the usa basically you had to wait outside in the sun for a pretty nice train to arrive. if you wanted to go to the philippines or nicaragua or whatever you had to walk down these grimy steps into an underground platform and hope you didn't get robbed and wait for this dirty train.

then, if you wanted to go to sudan or the darian region of panama or something you basically had to go even further down into this really atrocious platform. this platform was closed off by these great big metal doors that opened for about ten seconds every 10 minutes, so you had to wait to get in, or out. then you went down into the center of the earth practically and waited for your train, which at that point basically consisted of an engine, a series of wheels, and a platform that you jumped on to. a lot of death occured down in this platform.

anyawy i went down there just to check it out and immediately fell upon a large group of thieves and murderers and other interesting people. i made it clear that i was armed, and that i had travelled to shitty places before, and that i wasn't some retarded north american that didn't know anything about the world. they sort of cleared up their attitudes after that, and viewed me a bit more as a co-conspirator.

one woman i saw was walking up and down this underground platform holding all these pictures of lions, tigers, pumas and other full-grown giant cats, all of them being petted or hugged by white people. i asked her what the hell she was playing at, and she told me to watch. she went up to some unfortunate/innocent looking dude and struck up a really bizarre conversation.

she told the guy she worked for a group that takes care of big cats that have been swiped from the rainforest after their parents were poached, or sold to circuses or rich families etc etc etc and were one way or another been subjected to some form of abuse and then seized by the authorities. her group was now looking for volunteers to help take care of these animals.

the dude, who was obviously a clueless tourist heading to fucking sudan for some goddamned reason, looked really interested and asked where & how much. the woman smiled, glanced at the man's ticket, and said that there was no cost, it was volunteer operated, and that there was a facility based in sudan. she really sounded legit about it. the man now looked downright excited and said he was interested. she gave him a card with the name of another man on it, made a call, and said he would be met with once he got off the train.

they concluded this ridiculous transaction, and a great disgusting platform train rushed by, slowed down, and then a whole horde of terrible-looking people jumped onto the platform, along with the man. the train sped off.

i returned to the woman and asked what she got out of this arrangement, and she told me that her organization, while under the guise of charity and 'big cat rehabilitation', was mostly a front for a secretly-taped "tv show" she distributed through the black market. she said there were cameras all over the facility, and that within days the man would have been savaged to death by the cat assigned to him, and that people payed good money to watch the carnage. she then took me over to a large doric column that looked older than the train station itself, and all over it were these posters featuring cartoons (done in political-cartoon style, like in the early 1900s in france) of tigers carving people up with giant butcher knives, while underneath were these obvious slogans like "man can NEVER live against the tiger" and "a tiger will ALWAYS kill a human". it was actually pretty sick advertising. i wish i could draw because then i would have given it a shot when i woke up.

also scary

and since i just remembered it, this is the worst nightmare i have ever had in my life

i was in my ex girlfriend's bedroom, and there was this green light pouring out from the hallway. i couldn't tell what was producing the light but it scared the life out of me. finally i got out of her bed and slowly walked to the door. i took a deep breath and walked around and into the hallway, and there was this green orb just floating by the ceiling in the hallway, and this is what was producing all the green light. i have never been that scared/upset in my life.

fortunately my girlfriend woke me up and she said i was like a having a fit or something, and it took like ten solid minutes to calm me down. anyway that's the scariest thing i have ever dreamed about.

pit

last night i dreamt that i was on one of those flat boxcars on a very short train going through a sketchy part of some horrible country. anyway there were a lot of dead bodies on the tracks and we kept running over them and it was really morbid. there were about 7 of us standing on this boxcar. i remember one body was lying across the track and his head looked like a giant tomato because all the blood had been squeezed out of his body and went into his head.

so anyway the train stops and everyone gets off and we're now in like the 'bad part' of this country and we're walking down these tracks in the dark and there are just corpses EVERYWHERE. it seems like this is the dumping ground for murders. finally we get to the end of this alley and there's a fence and all the cop cars on the other side, and we all jump the fence and suddenly we're all 'safe'

then my friend jenn is like 'dammit, i left my stereo back there!' and i was like 'are you fucking serious?!' and she was like 'yeah, i just need to run back there and turn it off, i left music playing'.

and i was like 'come on!! really?!' but she insisted, so we went back over to the dark tracks, and found her stereo and turned it off. only thing was that there was now a second stereo next to hers, also playing similar music, and we were both really creeped out that someone had come and put it there.

as we're about to leave we found this video tape, so we ran back to the 'safe' zone and popped it into a video player. the video was FUCKED. it was a picture of this lush green mountain, and it started at the crest of the mountain and slowly went down to the base. at the base there were 8 tiny little black shapes at the edge of this huge pit that had obviously been dug with the aid of large machines (it was like a perfectly square pit)

the camera zoomed in and soon i realized that the black shapes were dead bodies that had been wrapped in black cloth. it was really scary for some reason. then the camera zoomed into the pit, and it was full of wriggling bodies all covered in white cloth. the camera kept zooming into the pit, and went right up to the faces of the wriggling bodies. they were people, but they were super diseased and you could tell they had lost their sanity & reason, they were missing teeth and had sores on their faces and their pupils were super dilated and they were just smiling and groaning and vomiting and staring right into the camera. their limbs were wrapped tightly to their bodies so they could only wriggle around like worms. a few of them were dead, and the dead were all on their stomachs with their heads up & eyes forward, and had what looked like spongy vomit pouring out of their mouths.

just keep going!

i had another weird nightmare last night. all of my nightmares seem to revolve around intervals of time

anyway i was on this weird little houseboat and totally lost. i was floating around in this little river in the middle of the woods, and there were a billion other little rivers and streams and tributaries everywhere and i had absolutely no idea where to go or how to get out of the forest.

anyway so i'm floating around aimlessly when suddenly there's this 90-year-old man just standing by the bank somewhere. so i bring the boat over and ask this old guy if he needs any help. he just shakes his head. then i ask if he needs to go anywhere. again the dude shakes his head.

then i ask him if he knows how to get out of the forest, and he points down the river and tells me to stay on it for three days.

so i was like 'really? are you sure?' and the old man gives me a stern look and says 'yes, go down this river for three days'.

so i leave him and i'm heading down the river and the night passes and i wake up and everything looks kind of different. the morning goes by and the early afternoon comes and it starts to get stormy. i'm starting to doubt the old man's advice when suddenly i see this little kid standing by shore. he can't be more than like 6 or 7 years old.

so i bring the boat over and i've got this weird sense of deja-vu and i stop by the kid and as him if he's alright. he nods his head. i ask him if he's lost and he shakes his head no. then i ask him if he knows how to get out of the river and he gives me this awful smile and says "i told you, go down the river for three days'

and then i practically have a heart attack and feel totally creeped out and jump to the back of the boat and start speeding away from the kid. i'm pretty much terrified and want to put as much distance between myself & him as possible. then i start getting this awful feeling like i shouldn't look back. i'm really compelled to do so, though, but something keeps telling me 'don't look back, don't look back'

so finally i look back and the kid is still standing by the shore, a few hundred feet away, but i can see him super clearly. he looks at me and mouths the words 'you shouldn't have looked back' and then he dives in the water and starts swimming towards me super super super fast, and as he's swimming i can see him transform into this blackish mass underwater and I start to freak out and the blackish mass goes deeper and deeper and deeper into the water and everything's getting darker and stormier and eventually i can't see anything anymore. it's just pitch black and i'm bobbing around in my boat and i can't even see my hand in front of my face.

and then my boat shudders and i can tell something just rammed into it from underneath. and then there's another hit. and another. and then i woke up.

also

actually, while i'm at it, both last night and the night before the bulk of my dreams revolved around assassins and murder conspiracies and stuff

the night before last i remember at one point i was sitting with a 'suspect' or something at a picnic table or something outdoors, when suddenly a bullet came whizzing through the air and struck the suspect dead.

i was like 'oh god i'm next!' so i put my head down and pretended i had also been shot. then i fell ASLEEP! and i remember when i woke up i was staring at this dude and i was like 'why hasn't this guy moved, yet?! how long am i suppose to keep him company?! i want some breakfast!" and i just sat there like an idiot thinking it would be rude to leave this dude until i remembered that he was dead, and then i was like 'oh yeah, i guess i can go inside now'

last night i remember inspecting some sort of house boat for some sort of clue, and every person i had figured for a suspect kept calling me on my cell phone and telling me they were being hunted down and were going to be dead within minutes. it was frustrating.

big stag

can any of you dudes read stuff in your dreams? i've had a zillion dreams where i was reading really weird books. usually it's pretty legible.

anyway last night i had a really long winding dream, but at one point i was a kindergarten teacher and i had asked my class to all write down a few sentences about a person they liked

so i had about 30 of these submissions and i was flipping through them and the first one said

"i like my dad he helps me when i "

and the second one said

"i like my big brother he is tall he can reach the cooky"

and i flipped another page and this one said

"I'd like to lay down the relative merits of the Big Stag himself, Norm from Cheers"

and this was followed by like a solid paragraph drumming up the man's character!

so anyway i was super confused, and i thought maybe another teacher had snuck in and stuck this in as a joke or something. so i checked the name and found the kid and i was like "hey cody, did you write this?!"

and fucking cody gives me this nonchalant look and was like "yeah"

and i was like "do you actually know Norm from Cheers?!"

and fucking cody was like "of course not! i'm 5 years old!"

CAPTAIN

i had a pretty strange nightmare last night. everything was pretty normal in the dream, i had the same job, same life etc, when suddenly i started getting these sudden random fits of paralysis where i couldn't do anything except feel utterly terrified for about 30 seconds at a time.

i'm not sure how this second part came into play, but while looking into it i discovered a single similar case of whatever 'disease' it was that i had. it belonged to a captain who bore the name 'albrecht', but whether it was his christian name i do not know. from what i gathered he was a horrible, terrible person, but the scariest part of what i read was that he was born on the same day i was, but back in the 18th century.

anyway the paralysis was getting worse and i couldn't find any other information so i kept reading up about this captain, and about the horrible deeds he did. i stopped sleeping and would spend my nights just waiting for the paralysis to take over. i noticed it was getting stronger, and in addition to not being able to move and feeling scared, i also became aware of the strangest sensation - one of being pulled. it wasn't like i was being physically pulled upwards or anything; it felt like the inside of my body was being twisted around in my skin, and i felt like someone or something was trying to bring me somewhere else.

one night after a really bad bout of paralysis i immediately knew what was going on. i went back to my books and looked up the date of albrecht's death. it was in three days, and i suddenly understood that my whole life was a parallel to his, and that in three days i too was going to die, or get pulled over to whatever/wherever i was being taken, etc.

my dream then shifted to that third-person perspective where you're floating over everything and watching yourself. i knew that it was the date of albrecht's death and i watched myself go into final paralysis. i was lying on my bed in my apartment, but it was the only piece of furniture there. everything else was empty and desolate and lonely and weird shades of grey. i basically watched myself die in complete wretchedness. then i heard a banging noise and watched as my front door was kicked in.

a bunch of people wearing black clothes and black masks threaded into my apartment and lifted up my body. they covered it in a cloth. suddenly i was floating over a graveyard somewhere, and i knew that a week or so had elapsed and that i was in the different part of the world altogether.

i saw the people dressed in black come out of the woods, still carrying my body. they stopped in front of a masoleum that was marked C. Albrecht; and underneath that Albrecht C. The date of birth and date of death were underneath that, and each date was inscribed on a small marble plaque that bore a handle. One of the men came forth and pulled on the first handle, and the plaque slide out of the masoluem. It was about the size of a brick. Then the person pulled the second handle, and the date of death slid out much in the same way.

cnce both plaques were removed a series of creaks and groans emitted from the masoleum and it transformed and opened itself in front of my eyes and suddenly there was an open grave in front of me containing the skeleton of what i presumed to be Albrecht. the group in black dumped my body on top of the skeleton and pushed the plaques back in, and the grave was once again transformed into a closed masoleum. i remember being absolutely horrified by this, and the last thing i recall seeing before i woke up were dozens of large black dogs wandering through the graveyard.

wheel barrel

last night i had this hilarious dream where i was in a hardware store trying to buy a wheelbarrow. anyway the dude was showing me these top-of-the-line high quality barrows and he was looking at this one in particular and was saying things like

"this one is really top shelf. lifetime guarantee, rust-proof, solid craftsmanship, this one is a helluva peach."

and i was like "okay sweet, i'll take it!"

and then the dude at the hardware store was like "AND... AND!! check this out! it's got TWO BRAKES! there's a brake on the handle, here, see, and that'll stop this barrow cold, and then there's this second one down here that you can step on and it'll also stop"

and i thought it was kind of weird that a wheelbarrow would need brakes, much less two, so i was like "cool, i'll take it!"

and the dude was like "yeah, you see.. two brakes!! this one AND that one.. you can use whichever one you want"

and i was like "okay, okay, honestly i don't really care, i'll take it"

so i wheeled the barrow up to the cash and i'm paying for it and the hardware guy is STILL hanging out next to me and he's now saying things like "just make sure you replace the brake cable every three months, and oil it regularly every couple of miles and make sure you..."

and i was like "god almighty, dude!!!"

and then the dream switched scenes and it was like half a year later, and for some reason i'm sitting in this fucking wheelbarrow just BARRELLING down highway traffic and i'm going like 150mph and i'm like HOLY FUCKING SHIT I'M GOING TO FUCKING DIE!!!! and cars are zooming around and all over the place

so i finally manage to turn around so i'm now sitting backwards and i lean over and grab the brake on the handle and the wheelbarrow sort of slows down for a split second and then i hear this snap and the brake cord comes flying out and i'm like "OH GOD OH GOD OH JESUS WHY DIDN'T I LISTEN TO THAT GUY!!!!" and i'm looking over at the brake at the bottom but it's too far for me to reach and i'm just flying down through all these trucks and stuff

metaphor

okay, this is an old dream i had maybe 5 years ago, but remember clearly because i thought it was important at the time. it was very lord-of-the-rings-ish

so i'm sitting somewhere minding my own business when suddenly i'm sucked up into the ionosphere and basically just watched the world get smaller and smaller and smaller until i was well in outer space and the earth was about the size of a basketball

and i'm floating around in darkness when suddenly it's like a giant sheet is lifted and all i can see is the sun, everywhere, and everything's super bright and illuminated and the earth looks brilliant blue and green, like the colors you see in reptile scales or bird feathers. and i'm recoiling from this and squinting when suddenly there's this big WHOOSH sound and everything goes black again and the sun's extinguished again. and then my eyes adjust and i start seeing all these little bright dots of light in the darkness, and i remember thinking 'okay, well the stars are out so its night again'

and i looked over to my right and i saw this second planet that was red and grey and looked very volcanic, and i thought to myself, okay, that's mars.

and then i tried to figure out what the hell i was still doing in outer space when suddenly i was given the impression that someone had just asked me if i wanted to see exactly what was going on. nobody said anything, i just suddenly knew that someone had asked me if i wanted to understand things.

so i sort of thought 'yes!' and then i starting zooming out even further, and the world revealed itself to be attached to a big chain. and the planet that i thought was mars was also attached to a chain, and soon the other planets also showed themselves and they were all also hanging by chains.

so i'm still zooming out when i noticed that each chain was attached to a sign post that said "earth" or "mars" or "jupiter", and all these sign posts were attached to a big ornate lamp post, like the ones you read about in dickens' novels. at the top of this lamp post was a giant raven perched next to a big glassy bulb that was casting light over the planets.

so i stared at the raven and it looked at me and lifted up one wing, which obscured all the light and threw the planets into darkness, and little rays of light filtered through the feathers and i realized those were what i previously thought were stars. then the raven lowered its wing and the shadows passed and the planets were all illuminated again. i got the impression that the raven never left its post and this was sort of how night and day came about.

i zoomed out further still and saw an old ornate iron bench next to the lamp post, and although i couldn't factor it in to the daily operations of planet earth i had this sensation that it was incredibly important to the existence of my solar system.

while staring at the bench i saw that the lamp post was set on a very peculiar base, one that could swivel around, and while i looked at this a giant breeze came in (more and more i realized that i was in fact in a park at dusk) and the breeze set all the planets swinging gently from their chains, and this in turn spun the light post, and i was made to understand that this accounted for revolution much in the same way that the raven accounted for rotation. there was a path alongside the lamp post and i felt that anyone coming through was suppose to sit by the bench before continuing on their way, but that nobody was suppose to stay for very long in this place.

that's really about it. i don't remember what was going on when i woke up, i mostly just recall staring at this entire setup and thinking this was a interesting turn of events.

small things

last night i had a dream that there were this little cute furry animal being chased by this thing that looked like a worm. anyway then this second cute furry animal showed up with a blow torch and cut a hole through a wall and the two furry animals escaped. they ran down a track for a while and then suddenly things zoomed out for about five minutes and i realized these two 'animals' were ridiculous tiny, like the size of an atom.

so it zooms out and we're in this lab and there are these two dudes fighting. one clearly has the best interest of the animals at heart and he puts this little glass thimble on the desk, which presumably protects the animals

and then they start fighting and the protagonist wins. then it zooms back in for five minutes and we're back with the animals, only this time one has a remote control and a little headset and you realize he's controlling the human and that all humans are actually robots being controlled by these tiny little super-intelligent creatures that you can't see.

umbrella genocide

i dreamt last night that i had made my way to ottawa to watch this giant protest. it was at the museum of nature. when i got there i noticed they had bulldozed something like a 5-block radius around the museum, so it was almost like the museum was in a field, and it was just surrounded by hundreds of thousands of protestors. there were about a billion dumptrucks in a circle surrounding all the protestors, acting sort of like a barrier.

anyway so then it starts to rain but there was something really odd about it because the sky was still pretty clear and i couldn't really figure out what was going on but i felt somehow like the rain was man-made and coming from some sort of machine in the sky or something, and i got really nervous and squeezed out between two trucks and decided to leave. i walked out between two dumptrucks and climbed the nearest hill. it wasn't raining where i was, and that worried me even more. then i noticed all these guys in black suits walking in and out of the crowd handing out these giant black umbrellas, and all the protestors were taking one each and opening them up to keep the rain off. pretty soon i couldn't see people anymore, i just saw this massive sea of black umbrellas and it was like a big living black canvas.

then all the dudes in suits edged out between the trucks and it was really starting to rain over the protest and then suddenly all the dumptrucks turned on and unloaded tons and tons of boiling concrete onto the crowd! and concrete was poured out from the roof of the museum of nature, and it was just fucking horrific - i think the plan was that the concrete would smooth out over the umbrellas and the heat generated would suffocate everyone underneath

so pretty soon the protest was just this writhin mass of melting bodies and people trying to breathe through concrete and it was just fucking horrible and i was so appalled

and anyway the concrete started to set, and like a small percentage of people were crawling out of it, and the number of survivors was still pretty formidable due to the sheer number of people attending the protest in the first place, and they were fucking insane. they were picking up broken pieces of concrete and smashing windows and trampling cops and tearing the dumptruck drivers limbs off and then they all went on this giant fucking rampage all the way to where the old city hall is on sussex, tearing up just absolutely everything civic in their way

it was nuts!!

assassin

so last night i dreamt that an ex girlfriend of mine started dating this world-class assassin dude who i guess killed ex boyfriends or something but anyway he decided to kill me. i was living on the top floor of this apartment building and had this really weird feeling that something bad was going to happen when i noticed i felt light-headed, so i walked to the kitchen and there was this white gas spraying out from under the door. and i was like 'holy shit!' and kicked the door open (it was the only way to get out) and somehow made my way through the gas and went down a floor where things were clearer.

and all the doors in the stairwell were locked and somehow i knew there was this fucking butcher downstairs who the assassin had hired who was waiting just in case i escaped the gas. and i also knew for some reason that the assassin was so sure of himself that he had thrown a big party for all my friends in the main floor of the same building that he planned to exterminate me in.

so i went downstairs and sure enough there was this giant butcher dude who lunged at me but somehow got caught on a big sheet of reinforced wire that was covering the only escape, so i took the opportunity and threw a table at him and knocked him out. then i used his cleaver to cut through the wire and opened the emergency exit and escaped out back.

and then i was like 'time to get this fucking dude!' and was running blindly down dark alleys and threw out my phone and i knew i was being followed by his henchmen and things actually kind of got disappointing and sort of disney-ish and then i woke up.

dude at the top

so last night i dreamt that i was standing around in the street next to this supposedly haunted house. it was one of those three story houses where the 'top' floor is really just an oversized attic with the roof slope making up its walls and one window overlooking the front yard.

anyway everyone wanted these books from the basement of the house but nobody wanted to go in there because it was haunted. and i was like 'you know i don't believe in this horseshit, i'll do it' and my friends were stoked, but worried for my safety at the same time.

so they gave me a walkie-talkie. and i was like 'guys i don't need this, i'm just gonna jump in there and grab the books' and they were like 'take it anyway, just keep in touch'.

so i go inside and walk down the basement steps and the basement is actually pretty scary. there's broken pipes everywhere and water dripping and blood stains and it's just really creepy. i have to go through like 6 rooms, each one getting darker and smaller when suddenly the house starts to shake. and i'm like on the walkie talkie and i'm like 'is the house collapsing?!' and my friends are like 'quiet as the grave, dude!' and i'm like 'well that's really weird because everything's shaking in here'

so i finally find the books and there's like 40 of them, and they're giant, so i have to bring them back from room to room in stages. and finally curiosity overcomes me and i open one up, and it's just all these gruesome accounts of shit that has gone down in this basement, like people getting sliced in half and heads being decapitated and people seeing ghosts and demons and god knows what else

and i'm back on the walkie talkie and like 'dudes these books are just stories about horrible shit that went down here in this stupid basement!' and it's all quiet on the other side and i press the button again and i'm like 'dudes?' and it's all quiet and i'm like 'what's going on?!'

and then finally one of my friends finally gets back to me and he's like 'dave, you should get out of there, man'

and i'm like 'why, is the place collapsing?! i told you it was shaking down here, it was like there was an earthquake!'

and shit's silent on the other end and then my friend again is like 'um, no, nothing's shaking, but there's some sort of.. something staring out at all of us from the top window and it just disappeared from sight'

then i woke up

crude

last night i dreamt that i somehow managed to get a special part of my body physically lodged inside a special part of my girlfriend's body. we were both sort of nervous about the entire thing and if you pardon the shitty puns we were doing everything we could to rectify the situation. it wasn't working so we grabbed a bunch of mirrors and angled them this way and that in order to try and see how we could untangle ourselves. this, too, failed. so we called a doctor over and he asked if we had tried to use mirrors to get a better view of the mess below. i told him in no polite terms that yes we had tried to use some mirrors, and to my surprise & irritation the doctor asked where the mirrors were. i pointed towards a corner of the room and the doctor got up and walked over and sort of picked some of the mirrors up and looked at them in a very unconcerned, nonchalant kind of way. then he smiled and looked at us and said 'well that's your problem, you're not using the right kind of mirrors' and i said 'well what the hell kind of mirrors and we suppose to use?' and the doctor smiled and looked me right in the eye and said 'rear view'

sleep jokes!!

apple baseball

last night i had a dream that i was playing baseball with some friends, except we didn't have a ball so we were using an apple. the bulk of the dream revolved around my complete stupefaction that the apple wasn't disintegrating to bits every time someone belted out a homerun or something. towards the end of the dream i was almost beside myself staring at this indestructible apple. towards the end of the dream this dude chris, who i haven't seen since highschool, looked at me and said "i don't get why you think this is so amazing"

so this is a dream

three nights ago i dreamt we were playing the pumas, who are the worst team in the league, and in my dream i was playing forward and within seconds had scored a goal. then like a minute later i scored another goal, and then like a minute later a third.

and the best player on our team came up to me and said, "dave, tone it down! these guys have feelings, you know!"

and i was like "who gives a rat's ass about feelings" and went and scored like 8 more goals

and throughout the game i felt like everyone on both teams were getting irritated with me, so i just kept scoring

and then at the end of the game i found out that the entire game was a fundraiser for charity, and if we had tied like a million dollars would have gone to orphans or aids research or something

shots

last night i dreamt that i have invented a new kind of alcoholic shot. basically you combined these three magical ingrediants into a shot glass and once they were all mixed together they instantly froze into this electric blue solid. then what you had to do was stare at your shot glass until the frozen blue mass inside it turned a malachite green, and then it was ready to drink. or so i thought.

anyway because this shot was so ridiculous i tried to patent it, and called some sort of meeting on the top floor of an impressive building with various CEOs of various liquor companies. everyone was shuffling around in expensive suits when i entered the room with my special ingrediants.

everyone sat down and i expertly mixed about a dozen shots and watched in appreciation as everyone ooh'd and aah'd the fluorescent blue result. then that died down, and finally someone said, "well, can i try it?"

and i was like, "uh, no.. it's actually frozen right now" and i held the shot upside down to demonstrate. someone else looked a bit irked and i said, "don't worry, this is the cool part - we have to wait until it turns green!!"

so then we all just sort of sat around this table and stared at these shots and things began to get really awkward, and then finally, finally, thank god, one of the shots started to take on a bit of a greenish hue.

"see!!" i yelled, and grabbed that particular shot, "now it's ready! try it!!" and i stuck the shot in front of the CEO nearest to me

and he sort of opened his mouth and tipped the shot back and promptly started to choke. i guess the shot wasn't quite liquified and was at that particular moment of a consistency akin to molasses, or silly putty, but anyway the dude was choking pretty hard and pretty soon he toppled over and went still.

undaunted, i grabbed another shot which had also begun to shyly display a hint of green and thrust it in front of the next guy over. he looked at me with fear in his eyes and with a bit of a squeal tried to down the unidentifiable mass i had set in front of him. like his companion, he too gave up the spirit shortly after drinking the one i had forced upon him.

fighting a wild panic that was growing in my stomach, i grabbed a third shot and practically threw it at my next victim. this particular man regarded me for about a minute straight with a soured eye and finally told me perhaps i should consider marketing such a product to the military.

i was crushed. then i woke up.

every 15 minutes

alright so last night i had this really awesome dream. it was kind of dark and stormy outside, but not raining. i was outside this giant old castle that had been renovated and turned into a restaurant that gave tours to the rest of the castle, only a bunch of people who took the tour died mysteriously and everything sort of shut down. the owners of the restaurant still wanted to keep the place open but because of the deaths nobody would go there anymore. so instead they sort of closed things off to the general public, but offered their services exclusive to any large groups that weren't afraid of the rumours surrounding the castle. so basically if you & about 30 friends wanted to eat in a castle, and then take a tour where people mysteriously died, you could do it.

so anyway basically myself and some friends booked the castle, and basically as we were walking up to it (it was in the middle of nowhere) we heard all these screams coming from inside and all these noises and it sounded like shit getting destroyed. so we all sort of hastened our pace to see what was going on (and if anyone inside needed help) and suddenly EVERYBODY around me started to slow down and get sick. like everybody just started doubling over and kneeling down and throwing up and curling up in fetal position.

and i was like 'this is fucked! why am i the only person who isn't getting sick!' and i'm staring in dismay at all my friends slowly going still when suddenly i see myself tumble out of the front door of the castle and fall down all the steps.

so i'm like HOLY SHIT! DOPPELGANGER! and i know i'm not suppose to look at this thing in the eyes, but i'm compelled. so i'm basically staring at myself and asking me what in the name of all hell is going on.

and the thing that looks like me that just fell down all the steps is pretty bruised and totally disoriented, and it opens its eyes and looks at me just horrified, and it sort of tells me that i'm going to see myself every fifteen minutes. i have no idea what this means. i'm just sort of holding the thing in my arms and it's flailing and it's telling me that i need to get in the castle before i die, and that i need to use the 'every fifteen minutes', whatever those are.

so i'm kind of scared by all of this, and the thing just keeps saying to get in the castle before i die & we all die.

so i start up the steps (about fifteen minutes have elapsed) and ANOTHER version of me comes flying out the castle and falls down the steps. i stop this one. this doppelganger is in better condition and it looks at me and says 'dave, i tried - you gotta get in there, there can't be much time left.. just keep trying.. i think we can beat this thing' and then it sits down halfway down the steps and just sort of stares at the first version of me, who is all the way at the bottom and holding his head disconsolately.

so i'm like 'dude what is going on!' and dave #2 is like "i'm not totally sure.. we went to the restaurant and took the tour, and something happened.. it split everybody up into like a million versions of themselves.. it was like hell.. everyone died.. it killed everybody but me.. everybody but us.. but whatever is in there is trying to finish the job.. there's a new version happening every fifteen minutes.. we don't know what to do.. i don't know as much as the next dave that you'll meet, unless we're dead already.. i know more than the dave down there on the stairs, though.. right now i just know you have to get into the castle, as far & deep as possible.."

so i give one last look at all my dead friends outside, and book it into the castle. once in there i'm in the restaurant part and it's all empty and full of tables, and i'm hearing screams from god knows where, and suddenly dave #3 comes tearing out of hallway (another 15 minutes have passed) and he's bleeding. and he rounds the corner and leans back on the wall and gives me this knowing look and says "down the hallway.. that's all that i managed to learn. i heard the next dave.. he didn't do to well. i think it killed us, i'm not sure.." and we go to the castle window and look out at the first dave i saw, and i'm just horrified to see that dave #1's face is starting to turn this scarlet color and his whole body is starting to bruise and these gashes are opening up all over his arms.

we look at him just getting sick and dave #3 says "look, if he dies, then the next dave is going to have the exact same thing happen to him 15 minutes later.. we're all 15 minutes ahead or behind in the future of each other.. then it'll be me.. then the next one, if there is one, then finally you. you need to get down into the castle, and stay alive as long as you can.. the longer you live, the better chance you have of killing whatever is down there."

so then i'm like 'so i need to follow you guys, right?' and he's like 'i think so', and i sort of confirm which hall he came from, but he's a little out of it. he sits on a chair and sort of stares at the ground. so i run down the hall and i can see bloodstains on the walls and i hear more shrieking and follow it.

so i get down to this room and dave #4 is leaning against a wall, just bloody as all hell, but breathing well and he sort of smiles at me and says 'we didn't die! it was close! everyone's getting sick. i can't remember more than 15 minutes before or after this very minute, but you chased whatever attacked all of us, and it wasn't expecting that.. it went down there. there's a painting, the next dave told me that.. you need to use it to kill the thing.. i wish i could be of more help'

and i run in the direction he pointed at and climb these stairs and end up in this room full of paintings. and i am hearing horrible horrible noises, it sounds like some giant machine is screaming or something, it's getting so loud and i can barely hear anything. and i'm looking at all these paintings and somehow know which one i need.. it's the picture of this old, respectable-looking man in a nice suit and as i'm staring at it dave #5 basically comes crawling in, and he's got blood pouring out of his mouth and lungs and he's dying and he sees my concern and says "don't worry.. i can't die until everyone before me had there chance.. i have at least an hour. i found out what you needed.. it was worth it.. run your fingers down the painting" so i sort of brush the painting with my fingers and the oil just sort of melts away and where the old guy was, there's this other young dude, just standing in this forest, looking petrified.

and the bleeding dave on the ground sort of smiles weakly and says "good.. that's the person that this thing is after. it's coming for you, though. i tried to delay it. i think it's your turn.. i don't know what the last step is, though.. i can't see far enough ahead.. this is it"

and before i can do anything else, this fucking giant demon/devil thing rounds the corner, and it's like this black swamp-thing creature with a bunch of arms and legs and tentacles and it's just fucking horrific and it's got these red eyes and it opens its mouth and lets out the loudest, most piercing scream i've ever heard, and without thinking i basically hold the painting in front of me with both hands and just basically pull it into myself.. and i put myself through it, and suddenly i'm in the forest with this young dude.

the young dude can't see me, and is looking the wrong way but i can tell he's just terrified, and off to my left i can see the vague outline of the castle, except it looks different, and i get the impression i've gone a few hundred years back in time. the dude looks totally scared, but also preoccupied, and i follow his gaze and notice with some surprise that way way way off in the distance there's another version of himself crawling towards the castle, bleeding and with a knife in his back. the kid just looks terrified.

suddenly i see this fucking evil looking man with a hunting knife creeping quietly through the woods.. he sneaks up on this young kid and explodes out of the bush with his knife above his head and clearly he's about to murder the kid.. so i rush in there and tackle this guy, and he just looks like pure fucking evil, and he opens his mouth and lets out this horrible scream like the one the monster just gave, and i manage to get the knife away from him and then we struggle (the kid is useless at this point and is staring at us and just totally insane) and i manage to stab the hunter in his side with his own knife, and he relaxes his grip and i pull the knife out and stab him over and over and over in the heart and neck.

when i finally look up i'm back in the castle and the creature is dead. the dave that's in the room stands up and he's still bleeding, but only in the same places that i am. he smiles at me and nods and starts walking back where he came from. i know suddenly that i need to walk back to the front of the castle where this whole mess started. so i do that and he gives me one final nod and disappears around the hallway. i make sure to walk back the exact route i took to get into the castle, and as i do i pass all the other daves in perfect intervals. they, too, are all cut and bleeding in the exact same way that i am, and they're also smiling. they each all disappear around a corner. i pass the last dave by the steps outside the front door and am relieved to see he's also okay. i ask him where they're all going, and he says i already know.

then i woke up.

last night i realized that i like everything to the point where i can't stand it, in all five senses of the word.

work

last night i dreamt that i was on tour and was playing a house show in ohio somewhere. after the show i was wandering around the house and i went upstairs and i ran into this girl i work with, wendy. and i was like 'wendy?! what the hell are you doing here?'

and i don't remember exactly what she said, but she basically had some sort of grand life plan that she had embarked upon, and as she was unveiling all the events in this great 'plan' i remember thinking "holy crap, this is the worst plan i have ever heard of in my life - i can't let her do this!"

so then i was like "okay wendy, i don't want to sound like a dick here, but your plan is just fucking awful. i mean you're hardly started it and you're already in the middle of nowhere, ohio - it's a terrible plan. i really really think you should reconsider your options and go back to ottawa and work something else out."

and then wendy got PISSED and all quiet and i thought it best to leave. so i went back downstairs and hung out with people at the house show and maybe an hour later i remembered wendy and went back upstairs again. and this time when walked into the room she was lying down on the bed with her eyes open. and i was like, "uh wendy? what are you doing?"

and she was like "I'M TAKING A NAP" in a really angry tone, and i was like "uh, okay... um, do you want me to wake you up in an hour or something?" and she was like "HOW ABOUT YOU WAKE ME UP WHEN YOU SEE THINGS MY WAY"

and i was like "oh man, work is gonna be awkward tomorrow"

island of rabbits

i don't think this dream is offensive:

so i'm on this big island with a bunch of my friends, only this wizard has turned about half of them into rabbits.

and all my friends are all kind of giddy and excited about the whole thing, and we're all sort of standing at the edge of a big forest, and then some idiot yells out "well, what are we waiting for!! let's go find our friends before they get eaten by wolves or something!!"

and everyone's like "alright!!! yeah!!!" and they're just thrilled beyond words and they all but bolt off into the forest

then suddenly i realize what a terrible fucking idea this is and i'm like "WAIT YOU RETARDS!!" and everyone sort of pauses mid-stride and they turn around and face me.

and i'm like "we can't just all dash into the goddamned forest, we're all going to get lost! we need a better plan!! and how do you expect to tell our friend-rabbits apart from real rabbits?! huh?! yeah, nobody thought about that did they? we need a PLAN! we need to PREPARE and FIGURE something out and - "

and while i'm doing this i'm sort of waving my arm way off to my right and i happen to glance down in that direction, and there, by the shore, are a whole bunch of rabbits playing in the water and building sandcastles and sunbathing and stuff and i'm like "okay, well that's them"

sweatsuit

alright, so here's a pretty racist dream i had:

so i'm part of this film crew working for like national geographic or life network or something like that, and our 'assignment' is to follow around some idiot who's developed this costume that harvests energy from just about anything.

so we pull up and there's this dude wearing what looks like a one-piece black velcro suit, and and soon as we all get out of the car he's like "hey guys! glad you could make it! this is going to knock your SOCKS OFF" and all that, and i'm holding the boom mic or something and someone says 'okay we're rolling!' and the cameras are on and we're live

and basically this dude starts skipping down the street backwards, and he's facing us and the cameras and he's talking about how humans are wasteful and how we don't understand all the different sources of energy there are, etc etc

and then at one point he stops skipping backwards and he says "alright - now how much energy do you think i just stored up from that tiny bit of skipping i just did?" and he looks at this watch-thing built into the suit and he's like "a tenth of a watt! look at that!" and then he's like "and how much energy do you think i stored up from being in this beautiful sunshine?!" and he looks at the watch again and is like "another tenth of a watt!! can you believe it!!"

and then he sort of hobbles over to this nearby alley, and we're all running after this lunatic and he basically just jumps right into this big disgusting dumpster. and we're trying to get the cameras and the mics in position, and the guy is practically rolling around in garbage and yelling shit at us the entire time.

and he's like picking up banana peels and stuff and sticking them onto his black velcro suit and he's saying things like "there's so much wasted energy in organic matter!" and he finds an old carton of yogurt and pours it on his legs and says "just look at all that energy!" and he grabs a piece of old pizza and smears it on his legs "look at all this energy!! and that's not all!!" and he finds some old coffee grounds and pours it all over himself "all this 'garbage' generates a lot of heat! if i cover myself in this i'm set for winter!"

and then this one camera man near me turns to me and says "ah yes - the ol' mexican sweatsuit"

new direction

because i am tired of explaining pictures, i will now discuss semi-offensive dreams i have on a regular basis, coupled with a completely unrelated image of someplace i have been to.

first, i will start with older dreams that i have remember for whatever reason.

okay so in this one dream i was watching pavlov do his experiments with the dog and the bell. and basically pavlov was this big fat guy and he had the dog up on this little stage and one day after making the food/bell association for weeks on end, he finally did his experiment and rang the bell, and sure enough the dog began to salivate.

and pavlov goes nuts. he's just excited as hell and he starts yelling for his wife, martha, to come downstairs. martha shows up in an apron and pavlov's like "god dammit martha check this out!!" and he rings the bell and the dog starts to drool. and martha, who seems to be a good wife, sort of gives pavlov an encouraging "that's great, dear"

and pavlov is waving his arms around and saying things like "great?! it's the greatest god damn achievement of all time!! i've broken open the secrets of the universe, woman! break out the champagne! do we have any cake?! this calls for a celebration!!"

and pavlov slaps martha on the butt and she hurries off into the kitchen (remember this is the old days when everyone did that) and returns with some champagne and cake, and pavlov eyes the cake (it's a very good cake) and cuts himself a big moist slice and takes a swig of the champagne and asks if they have any cheese. and martha, being the good natured wife she is, shuffles off and finds some cheese.

pavlov is now leaning back in his chair and really happy with the fare in front of him, and he decides before he shows his experiment to the world he should make sure everything's locked down, so he calls up some friends on the telegraph and morses them to come over tomorrow afternoon. they all telegraph back, morsing that they'll be there. pavlov turns to martha and says "i'm going out to buy some ribs and stuff, we're having a little bit of a shindig tomorrow"

so tomorrow comes and pavlov's friends amble over to his house and he sits them all down and says to hang on to their pants because he's going to show them something that's going to ROCK THEIR WORLD. and they're all a little bummed out when he disappears and comes back with a stray dog and puts in on a little podium, but they're still interested.

so pavlov explains what he's been up to and really talks it up, and since his friends are all into science they all get excited about it too. and then pavlov rings the bell. and the dog starts to drool!! "holy shit!!" his friends yell out and everyone jumps up and starts yelling about how this is the greatest psycholomological discovery in the history of the god damn planet, and pavlov is just overjoyed and screams at martha to bring out more refreshments. and martha comes out with these plates of devilled eggs and other appetizers, and pavlov looks greedily at all the food and licks his lips and him & his friends really just plow into all of the stuff martha prepared.

then they sort of munch on leftovers and discuss how to present this. they decide another formal showing at pavlov's house is best, but this time a full out dinner party and like 60 guests. they decide to do it friday night. martha is once again requisitioned to start making the necessary catering prepartions, and she goes about it cheerfully and says pleasant things like "boys will be boys" while plucking chickens and stuff, and she's totally being a babe about this whole thing.

anyway friday rolls around, it's the usual scenario, except this time everyone's standing up and in formal attire and wearing monocles and stuff. the dog is now on this little raised stage and not sure what's going on. pavlov delivers the formalities and the explanations and then here comes the big moment and he rings the bell and the dog starts slobbering all over the place and it's a hit.

"this is the biggest scientific breakthrough in modern history!" everyone cries out! the dog wags its tail! pavlov looks around at his friends and says "I KNOW, RIGHT!!!" and a big toast is made to pavlov, the human mecca of all that is scientific and civilized, and then martha comes out with this giant pumpkin pie and is like "pavlov i made you your favorite pie!" and pavlov practically starts drooling himself because the dude loves food.

i don't want to keep repeating myself but at this point everyone should understand how the dream progressed, with larger and larger demonstrations and recurring food and basically things getting to the point where pavlov unknowingly conditions himself to receiving delicious snacks whenever that bell is rung, and basically both him and the dog start to drool whenever he rings the bell like a town crier, and then there was some really heavy panopticon-like ideas swirling around in the dream that i can't really explain, and the dog & pavlov suddenly became metaphors for each other, and that whole 'circle of life' thing sort of revealed itself to my pineal gland, and then of course i woke up and forgot all the subtleties of the dream and only remembered the basic premise.

masquerade

here is a picture of the scariest mask i have ever seen in my life. apparently made out of human skin, some horribly demented person saw fit to make this terrible thing and used it to scare the life out of everybody within viewing range. NOT COOL. this is every bit as bad as that elephant status with human eyes.

tarsiers

so these things are like the size of my palm!! they blink really slowly! they've got messed up fingers!!

anyway we hired some idiot to drive us out to the tarsier foundation, which was in the middle of nowhere, and when we stepped out the cab driver said he would wait in his cab with the meter running while we spent the day running around in the forest looking for tarsiers. i promptly sent him on his way.

then we went inside the building, which was empty, and looked around at a tiny model of some trees, and then a person who i believe was the janitor showed up and asked our business.

we said we planned to go search for tarsiers and he disappeared and then this other guy came along and made us follow him into the forest. we learned that this guy's job is to saunter off into the rainforest every morning and figure out where all the goddamned tarsiers are. this is his occupation: monkey finder. and i really have a hard time believing the tarsier foundation receives more than a dozen visitors all year long. the whole thing was confusing.

anyway this dude took his job seriously and barely spoke a word to us the entire time. we wandered behind him and every so often he would turn to us and put his index finger to his mouth and then vaguely point way off into the tops of the trees and then watch us in extreme satisfaction as we squinted and grimaced and generally didn't see anything. then, without warning he'd take off again, we'd go another hundred yards, and then he'd pull the same shenanigans.

eventually, however, we came across a tarsier at eye level and i spent an enjoyable three minutes getting bored of the little creature. they sleep during the day and, as far as i'm concerned, don't respond to any sort of stimulus whatsoever. our guide snapped his fingers and the tiny mammal very slowly turned its giant eyes in the wrong direction, and then the guide gave us a knowing look and then we marched further into the brush.

we saw several other tarsiers and then decided to have a go at finding some on our own. this was a mistake, because as soon as we set off in a direction different than that of our guide, we ran into giant spider webs and poisonous fungii and swarms of fire ants and all sorts of other nameless horrors.

getting home was retarded, too. the cab driver was long gone, so we hiked back to the main road and just kind of started ambling back to the nearest village which was over an hour's drive away. eventually a large brightly colored vehicle drove by, i flagged it down and we bartered a ride back.

old churches

while i am not religious by any means, there is something pretty neat about aged architecture. this is a 16th century church whose basement has not been entered ever since an evil spirit got stuck in there by accident. or perhaps people were just flat out lying to me. either or.

camel xing

so this was taken while inside a taxi driven by a man who had absolutely no idea where he was going. we had been warned that cab drivers in this country had no idea where they were going, so we tried to one-up the system by hiring a guide. it seemed like a good plan, except the guide also had absolutely no idea where she was going, and as a result we stayed on this road for about fifty minutes before she made some calls and then decided we were heading in the direction opposite where we wanted to go. the cab driver didn't realize we understood a bit of the language and kept talking about what we had eaten for lunch in this awed voice. or at least that's what i think was going on.

muscle

so this is the world's oldest city wall. it's enormous, and what's even more ridiculous is that every single brick is inscribed with the name of the poor soul who made it & placed it. it's kind of nuts.

what totally fucking sucks, though, is that because time and war ravaged certain areas of this wall, the city commission decided to revamp it by placing giant fake plywood turrents on top of it every ten kilometers or so. no doubt this makes the wall look more "complete" and "better kept", but what it also does is makes unassuming tourists think that there's a way down from the stupid wall way off in the distance.

i can't write this morning and am aware this entry is horribly worded, but anyway we had been walking on top of the wall and generally enjoying the perimeter of the city when fatigue settled in and we began to look for a way down. of course there weren't a set of stairs in sight, and it had been several miles since we had last seen a post with a way down to the ground. we decided to walk around a small bend and see if there was any hope up ahead. we did so, and sure enough, way off in the distance we could see a giant red and yellow turrent. certainly this is a way down, we all thought, and kept on walking. 40 minutes later we arrived at the turret only to find out it was all smoke and mirrors and basically there was absolutely no way down. we discovered an old hole in the floor of the wall and i crawled down there but it was creepy and full of rats and probably skeletons and shit so i came back out into the sunshine and told everyone we'd have to turn around. everyone was bummed.

about a kilometer on the way back we came across a clump of trees growing alongside the wall and decided to risk climbing down. it was a little dangerous and a lot of dust poured out after us, but nobody died and we all felt good about ourselves for the rest of the day.

loud mannequin

some people choose to use mannequins as a means to tastefully demonstrate how flattering their clothing looks draped over the human form.

others use mannequins to let their customers know that they can BUY MY FUCKING RED COAT

YEAH!!!

whoosh!!! vamooosh!!

so this is a tiny little part of a giant wood carving in a building built around a live archeological dig. it was pretty cool. later that day we saw a fat girl wearing a sailor moon costume, and i got drunk with this dude rick from philly while the guy running the hotel slapped down wads of $100 dollar bills on the table and demanded we acknowledge his wealth and power. plus i hung out with some kittens. actually this was probably one of the best days of last year.

my ankle is still sprained, but i have decided that once i am in walking condition to reward myself with a trip to toronto to visit friends i have not seen in years.

metafilter/reddit people: i found several unpublished stories from the batch i wrote in winter 2005. there are about 10 of them. i will put them up when i finish correcting them.

russian spacecraft

so basically one day i decided to try and take pictures that would totally confuse me later on, and it actually worked pretty well, even though i do remember that this is part of some russian satelite i saw in a dirty city called hohhot.

other pictures from this series include a shadow on a man on a horse, seahorses in a glass, the skull of a monkey, and a couple of other stupid things i have little recollection of.

this is why you wear shoes when you bike

so this is why you wear shoes when you bike. worst still, when i tried to clip off the upper right part of the nail, the whole thing just came right out of the toe. it was disgusting.

kids

so to counter that horribly sad picture of the tiger i posted earlier, i've decided to post something a lot more upbeat and god-fearingly pleasant.

pictured below are some nine children who we spent almost a full week with. they popped out of the ground as soon as we turned up (this is in a village called 'da'bay'tayan, near lapu-lapu, in the sulu sea) and basically ended up being the poorest, most polite, well-mannered children i have ever encountered. they never asked us for anything, not once. i'm not sure if they had parents. they wore mis-matched, moldy sandals that washed up ashore, and tshirts that you will only ever see on the bodies of loser montreal hipsters who play in "art rock" bands. they were fantastic.

these kids were evidently very lonely, because they asked us all sorts of questions and seemed to want nothing more than to follow us around on our walks and listen to us talk about places they've never been. the plan for the week, as far as lj & i were concerned, was to get up at noon every day, eat pancakes, go swimming, wander around the nearby forest and stare at starving cows, go swimming again, and then eat more pancakes. i still can't believe how great our plans are. anyway whenever we went on our walks, these kids would follow us around. we were positioned on a shallow bay, and when the tide went out at dusk you could walk for miles on the beach floor and watch these massive, 2-foot long red spiky starfish desperately try to crawl further out into the ocean.

anyway one cool thing about these kids was that although they didn't know the proper name for anything, they were ultimately familiar with every creature in the ocean and kept running out to grab something disgusting and then show it to me. i can't stress how awesome these kids were. they would just walk alongside us and ask us questions about the world. the two kids at the back were the oldest and took care of the rest as best as they could.

anyway we had a blast that entire week. we had been warned not to touch the kids because they all apparently had horrible communicable diseases, but they all looked pretty clean to me except for this one poor kid i lovingly called 'scabs' who was about 8 years old and just covered in lesions and had no teeth and never said a word and lived only to sit a few feet from laura and just stare at her and then give her the biggest smile ever whenever she smiled at him.

anyway long story short, after we met these kids we went to the nearest town and wrote our parents and asked them to western union us money so that we could get these kids some clothes. the next day we visited the western union office and they had sent us $250US, which is just a retarded amount of money in lapu-lapu, so we really went to town. we borrowed some bikes from a seattle lawyer who was in a coma (this sounds made up but it's not) and took off to the market, where we bought about two dozen pairs of sandles, toothbrushes, school supplies, toys, basketballs, dolls, etc etc etc and then went back to the bay. those kids lost their shit. it was so awesome. it was so fucking awesome to see that scabby kid shake off his enormous size-40-slimy-disgusting sandals that he had found in the garbage and put on a little orange pair of flipflops that fit him and were bought for him. about an hour later we saw him in his old crappy sandals
again, and carrying his new ones in a garbage bag. laura looked dejected, we asked the older kid what was going on and he said the scabby child didn't want to wear them because he wanted them to be new forever. anyway he looked ridiculously happy. they all did. later on i took a picture of them and found out that they didn't have any pictures of themselves, so what i plan to do (i still haven't gotten around to this because i can't get an address) is send them copies of the following picture as soon as i can locate a reputable contact in that part of town who will be willing to stroll the beach for an hour or so calling out the names of homeless children.

anyway, a picture of some happy kids who at that point in time probably couldn't wait to run home (wherever that was) to look at all the stuff we bought for them.



ps. this picture is taken in the bay i spoke of. in the early afternoon the water level would easily be about 10 feet high.

unimpressed @ the warriors

so maybe this is a good reason to travel; you tend to remember small, useless facts that will do nobody any good, whatsoever.

we took some stinky train to xi'an to go see the terra cotta warriors, which i was under the impression were one of the seven wonders of the world. i now know that there are different 'categories' of wonders of the world; there are the ancient wonders of the world (which are like the gardens of babylon and the leaning tower of pisa, even though tiger hill is older and leans further), then the wonders of the middle world, and the modern world, etc etc. and despite the fact that the terra cotta warriors are basically as old as the lighthouse of alexandria or whatever, because the greeks apparently didn't travel that much a bunch of interesting shit never got included.

anyway in case anyone ever tells you about the grandeur of the terra cotta warriors, i will quickly give my impression of the whole affair, history and all.

1. qin was a ruthless leader but brought china together in a lot of ways. he wanted an army to take with him to the afterlife, so he had all these life-size warriors built. we don't know how many. people think we've only unearthed 1/10th of what's actually underground.

2. it reportedly took 700,000 people to build all these warriors, and afterward qin had them all killed.

3. apparently he had rivers flowing with mercury. this is the only cool thing about it.

alright, now the experience. the actual exhibit is a ten minute walk from a giant parking lot. there are two small, poorly marked footpaths that you can take and eventually you'll find 4 or 5 giant white concrete museum-looking buildings. you have to buy all sorts of retarded tickets. random chinese people who can't speak english will demand that you purchase their services as 'translator'. it will probably be sunny out, so everyone will be carrying umbrellas because chinese people all want to look as white and pale as possible.

after you push some fifty 'translators' out of the way and buy your tickets, you will march through the buildings containing the pits. after you've look at two terracotta warriors you will want to go home. they all look the same and they're all broken. we decided to save the third & largest pit for last, and when we walked i didn't gasp in awe or anything. we walked around the entire pit, took a lot of pictures that look the same, and then decided to leave. oh yeah, there's a small exhibit in the darkest museum i have ever been to in my life. whether or not all the lights were broken or they just assumed people would bring heatseaking devices with them i do not know, but basically the only time i could see was when someone's camera went off. there were about 700 people crammed in there, everyone bumping into each other and trying to find that little silver chariot you always see pictures of. it was horrible.

leaving is the tricky part. the chinese have cleverly placed an overpriced 'souvenir shop' inside the grounds where clumsy white people pay upwards of 500x what the actual price is. we ignored this. as we passed the exit gates we were accosted by a couple of dudes in their mid-twenties trying to sell us a box of 6 terra cotta warriors for 60 yuan. (the ones in the giftshop were about a 1000). i told them we'd give them 5 yuan (laura suggested we get some for friends), and after some heated arguing (where i definitely loudly threatened to punch one guy in the face if he stared at my girlfriend any longer) we settled on 6. of course then they didn't have change for a 10. (by the way, 10 yuan is like $1.15, so we're literally arguing over pennies at this point). one dude definitely tried to give me .4 change instead of the 4 i was owed, and i threatened to hit him as well. he was all shifty about it, trying to push jao into my hand like i didn't know their currency. they were PISSED off after we left. towards the end i was talking to them like they were handicapped and saying (in mandarin) "no, i give you 10. 10! 10 minus 6 is 4! 4! no, that's 1! shut up! you give me 4! i will take 4! 1! 2! 3! 4! now go home! i will hit you!"

of course like 3 minutes later the exit route led us through an entire small village of commerce and random shit for sale, where i saw the same stupid warriors for 4 yuan, and we actually argued people down to 2, but anyway we ended up with a ton of little statues to give to friends.

then we made our way back to the parking lot, climbed on a random bus, demanded to go back to xi'an, and decided not to stop at this weird hot springs attraction we saw on the side of the road.

sheepherding

so i can't herd sheep for the life of me. this family graciously acceeded my request to herd their sheep for them, and i basically opened the gate and every last stupid sheep pretty much exploded out and took off in separate directions. so then i sort of hobbled after them and yelled out various things in various languages, all to no avail. then i considered how i might go blaming laura for the poor turn of events. then i considered sleeping out in the open for a little while, at least until the family had forgotten how i lost their entire livelihood. then i turned around and marched back to the farm and planned what i was going to say.

fortunately for me this family either had unusually spirited sheep, or perhaps a lot of stupid people had tried their hand at herding them before, because before i got to the front door they sent their two tiny daughters out into the field. one was armed with a long stick that had a rope attached to it, the other was on a dirt bike.

and i swear to god, within about 45 seconds those two tiny girls had rounded up every single last sheep and had them charging back into the pen. god damn.

i now maintain that had i been given a dirtbike and stick with a rope on it, i could have handle things.

addendum and beavers

so a few things:

1. i found another picture from that horrible alligator encounter in southern USA. if you look closely you can definitely see the crocodile's eyes. this was taken after the other people in this picture burst onto the scene and made me aware that i had been practically sitting on the thing.



2. here is a photo i took in huainan, chiefly known for it's dreaded, motherfucking man-eating beaver!!!!

chocolate hills

so i sprained my ankle last night, and as a result just about everything that is currently occupying my attention needs to be delayed... recording, soccer, cabin building, etc. it sucks. i'm never spraining my ankle ever again.

anyway, this is a picture i took on the island of cebu, philippines. actually, wait, this was on bohol. we took a ferry over to the island of bohol, from cebu, because we wanted to look at the illustrious chocolate hills as well as those little monkey-things with the big eyes. tarsiers?!

anyway, we had a bout of extremely good luck back on cebu and basically were taken care of by a local eldery couple, who used the english names 'daisy' and 'tom'. they treated us like their grandchildren and we are pretty much forever in their debt for taking us in and showing us around. when we left for bohol, daisy explained that the best thing to do once off the ferry was to try and negotiate a driver for the whole day (she also provided me with a good price to settle on), and that's exactly what we did.

we ended up with a reasonably competant man who i think might have gone by the name 'eddie', and we were promised all the sights and sounds we had on our little list. this included the tarsier reserve, the chocolate hills, this long, high & dangerous bamboo bridge over a completely green river, one of the world's oldest man-made forests, and a few other things that had caught our interest.

anyway it was all a lot of fun. eddie sort of kept rushing us but we insisted on taking our time. the philippines have the worst food i have ever eaten (it's all canned pork and canned sardines for some reason), but we ate rather well in bohol. we stopped by a small family selling fresh coconuts, watched the man expertly butcher them up and even carve rough spoons for us out of the tough shell, and later we discovered another interesting snack, which consisted of long narrow fruit strips (about the same width and size as french fries) from unripe melons and mangoes and stuff. they sprinkled salt and malt vinegar on them. it was pretty good.

yeah so anyway these are the chocolate hills. unlike the steep and narrow karst hills i posted earlier, these ones were perfectly convex. there's some 1200 hills counted in this area, and they're all made out of fossilized crustacean skeletons or something equally cool. they kind of remind me of super mario world.

captain bringdown

so this will probably just bum people out, but these tigers are pretty much left like this 24/7. this was the first live tiger i ever touched, and i think the thing was desperate for contact of any sort. it let out one of those deep sepulchral growls when i sat down next to it and then tilted its head in my direction. i scratched its ears for couple of minutes and vehemently hated mankind with all my heart. when i left some people were loading it up into the back of a jeep. fuck you, bengbu!

karst

so that last post about being near vietnam made me hunt down some pictures of the karst mountains.

while not actually across the vietnamese border, we're hard by it, and rented some bikes to make our way through karst mountains. yangshuo is getting more touristy by the minute. we spent all day getting lost, wishing we had anything to eat other than bouzi (probably spelled wrong since my pinyin is awful - pronounced 'bow-dsa'),l and more or less taking in the scenery. everything here, contrary to the village where we were staying, looked genuinely old, and we frequently biked by ancient stone houses, long abandoned.

we hiked up one of these suckers. it was steep!

speaker boxes

let me preface this by saying i do not advocate crime. i would also like to inform the public that the person in this picture is not me.

however i will discuss a dream i had where i had been practically living in lj's apartment on bank street for the better part of a year. her bedroom had three giant charming windows, all east facing, and usually, to the best of my recollection, somewhere between 3 and 3:15am the sun would peak over the horizon and instantly the room would be flooded with blinding rays of searing white light that would have thrown lesser men into convulsions.

another charming facet of her apartment was that, being located one of the ottawa's noisiest street, the apartment literally shook like an abused child everytime a garbage truck or some other large means of locomotion passed by. which happened several times a day.

thirdly, and most charmingly of all, on the corner of bank where her building was built were four stop-lights, each armed with two small speakers that whistled loudly everytime the light turned green. because the stop-lights were perpendicular to each other, one set was always green, and therefore the whistles were performed in perpetuity. this would happen long into the night.

anyway, if i remember my dream correctly, one cold night after i had too much to drink i lost some of my cool, and, snatching the largest knife i could procure, ran out into the snowy night, scaled every stoplight, slit the wires attached to the speakers and knocked the offending electronics into the snow using sheer brute force. it was a tricky business, because the poles were covered with ice, and i had to hold onto the knife with my teeth in traditional pirate fashion in order to climb up high enough. the whole thing was thrilling. afterwards i collected the speakers and put them in a large garbage bag which i then hid underneath laura's bed. someone, let's say a magical unicorn since this is a dream, disposed of them at a later time, far away.

the following night i slept like a baby, despite a multitude of cuts and bruises on the sides of my fists. when i woke up i thought to myself, 'what a ridiculous dream!! and went about my private business.

hong kong island

so we had written hong kong off as a complete waste of time until a couple of friends came back and said it was just like canada and they had gone camping. positive they were lying, we immediately purchased tents and sleeping bags and pots and pans and swiss army knives and sleeping pads and flashlights and whistles and this thing you screw on to a small butane tank and then press a button and a goddamned bolt of lightning shoots out from somewhere and suddenly you have a little flame under control.

flying to hong kong was out of the question, so we took a train from guilin (about 4 hours from the vietnam border) to shenzhen, a large shitty chinese city. from shenzhen you basically walk over to hong kong. it was really bizarre. they have these big "HONG KONG" signs everywhere that take you down streets, through malls, in and out of buildings, up stairs, around corners, etc... for all my local friends, imagine seeing signs promising "USA" in the rideau centre and then leading you down elgin street.

it didn't help matters that we were both carrying giant camping bags, stuffed to the brim with useless equipment we pretty much either wrecked or ditched later on. i felt like we were being made fun of.

eventually, however, we were informed that we were now in hong kong (by a man who told me to take off my hat, no less - i asked him why, and he pointed to a private booth in a corner and said they were checking everybody's temperature using heat seeking machinery in order to determine who was diseased and who wasn't) and suddenly the skies cleared up and i saw my first tree in about half a year.

we took a pleasant, functioning train for about a 40 minutes and got off at some sort of large mall (diamond hill?) that had english signs, english food, and other things we hadn't seen in months. we transferred here onto a bus bound for the far eastern peninsulas of hong kong. at this point we were some 5 hours behind schedule. apparently this bus was suppose to drag us up into the mountains and abandon us, whereupon we would see whether or not you can really camp in hong kong.

the bus brought us to a little ocean-side village that reminded me of all the little port towns of new england. we got off, wandered around for a bit, couldn't find a single trail leading anywhere, and promptly got on another bus. at this point it was getting late.

the second bus took us into the woods. at one point i saw a great big sign saying 'mackinaw trail', yelled out 'STOP!' in mandarin (they speak cantonese), and we shuffled off. unfortunately we had gotten off at the bottom of hill where the trail begins. the next 40 minutes were gruelling beyond measure. the sun was setting, we were sweaty, laden with gear, swarmed by wild cows (which are everywhere in rural hong kong) and clearly not going to make out post before it got dark.

eventually we made it to the trail, and the hike began. at this point it was dark. we were hiking on a thin, slippery trail with only a few weak chinese flashlights to aid us. the bush on either side of the trail was far too thick to even begin setting up camp. finally, after an era of uncertainty, we found a clearing and a firepit. we set up our tent (i fortunately had the foresight to practice this back at our apartment, just in case of such an emergency), got the lightning-bolt-thrower-apparatus in place, warmed up some soup, tried in vain to start a fire (it was far too damp), crawled into our sleeping bags, and fell asleep.

the next morning we woke up in one of the most beautiful areas i've ever seen in my life, spent the next few days hiking around, swimming in gorgeous beaches, and enjoying wholesome camping food.

now the picture, which has little to do with my story: after camping we headed back to kowloon, took the star ferry over to the island, took the world's first funicular tram up to the top, watched a marching band play to a small group of well-dressed executives, watched said executives launch a thousand silver balloons into the sky, climbed off into the forest surrounding us and enjoyed life:



NB - one reason hong kong island is such a great city is due to their building restrictions. the entire southern half of the island is off limits, and northern development is almost entirely halted, letting the rainforest once again take over. this leads to a fantastic city where you'll find old growth gardens and wildlife parks smushed in between gorgeous architecture. and besides, where else do you find outdoor escalators?

georgia swamp park

so we're barreling down towards the everglades when we come across some sort of weird-but-free conservation area. not ones to miss out on an opportunity, we pull off the 95 south and follow the signs. pretty soon we're in something right out of african wildlife safari and spend a good hour figuring out how to keep the van slowly moving (using the famed rock-on-gas-pedal plan) while everyone sits on the roof and looks for animals and birds.

anyway the whole point of this story is that i unknowingly ended up some 8 feet away from a fully grown alligator that was missing an eye, and it's because of this missing eye that i assume i'm still alive. i've cherished this private conviction that because of the injury, the alligator had no depth perception and therefore wasn't quite aware of how close i was to it. the whole thing was stupid, and my brief meeting with the alligator constitutes one of the two scariest encounters i've ever had with animals, narrowly trailing the time a giant fucking shark snuck up on me while i was snorkeling in the carribean sea.

anyway there's only one picture of me with the alligator, and it's after i realized the thing was there and moved rapidly away from it, and i don't happen to have a copy here. i do have a picture from the beginning of our adventure. i am in the blue tshirt. i do not remember what we saw in the trees.

knuckle bleeding

so i'm constantly excited all the time. especially during fall. aside from the incredible weather there's just something about leaves and football and pumpkins and thanksgiving meals and small towns and roadtrips and weakening sunshine that totally rules.

anyway so i hacked up my knuckle pretty good while in the good ol' USA and because i hadn't taken out any sort of insurance i had to wait until we were back in canada to get it looked at. it was a mess. i used a plastic fork to sort of hack away all the dead flesh and then decided to take a picture because you could see into the wound pretty well.



and just for the hell of it, a picture i took of one of my favorite things in the world:

swedish warships

so we're lost in the snow and the only thing that has brightened up my day so far is watching a large man first yell at his son, and then take a really nasty spill on a patch of ice. i'm convinced that all of norway is a trap, when one of the old churches suddenly comes looming out at us. i took it as a cue to go home.

up next: cutting my knuckle really deeply in california.

i take it metafilter is interested in stories? some dude took the time to copy/format some stuff i wrote in early 2007: http://www.storylog.com/true-things-the-assistant-has-said/. it might occupy your time for a little bit.

kittens!

so my dad adopted this cat that he thought was 'fat'. of course within minutes of announcing ownership the thing gave birth to some adorable kittens that now live on a farm some 80 kilometers outside the city.

also, for what it's worth, i'm now updating this thing almost entirely for brian's sake.

sometimes you just take a really good picture

so we're underneath a golf course and getting tired of looking at exhibits when suddenly we walk into something right out of a cross between ferngully and a bad nightmare. i pulled this together right sharp.

moving trains

so we're in wichita, kansas for some reason or another and i've just found a dollar store that sells jeans, so you know we're in a nice place. anyway to stave off boredom we decided to go check out the nearby trains and killed the better part of an evening climbing all over the place and jumping around in the dark. eventually we heard a train coming and rather than get out of the way, decided to lie down some five feet from the tracks and wait it out. it was a terrible idea. the vibrations caused by the massive locomotive send a fine shower of those little grey rocks in my direction and in something like a third of a second i took a quick picture and got the hell out of there. boredom at dusk is a scary thing.

the beginning of a hurricane and the end of it

so we got hijacked by some last-minute hurricane and i almost missed the whole thing because i was sleeping. fortunately the dog started barking and i had the good sense to turn on the radio and then run outside to greet wilmington in my pajamas with my camera.

i don't know why people complain about hurricanes; they're a blast. stuff gets knocked over and life becomes temporarily dangerous. anyway the highlights are as follows: 1. saw a large soccer net get flipped upside down. 2. saw a large indoor shower get blown down a field. 3. saw many large trees fall over, likewise saw many large lizards get blown out of trees.

afterwards i walked around the neighborhood and surveyed the damage. on the whole it was all pretty decent.

i made this

so here is a picture of a fork i made out of office supplies one lonely afternoon. my job loosely entails baby-sitting scientists and making sure they're spending their money on climate change research instead of, i don't know, pontoons and stuff, and as you can imagine it's an exciting, fast-paced occupation rivalling exciting positions like 'astronaut-fireman' and 'time-travelling-king'.

anyway, yeah.

squats

so i went over to austria to hang out with thomas on his birthday. it largely involved us drinking for a while and then cramming into this little car to go see boston's r'n'r play at this tiny little punk loft. it's hard to make out my face in this picture but i assure you i was looking down at the monkey on my left with the utmost disdain.

later on we went to one of those ridiculous euro punk bars where everyone there was 40+, sporting mohawks and drinking heavily. it was fun. blue monday came on and a fight nearly broke out next to us but didn't. thomas was bummed. i think he's gotten in a good solid fight every birthday except for the one i was present at. a few weeks later i think he broke his hand while punching some kid in the face, so i figure that counts.

bridges to nowhere

so we're going up this rickety cable car to the top of gunung mat cincang, some 700m above sea level, in hopes of catching a glimpse of satun, thailand. we're thinking about heading over for a few days and further escape the new year holiday, but it turns out the place is packed already so we set up camp where we were.

the ride up is just awful, it's instant death if the cable snaps or the car overturns, and both these things seem extremely plausible when the wind is blowing you all over the stupid place and the car is making these horrific groans every few seconds.

once at the top of the geopark you'll see this ridiculous bridge to nowhere describing a giant arc across two mountain peaks. it's a fun walk with some great views in the middle.

my camera has this basic stitch function that sort of failed me this time, but i'm hoping somebody with photoshop skills can piece it together a little better in the near future.

the kattegat

so i'm standing on the edge of scandinavia for some reason or other and staring out over the waters of the skagerrak and basically trying not to freeze to death. i had decided to visit a few norwegian friends who had accompanied me on a horrible six-week tour and the first week in oslo culminated in me removing most of my clothing at a bar and getting everyone kicked out of it.

the next day we decided to take a long, meaningless walk around the coast and i thought it probably best to document the view.

88.5 to 107.3

so we're having a hellish time driving through the sonoran and the only thing even remotely amusing is how the radio keeps searching through the entire band and coming up with nothing. watching this gets old quickly, though, and arizona & new mexico have little to offer.

mercifully we made it through to california without much ordeal. our front right tire tread pretty much melted off after the seventh or eighth hour of cruising through 130+ farenheit and when it exploded up under my chair i thought we were being fired at. other than that things were pretty calm, and by calm i mean hot and irritating.

astronaut dog

so lj called me up at work laughing hysterically, and showed me this when i got home.

naptime in the iso booth

so we spent six twenty-hour days crammed in pebble studios working on the van johnson full length. mercifully the whole thing is a blur at this point. buy the CD here and the LP here. mike bond took this picture of steve & i trying to sleep in the iso booth.

hispaniola

so we're stuck in this mini-van (not unlike the jeepnys of the philippines) on the dominican republic side of hispaniola and the whole goal of the day is to look inside one of those ridiculous huts that everyone seems to live in. central america has this baffling, lucrative trade of tying up random animals to the roadside and subsequently abandoning them and the gravel path we were on was flagged with donkeys and dogs anchored to nearby trees.

eventually we reached a completely nondescript central-american house, which is code for 'rough hut that looks like it was built by a three-year-old'. a local kicked the door in and we all went inside. it looked pretty much exactly like the outside of the house, only covered with pepsi and jesus posters. they used gum to patch up the roof, despite having a perfectly functional plane and an abundance of hardwood on their property.

i skipped out back to the kitchen (most kitchens in these parts are outdoors) and came across the picture of a lifetime. a dominican woman, some two hundred and fifty years old, was smoking a pipe about three feet long and looking for all the world like baba yaga. i fumbled for my camera while the ancient woman looked at me, apparently bemused, and then she suddenly extinguished her pipe, turned heel, and marched off into a nearby pig sty. the moment was over. i took a picture of the outdoor kitchen instead.

pregnant lady island

so this path leads to a giant freshwater lake in the middle of a red-earth island somewhere in the andaman sea. and on the particular day we ascended the path to the giant freshwater lake in the middle of the the red-earth island somewhere in the andaman, we saw a large man covered in those little water-wing floaties get all panicky and kellen had to drag him back to shore. the world is a fantastic place.

january in london

so i missed my flight home because i was drunk and got stuck in london for a little while. i found an overpriced hotel along hyde park and spent most of the day recovering near oxford circus. one thing i like about london winters is that everybody who lives there wears the exact same pea coat, allowing you to spot foreign friends immediately.

after spending probably about a hundred dollars on a sandwich i walked around looking for anything amusing. i found a store called 'love juice' and a war memorial that looked like an advertisement for a van damme movie.

earlier that week i had stepped on what i thought was a bus bound for standsted; it instead brought me down the west coast of the isle. the whole thing was a horrible ordeal. i had to take a train back up and i swear at one point we had run ourselves off the rails. i actually penned a quick letter to my girlfriend in case we plummetted off the nearby cliffs and into the ocean. when we finally arrived back in the city i allowed myself a thorough glance of the man in charge of the trip - he was definitely the sort of person who'd put risk life and limb to see what other types of terrain one can conduct a train through.

hi there, scary

so we're on tour somewhere near kentucky, barrelling up piedmont to the blue ridge mountains when without warning this hellish fog descends on us and we're suddenly lost at sea. whenever wheather conditions get bad in the mountains all the 18 wheelers pull over, so generally the road is free. we reduced speed and posted lookouts for accidents up ahead. suddenly we pulled up alongside a schoolbus, driving way too fast for the conditions at hand. we kept our distance behind it and watched as the kids inside waved and generally enjoyed the bizarre atmospheric conditions. then the bus put on a sudden burst of speed, and quickly disappeared into the mist. we couldn't have been more than a hundred feet behind the thing. we went over the top of a hill and the fog lifted as quickly as it had settled. despite having a perfectly clear view down the mountain, the bus was gone. totally vanished. there was no way it could have gotten more than a few hundred feet ahead of us in the time it took for us to get separated. here's the last known picture of the ghost bus.

monkeys actually stole our food

so this old guy decided to live vicariously through us, and spent the better part of the night regaling us with stories about eating barracuda, making laterns out of household materials, and making love on the beach. somepoint in the early hours we decided the man was right and agreed to be boated off to a deserted island of our choice.

we spent the day checking out islands and doing other interesting things. the langkawi archipelago (known fondly as the jewel of kedah to its people), situated along peninsular malaysia in the malacca straits, has plenty to offer and we passed our time pleasantly enough. eventually we came across a reasonably sized island (which i believe to be located at the following lat/long: +6° 10' 9.22", +99° 46' 32.16") and threw all of our possessions onto the sand.

knowing virtually nothing of near and neap tides, we thoughtfully waded out waist-deep into the water and started a gallant trek around the island in order to survey our land. about forty seconds into this nonsense i espied a monkey, an actually goddamned monkey, ripping through all our belongings.

"monkeys are stealing our food! monkeys are actually stealing our food!" i yelled out to my compatriots, and we all turned about face and began slowly surging back. the monkey, realizing it had time for more mischief, somehow attached itself to everything we owned and bolted for the forest. fortunately we only lost a few onions.

we spent the day building all sorts of ingenious monkey traps, monkey weapons, and monkey nooses but the wretched animals kept themselves out of sight. around 2am that night, while in the midst of celebrating, the tide came back in and with it a billion fluorescent blue bioluminescent plankton. i've witnessed phosphorescence before in other parts of the world, but never to this magnitude. the waves left bright blue streaks on the sand. anyone swimming in the water was outlined in fiery blue. the whole thing was pretty amazing. we also raced fairly large hermit crabs.

boldt

so in order to make a weekend a little more interesting, we rented a car and drove down to alexandria bay, which is a little US town (jefferson county, NY) nestled along the st. lawrence. once there we jumped on a ferry and made off for boldt castle, a marvelous structure built by a man of questionable character. from what i recall, george boldt somehow pulled himself up by his bootstraps until he owned the waldorf-astoria, lost it all, built up his fortune again, lost it all, built it up, etc etc etc. somepoint along this roller-coaster he decided it was high time someone built a castle on an island for his wife, who promptly died. then the thousand islands bridge authority, of all people, graciously snatched up the island for $1 and turned it into a tourist attraction.

the cool thing about the castle is that it's unfinished. sounds lame, but the thing is basically a giant adult playstructure. i have long maintained that the best places to play are among old ruins and castles, and this is no exception. to make matters 1000x more awesome, we experienced a freak thunderstorm almost as soon as we stepped off the boat. i was hoping for skeletons to drop out of the ceiling or something but of course that didn't happen. nothing exciting ever happens.

for what it's worth, the turret that lj's looking at is part of the same castle.

jingoism

so i was wandering around an army base in virginia beach and checking out damage caused from the mild hurricane the night before. i was stuck on something like the 15th floor of a hotel, that, as far as i'm concerned, was somewhere in the eye of the storm and i had watched a car get blown over. i was really hoping the car would go rolling down the street but no such luck. anyway the next day i decided to survey the damage. i first checked out a nearby peninsula and saw a dead pony on someone's lawn. then i went to the army base and was appalled to see that everything appeared to be in ship-shape order. i was hoping to find tanks overturned and missiles rolling around and other interesting things, but it looked like business as usual. i snapped this mostly out of desperation.

where the executioner lived

so i was pretty much waylaid in austria and some fat cheerful man cheerfully and fatly ushered me onto a bus he claimed was bound for slovakia. i assume now that i must have overshot slovakia within minutes because i soon arrived at the hungarian border completely unaware of what had happened and had to waste most of an evening trying to figure out how to get back to slovakia.

once there i discovered that devin castle would be too much of a hassle to go see, so i hung around the city wall with a couple of friends. surprisingly i somehow managed to wander off and got lost. fortunately i had a map of bratislava in the 17th century and although this sounds far-fetched i was definitely able to navigate my way around.

eventually i came across a creepy looking alley footed with a creepier looking building. as i took a few pictures a nearby man explained to me that this was where the executioner use to live. i thought long and hard about breaking in but decided not to. it was dark and you just know that some idiot teenager is liable to be inside the place on a dare, and the second that poor kid comes jumping out of the shadows to ask for assistance or the correct time your whole body's just going to shut down and call it a day.

this is a great wall

so our friends recommended a drunk man as our guide to the great wall. there's about 6km of the great wall available to visitors, and these particular 6km have been rebuilt a thousand times and are stuffed with tents and cheap statues and plastic banners and basically the whole thing is a giant atrocious tourist trap.

so the thing to do, apparently, is to hire your nearby local drunk and have him drive you three hours outside the city to a spot on the wall that is not crawling with tourists. this is easier said than done due to beijing traffic.

the trip was well worth it. there were four people (including myself and lj) as far as the eye could see. our 'guide' barely made it up the mountain and once we got to the wall he pretty much laid down and looked like he was ready to expire. the third dude, a large photographer from chicago, tried to keep up with us but couldn't, and i think he wrecked his cameras in the process.

anyway the whole thing was extremely unsafe, and therefore awesome. there were times where we had to keep ourselves flush to the crumbled outside wall, or fall down several hundred feet into the forests below.

the horrible thing i saw

so we're living on jaguar-preserved lands in belize, right by seine bight (placencia penisula, population ~500). we've got this house on stilts next to the world's smallest street and maybe 100 feet from the ocean. belize has some decent food but most of the fruits and vegetables look like shrunken heads, and we quickly became accustomed to running after any pickup trucks laden with produce, pineapples, etc.

anyway one day after returning from such an errand we saw one of these horrible awful things. it was walking along the top of a fence like a cat, then jumped down and started bounding down the street like a monkey. it crossed directly in front of us, gave me a look that i'll take with me to the grave, and began climbing up a nearby shack. then it hung out on the roof for a bit. oh yeah, and unlike the picture here (which i lifted from www.richard-seaman.com), this one was enormous and almost entirely white and black in color.

later we asked a few people if they knew such a terrible creature existed, and everyone told me it was a 'raccoon'. being canadian, i know what a raccoon is, and promptly informed everyone in the village that the thing i saw was anything but. everyone held fast to their story, and i let the matter drop. a month later, back in a country with the internet, i discovered that the thing must have been some sort of cross between a coatimundi and probably a small yeti or something.

xi wu

second time in hangzhou. eventually rented bikes (wo yao lian ger qi che. shen me? shen me? shen me?) and followed around west lake to the longer causeway. stopped by the island with the caligraphy yard and followed it around to a suprisingly verticle hiking trail. after ascending we caught glimpse of a small, empty park. lord only knows how old these statues are. 10 months in china and i didn't see a single sheep, so i can only imagine.

dune jumps

so we were swindled into the gobi desert. they threw us into a jeep and dragged us out into the sand. a nearby woman wheedled us into buying these big felt boots. then we were slung on top of a couple of dying camels and shuffled off to a derelict shack whereupon everyone insisted we had arrived at a "museum". the "museum" contained half a dozen pigeons, somebody's dog, a broom, two or three sheep skeletons, and a cracked leather saddle. fearing some sort of robbery, i quickly left the ramshackle edifice and spent the remainder of the afternoon jumping off sand dunes.

yurts

so we took a bus out into the middle of the grasslands and spent the night in a yurt belonging to an adorable mongol family. this was after we were swindled out in the desert, something i'll write about later. irritated beyond belief, we (i) decided i wasn't going to let ourselves (myself) get pushed around anymore and told everyone within earshot that we (i) were (was) taking the first bus out of this city, whatever it's name is, and making my way into the grasslands without a tour.

the announcement actually caused some commotion. i think most likely everyone was worried about losing potential business, but for the remainder of the evening everyone told me that the grasslands was the sort of place a man goes to die, and that the only way any sort of acumen or enjoyment is to be had is with a tour group. of course these were idle threats, and after everyone realized we (i) wasn't kidding, we got a little advice. we ended up taking bus # 3 heading north out of autonomous mongolia.

eventually we made it into the grasslands, and of course everything was just fine. every half hour we'd spot a cluster of yurts and some horses. i was aiming for a town containing about 7 or 8 syllables, but we were kicked off the bus before we got there. i'm still not sure why. a fat han demanded where i was going and i told her the name of the town. i asked where the town was, and she pointed vaguely off in the distance, and then insisted that i (we) get off the bus. when we refused the bus started stopping just about every other minute and this woman would insist that we get off. we finally got off the bus in the middle of nowhere, asked the nearest wandering hobo where our town was, and discovered we were still about 20km short. a random man offered to drive us there at about four times the price. we haggled for a while, but he knew he had us on the ropes. we ended up paying about double.

once at the town we were picked up by the head of the small adorable mongol family, and he literally turned off the road and just drove us right off into the fields. after driving away from life itself for a little while we came across a very quaint little farm and quickly made ourselves at home. here's the view from our yurt.