Lament the Demented

Day 30. Heading Back to Baby on Beautiful Street

2011-08-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

Don’t ever try and accomplish anything on a Lithuanian national holiday.
It won’t happen.
I would hate for an incident to occur on these days- a child trapped down an elevator shaft, an elephant escaped from the zoo- nobody would be there to aid in it, no service even exists.

It was the last day of the job, and things weren’t looking easy.
For starters, the final story was a huge pile of RUBBISH-
A trip out to the local landfill.

“How do you like that Chanel No. 5?” The unshaven owner of the landfill laughed at me, as I gripped my nose in grief.

Other than him, nobody was around to give quotes, to open doors, or even to usher me away like an alley cat.
So I decided, liberally, to fuck work and finish the remainder of what I had to do out here in peace.
To go looking for filthy Russian pornography, moose meat, and to flog my clothing to a hobo- the usual ‘To Do’ list for a person with only a fraction of the mind left to do them.

First, the clothing had to go. A rucksack packed full of dirty and disintegrating garments: jackets, sneakers, work shoes, sleeve shirts and a whole other universe of unknowables. These items were never going to make it on the plane, or I may be considered a terrorist. A stinking bomb threat. They had to go.
So I stalked the streets, for two days running: and even on non-national holidays, the second-hand shops didn’t want a whiff of my stale goods.
It was a gift! My generosity was met, usually, with startled looks, and hand-halting refusals. On the other, less peaceable instances, it was greeted with anger.
As if I were an exhibitionist, flashing faulty gadgets, rather than giving away a bounty of free threads.
Why?
They’re not big on recycling, the Lithos. Well, if you took a trip to the local landfill and inhaled those sweet shades of Chanel No. 5, you’d see that with 100 thousand tonnes of trash piling in per week, ‘recycling’, was a term used exclusively in regards to underwear overuse on more than a five day sequence.

But I was determined not to simply ditch this beggar's birthday suit- they had memories! Stained and tainted memories.

From the brown Bulgarian dinner jacket, which was bought, worn and ruined for a Bob Dylan concert in Sofia, to the swiss-cheesy timberlands (affirmatively the most comfortable shoes in the solar system) which padded my toes as the lone walkers all the way from Australia.
But on the national holiday- there was no hope! Nothing was open.
Various items of clothing began to be scattered out like confetti.
A three-dollar shirt in a skip-bin, an ill-fitting pair of boots strung by the laces around a shut second-hand shop’s doorknob.

Then, out of the mid-morning haze he appeared: the handsome, soon-to-be recipient of this one-of-a-kind classic dinner jacket, which was once owned by Bob Dylan (well, that would be the write up on ebay).
He was digging through a dumpster. Suddenly, his hand, caked in murk, began operating like one of those claw-machines at a supermarket which picks up plush toys- and from the depths of the dumper he pulled out a slimy old Playboy.

“Would I be ‘killing two rabbits with one bullet’ here (as the Lithuanian saying goes)?” a shot of clarity grabbed at me. “I’d have my friend’s requested Russian sleaze AND a new owner for my fine brown blazer.”
I approached him without caution. On closer inspection of his treasured magazine, his grimy teeth glinting in glee at it, I decided he could keep it.
Then, as I removed the jacket from my Santa’s sack, his eyes jumped joyously!
Or more so, with confusion and hesitancy. But still, they jumped.
Somewhere in the field of his Delirium Tremens, his brains did fathom that this was a freebie, and so he accepted it: the brown, candle-wax coated blazer, (with the hole cut into the inside lapel, a specific invention to allow the sneaking of long necks at short notice, for taking tallboys to the lowlifes, into small-town high-brow events).
So off he staggered, away into the park- to prance and pass out in fashion, wearing a jacket I could never give justice to.

And so onward! This final parade around my private paradise, where the sun was singing on this holiday surrounding Saint Mary- a religious occasion for the sinners to go out and get shitfaced. Hallelujah!
All will be forgiven, (just as long as somebody sells me my moose-meat).

One of the few souvenirs I had under request to bring back, was this, a tin filled with flayed hoofs and antlers. Yeesh. A Bullwinkle barbeque was on the cards.
Once this was sorted- and it was, somehow, without worries- there was but one item left on the rotten agenda.

My scraggly best mate, an alleged artist from Sydney, had sent through his demand for, quote, “weird low-budget European pornography.”
I’m not sure what lead him to believe I had any (what??) but I didn’t, so I trailed off on the seedy search.
I had expectations of frog-fetishes, midget kebabs, broke-back mounting of mules, grotesque insertions of gherkins in surgery, and homo-exotic chainsaw feuds.
But did I mention it was a national holiday??
“HALLELUJAH!” I screamed into the mid-summer miasma, at finding yet another shop shut.
I noticed at this stage: I was sweating profusely from the heat, and even shaking slightly, like a nut from nervous energy.
Had I succumbed to the lifestyle out here?
Was I now a Litho-maniac??
Before I dwelt too long on this thought, I rustled through my backpack, and pulled out my papers. I double-checked the documents.
Flight tomorrow.
Germany.
Heading back to baby on Beautiful Street.
Ach so dann, zurück nach mein heim an Schönstraße.
Das bedeutet, kein mehr ‘Litho-Mania’.
And I exhaled an infinite sigh of relief- I let it float there for a second, in front of me, so I could watch it and realise it was real- then I let the wind whip it away, and add it to the trillions of sighs hovering out in the atmosphere.

But still I had these trusty timberland shoes- what to do with them?
Without really thinking, I tied the laces together, and with an almighty fling, set them free from the threat of the landfill. (Actually, I gave them three 'almighty flings', before they decided to settle there, swaying steady in the late afternoon).
I gazed up at the electricity wire, which was humming from the base power disturbed by the two new intruders, and wondered...
...Where would the world be flinging this Old Boot to next?
And I took a last look around, at a magnificent moon, ate up the summer air, then turned to go- off to offer an untranslatable fit of farewell, to the one-armed old man in the Blocks.
And already wishing I had my shoes back.

THUS = THE END OF LITHO-MANIA.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE, AND HAVE A NICE RIDE HOME. PEACE AND CARROTS, MFG. 2011.

Day 29. Atop the Hill of Three Crosses

2011-08-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

There is a back path of wooden planks, which cuts alongside the river Neris, and spirals up to the grassy peak of the Hill of Three Crosses.
If you’re prepared to take this treacherous route, tripping and stumbling over rotted boards and branches, you are rewarded with your own section of solitude- isolated from the hordes of Russians, Poles and Western tourists who hike up the opposing side of the hill every day for the view.
The ulterior pathway comes equipped with human headspace. Out of the crevasse of computer life, away from the businesses of supermarket shopping, landlords and all other forms of daily modern labour, the hill unwinds into a peaceful shroud of pines and Baltic bird-life.

As the wilderness engulfed me, I could feel the last four months begin to unfurl. Now that this space was here, and I was away from everyday stresses which reached out to woe me- deadlines, faultlines, lifelines- now retrospect was opening up in my weary head like an acid trip.

The rain was dripping gently, constant, almost tropically. The trees, likewise, posted a canopy of umbrellas, not unlike a wetland rainforest. I ventured through this jungle, lost almost in a stream of subconscious.

With thoughts otherwise occupied, I failed to notice: I was suddenly standing on the edge of the apex, the Three Crosses to my side.
The city of Vilnius lay gracefully below- an aging Lithuanian beauty, decked out in all her exotic finery, and sprawled lazily in the grey day upon her brass bed of histories, mysteries and time. How much this old lady had been through!
The green domes of the Orthodox Church glinted out in the distance. Gedimino’s Castle cast her rigid shadow over the bubbling Neris. The television tower spurted from the ground like a syringe on the backdrop. And closer, a spiky sea of steeples rose from out of the outcrop of Baroque architecture, communist blocks, and Old Town abodes.
She had been good to me, this lovely lady, this Vilnius.
But I was leaving her all the same.

Peering out over the panorama, still emersed in the solitude, I began to realise how needless, pointless and petty all my modern stresses were.
In a seamless segueway, thoughts began to drift toward a different old Lithuanian lady, one who too, like me, had left the lanes of Vilnius, though long ago, and not entirely by choice.

In the 1940s, my grandmother spent days hiding in the forest, bunking on a blanket, alongside her husband, my grandfather, as the soviets rounded up and deported her neighbours to Siberia. She was forbidden from attending her studies once the Nazis rolled in- an SS guard had towered outside her faculty, clutching a machine-gun, for anyone who tried to argue. She bore two children, my uncle and my aunt, who were forced into the whirlwind of wartime displacement as she was. Clutching her kleine kinder under her arms, along with whatever possessions she could carry, she was forced to flee her home country, alone. She never saw her parents again. Like a lost soul, separated from her husband, she trekked her way through the train lines, to Germany, by the war’s end. She walked by and through blazes of gunfire, burnt bodies in totalled towns. She slept in train stations, in mossy bunkers, in blasted-out barns, her suitcase acting as an occasional cradle for her baby. She gave life to a third child, who would have been the sibling closest to my mother’s age. Due to neglect by staff in a Naples hospital, the baby succumbed to a fever and passed away.

Though this is, of course, a grotesquely short and straggly summary, it’s just to give you an idea.
My grandmother stands as one of the world’s great survivors. A boat person who made it to Australia in 1949, with her life, her husband and her two children in tow.
She settled down as a teacher, in Sale, Victoria, where her fourth child was born: a pretty girl (who would become, among many other prosperous things, my mother).

Now 91 years old, my grandmother resides in a Sydney nursing home. Here she reads, reflects, relearns languages, and watches as Crimson Rosellas and Rainbow Lorikeets feed from birdseed on her balcony. Her husband has long since died. Her eldest son, living in Melbourne, turns 70 this year.
In 25-odd years, I have never heard my grandmother whisper a negative word about life.
The optimism imbued within her has been the biggest inspiration of my time. Through everything that went to pass within her days: As a wartime refugee, to a migrant, to a published Australian writer. Through everything she saw, read, loved, lost, grieved for, longed for, fought for and forgot: she’s always radiated the light of an essential faith in humankind. She recently sent me an email, in regards to the tsunami in Japan. Within it was a mention, in a fleeting sentence, which one was left to think of for days, about the absolute fragility of human existence.
Without boundaries of class or wealth, the beggars, the boat people, the blind or the bankers- we all are of this same broken breed.
This is one thing she has taught me.

As I wrote this entry, sitting, huddled against a birch tree (ants crawling up my leg!) atop the Hill of Three Crosses, life suddenly made a heap of instant sense.
In the dedication page of her book, Elena’s Journey, (which was written and published in both Lithuanian and English- her third language, of about five) it reads:
to my Grandchildren.

All her struggles brought us into existence, and allowed us to grow up in the free world of Australia.
As I prepared myself to replicate a version of her feat: leaving from Lithuania, off toward a modern Germany, the irony was inescapable.
Though I had no firm grasp of where my life was leading, I would be travelling in the comfort of today’s transport (yeh, well, Ryanair…) with a certainty of a bed and a friendly face at the other end.
In other words: the exact same trip, but the complete opposite.
Now I get ready to retrace her steps, at least, figuratively, and in a different dimension. In gratitude and thanks for all I’ve seen, in some ways I've been living the free life she could never stick around for, out here in Lithuania.

I descended the Hill of Three Crosses, stumbling back down the same soggy path- with no more stress for what’s to come, and only hope imprinted on my brow.

Day 28. Off the Rails, and Return to Reality

2011-08-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

An Ode Owed to Re-Finding the Fields of the Frangipanis

In a whine and a bump, the train shunted out of the station.
The monoliths of Minsk shrunk and sank beneath the hills, as if the city was suddenly swallowed.
As we rolled along, the rafters underneath the carriage rumbled in rhythmic consistency to the thudding clunks inside my chest.
B-dm, b-dm, b-dm…continuous on both sides, yet somehow without depth, devoid of all but the solitude of silence.
B-dm, b-dm, b-dm, b-dm…

The carriage was dolled up almost like somebody else’s motor home. Quasi-Persian rugs reached along the corridor, hiding trapdoors and crap stains and whatever else for which a train from Minsk could possibly use a Quasi-Persian rug.
Furry blankets out of granny’s cupboard shimmied down from their receptacles, acting as makeshift shade-cloths for the late-afternoon glassy glare.

In this train, opposed to the last, the passengers were sectioned off from each other, cordoned into individual blue patterned booths. These were perfect for diving into an undisturbed doze, but a spoiler for any amount of people perversion you wished to partake in on your lonely way back to base-camp.

Not that there were floods of other persons anyhow- a toddler squealed a tantrum three rows to the rear, and the occasional boulders of a middle aged redhead rolled around the aisle.
Our hostess was a cougar.
Her shimmering pink lip gloss emboldened only her mouth, leaving the rest of her faded features to face the havoc caused at every curve or canter the pink lips pulled.

There were no shiny statues singing from this corner either. The twine stitching was tethering.
The luggage beneath my eyes was all bloated at the seams.
In numb facilitation, I turned them to ponder the scenery steaming past.
Again, we encountered the slideshow projector changing the image at rapid rates.
The landscape outside now ran like what I imagined were Welsh valleys, out in a sprint to the horizon until they hit the pillaring pine forests halting them to a dead end.
A Dead End.
Minsk rode through my mind like a masquerade: A brilliant ballroom blazing from the unknown. The communist city skirted within me, making me marvel at how I could probably never reach behind its many masks.
I pulled out the pocketbook and began jotting jagged notes.
‘The City of the Red Star…’ and I began to scrawl and salivate.

Distance and time spindled by, and energy ebbed.
Twelve or so pages of haggard handwriting later, I phased out, in pure just, nothing.
Staring into the glass rather than through it, it reflected a curious waste.
What had happened?
Without caring to dwell on the wreckage waiting to keep me hostage, I flipped a few pages forward.
The fresh paper sat stagnant: the gaping rock face of a clear white one, blinding me like a blizzard without a word as its imprint.
Villages unwound outside, and I wondered what would happen if I got off and stayed there, forever, but I decided probably nothing reasonable or worthwhile.
So I pulled up my posture, which was slumped and folded, like a rotted drawbridge to an abandoned castle.
And I peered out into the backwoods of the Belarusian fields, which were washing to purple from the onset of sunset: or rather, I pierced my peering through them too.
All I could see was one shining ember pulling apart the cobwebs of my consciousness. And she wore a straw hat.
And she shimmered like the Sun when you stare at it.
And I wrote and I scribbled a million mishandled consonances, exclamations and vowels from the curls of my bowels, to the Girl of the Frangipanis.

The pen was perspiring, rather than printing, and continued to drip out all the sorry story sorrows which one can only muster once the custard sweetening the brow has disappeared and left the being to fear and frowns.

Then as if the time machine had touched down, the slide projector was trapped in a spin-cycle and the whole system was slipping out of my grasp, we were there, pulling into the station, back in Lithuania.
Back to Vilnius: where I’ve called my home for the last how many months.

Sweeping myself and mystuff out of the wagon in a flurry of forced movement, I began to trail my steps out of the station.
“Back from the mayhem of Minsk. I made it,” the thought wanted to win. “I’m home now.”
Though there was something not especially homey about it all, but I couldn't quite work out why not.
And then the loudspeaker lauded out in thick Lithuanian:
“The train on Platform One is going to Moscow, via St Petersburg. Now boarding, Platform One, Moscow via St Petersburg.”
Wow. The cusp of real Russia. Was I really so far away, from where I once was?
What does it even mean? How did I get all the way out here?

The automatic doors steamed open in answer, and beckoned me out to the last of the light. I craned my head to look down the Crescent.
The exterior of Vilnius station was abuzz from clacking faces checking clocks, grinning, greeting, grabbing palms in pleasure, happy haunches heading to their shacks of shade and safety.
The loudspeaker announcement echoed through my memory. A group of latecomer Russians bustled past to purchase tickets.
As they swore in Cyrillic I wondered again, how did I get all the way out here?
B-dm, b-dm, b-dm, b-dm…

I could tell there was a sense of The Ending in the air.
The rain began to tumble down, and I laughed and removed my hat: as if ready to begin busking to the heavens.
I began to whistle dixie, and turned to trundle back up to The Blocks: ready for a new week, ready for anything.
The Sun was in my mind, the raindrops racing down my jacket.
I soon became saturated as the monsoon marooned me further, which seemed to trigger an unreasonably hilarious internal tickle.
The meaningless drinking, stinking, and pelting every which way but homewards: All parts of the Litho-Mania: was soon coming to a closure.
“YAHOO!” I bellowed it into the wall of water, and tap-danced the rest of the route back to base.

Day 27. The City of the Red Star

2011-08-09T11:57:00.000-07:00

Gazing out the tinted glass of their tenth storey apartment window, over what appeared as an infinite cemetery of humongous housing blocks, my focus pulled into alertness.
This was it.
Minsk, Belarus: The Iron Curtain’s Final Frontier.

As these impressions washed over me, I stood oblivious to the Russian hooting of my ‘aunty’ beckoning me back for borsch.
Though I soon roused, and scooped up a hearty three courses of curious cuisine (what is ‘buckwheat’ anyhow?).
As I ate, my cousin bundled our belongings together ready to hit the station for the city.
*
Soon, down in the metro, I stood unmoving, in awe. The image which smashed normality like, well, a hammer, was a beachball-sized slogan of Bolshevik bad times, pillaring over the main platform.
Televisions mounted on either side of it blared synchronous broadcasts: grainy footage of rollerskating couples, laughing children, layered within a montage of men labouring. It was accompanied by the beeping soundtrack of an eighties Atari cartridge. The actor builders were sweating and smiling, apparently from the satisfaction of work ethic.
Get the message? Socialism is Great!
And don’t breathe otherwise.

As a westerner whose childhood was as unrelated to the USSR as iPods to the elderly, it was a stun-gun to the senses. Was anyone believing this guff?
Bewildered, I scanned the starring actors of this wild new movie manifesting around me.
Military musclemen sporting red stars were the first noticeable breed.
But upon closer look: they were just kids! My cousin caught my astonishment.
“Men must go to the military once they finish university, for one year. University starts around age seventeen here, so they have to go in pretty early,” she informed me in her manner of preciseness.
Military culture continues to serve as a major portion of Minsk existence, at least visually. As the bus leads you in to the centre, billboards of anonymous generals, decked out like Christmas trees in baubles and badges of a thousand unknown triumphs, dot the main roads as reminders.

As we waited, darting my eyes further across the platform, an aesthetic anomaly, bar, a happier one, diverted the attention span.
The fairer sex, certainly were. They sauntered around as if, in their border locked and propaganda pasted island, they had absolutely no idea of their own absolute and copious finery.
As if out of Dior’s production line, they flowed in rivers, one by one by the next, and I thought of converting to communism.
“So this is why Lukashenko keeps the doors closed, the sly fox,” I surmised, hit by a bullet of clarity. It made perfect sense!
All these hammers and sickles were constantly going at it hammer and tongs.
Who would want to let the rest of the world in?
We boarded the bus, as I wallowed in my whiplash.

As I began to soak in the magnitude, just the utter difference from life I had always known, looking around I realised how actually everything was really tidy, elegant and grand.
We were approaching the inner sanctum now, the Minsk main centre.
As we rode, my cousin began to dish out in energy some skerricks of everyday life lived under the thumb of a ‘dictator,’ here named President Alexander Lukashenko.

She studied at a university, was free to learn languages, make friends, take trips.
Alexander Lukashenko was not all bad, she told me. While he has spoilt a lot of things, and selfishly bars his own little enclave from being able to join the remainder of modern Europe, he does do his bit for Belarusian present.
“The new communications faculty by the main train station is just one of many new projects,” she enlightened me, pointing towards a glimmering glass shark’s fin of modern architecture.
And the streets were admittedly spotless- later in the evening we even saw a cleanup truck individually torch-lighting, from the passenger seat, every single bin as it mowed along.
Who would have imagined Alexander was an anal retentive? But there it was.
But the weak points of the politics, in her perspective, shining sidewalks aside, soon surfaced.
“Lukashenko does not give his people a say,” she told me, shaking her head in grim acceptance.
Each week, protests take place in different locations around the city, trying to create noise about democracy and fair rights, though demonstrators often face the threat of being imprisoned for it.
“He builds huge new stadiums, and our main railway station is said to be one of the best in Europe. But when it comes to repairing hospitals? I went with a friend of mine to one in an outskirts district, and it looked like out of a horror movie. Walls peeling, insects, the whole thing,” she revealed in her broad Russian accent.

Though the middle of Minsk, where people were watching, did not immediately appear like it was without money.
Strange, considering the massive debt the country was currently weighed underneath.
“The government tells us the economy is good, much money is being earned. But then, why do things cost four times as much as six months ago? They are lying to us,” she shook her head in scepticism.
Belarus encountered an all-encompassing currency crash in May, when their money was devalued by over 50 percent. A kilogram of apples today costs around 12 thousand Belarusian rubles, when before it cost just three or four.
So where had all the money gone?
Standing beneath the skyline, it began to come clear.
“Woah…” was the deepest offering I could muster.
Monoliths weaved out into the distance, huge, freshly painted power-block buildings stretching into the horizon.
As if someone had taken a polaroid of baroque Vienna, enlarged it by ten-fold and slapped it to the brim with hammers and sickles, here would stand the blueprint of inner Minsk.
It was clean, beautiful and not just slightly BIZARRE.
The checklist for travel hopes was now getting close to complete.

It was a soviet memorabilia museum, but alive and buzzing. And not at all downtrodden or cast, (perhaps because the sun was pouring down, unable to be controlled by the vigilant visa restrictions).

For all the civil rights infringements we’ve heard about, though I’m positive they exist, as there is no democracy in some hounds dictatorship, for today, I saw a different side to the city.
The sun glinted off the glasses of the girls strolling past, emersed in chatter with umpteen companions or hugging close to a boyfriends (just don’t mention homosexuality). Families sat about sharing a giggle or a grill-plate, and gangs of apparently sass-loving sailors, wearing berets and singlets, donning sickles and all, commemorating some kind of Air Force holiday, were entertaining themselves with bottles long into the afternoon.
“Is this the everyday fashion in Minsk?” I looked at my cousin, flabbergasted at the sailor’s popeyed styling.

So it was, in short, sunny day anywhere, free world or far away.

We trundled by the cinema, a futuristic movie-set from the 1930s: an idea of what the world could have looked like, if Stalin had won the war.
“Woah,” I repeated my witty commentary.
Another aspect to the city was its adorning paraphernalia.
In the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia, the hammer and sickle slogan is banned, and production of it is counted as criminal.
In Poland, the distribution of such symbols can carry a sentence of two years in jail.
In a call for it to be forbidden EU-wide, ministers of these countries composed a letter stating the denial of soviet war crimes, and their underlying connection to this symbol, "should be treated the same way as the denial of the Holocaust. They must be banned by law."
But not in Belarus.
Here, as if paying tribute to the conquering totalitarians of the past, the hammers happily own the awnings of the buildings young and old-
-including above McDonalds.

This trendy capitalistic hotspot of Maccas is a fashionable choice for young Minskians.
“Some people go there every night. It’s always crowded. Don’t ask me why!” my cousin laughed.
Well, if fighting against the system here means chowing upon a cheeseburger, it sounds feasible enough for a fashion to me.

As we strolled onwards, the buildings kept growing bigger, more daunting and dominant. As if we were meant to notice our own insignificance shadowed by some omnipresent power: there lorded the KGB headquarters (dubbed by my cousin, ‘The Residence of Evil’) and the government house. Lukashenko’s residence itself was an icebox version of Buckingham Palace. One lone open window on the top floor wavered slowly on the soft breeze: The President catching some rays? We decided not to dally and find out, as a guard patting his pistol began to eyeball us.
Then, as if the time machine had finally delivered us to the source of the soviet saturation, there he stood.

Superhuman sized, the statue of Lenin brought a look of immense distaste into my cousin’s features. Behind him, the Belarusian parliament balanced her flag of red and green, as storm clouds appeared to circle over it ominously, and singularly, as the rest of the city remained immersed in sunlight.
She scoffed at the scene.
“Nobody likes Lenin,” she spat.
This tourist however, modelled for a photo in shameless excitement.
Though, the situation was tense. We were unsure if political photography was legal, and so were hesitant to take a dozen snaps. Two or three, a glimpse of a guard lingering in the background, four, and we were gone.
Trailing through the digital images later, the fleeting tourist photograph seemed to capture more than just a novelty niche of Europe.
There was something about the greyness which rang out a tone of sorrow, about this buzzing and beautiful city continuing to be trapped behind the bars of bureaucratic and traditional totalitarianism.
Though, all seemed not lost.
T-shirts emblazoning way-out western logos, band names, English taglines were everywhere. It seemed it was a quiet rebellion, or at least, the proof of a population not resigning to living behind the cultural walls this dictator has set up.
“Lukashenko has to die one day,” my cousin shrugged the unwavering truth.

Minsk was a hospitable place, more so than other capitals in the EU which I’ve visited… *cough* Bucharest *cough*…coated, as it was, in flowers and peaceable people.
Untainted by the throngs of western tourists (well, almost) and free of mass migrations from unsavoury sections of Euro society…
Minsk has got it made!
As a grin straddled my gums and these thoughts ran through me like quicksilver, my cousin suddenly gravitated me back down to land.
We were standing outside a Metro station, one with colourful CCCP murals livening its exterior. A cluster of candles dripping wax on black shawls placed over boxes was positioned outside the entrance, nestled between hand-placed crucifixes and icons.
“This is where the bombings happened, in April,” she spoke solemnly, as it had affected her too. “A music teacher from my school was injured. Another boy, from my uni, was badly hurt.”
She was referring to the results of a bomb attack, an explosion of nails and ball bearings, this year, from where fourteen people were killed, and at least two hundred others badly injured.
“It was just so strange, to happen in Minsk. We are such a small country, we can’t harm any others. The only people we could injure are our own,” she said in grief.
Nobody really knows who was behind the bombings. A popular media myth was Lukashenko set it up, to detract attention from political opposition.
Whatever the case, Minsk remains a contradictive city: unburdened from the outside turmoil of what Lukashenko calls “nauseating” democracy, though at times, at war within itself.

Without noticing it, the cloak of night had covered the block surroundings, and we set off back towards her micro-district home.
While trudging the ten kilometres, we wandered into a spectacular marvel of Minsk: electronic strobes emitting from the thousands of bulbs attached to the rhombicuboctahedron (that’s right) shaped national library.
The show danced like manic fireworks, furnishing the back boroughs from its lightning shards.
“Wow,” I mumbled another wisdom. Then wondered: “But how can they afford the electricity?”
My cousin shrugged. This left me with the impression, its best not to ask how or why or what.
In Minsk, the best thing to do was soak in as much as you could, then be on your way: like a sponge at the edge of a mysterious ocean.

Day 26. On the Rails to White Russia

2011-08-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

As a foreigner bouncing along on the bumpy train to Minsk, the feeling is somewhat akin to slouching in a hospital waiting room, before an operation. You have no idea what to expect, but know the outcome is going to go one of two ways: either you’ll end up better than before, or you’ll be dead.

Crazy Russian rap blared through the carriage as we rolled out of Vilnius. We were zooming towards what has become known in newspapers as “Europe’s Last Dictatorship,” the capital of Belarus.
Not exactly the darling of travel brochures, all reports had alerted me the rail to Minsk was more like a time machine than a train.
Just three hours away from Lithuania’s capital and you enter a zone known like North Korea, what can today safely be described as a living Soviet museum.
The intrigue had always been inside to explore this unknown city- probably primarily because authorities always tried to keep you out of there. There were steadfast visa restrictions for outsiders, and you needed an invitation from somebody living inside to be allowed into what were, presumably, their huge cast-iron gates.
Now pocketing my accepted, stamped and raring little visa card, I was boarded and off, being showered on by rowdy Belarusian Muzak.

It happened as such: After a cyclone of organisation, tableside discussions with distant cousins, it had become evident- there was a link awaiting me in Minsk.
The daughter of the deceased brother of my mother’s cousin’s father: obscure to understate it mildly, lived within the borders of dictator Lukashenko’s love-in.
The relation was unknown to me as the country she slept in.
From family broadcasts, the latest report was the young lady was accustoming her mirror to a recent bout of rhinoplasty, so even if I’d ever seen a photo of her, chances were slim as her new sinus for an automatic recognition.
But, all the same, the generosity from the unknown is often incomparable, so I gratefully accepted the offer, and happily took the stranger’s candy.
So with all the legwork done, I leant back in the anti-chamber of this crazy commie caboose, and let the scene flow over me.

Outside the window, a lush wash of absinthe appeared to have been doused upon the fields. Everything was sparkling in a somewhat surreal tinge of green.
But maybe it was merely my eyesight.
Synagogue domes burst out through the rooves of farmhouses, suicidal billy goats strayed close to the tracks, and villagers in army get-up visored palms over their working brows to catch a look at the steaming engine speeding by.
Inside the cabin, it was a slightly scarier story.
Passengers in my vicinity ranged from garish princesses to bearded vigilantes, none of whom I could brave eye contact with at this early hour of the AM.
I ignored the squeeze and kept busy percolating over my migration forms, trying to maintain a steady pen grip.
But it worked for only so long. My brain was whipping up a blend of thoughts: What could be expected within the borders of this, a landlocked country so regularly vindicated by global media as being chock full of abuses on human rights?
I had read profusely about the amount of journalists they had locked up in Minsk for expressing their views in the free press.
I double checked my visa form:
Occupation: NONE.
I was safer as a drifter than a journalist, I surmised. I leant my head back, clamped my eyelids, and tried to block out the commie crud serenading from the speakers.
The Belarusian border was sidling in out of the distance.
*
The border crossing was less of a bullfight than predicted. A few minor discrepancies did arise, however. A rather severely handsome woman placed my documents upon her reader. All seemed okay…’but what kind of planet are you from?’ steamed from her glare.
She shot me a threatening question in Russian.
Non comprehendo, lady.
The surname ‘Garrick’ suddenly threw her into a tailspin of confusion and disbelief: as if its utterance brought on some kind of perverse and powerful curse, or were the secret codename of her turbulent lover lost in battle an eon ago.
Though, after some repugnance at my lack of comprehension, she tossed me my papers and left me to transfix on my thoughts once again.

Soon enough the train would be rolling in. Soon enough we would see what all this hubbub was about.
As if someone had quickly changed the slide on the projector, the backdrop altered completely from just ten minutes prior. The farmers toiling in their trenches, their cows half-dazed by the passing commotion were no more to be seen.

Now outside the glass, hundreds of obelisks, like the anthills of the Australian outback, though on a rather grander, greyer scale, jammed the horizon. These were the housing complexes, brimming from the million plus population of Minsk. Manmade escarpments of gritty greys were juxtaposed between brazenly bizarre buildings painted in the fluorescent fashions of Gold Coast teenagers.
Alongside of the train tracks, construction workers leant against crates of supplies, wiping perspiration on already soaked shirt sleeves.
The interesting aspect: some of their caps donned the hammer and sickle slogan.
A rising intensity grew from inside me. I swallowed it down as if it were medicine, and carried on looking.
The station was blooming into focus now. The brakes tweeted out in the universal language, “we’ve made it,” jangling us around like seeds in a pod. The lulling Russian strumming began to peter out.
We had made it to Minsk.
*
Scrambling rather than stepping out of the carriage, the station immediately dizzied me. I became aware, if these mysterious cousins weren’t here to meet me, I would have to toil with public telephone boxes, a feat comparable to opening the tomb of Tutankhamen.
For forty seconds standing motionless, I waited for fate to guide me.
Behold! I was greeted by amiable countenances, excited to see somebody from the strange kangaroo-eating village of Australia.
The lady there to greet me, to save confusion, ‘my aunty’, was a striking character. Her face was dwarfed by magnificent pink-rimmed spectacles, and a firestorm of curly red hair, dangling each which way, down to her shoulders. A chunk of amber was slung around her neck. My cousin was black haired, youthful, and, thankfully, English spoken.
“Hi! You made it! Are you really from Australia?”
At this point, I was no longer sure. It felt as though I’d been living in space for the last years, but I decided to let it drop.
“Sure! Great to be here!”
And no sooner had these words been spoken, did I notice the so-called City Gates dominating the backdrop.

Soviet statues lined the gates like snipers. Somehow, it was a refreshing sight to see all these hearty soldiers, buxom farmer lasses, beckoning the crowds, all of us equally, with fearsome waves of welcome.
Again the intensity rose, but once more it was swallowed back down like a bad batch of cough syrup.
“Mother asks, are you hungry? She’s just made a big batch of borsch,” my cousin questioned.
Multiple hungers were writhing within me, but I couldn’t be sure if one of them was borsch. But hastily I shot back a,
“Sure, I’d love to!”
And without further explanation, we dove down into the Minsk city metro, bobbing like pinballs through the socialist streams of peek hour workers.

(To Be Continued…)

Day 25. The Blocks (Colloquially: Da Blox)

2011-08-06T10:51:00.000-07:00

*A day dedicated to documenting the life directly outside these Iron Curtains*

MORNING

Around 5AM, on cue, a choir of car alarms rouse like the rooster all the sleeping sapiens bunkered in The Blocks.
As if an orchestra of primary aged orphans tootling on recorders, all out of time and tune, have taken camp underneath your windowsill, the alarms bloop and bleep until you crush the pillow against your scalp in moaning.
Whether hit by a falling leaf or a flying vodka bottle, the hair trigger systems appear to be tied harmoniously into the cycles of the day: as they will only choose to sound either deep in the dead of night, or, as mentioned, together in unison at the bleating of the dawn.
Soon, the clopping of heels, the swishing of soles against sidewalk and the little pip-pips of car key buzzer beepers to open their caterwauling car doors contribute to this otherwise unfathomable salad of sound.
Then cometh the bagpipe of all street noises: the baby. More specifically, the baby wail.
Training for the Accadacca Achievement Awards, these baby Bon’s could certainly stir up the levers on some seismographs.
I’m not sure what they are doing to them out here. Neither am I interested in finding out.
But, for all awaiting the results, the author has decided the Victoria Park Centrelink orifice in Perth is no longer the Capital of Early Morning Baby Bawling, after existing four months in The Blox.

After this, amid these early hours, as hot teacups gently allay the shaking of frayed fingertips, various arrays of moustaches and dog chains shuffle past. A particular highlight comes in the form of Mr Potato-Head’s crossbreed with Jeff Bridges, as he staggers by on his morning stroll, always wearing the same t-shirt, brandishing him as the “Easy Dude.” (Take it easy, Dude, wherever you may be).

Almost foaming into the footpath, the rally course utilised as a parking station causes no end of grief to the many mufflers driven in, over and inevitably, away from, The Blox.
As if caused from a series of spent landmines, the potholes and ditches patterning the sandy lot exceed any auto-mechanics wet dream. The stationary vehicles which pile up within it, featuring a catwalk of flat tyres, cracked windscreens, dented fenders, and grumpy stickers on twisted bumpers, contribute to the air of a way-out-west wrecker’s yard.
Scrap metal collectors too, rise with the screaming of the alarms. They know within their scabbing hearts, an hour will pass and a dropped number plate, a hurled off hubcap or, even, for the true purveyor of metallic monetary value, a coathanger aerial, could be awaiting the scrummage of them, the scavengers.

As the morning kicks into rhythm, so too do the elderly washer-women, unchanged in their working routines since Einstein discovered atoms. Pegging linens with crab-like virtuosity, alongside moo-moos, and a mysteriously wide variation of undergarments, they reveal a display which will float for the day like flags in the wind.
Centring the all-seeing eye of the Blox, a petite slapdash set of pylons called a playground sits, which within it, among potential glass hazards and other spiky spinnerets, play the offspring of dozens of Blocks inmates. Charging at each other, the tykes transform into an imaginary army. The puny-partisans frolic for their freedoms clutching on to a fragment of fibro or an amputated birch branch as their weapon. Lurking stealthy behind an archway, in a sleek spring motion, they slip out like a sniper for a series of POWPOWPOWs at their peers.
A slim few of their ‘fathers’, though not all may agree they distinguish this title, adhere to the strict diet of bad parenting: slug booze back, lay back like a slug, then slug kid.
This may appear judgemental, if not just plain mental, but paying attention, you notice a couple of the mini-mites sporting omnipresent markings of blood and blisters on their filthy ice-cream covered faces in the local canteen, as daddy buys another plastic bottle to transcend his morning into midday.

AFTERNOON

Communities of crows and pigeons dig at discards from the green trash train of dumpsters which centre The Blocks like grim monuments. Another unfortunate scrounger soon swooshes the devilish birds away with his fist, so he can make sure they haven’t made off with his lunch.
Raking through the remnants of awful off-cheese parcels and scooping out slurps from an unfinished yogurt, either a stubbly gent who won’t look you in the eyes, or a scarfed ancient widow who dreamed once of different things, do their duties on a daily basis.

A stoic lone local heaves a single-blade lawnmower, the type on two wheels, over a hectare of daffodils and beanstalks threatening to surpass him in height.
Two chatterboxes crouch and gesticulate in expressions of grandeur next to the bench, long lost chums apparently regaling the treasures of some heroic weekendly experience.

The Blocks themselves, relics of the Russian occupiers, are made up of around eight to ten twenty by twenty people drawers, shelving units to fit the many squadrons of humanity, particularly, unfortunately, the poorer bracket, within them.
When you lazily pace the grids of granite and grass acting as thoroughfare between The Blockish buildings, one is struck immediately by the dozens of trailing eyes, watching from their windows. Historical generations with nothing left to do but gawk, abstractly, as the day shuttles slowly by.
An autistic girl gets home from school. As if locked in gallows she hollers to the hills, almost as an animal, turning at her mother, who walks beside her in such practiced patience you would believe she was either a saint or drugged beyond the heavens.
As the sun marches lordly over the Blocks, come mid-arvo, pillars of glass, large windows centring each individual block, reflect laser flashes of syrupy gold on to the passer-bys.

The washer-women’s daily rituals bring her back to her line by now, to collect her husband’s tainted trousers, clicking them off with her peg-like fingers.
Balconies, with their rusted palings, brown as toothpicks and nearly as fragile, harbour jungles of potted ferns, plastic umbrellas, cigarette ashtrays and Donald Duck towels which hang over their precipices, as if looking to escape back to Disneyworld.
The Block buildings vary in sizes: from the minute five storey to the granddaddy twelve. Each has her own shadow which carves over the puddly ground during the dusky segway to sunset.

EVENING

Light lingers like a vagrant in Lithuanian summer, dallying over the inscape of the Blockades as would a spider over a large and fruitful fly.
The worker’s waddle homeward now, once again clopping heels, shuffling shoes, carting shopping bags slinging from sleepy sleavecuffs.
She, the grandmother, her face a map tracing the paths of fabled seafarers, her skin the bumpy tides, the waves of wrinkles, bends to tap the pooch upon his hopeful head.
Doctor, the Belarusian neighbour, ambles home in his acrylic jacket, appendicitis victims on his ailed mind, as usual, distancing him from the window watchers, the omniscient onlookers.
Easy Dude meanders down his straight arrow line, back the other way, as if Waylon Jennings blasts in his aura wherever he may forever wander.
Munted mufflers rattle back into the vicinity, slugging out up Mt Blockmore, into the wildebeest grazing zone of the pot holed paddock carport.
Dusk continues to settle over the ogreish oblongs, painting them a thin tone darker.
Individual bricks lose their borders in the sundown, and the Blocks become one uniform mass of material.
In the twilight eyes still twinkle at their watching perches, as they ready for bed and or to depart and transfer their furry views to the television.

The Blocks, these Space Odyssey Monoliths, sink down beneath the darkness now, as night slips in and cuts off the visuals of their life.
A stunning transformation here occurs: like approaching a city coated in blackness while looking from an aeroplane, rows of lamps in individual interiors switch on in steady flows. The huge black monsters are lit intermittently, one by one, flicking on, in a dazzling electrical display.

And here the Life of the Blocks privatises each member out to their own luminescent little worlds: to live and love and get ready to be ripped from sleep by the clamour of the car alarm choir, one more round, at the friendly hour of 5AM tomorrow.

Day 24. Dancing in the Meadow at Midnight

2011-08-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

Weaving along a cracked concrete path into forest, I felt as if there were rifle butts puckered up against my sternum, sucking me forward.

Though, the shooters were subconscious: a messed-up mental ambush I had prepared for myself, in order to send me off to work on a day I least delighted to.

So skipping out into the woods, externally a Little Red Riding Hood in his little yellow laced boots, internally the Big, Bad Rotten Old Wolf, he was radiating work ethic, off to meet the grandmother of all stories, hiding somewhere out between the wildberries.
Well, not such a charming fairytale as all that.
The metaphor of the rifle butts was succinct for this ominous occasion.

In this spot where I was walking, seventy years odd prior (for history’s sake, between the nineteen hundred years of 39 and 44) in this exact gloomy garden where I was gallivanting, 100,000 Jews were marched in rows, no doubt spurred not by rifles, but machine guns adhering to their shoulders, to their deaths.

The Ponary Massacre in Lithuania was one of the worst Jewish genocides of World War Two.
Staring at the faces of the families hanging on the tumble-down walls of the feat of drunken architecture which was the Ponary Massacre Memorial Museum, you could not help but wonder why it once all turned so sour, out here in little Litho-land.

But to get to the massacre memorial site, the forest, where weeds protrude like grappling hands through the concrete pathways, one must first trek to the edge of Paneriai.

Paneriai is a village of wooden sheds, jovial direction givers, and nasty scowls from unwed Russian milk-maids.
Out here, practically zooming through the heat, privately unhappy about a recent hacksaw haircut, I was tracing the path of 100 thousand murdered, burnt, and secretly disposed of humans.
During Nazi occupation, 95 percent of Lithuanian Jews were deleted from existence. The forest shivering on the edge of Paneriai silently swallowed many of these bodies.
The lives of doctors, jewellers, lovers, children, were ripped apart out here by bullets then fire, as if they were but an end season sugar cane crop, which would grow again after the traditionally post-harvest burning.

The air tasted bitter around the graniteblock statues of the Ponary Massacre Monument, as if it was fetid with the guilt and the shame of the crime’s accessories.
Lithuanian people were involved in the dirty work of Ponary, alongside the Nazis. Feelings of resentment, jealousy, (as ex-PM Bob Hawke once put it, “hatred and envy are the most corrosive elements in life”) thrust Lithuanians to corrode and kill their own countrymen.
People with the Star of David apparently tattooed upon their souls were denied participation in the world of the day.
And the sick fact is: some of the countrymen living today deny it ever happened.
What I was out here looking for, was to photograph a recent slur on the Semites.
Red spraypaint apparently vomited over one of the monuments, in Russian cyrillics, proclaiming, “Hitler Was Right” underneath a swastika.
Ok, but I think you’ll find you were wrong there buddy… though I won’t be the one to tell you in person, as I don’t want to end up number 100,001 of bodies deposited in the Paneriai forest.

So as you skipped along this twisted pathway, craning around this forest of ghosts in search of unintelligible Russian skulduggery, something to call a story with a pretty little photo of an anti-Semitic slur in a cemetery, who else would you happen to run into, but...
“Labas!” I spat out a greeting in order to gauge a local for directions.
“Sorry, I only speak English!” came the unarguably antipodean response.
Her head cocked sideways, a flush of dehydration in her cheeks, and she wore the pilgrim’s star of many massacre sites, strung boldly in the valleys of her throat.
“Hey! That’s good, me too.” I wheedled over and stood like a lamp. “Have you seen any graffiti around? I’m looking for this vandalised stone.”
“What? Nah, I didn’t see it! I’ve been here for two hours, and didn’t geta glimpse!” Aha. Revealed through the telltale shortening of speech.
“You’re an Aussie?”
”Sure am!”
“Out here in the backwoods of Panarai?”
Her eyes moved in an awkward eclipse around the scenery, as if it had just dawned she’d been teleported from Gloria Jeans in Gosford.
“Guess so!” came the half-mock reply. “And you are too I guess,” she slammed it, as if her mind’s alarms were blasting, “CAN’T ESCAPE ‘EM! CAN’T ESCAPE ‘EM!”
As for me, I hadn’t seen a wild random Austral in months, and this was the luck of the wicked playing LoveSick Sally for my senses.
“Yeh, for sure. From Sydney! Balmain.”
“Oh yeh?” She laughed through her nose (a typically Sydneysider response), “I’m from Bondi!”
I too scanned the vista around, as if I had been teleported back to Bondi, for a quick surf and a lark instead of trudging into a Holocaust massacre scene.
We shared some homecooked wordplays, reminiscing of Sydney this and that, then swam about our separate ways, myself, searching for the story that never was, she to take her chances on the cannonball run known as the district rail service.

We departed from each other, and I went back into Holocaust grumbling mode for two slivers of a second.
While ascending the steps of a dugout, a cylindrical manmade hole apparently for disposing of wasted lives, I suddenly decided I was feeling faded.
The realities of the scenery far surpassed my unnerved response to my hacked up hair job, and I needed to sit and not think about burned bodies.
I slumped against the neat Hebrew carvings middling a massacre memorial stone, and drifted out into a heatstricken memory montage.

…Her hair was matted, a lack of showering, and she bade me to hush by placing a palm over my mouth. Nothing subtle. Her eyes were electrified, perhaps out of her own personal craziness, or the adrenaline of the situation. I wore no rubber boots, and so her electrical pulse ran through me as she grabbed my hand. We were ready to bolt. And out we dashed, two white rabbits, running across the meadow, doing our best not to be spotted from the homestead. The living room lights were still on and spitting out between the cricks of the Victorian veranda. It was midnight, or surpassing it into the wee hours, and the two lives ran skipping through the sprinklers, out into the irrigation paddock on her father’s farm.
As if it were procedure, once the dirt amassed between their toes, they dropped their dacks and began dancing through the droplets, under a moon shaped and sharing light like a disco ball, and twenty million barroom crystals shaking and staring down from around it.
Bare to their birthmarks and howling as the freezing droplets slapped against their skins, their back-foot boogying blasted each other in a bounty of mud.
Then I drifted, back to the friend I had just made in the forest, and her falsified teleportation temptation back to Bondi…
I thought of diving underneath the moss slimed pontoon skirting the wall of Dawn Fraser’s saltwater pool in Sydney harbour…blood drawing from a heel against a barnacle siding a rockpool in Coogee… a beach shower which turns to steam as soon as it hits the eggfrying heat of the midsummer asphalt.

And I reopened my eyes to the crop circle death pit in front of me. A shudder spiralled like a tadpole down my spine. All those poor people…

The modern histories of Europe are as important to world life as mint to a Mohito…
But thank all the bloody deities for letting this one begin in 1980s Australia.
I absconded back up the cracked old concrete path and out of there, without a story to sell.

Day 23. The Unpublished 'Scoop'

2011-07-31T10:33:00.001-07:00

As Hillary Clinton left Vilnius’ Presidential Palace following a Community of Democracies meeting, flanked by her entourage and getting doused in rain, the last thing the watching crowds ever predicted waited to greet her just around the corner.
No, it wasn't hiding amid the greens of the grassy knoll, sporting a shaven scalp and a pocket brimming from buckshot.
Nor was it the beardly bad looks of a fanatical Talibandit.

But close.
Hovering close to the curbside like a burnt-out buzzard, I was clutching my camera in apprehensive wait for the Big Shot's appearance. As usual, in Litho-rainy-a, hair slapped against foreheads and umbrellas starfished above the scene, obscuring vision for the dedicated desk-hounds amongst us who were awaiting a possible angle.
The ones who needed something.
Who had nothing.

I had my barrel focused on a miniature sect: A Lithuanian-Canadian family of four, daughter, grandmother, mother and man, who stood on the roadside shaking soggy American flags at the end of the downpour.
Talking to them afterwards, after events transpired as they did, they told how the last thing they ever expected was to be met with hugs and handshakes by one of the world’s most famous women.
But, within minutes, there it was.

Police sirens sounded and Clinton’s motorcade, a convoy of dark four-wheel drives and luxury sedans, pulled out into the cordoned-off road, to take the one-time US presidential hopeful back to her hotel.
The family’s little girl, Cordelia, clutched a bouquet of local wildflowers, plucked with the passion of glittery childhood, as she waved at the passing brigade.

Without more than a signal, the motorcade suddenly braked, and a gaggle of security forces surrounded Clinton as she stepped out on to the Old Town cobblestones, to take the child in her arms, accepting her flowers in feigned grace.
Wriggling into the moshpit of CIA serve-bots and starstricken civilians, the trusty Nikon clicked and whirred seemingly seperate from my control.

After what was no more than two minutes on the footpath, evidently 120 seconds of arduous fret for her bodyguards, Clinton clambered back into the safe haven of her hired hatchback, and the motorcade sped off to their destination.
Cordelia, who grew up in Boston, USA, was glowing, trembling like a trout, though was still, as would a pistol-whipping patriot, shaking her Stars and Stripes.
“It was amazing,” she answered as you'd expect a starry-gazed five year old female to answer, when asked how it was meeting one of her role models, one of her favourites after Harry Potter and her goldfish, Greta.
But so not to drone on like a cynic, they were a happy lot, and it filled me with something akin to humanness (if possible), I guess, to watch them, the family of four, stroll off contented into the purple hued evening.

Seemingly, perfect.

But there was something about the spontaneity of the whole event which rang out with questions.
What was interesting about Clinton’s sudden stop was how the world’s media were already present: obviously professional photographers standing idly beside the family in wait. The next day, Clinton’s grapple with the girl was plastered all over daily newspapers, and online.
So, was it set up? Was it a pre-planned public relations dig to gain some brownie points so close to American Democratic election time? Did she need it? Or was it, as one would hope to believe, a pang in the heart of a politician at the sight of a real fan and family?
Whatever the case, Clinton’s two day visit to Vilnius heralded some interesting sights and scenes for the locals, as she now jets off to the Mediterranean, to meet with some President or drug-don, or whatever of the Spanish Government, part of a seemingly endless circuit of high-wheeling publicity frenzy.

And as for this guy, the lone shooter, he wandered back to his crazy outpost on the outskirts of oblivion, and removed the tie he bought especially to strangle himself on this special occassion.

Day 22. Legging it Across the Latvian Border

2011-07-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

Memories of Things from Time

“Casting your gaze south from the colourful Latvian border pole on the Baltic Coast, a sprawled out beauty lies stretching for kilometres, petering out in the distant Lithuanian horizon. Spilling against the shoreline, the inky tides of the Baltic Sea harbour all the romanticism of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel. They also, tragically, harbour thousands of tonnes of industrial chemicals from Russia and Sweden, making the sea one of the most polluted in the world.”

I cringed and tossed my pen aside.
What was this jabber?
I rose and slumped into my Nixon thinking position, fogging breath against the window pane, hands clasped behind my back.
Staring out between the pale curtains of my cinderblock commie outpost, sweating from the heat of mid-summer, I couldn’t see anything- stifled as I was by my own internal writhing.

Eastern block. Apartment block. Writer’s block.
I just wanted to block it all out.

I felt like a cigarette. I felt for a cigarette.
I pawed at my pants in presumption.
The smoke would dance and I would write again!
But my pockets were empty as a Lithuanian bank account.
Ah, forget it.
I don’t smoke anyhow.
To hide my article anxiety, I went to hide behind a mug of the Earl’s finest Grey.
I flicked the trigger, and the kettle blurted into function.
I tried staring out the window again, as the steam began to whinny from the kitchen. This time, instead of seeing blank, I peered out at a domino row of the commie cinderblocks, micro-districts, racked together in stack of grey, taking on the guise of gutted granite yards.
A crow clacked his warning from atop an opposing balcony.
A friendless scene.
It reminded me of the Karlgoorlie Superpit, a gigantic mineshaft in Western Australia, one I had never witnessed first hand, but whose monolithic moniker stirred some kind of synonymous leanings to the sight before me.
I sighed and tilted the kettle, tipping its warm innards into a cup.
What was this article about anyway?
It’s sounding like the sleazy start of a romantic novel. A romance novel, if it were chiselled by the knuckles of Nostrodamas.
“You’re a knockout hun, BUT FORSOOTH! THE WORLD WILL PERISH!” and so on into the night.
Yes, but it was about the Baltic Sea. But why, what?
I couldn’t even remember the angle I was arching for.
Pollution? Baltic? Bah…
All I remember was how it all began.

How I found myself standing at that lonely, sandy junction, on the crossing point from Latvia to Lithuania, wind stripping the trees to their sheaves by my sides. I did gaze south into the grimy distance, I did, and wondered why we can never retrace the steps we took when we were younger, never go back and rectify what went wrong.
Never backtrack to where our souls were once before.
Here I stood in the blustery Baltic breeze. So far away from everything I had ever known, wearing shoes ground into mulch, and carrying a backpack bloated by useless utilities.
Cyclones of time had captured me, thrown me here, as part of their whimsical will. Abstract forces beyond my knowing, they had conspired and pushed me onto these outskirts of oblivion.
But not alone!
Connected to company I was, with a troop of twelve, preparing to trek twenty kilometres across into the Lithuanian landscape.

And so it was: All spilling back into clarification now…I poured another Earl.

Like a lazy caterpillar, the clacking train delivering me to the country's far southern side had wound and whipped me there no faster than one could expect it to.
Half-sleeping and dreaming of people I no longer knew, I was jarred and jerked around as the rattly caterpillar kept me near to consciousness.
Memories were meshing with images of the outdoors, which was waking up with the dawn ongoing outside my window.
Soon it would be bright, and the day would spawn from beneath its sleek silkscreen. Soon Australia and the Pacific Ocean would be covered in the gloss of a thick black winter midnight.
Soon the train would be arriving at Kretinga, my station, and soon I would be meeting my ride.

It seemed for once the early bird was me, and I awaited the worm with vigour.
The worst coffee ever brewed found its way into my skinny palms, and I supped and gagged consecutively.
Without a need for dialling numbers and questioning whereabouts, the overpiled auto appeared, nearly toppling around a corner and into the carpark.
Greetings were exchanged, and codenames allocated; a thoughtful figuration so I wouldn’t have to remember twelve Lithuanian names.

My codename was Kebab. I thought the comparison of object to person was succinct: meat of questionable origin and taste, though always gets better after a few too many drinks.
From musical styles to degrading Russian pseudonyms, the rest of the nicknames served for a hearty vernacular gumbo.
Jazz, Elvis, Juggs and Kebab, among the others, were off on their way to the water, to taste the tingle of the Baltic tides.

Spurting along to the border, the back seat of the car was overflowing with oodles of cheeks, thighs, expectant eyes.
Squirming sods, we swivelled into pairs, pretending to be two sets of Siamese twins if the cops ever stopped us.
A bag of cucumbers was placed upon my lap.
Juggs quaffed:
“It’s the only food for the duration of the trek.”
I stunted. “Uhh, Trek? Weren’t we heading to the coast for a swim?”
“Didn’t we tell you, Kebab? We’re walking down the coast into Lithuania! It’ll take days! Jazz must have told you.”
“Jazz never mentioned anything about walking. I would distinctly recall the word ‘walking’. I have my damn computer in this bag! I don’t have a tent! And besides, we’re already in Lithuania!”
“Not for long…”
We sped passed an empty soviet border station. We had crossed the government’s invisible ink into Latvia.
I stooped in stupefaction.
“We’re walking Kebab. There’s nothing you can do. You’re here now.”

The tyres crunched against gravel, speeding up a dirt driveway.
Then, the implanted image struck upon me for the first time.
Over the treetops, under the silver sky: a vision of the coast.
My virgin sighting of any sea for the summer: the first in what felt like centuries of landlocked labour.
It slithered along for kilometres, out into the puzzling mist and down to Lithuania. We rumbled out of the car convoy, twelve bodies in mass unison, running toward the sea, our bags bouncing, thrust across our backs.
“Ready Kebab? It’ll be a long couple of days.” Juggs mocked gently.
I scooped my feet out from their cotton coffins, smiled half-heartedly, and sunk my pearly toes into the sand.
“Couldn’t be too long,” I spoke quietly, not really listening, gazing south, to where the seaside petered out into the mysterious Lithuanian horizon: missing now for so many months the one I loved, and sliding over the faces of all the folks with whom I had ever laughed. I wondered how and from what hand it all had come to pass…
“Can’t be too long at all…”
Juggs peered at me sideways, quizzical.

And I remarried the pen to my fingers, and frantically continued the article.

“If one manages to secure the time, trekking the Baltic coastline brings to the soul a sensation of wonderment: the wafts of salt air, the icy water against your soles and the occasional score of a piece of glinting amber underfoot. It paints a scene of idyllic, untouched splendour…”

I grumbled, snapped the pen in two, and shuffled out for the last of the Earl Grey teabags.

Day 21. Hitchin’ Out of Stalinland (and Into the Soul of the World)

2011-07-24T11:23:00.001-07:00

The teepees were now history. All which remained as muddy memories were the grass-stains on our crud encrusted costumes.
After a mid-morning bathe in the lake- a chance for airing out all the external corridors: armpits, rivets, hairs: and exfoliating off any remnants of the prior evening’s encounter with the Bear- we took to the road.
Crimson light filled the sky, the product of a dissipating storm (which our teepees had miraculously survived) crumbling across a rising midday glow.
The highway in front of us, our exit path, curved away into pillars of nature. It disappeared into the forest, coyly, hiding from us, expecting us, waiting to be run, in pure exhilarated anticipation.
Light cut through the trees skirting beside, in tapering slivers of brightness, splayed out against the heating tar.
We heard her call and it revived us.
Kindled our hungover hearts.
Into king’s soldiers we turned once again,
Ready to start,
Ready to roam,
Ready for battle,
We weren’t going home.

Rudely stinking of myriad outdoorsy odours, we saddled ourselves into the shaking seats on the bus out to Stalinland. And the ancient engine grunted into gear.

And the highway ran toward us,
In all her shades of black
And cramped within a rickety bus
The soldiers leapt into attack.

Just over twenty minutes of bus travel torture away, positioned obscurely in the backwoods of a rural village called Grutas, Stalinland waited for us like a poised sniper.

For a bit of background, Stalinland (in Lithuanian, Gruto Parkas) is an outdoor museum. It displays the severe statues of fallen Soviet figureheads: monuments which once stood in the streets and squares of Lithuania. These same statues were toppled after the country’s victorious independence battle in 1991, pulled down during passionate protests: The local populous cheered as they ridded their world of Russian authority. In one of Vilnius’ central parks, Lenin, with his left hand upheld, was strung up by a crane, as if by a lynching pole. He was wrenched apart from his steel foundations, and the crowds embraced their new found freedom.
But as the bulldozers rattled in, to remove the ugly figures of totalitarianism from the city sidewalks, from spots across the whole country, some bright cookie realised: there was a potential future tourism opportunity amid the rubble.
So Lenin and friends were collected, and eventually, once the hubbub died down, deposited among the fresh fields of a rural back-lot, for tourists to enjoy, and for those who lived through it to visit the old days in confused nostalgia.

So, as can be deduced, it was a must-see on our tourism agenda.

Trudging two kilometres through the barns, bird houses and busted gates of Grutas, we slugged it through to the entrance.
Disguised as mild-mannered journalists, the ever-sagacious Tripvan handed over his pre-prepared phoney business cards to the attendant.
“Joseph Zapiano and Ray Parker, telling the tales to the people, that’s us.”
We handed them over with a wink and a cheap grin as they glossed over our bogus names. So we slipped in for free. Perfect.
But really. Why must everything be a fabrication?
Are we not respectable citizens who deserve free entry on our own accord?
As I scanned my red bulging pupils over the caking and froth, lining the alleys of Tripvan’s mouth and beard, I figured probably not.
So we took what we could get- and Ray and Joseph received their entry into Stalinland.

We wandered about, seeing this weird world through slitted eyes. Strange ironies were laced all over- little children happily playing army games. Hide and seeking behind the relics related to mass slaughter and suppression.
Stalin, Lenin, the founder of the Russian spy organisation the KGB, Dzerzhinsky, all peered down with the mocking stain of pigeon-shit marking their past stature and running down their cheeks. (Missing from the proceedings was former Russian heavy, Gorbachov- who when a pigeon deposits upon his face, it replaces his birthmark and looks perfect as a portrait).
After an hour of perusing this gloomy, yet lush attraction, posing for photographs perched on Vlad’s head, we thought it due time to make tracks back to Vilnius.
Joseph and Ray nodded their wishes to the cryogenic crypt-keeper at the gate, then swiftly transformed back into the mugs of Mutt and Tripvan.

Mugs indeed: we were facing a sorry situation.
“How are we going to get back?” popped the simultaneous query.
Vilnius was over 200 kilometres away, and there wasn’t a bus station in sight.
I figured our options on the abacus of my mental state…click, clock, clack…and the solution rolled its way into vision.
Without the need for verbalism, I held out my thumb and nosed it roadways.

*THE REST OF THE DAY TOLD AS THE HALLUCINATION IT FELT LIKE*

The first ride prospect crawled into stoppage, opposite the shimmering swimming hole, where local blimps and beauties floated in formation like lilies.
A stark contrast to the bluebottle blues of the water, the swimmers were still blinding in their winterly whites.
We were aware of our stenches as we shuffled into her seductive sedan. Plush.
She spoke no English, and our jabbering seemed to her less than meditative.
The ensuing silence multiplied our skunkliness by trumps, and lines of scent were visibly noticeable drifting from Tripvan’s sneakers.
Fortunately, for everyone involved, after twenty-five kilometres of countryside, she removed us to some kind of pastoral crossroads, a gleaming gateway to anywhere, and off she shot. We stood and peeked about.
An ancient oracle in a straw hat and a rotary club jacket covering a sleet coloured skirt, stood nestled on the side of the road, thumb outstretched going our way.
“Damn! Competition.” We warbled over to court with our counterpart. We waved and tried to appear friendly enough to not seem like murderers, but not wanting to wreck her chances, we continued to wander down the road.
Looking back toward her, she, the old lady, a blazing silhouette backed by a searing white sky, struck the outline of a scanty scarecrow.

We continued roadways, beating forward. We were trailing our way into the real Lithuanian landscape- lyrical scenery so removed from modern Europe, where peasants continue traditions and routines of early harvest, circa 1850s. Carrying buckets by sticks atop their shoulder blades, scarves twisted across their heads, trundling toward the paddock, or leading the path for a wayward bovine.

The sun had risen into midday fury, high and brutal, and we, wrapped like Arabs in t-shirt headware, marched into its tempers.
Ground shook from gassy fumes, melting tar.
Turning to peer back- the old lady, rigid as a crusifix, still hovered hooking for a ride.
We may have to wait some time, we figured, if granny wasn’t getting any luck.
Steps stomped the ground, following steps, placed one in front of the next, slightly stumbling, but continuous.
We lurched on, past the warmth of smiling tractor drivers, and the whispering lips of wind wavering water flowers, until steps could be stepped no more.
Base camp appeared beneath a buxom willow.
We took turns on the road thumbing, as we waited, while the other guy shaded in respite.

Vans, loaders, lifters, shifters all sped by. Lorries loaded with grain for a starving city stalled but didn’t stop. And we were left in limbo out under an open escarpment.
Fringes of forest licked the periphery. We slumped stagnant among the wafts of manna and dandelions, pondering which way from here.
Tiredness was conspiring to stall us. Sun rays lapped over us like lathers of buttermilk.

Suddenly, a stop! A screech mid highway!

Two hands reaching from out atop a sunroof beckoned us over. We bolted like escapees, our shoes sticking upon the melting asphalt, and we thrust their doors ajar.
Two apostles of humankind- consecutively female and male, gorgeous laugh and youthful calm, were not expecting to find two unwashed antipodeans on the outskirts of everywhere, clambering into their caboose.
“Heading to Vilnius?” The male, 20, and soon known as Jonah, propositioned.
“Wherever you are going, we are.” We answered, realising our stench had returned to irrelevant.

We had tapped into the Soul of the World, and it was guiding us as it felt necessary. The engine grinded into get-go, and we began to fly.
Mirages of brilliance glided through our visions and into the catacombs of our hearts.
Oxygen blasted in through the sunroof. Oh, to live!
The girl’s laughter echoed around the airspace like bubbles, as her curls twirled from the wind whooshing in.
We paid our fare by cracking jokes, radiating craziness and relaying our stories.
Lank storks perched on farmhouse rooftops, unchained horses mellowed by the curbs. A nuclear tinge in the sky captured the bloodstream tingle of a top afternoon.
We chased the Soul of the World through the pastures, down the runway of the road, as if we were chasing a physical fireball which was lighting our way back homeward.

Stopping in stepping stone leaps, we encountered drunken Russians who had been stomped on by the fall of the Soviet system and heavily hobbled by booze.

We came across a dog dubbed Jackie Chan, next to a castle on an island, Trakai, a place of mysticism, fabled knights and pastries.

We found ourselves in the fog of a mushroom fest, the most magical thing about it being the poverty friendly prices of beer.

And like mossless stones we continued to roll.
Gazing over a lakeside backflipping competition, Jonah lulled us, his half-cut crowd, sliding his fingers along the guitar chords of Lithuanian lovesick folk.
Naked trees flashed by in teams, streams of green, joining naturally the hues of house paint, lakes, fields, humans, blurring together naturally, into one gargantuan pattern of molecules, of beauty, (perhaps a little hint from the artistic heavens):
“It’s all one thing. It’s all one big ball of beauty and wonder.”
And on we swam, blessed by the streamers of sunlight which danced over us. Through the earth like the swans which tore through the sky, we pelted onwards, as part of it all, as vapours, as insects, as sawdust, as light: and I turned to Tripvan and lamented,
“The worst thing of it all, is that it’s gotta come to an end.”
And Trip stared blankly out the window, as the city semblance lurched into view.
*
*
*

Day 20. The Contipi Tour (Continued)

2011-07-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

Awaking in my cone-shaped sauna, I had no idea which way to go next. Just staring, I focused on the vast ocean of sky, through the tiny hole in the top of the teepee.
There is a chance I may have encountered worry at this disastrous lack of direction, had I not been infinitely more crushed and warped out due to a night of fending off bugs the size of bullets, and freezing from an artic crosswind disguised as a lonely Lithuanian breeze.
I felt ruined, and stretching wiry fingers at the loose skin beneath my peepers, I understood, I looked it as well.
Wearing the ecosystems of a dozen endangered insects, I crawled my bony arse out the cat flap, and into the sizzling sunshine.
As one flap slapped closed, another one ripped open: “HI-YI-YI!”
An Indian burial call curdled out of from the chapped slugs of my lips, to summon the dead spirit of Tripvan.
I took a look round the vista, as I waited for his tepee to stir…
Nothing was as it seemed today, and I imagined a volley of coked-up Indian dreamtime assassins ready to bust me down from behind every waiting birch tree. This was the life of a teepee dweller!
I knew how the last of the Mohicans once felt, and it was lousy. There were more Mohicans, out here in the deserts of the western world, and I could hear one of ‘em rattlin’ out of his domicile right now.
A moan shook the colourful neighbouring pyramid.

In a flurried flashback, words which Trip had continually repeated the night prior appeared levitating around my frontal lobes.
His dire prediction of things to come:
“It can only spiral from here, Mutt, man, it can only spiral from here.”
Indeed, when anything: rockets, vultures, druggies, reach their highest altitude and perhaps a glimmer beyond it- there is but one direction from there, and it is descent.
(Though, in retrospect, if I was worrying about plummeting from our muddy pontoon which acted as our pinnacle, we didn’t really have a long funnel to fall).

Tripvan materialised, eyes more blood than suds, body more mud than man.
“Morning,” He coughed it out.
This slumping sundial, no matter the disdain in his dialect, was correct.
Morning it was, and the orb above, casting our meek little shadows upon the shaven grass was our enemy on this one. Bearing down on us, his gassy gargantuan grimace bubbled our skins like a pair of wayward weenies.
“Phew. Maybe a swim is on the cards?” the sentence galloped from his jaws, almost in agony.
“Soon, my fried friend, soon. First, there is work to be done,” assumed the sensible journalist who was so often dormant within me.
I tied my beaten boots, ready for the day’s awaiting slog of interviews, and raised my gaze to face the world. I had a story to research, and an accomplice to help me.
I thought.
And then all I faced was an empty paddock.
Tripvan was already half a kilometre away, towel in tow, racing off toward the lakeside.
“Sorry man! Good luck with that! I’ll see ya this afternoon…” the voice petered out, luckily for it too far to reach with a rock.
And there I was, forced into the coalmines of routine journalism, alone.
“Just like the old saying,” my wisdom feigned to the surface. “When the mowing gets tough, the grass gets growing,” or something similarly idiotic.

Andre Agassi, the caravan/tepee park owner was the first plank on the chopping block for an interview. He seemed almost to desire it, to deserve it. So I clicked up my pen nib, my shovel, and trudged off into the mines.

FOUR HOURS OF FUN UNPROFESSIONALISM LATER:
LUNACY BY THE LAKESIDE

Covered in a visible layer of teepee induced crust, I plunged into the shining, apple-crisp waters for a cleansing.
Though the water was by no means less dirty: a new crust enveloped my sun-spot speckled Australian skin- apparently, a dredging crust, a clingy algae created by a sifter shifting sand way out on the backdrop, beneath a flailing wisp of cloud.
I stopped and stared at it. The green machinery seemed to be billowing out balefuls of gasoline bi-products, and bilging grey chemicals into the picturesque, sky-reflecting scenery.
Also, the aqua man, of whom Trip had informed me by pointing, had hobbled freely in his freakishness from his camper parked by the lakes ragged rim,
(Side Note: Though I appreciate and rather revere the ‘freaks’ on every other day, this one had a back hump like a Sherpa’s bulging baggage, and a glint in his eye more murderous than a pirate with her period)
,into the sandy waters to begin exfoliating his lepers suit with a bar of soap and what appeared to be sandpaper.
“Gross,” I muttered, quietly urinating in hypocrisy.
“Hey, check it out.” Tripvan pointed out a sixth finger growing from out his palm, as the dredging machine continued to dredge, and the leper continued to lep.
“mm,maybe let’s get out now.”

Sitting on the shore, staring at the humming machine, all was not lost: in fact, everything was spotless and found.
Today we were stocked and ready: Clk!! Fzzzzzzzz…
The universal sound of unwinding- the crack off the top of a tinny.
Sip away as the sun slips in to setting.
“Yeh, well, seems like a perfectly relaxing end to the day.”
Tripvan shook his head in sorrow at my words. I realised it as well, in horror.
I had jinxed us! Any chance of continuing our calmness for upwards of ten minutes had been catapulted off of my tongue. Damn.

The seismic clattering of a carnival didn’t take long to run through our eardrums.
I winced, and crumbled at the prospect of my head’s interior by morning.
Clk!! Fzzzzzzzz……..
In Lithuanoa (I can’t remember about other countries, but I think I recall the same), the sight of others public drinking is an open invitation for the sidelines of society to come over for a conversation. Normally, this is one of the finest attributes of existence, embroiling a fellow earthling in a chat about everything, but today, as can be well understood, if you’ve braved your lonesome eyes over the last five pages or so, we really just weren’t up for it.
The Wild Call of the Booze Beacon can sometimes attract unsavouries.
And today, as we sipped on the sap from our honey pots, we were greeted by a bear.

I wish I had taken a photograph of this marvel, this human jackolantern. The girth of his skull was equal to a waterlogged volleyball, and his grin reached across both its sides as if it were the ball’s stitching. In his mutant paws he clutched on to a bottle of brandy, which he proceeded to peddle ad-nauseum.
“You want Lithuanian brandy? You must drink my Lithuanian brandy!”
“We’ve got our own pal, never mind an old thing.”
I pulled our plugger from my back pocket, and Tripvan sank a swig.
Time marched onwards.
Tripvan had taken quickly to the whims of the Bear, and begun devouring his ‘Lithuanian’ Napoleon brand brandy (which on the side of the bottle read, ‘Product of France’).
Within an hour, we were throttled.
New bottles seemed to be conjured into the Bear’s claws faster than the last could be forgotten.
Tripvan, especially, was hitting the spirits like a Bunbury local hits his spouse: hard, and frequently.
The Bear’s hound was growling at us, moreso even than the Bear himself, and the night folded over upon itself and into the photo negative of delirium.
The hound took a lunge at the Trip man, gnashing at his shirt sleeve, and ripping it from the hem. I was shocked. Tripvan guffawed and drizzled himself from Napoleon’s guts.
How would this night end?
Taking another tug at the toxins, I realised: neither of us would be around to find out.

Day 19. The Contipi Tour

2011-07-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

A stark contrast to the black woodlands encroaching us (and the blacker night hovering upon it), we carved our way along a luminous gravel path, guided by our mysterious and fated bus broads, as if skipping down an evil Yellow Brick Road.

Weariness was casting its claws at our tethers. We had begun to wonder if a house of respite and replenishment would fling itself upon us, or if perhaps we would be sleeping in a ditch after all.
Taking our aims away from dozing in the sleek and shaven arms of the bus babes was a necessity, for our thoughts were filthy, and our clothes were appropriately matching. We were figuring ourselves a lower chance of this than of finding a clean bookie in Bulgaria.
Quiet chatter shared between us, the duo of two-o, about bunking in the basement of the bus babes’ abode, was beginning to ring like a nefarious ploy.
We took it in better judgement to never pop the topic, and find our slumbers out under the still moon, like cattle, like drifters, where noone could question our motives bar the mosquitoes, police and pigeons.
To their due credit however, the femininas were saying nary a word to lead us thinking otherwise: they had stuck around, acting as our fair tour takers, and were in all fact trying to steer us away from spending the night sleeping by a muddy brook or badland in the lovely salt-water spa town of Druskininkai.
Well, kind of away.
“My father owns the town campground. You won’t find a cheaper place to stay in whole Lithuania,” spoke the grandly glandulared Ginta.
We hummed, hoo-haad and hawed.
It wouldn’t be cheaper than lying facedown sprawled over an anthill by the lake, and after having to forego our dinner due to the forking of bribe at the bus station, we were wary of any unneeded purchases.
“Come on, you’ll love it!” Ginta’s bouys bounded against her chin as her mouth wobbled in unison. She had drummed the point home with fair words, a bounce and a giggle.
“Alright then, let’s take it,” we agreed, though still glanced hesitantly at each other in fantasy of clean linen in the bus bunnies’ basement.

It was only the first hours out of civilisation, and already we were beginning to dilapidate into shoeless, mangy wolfmen under the moon’s pale tug.
Well, maybe wolfmen was an overstep.
But at least into ragged poodles.
Poodles without oodles of whiskey to help in our friskiness, without hopes and without beds, and simply trailing along behind the spherical lanterns connected to multiple items of Inga and Ginta as our beacons.
Anyway, we had decided to brave our money-spending option, and we wanted the details.
“So, where are these caravans anyhow?” Tripvan grumbled.
Ginta’s shelf shook from glee.
“There is no caravan! I said cheapest in Lithuania, not the pope’s palace!”
Okay, so what are we looking at here. Bunks? Dugouts? Ditches? Tents? Teepees?
The eyes of our guiding squaws lit up.
Bingo.
Out of the black, Tripvan’s countenance began to alter. He seemed to stir and glow. The gravel pathway was growing ever slimmer. Yellow beads twinkled from the forest, starlight against tree sap, or…eyes?
Beating his naked feet against the ground, Tripvan suddenly started to undertake what appeared to be some kind of whiskey rain dance: as if the amber alcohol would come flooding from the sky in recognition.
Dancing and howling underneath the pines, he succeeded, if only for a brief second to let the cider slide, as I pissed unseen on his sneakers.
“Teepees ay? Well, lead on squaws, lead on!”

We tumbled onwards, deeper into the magnitude of precarious pines. Their carnivorous canopy was circling us, embracing us, forgetting us in our microscopic humanness. A cacophony of crickets, frogs and march-flies frolicked about on their business.

Perhaps it was the animals which brought it on, but out of my mouth flung a wild barbarian war shriek- and pain pulsed through my bloodstream. My bare heel had been shredded by a wayward flint.
An arrowhead?
As I assessed the injury and looked up, I realised- the enveloping madness, the same which is always on the edge of my breath, the same I was constantly anticipating, had finally reached us.
Things had turned. I glanced once more at the arrowhead, to judge its reality, then surveyed the situation. Yep, things had turned.
Bom,bom,bom…
Conga drums were beating ferocious fast patterns out in the foggy distance. Incantations and the bleating of bog-men had erupted in place of the crickets’ cheerful chirrups by the gloomy water’s edge.
Seeking reassurance that this was merely a fantasy, a delusion, I grappled at Tripvan’s shoulder, and swung him around.
But Tripvan was no more.
Chief Rotting Liver peered out from a blood-drained scowl.
“But wha--?” I was paralytic in petrification.
The Chief clapped his hands together, and as if from prompt, began to duck and sway in a spasm of tribal fever.
The dark-featured West Aust Alien had reverted to an incarnation of millennia past- kitted up in all the headware of an ancient American Indian.
And the squaws, wrapped now in the skins of boars and bathed in chicken fat (some kind of food fondler’s fantasy), were rotating creepily around him.
“Hee-a-hoya-hee-a-hoya…” The creepy rhythm rocked out of their mouths as the Chief shook with electricity, a horrid white against the empty forest black behind him.
He hurled his arms skywards, as if in surrender to its vastness, and a thunderclap jarred the nation askew.

“Haha, we’ve made it!” Cheered Tripvan, as the Chief faded into the shadows of his mind’s-eye. I wiped my brow in wonderment and fatigue.
But the cockerel crowed at the correct time- indeed, triangular silhouettes zig-zagged upon our horizon.
“Teepees??” we cackled on like a couple of burning Indians.
Our helpful squaws too had reverted to their normally well-formed physiques, and took about squirreling up all the arrangements with Ginta’s father.
A quick splash of words on her pater- he stood as a classic of modern sculpting and evolution. From his nostrils bloomed a brown bouquet of a hairpiece, and on his body was strapped a fluorescent lithograph of aging sportsman Andre Agassi, pre-baldness.
So, after a few minutes easily spent staring at him and his movements, all the hairy details were sorted.
“Do we need keys?” Tripvan inquired in apparent dementia.
The squaws tee-heed as we closed in on our teepees.
“No, no keys. But I hope you brought something warm.”
No, we didn’t bring anything, but perhaps if you just stuck around…
Somehow the squaws managed to vaporise, and our colourful enemies of igloos appeared before us.
I peeked inside the flap of the nearest one of the two, which would be our homes for the duration of Druskininkai.
All the lay within it was a feeble wooden bedframe on a layer of moulding soil. The pestering zing of mozzies quickly brought its presence into ours. Oy.
The suitcases beneath my eyelids began to pack with weight. The realisation had kicked in: the night ahead would be arduous.
I removed myself from out of the plastic pantheon, and turned to check opinions with Tripvan.
“Hey, do you reckon we’ll live the night through?” I grappled upon his shoulder.
Chief Rotting Liver spun round: fresh blood tainting the perfection of his hideous, ghostly grin.
“How!”
He passed on his American-Indian greeting call, answering my question in the same, shiftless syllable.

Day 18. Hookers, Bribes and Bus Babes: Beyond the Average Tuesday with Tripvan

2011-07-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

Following a crazed (crazed being the operative word, after our endeavours at the Belarusian embassy) and lengthy night, we decided to cash what was left of our few chips and heave to the highway for the countryside: but it wasn’t easy.
Pulling ourselves together was like building scarecrows from spaghetti.
In our slumping stupor, we parked ourselves by the busted up bitumen at the wrong side of the bus station- and henceforth began a(nother) ‘crazed’ and unpredictable cyclone of proceedings.

We had sat, peacefully at first, watching the wildlife, the local working girls, turning tricks for the passing drivers. Well, at least they were trying to- the brow-beaten street strutters weren’t having much luck, as each battered car, even if it was on its second curious loop around the block, in a shop for a score, kept driving onwards without so much as a brief glance. Maybe the girls were overpricing for somewhat tarnished goods…no offence meant to the hard working hookers of Vilnius.
Watching these folks go about their business was somehow transfixing, and at the same instant, relaxing: like staring at a sleazy screen-saver.
The sun was packing it in for the day, slipping down the surface of the world, as if mimicking a metaphor of the poor pro’s hopeless existence.
We sipped away, equally empathetic in our hopelessness.
We had snuck to this secretive location so to sip away on cold ales unnoticed, for in Lithuania, street drinking is an outlawed sin, and authorities, or at least borderline stasis, don’t take too kindly to it: as we were about to find out.

Ready to whip across the flat plains, we were taking off on the bus to the resort town of Druskininkai- a gathering of shacks and shambled shanties, nearly smothered by surrounding forest. I was chasing a story of questionable viability, and was accompanied by an accomplice, Tripvan, a man of questionable morals (no offence Trip, but we did just watch street walking strippers for over an hour).
Our initial aim was to be onboard the 18.30, but as it ripped away from the station in scoff at our lateness, we wandered off unconcerned to graze on a patch of green and glass to laze away the hour.
‘We’d get the next one,’ we figured, cares were beyond our grasp for now.
For now.

Within the ticks of half a sunset, we had to move. We were being slyly eyeballed by an overworked, under-tanned loony, who judging by his tawny appearance and scars would have many a prickly pointer in his knapsack just waiting to call home to our guts if he got a chance to get close enough.
So, like dinosaurs, we made tracks.
This here, this immediate point in the history of this retelling, is where we fell upon the locale of the stringy sex-workers, and ogled their gaunt fly-bitten fleshes for an hour, as mentioned previously.
A blond in a tennis skirt previously utilised as Pat Cash’s headband, stomped past sporting sinewy muscles. She was winged by a trillion year old redhead with stitch marks like a puppet, sitting on slabs of horse meat for arse cheeks.
Tripvan raised an eyebrow in interest.

A parody of Bruno Mars strangled by a gold chain swaggered for a chance, down hooker lane, in such comical footfalls, he seemed like a moon man taking his first steps on ground with gravity. We tried to save ourselves from plummeting into uproar, but due to Bruno’s bewildering stature, we failed, briefly avoiding murder, due only to his unbridled embarrassment. We sat unhindered.
For now.
After conversing in dark shades about double teams and woodland abductions, all the normal barroom blabber, we marched off stiffly to the beckoning bus platform.
Of course, not without calling passed the drinking fountain for another frosty flagon for the road.
After all, what is a bus trip without a beer?
Like hell without water, so to speak. Boring, burning, sober, sombre, sad, infinite.
The visions of lush greenery in the Litho countryside were bound to liven under the burdens of the bottle, and opinions kept where your mummy made them, we were unanimous on our calling.
“Į sveikata!“ Resounded the celebratory catcall after a freshly cracked Lithuanian bottle cap.

The preliminary glugs slipped down our oesophagullies leisurely, as we mused over our spare change and checked our watches for time. The hooker catwalk was still crawling into conversation, though we realised we’d better not dally, as we had only thirteen minutes until the bus departed, with or without us.

Then we caught sight of the heavies. The police shunted by, accompanied by two heavy-handed, greased up security thugs, who eyeballed us with beady pupils: scoping the scene like Robocops.
It spelled Eastern European complications all over, and we should have paid more attention. They were hurrying a long-hair in a pink shirt away, no doubt for him to rot in solitude for his life’s remainder.
“They frown on the wearing of pink in this country,” we agreed solemnly.
We checked our faded apparels for traces, but other than dried blood and skin blotches, we were pretty much white and brown all over.
We judged that perhaps, under the murky circumstances, it would be best to disengage ourselves from our beverages.
We hid our beers: a couple of David Copperfields, Tripvan placed his arm in front of his, me, mine underneath a hat. Genius.
Needless to shout it, we’d been spotted. The first half of the rent-o-cop Robocops, shaped like a security brick-house, approached us and lifted my hat off the evidence.
Whoops, you got us.
Eight minutes until the bus.
Last bus of the day.
He tapped his walkie-talkie into awakening. It began to fuzz and crackle:
“Protokalus,” he stated, (which in retrospect I figure was code for ‘two suckers, red-hot’) “Protokalus…”
The transistor mumbled and tweaked, then switched off. Robocop towered menacingly.
There were no cops to be seen, just this security bozo, this overbearing thug and his gun, holstered to his hip.
Tripvan was eyeing me telepathically in fear, mind-messaging, “don’t say fuck you this time, don’t say fuck you…”
Six minutes until our bus ignition ignited.
Passengers were already beginning to hobble on.
We realised it was transaction time- now or never. I thought about those poor sickly hookers down in the parking lot, and gulped along with them.
We had to field a bribe, or else potentially lose something more important- just use your imagination, and don’t stop at limbs, livers or lungs.
The thug’s skinnier twin appeared, sentenced to a life of red cheeks and acne slashes. He sweated as if interrupted from a marathon masturbation session, and taking a swamp mug like this out of a trance like that, could only mean murder for us.
“Protokalus,” must have sounded like sweet ecstasy to his pinking eggplant ears.
He spoke enough English to let us know the deal.
“One hundred euro,” was his proposition.
For two beers?
From two deadheads?
Not likely.
I began to make the haggling stance, for ‘let’s get this over with,’ shuffle, when he grabbed me, and shoved me toward what would either be his office or a back alley.
“Don’t touch me, or I’ll call the police!” I uttered lamely.
Five minutes until the bus.
Tripvan rose to follow, but as luck was his lampshade tonight, Thug the Second ordered him to stay plonked and puzzled on the bus bench. Tripvan had a wallet full of Swiss francs and euros. I had 60 Lithuanian litas (the equalivent to about 20 Aussie dollars) and black holes in my pockets.
Talk about a bad choice of travellers by the Thug Brothers.
It could be seen at this stage: they wanted us on the bus and outta there, as nobody wanted the situation to linger.
A seemingly standard procedure unfolded: he took me to his cupboard posing as security post.

He was sweating, stinking and rose-coloured, his hands outstretched.
He opened the middle draw of a stripped-wood desk.
“Put the money in there.” He waved a slimy digit in my direction.
I whipped out the disintegrated remains of what was once my wallet, muttered melodies about the holes in my shirt, and threw the sixty rubles in the drawer.
“What, you are joking me?” he winced, visibly, as if in abdominal pain, at the minimal amount.
“Sorry, man, that’s all I got!” I led him on the tour of my rotted, gutted purse, and gave him up to grievance.
A piece of lint hovered between our unbroken glare.
Two minutes until the bus left us behind.
“Ahh, okay, just get out of here.” Annoyed at picking the pauper over the prince, Thug One abandoned himself to the reality of my poverty, opened the hatch and hustled me out and running.
Hopping back to Tripvan, I waved the bus driver as the air blower in the doorway breathed the sigh of closure.
“We’re coming!” We bolted like savages, bearing our tickets like spears.
“WAIT!” Tripvan suddenly turned, springing back to where Thug Two had been babysitting him. “Mind if we take our beers?” This brazen exhaling dashed from out his jaws. The guard brushed the air in perplexion, swatting at microscopic insects of annoyance of the ordeal, as if saying,
‘Just take ‘em and go! You’re more trouble than you’re worth! Literally!”
So somehow, still clutching our near full beers, the cause of all the trouble to begin with, we clambered into the awaiting sanctuary.

We were aboard the bus with but seconds to spare. We were off.
But then we realised: our sanctuary was missing something.
The bus driver mulled over his pipe curiously, as he gazed upon our tickets.
“hmm.” He seemed to have made a slight oversight when counting passengers.
He had oversold the seats.
Our passes were valid, though there wasn’t a chair to spare. Smokey driver motioned that we find an empty slab of floor, at the buses rear, alongside a panting middle-aged drunk, soon to be our buddy, who had scuttled on in behind us.
We sat and started to cack in disbelief.
A gold toothen old lady who we leant on screamed in hysterics, at us and our situation, and unknowing any of each others languages, she started chanting,
“TOTAL KOSHMAR, TOTAL KOSHMAR!”
Which translates fluid into “TOTAL NIGHTMARE!” as we later learnt.
Suddenly half the bus was in a tatter of hilarity, chaos and disorder, as the Australian duo began to introduce themselves around.
Six heads, perched on two bodies, smiling and holding out painted fingernails in pleasant greeting, suddenly took us by surprise.
“Hi!” They both sat grinning in all their 21-year-old glory.
“Shit,” murmured Tripvan. ”Maybe this evening is starting to get interesting.”

Day 17. The Belarusian Embassy

2011-06-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

(A tainted retelling of Franz Kafka’s Trial)

Here heralds the beginning of a beguiling week of wonders, of tearing around the nation on a series of misguided misadventures, joined by prodigious journalist and comrade, Tripvan Lavalamp.
Though this awkward mismatch of nouns is not the man’s real name, for the sake of not running him through the nefarious mud of his devilish deeds, or exposing the world to his criminal leanings (he said he was only taking them out to the woods for a picnic, and remains innocent until proven otherwise) we will let his rejoices be told under the T9 transcribing of his truthful moniker.

Getting on with it: Tripvan passed down through the clouds and screeched on to the dusty tarmac of Vilnius’ gravel excuse for an airport, sporting a head full of expectancies (and possibly paranoia painkillers) for what was to fall upon him, during his stint staying in this land of moose meat and minstrels.
If he’d known that within days he would be forced to cough bribes, be eyeballed by knifers and attacked by various bears (all of which comes later, later, later…) perhaps he would have double checked his itinerary.
But, somehow, I believe he would whirl through this rotten rotor all over again.

To slash this introduction short, to cut to the meat of it, it all began following an unfortunate idea- handed to us by a mousey brunette obviously filled by some malicious scorn to send us off on an unpassable mission-
-Us the brain damaged duo, tried to travel to the soils of the closed communist neighbour of Lithuania, Belarus.

Between the borders of Belarus, Lenin likenesses linger, monolithic block buildings line the horizons like dominos, and the currency is worth less than life in Libya. The whole show is run by some despotic neuroses case whose hand is on the buzzer, waiting to blare it against any intruder stepping foot inside who might blow his cover and show the whole world he’s just some nutjob named Martha who wears bikinis under his bathrobe.
Minsk is the capital city, and like a couple of deluded honeymooners, we thought we’d ramble out there for a jaunt to scope out the scenery. Easy done.
Problem was, this necessitated Visas. Which in turn necessitated patience. Which in turn necessitated for life to roll round and round through a series of hierarchical hurdles- obstacles which never lead anywhere- tumble drying us back to the end of a long queue which we were just at the head of an hour earlier.
Old wack-job McMartha wasn’t going open her country’s legs too easy, it appeared…her checkpoints needed coaxing, niggling, numbing.

We checked our chances. It was all a bizarre chaotic experience which nearly cost us our sanity, cost me fifteen bucks and probably cost us the opportunity of ever entering Belarusian airspace until the end of time.
Probably had we snuck in between her commie knees, and skipped around the joyous playgrounds of her innards for a day or two, we would never have escaped.
Probably it’s all for the better. But without further cryptic elaboration, here, by the embassy gates, our story starts.

*

Dressed down in thongs and summer duds, we travailed the streets toward the embassy like skipping on the breeze.
“No troubles man,” I assured Tripvan. “We’ll be in and out faster than a fornicating fifteen year old.”
Realising my error, I spun about, searching for some wood to knock on, but all too tardy. I had jinxed us.
We were approaching the gulag dressed down as an embassy, when we noticed what looked like a silent riot winding up the road.
“Are all these people trying to get in or stay out of Belarus?” we pondered.
Jabbering broken English to a Lithuanian copper, we managed to manifest ourselves as high-flying Western Pigs, and skipped the line for entry. We were in.
For the first time.
We sauntered through the door as if on a Sunday stroll. An unmanned metal detector bleeped at us, as we passed on in unnoticed.
And we weren’t the only ones; bedlam was taking place all around.
Soviet stooges were cramming through the detector, unnervingly setting the red cross lights blazing and beeping, and sparking images of pocketed uzis and grenades a-popping through our imaginations.
For a country which had experienced a suicide bomber attack on its main train station just weeks prior, you would think security would be relatively imperative…but at least the lack of checking seemed to make it all roll faster.
Faster and faster to the point of absolute rampaging anarchy- cougars in leopard spots were pushing passports in front of the jaded official’s weary fingers, cons were comparing prison tatts as their wives whited out records from application lines, winos dolled in garb stolen from the set of Schindler’s List bundled and shoved in all directions, and nobody had a clue what the hell was happening.

Tripvan and I took it as a laugh, found ourselves some visa application forms and jumped into filling out the particulars as bogus as could be believed.
Jobs?
Artist and sports writer.
Reason for entry?
Holidaying in Minsk (Tourism).
Accommodation during stay?
In a hotel.

A good few infinites later our parchments parading as forms were finished and we bumbled our Australian arses to the front of the only line where the counteress knew a skerrick of our language.
At first, she seemed to be on our side.
A grim giggle, she was ours. Visas coming up.
Suddenly, her voice grew hostile.
“Which hotel you stay in?”
“Ahh, it says there. A Hotel.”
This minx from Minsk was not in control of her vocal regulator as her voice-box began to fluctuate rapidly.
“YOU MUST LEAVE, AND BRING PAPER WHICH SHOWS YOU ARE RESERVED IN A HOTEL. OTHERWISE, NO TOURIST VISA.”
Right. The Trial begins.
Back on the broken footpaths, the pair began to formulate.
“We can do this. We just find a computer, book into the dingiest hostel possible, print out the reso and presto.”
Presto was not so simple. Running treadmills in a shopping centre like mad cats, we eventually managed to purloin a printer from a perturbed media-shop owner, who I am sure to this day has been skimming leisurely through my debit card account which I think I left on his desktop.
Already shaky by now, we ventured back into the heat, still blinded by the sweaty optimism we would be ‘Holidaying in Minsk’ by sundown.

Back to the chaos. Surrounded by a corridor filled with pistol packin’ commies, how could we know it was to be us cast out for villainy in minutes?
We crept diligently back to the desk of our rabid wench. Her hair was cropped in a short, sixties bob, with spirals acting as sideburns. A white Grace Jones with predatory peepers. Over-boiling.
We waited for a stocky cougar to finish flirting her dyke arse back into visa-town, growing increasingly impatient and doubtful.
Finally, history flash-forwarding, World War 1, World War 2, then now, we had reached the front of the line, handing over our registration gently so as not to upset the fragile balance of our bitch.

She looked it over. And over. And over. Then she shot us the glance.
“Where are your names?”
Ohhh.
“No, it’s only our reservation number. That’s all they put on the print-out,” I protested weakly, truthfully. “We’ve already paid a down deposit.”
Goodbye down deposit.
“I NEED YOUR NAMES, OTHERWISE, NO TOURIST VISA!”
She was percolating. And I pushed it.
“Hey lady, please, we’ve already gone to so much trouble to get this reservation.”
”I NEED NAMES!”
It felt reminiscent of a KGB interrogation.
Then, it tumbled out of my tongue like an internal A-bomb. It was all over.
“Ah, you’re crazy!” I told her straight up.
She shook like a Ren and Stimpy cartoon, close-ups of purple veins pulsing out of her neck.
“I’M CRAZY?? I’M CRAZY?? NO TOURIST VISA FOR YOU!!”
She slammed her booth shut.
Shit. The honeymoon was doubled over.
Tripvan tried to ask for one last chance, when a big bear of a previously non-existent guard (where was he for the pistol packers?) grizzled on over mumbling unfathomable threats in Russian to usher us out of the embassy.

A final nail was hammered in when a tiny, caged bird-like creature, wearing a pink blouse and shadowy brow, was told to come out of her connecting booth and speak;
“when embassy in bad behaviour is, must out go you must.” Then she disappeared back behind a doorway, as if out of a subconscious scene from a David Lynch film.
“What? I don’t understand.” I continued to billet us, but the Bear continued bidding us outside…then another A-bomb slapped from my hatch.
“Ah, fuck you all.”
Tripvan shot a startled glare at me. I gulped heavy.
The bear guard lowered his head, as if computing. It appeared he knew at least one English word. He began to shiver.
“Fuck you? FAAAAK YOU?”
His shoulders humped, his neck crested, his fists balled. We were on the verge of being obliterated by a KGB monster.
He marched us out to the street, uranium texturing his face in fury.
We waved apologies and assurances as he began spieling to a policeman.
We scooted on out of there as fast as our thongs would carry us.
“Shit man.” We looked at each other, shook up and bleary hearted.
“Maybe we should try the Russian embassy to go to Kaliningrad?”
*
If we’d followed through with this secondary debacle, rather than immediately hitting the nearest bar and exploding into laughter, I can logically infer that we would have been blotted from the face of the earth. Down into the ditch with the cleaver, is how ends The Trial.

Instead, like all rampaging tornados, this was just the beginning of its warpath. Like the mad Don Quixote told his (even madder) squire Sancho, "If last night Fortune shut the door which we were looking for, and deceived us [...], it is now opening wide to us another, better, and more certain adventure," and off they rode into the burning sunlight, doomed to their insanity and guided into the palms of the world.

Day 16. The Soviet Bunker Experience

2011-06-01T04:50:00.000-07:00

When John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote the lyrics, “Back in the USSR, you don’t know how lucky you are, boy,” they had evidently never been held captive in a Soviet bunker, situated six metres underground, in the middle of a Lithuanian forest.

Though the author of this article can claim differently; on an overcast Easter Saturday afternoon in 2011, the April winds ripping at the sides of the car, myself and another journalist were delivered to what was potentially the most freaky, hilarious and just slightly sadistic tourism event currently available in Lithuania, possibly Europe; 1984, The Soviet Bunker experience.

On the outskirts of Vilnius, out passed the rural hamlet of Neminciene, lies the extraordinary site of this reality-themed survival drama. What occurs out there is a three-hour long torture, sorry, tour, of what life was like in the times of Soviet occupied Lithuania.

Not simply life on the street though. A group of talented actors, (including a well-trained wolfhound) who seem to relish their roles as Soviet foot-soldiers a little too much, guide you into the labyrinthine maze of a former hidden TV station, which for all dramatic purposes becomes a Soviet bunker. Visitors to the fully interactive show get to live through the exclusive experience of being kidnapped, threatened, interrogated, scientifically prodded and fed sausages, in the depths of a KGB hostage facility. And all this comes over twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Some might say, “Well isn’t that why Communism was abolished? So we don’t have to live through such unpleasant ordeals?”
Indeed, the question must be asked. Why dredge up such horrendous real life events, and replay them over and over to audiences of school kids, Spanish tourists and Litho locals who received a ticket as a booby prize on their buck’s night?
“The Soviet Union was a horror. But it was also absurd and funny,” told former Lithuanian television producer, and creator of the attraction, Ruta Vanagaite. “The absurdity of the system: you wouldn’t have believed it existed, that people could survive in it. I think in this show we have a perfect mix of the horror and the absurdity of it.”

As we drove out to our destination in Miss Vanagaite’s fairly fancy four-wheel drive, she explained to me how the show was designed to illuminate the terrifying events of the past, an aid to preventing them being pushed underneath the education systems rug.
“Teachers who bring their children out here, they praise it. They often say the realties of the Soviet Union should be taught more. Children come here in school groups, unknowing and laughing, then they are surprised at how scary and ferocious it is. They say, ‘We are so lucky to live in freedom and independence.’”

As she pulled off the main highway out toward Neminciene, I began to gulp in trepidation of what was to come. Scary and ferocious? Was I so wrong thinking I would be writing a light-hearted story recounting an offbeat and wacky tourist attraction? Possibly, especially as I watched how Miss Vanagaite’s eyes shone with surprising glee as she described how visitors have reacted toward the show in the past.
“We had one man, from Belarus, who went totally hysterical. He called the local police. When they asked him, ‘So how did you get here?’ he said, ‘I bought a ticket!’” She laughed contently while I shook in my seat.
“People come out of it saying, ‘it was horrifying.’ They say, [the actors] were shouting at me, the dog was barking at me.’ The dog is our best actor,” she nodded, apparently envisioning the gleaming fangs of the prized wolfhound, and then added, “In every single group, we have had someone fainting.”

It must be said, she has pulled together an authentic troop of players for the drama. The actors, a small but dedicated motley crew of shaved heads and intense glares, come from various backgrounds as well as theatre, including professional policemen, and actual interrogators from Soviet times.
“They know all the tricks from KGB era,” Ruta claimed. But she was tight-lipped on releasing the names of all of the Soviet Bunker actors, as she believed it would counteract on the play’s authenticity.
If it was to be one hundred percent realistic, down in the cell of the Soviets, would the actors then be Russian?
“The Russian actors would not appear, as they think it (the play) is too anti-Soviet. I approached the entire cast of a Russian drama theatre, and they all refused,” Miss Vanagaite lamented. “But it is not anti-Soviet. We are not recreating the Soviet Union. We are just recreating the hell.”

A hell which many people would rather, “forget than revisit it,” as she put it.
Few Lithuanians of older generations choose to come to the Soviet Bunker experience, as the reality behind it is just too raw and real to for them to laugh about.
“I have Lithuanian friends who have said, ‘no, we remember it all too well’. They would not come here,” she said.

As she continued to roll out the horror tales of peoples reactions from being down in the bunker, (almost as if they were a prerequisite for entrance; like hearing spooky ghost stories before stepping foot in an abandoned house) I realised the village setting had all but diminished, and given way to towering birch trees. We were arriving at our destination.
“It’s only psychological,” she went on, “The bunker can cause claustrophobia. That’s why it’s very easy for people to break, and for their will to be broken. It’s because, once you’re down there, there’s no way out; just like in Soviet Union.”

As we veered from the forest road, into what looked like a concrete relic from Chernobyl, I began to wonder if perhaps these tales were simply scare tactics, aimed at the naïve journalists.
If at this point I had known within a few hours I would be slapped about, prodded, asked to remove my shirt, had a bag of (albeit, phoney) drugs planted on me, and forced to write a confession by a KGB operative who looked like a henchman from The Sopranos, I would have reconsidered.

The building itself was a remarkable find on behalf of the Soviet Bunker creative team. Constructed during the Cold War and completed in 1985, the bunker was kept as a secret, out in the woods, 25kms from Vilnius. Its original purpose was to house a secret backup TV station, to be used for emergency broadcasts if a nuclear attack ever erupted from the USA.
“The bunker was built near railway tracks and near the water, so in case of a nuclear war the workers out there had everything they needed,” Miss Vanagaite informed.
Officially named “Dom tvorchestva” (or, “House of Creation”) in early blueprints, the bunker was run by Lithuanian Film and Television and supplied employment for up to fifteen people, including plumbers, electricians, cleaners and guards. Yes, out in the middle of nowhere, the bunker still has hot water and electricity. This was a major reason for the Soviet Bunker team to choose the location, as there was no need for outside generators to be brought in. The Bunker team only rent the location though; the site is still owned by the state. So how does its real estate value look? Could the bunker potentially be sold off by the state?
“What would anybody do with this concrete monster, six metres under the ground?” Ruta questioned. Utilise it as a fake KGB stronghold to scare school children perhaps?

The crowd of the day’s tourists were bustling in, exchanging amiable glances and drinking down cups of the complimentary barley-ground coffee on offer (on the way to the bunker, we had stopped at a petrol-station where Miss Vanagaite had warned me, “Better get a coffee here. At the bunker, it’s only Soviet coffee”).

Sitting around sipping on hot mugs, sounds of Russian balalaikas strumming from the speakers, an uneasy peace took hold of the room. This was too calm. Though the paraphernalia adorning the walls- the metallic casts of Lenin and the severe black and white poster of notorious Lithuanian Soviet first secretary, Petras Griskevicius- gave you a grim inkling of what was to come, everything was still in a state of quiet.
Scanning the room, the ceilings mould-bitten and the lights flickering, I realised we had slipped into a time warp. The clock hanging above the Union flag still ticked, but otherwise we had become part of a frozen movie set, unmoved since 1984.

Seeing the dazed state of their guests, staff of the attraction swiftly thrust pens into their hands. A document was held out in front of us, demanding signage before we were allowed entrance into the bunker. A document which specified, among other rules, “In case of disobedience participants may receive psychological or/and physical punishments.”
Gulp. Staring at the world map on the wall which displayed the Baltic region in a uniform green, distinctly lacking in borders, I began to feel we were about take a glimpse into a life where many brave independence fighters had gone before us.

Before the ink was dry, the Soviet guard (played by revered Lithuanian actor, Irmantas Jankaitis) marched into the hall, a look of deep disdain, mixed with the remnants of a possible hangover caused by Lenin’s birthday the night before, across his face. The star wolfhound, muzzled as he was, entered alongside him, and immediately began wincing and barking, yanking on his leash held tight. The guard opened his mouth and let forth a torrent of Russian orders. You knew the event had begun.
“From once you enter, you have no rights,” Our translator, Ignis, relayed to us from what the guard was yelling. We were then sworn in as citizens of the Soviet Union. As soon as the red flag was raised, we were in; marched off by the actor/guards to meet our pretend fate in the bowels of the Soviet bunker.

As of being taken down into the bunker, I won’t explain everything of what happened. It would be too much to fathom, the depths of which they went to recreate this Soviet hell. At over three hours, the actors performed marvellously, miraculously even, as they melted into their roles, screaming, jeering, poking, and taking evident relish in it all.
I will of course say a few things; firstly, about the madness and the monotony reflected of the Soviet era. We, the inducted citizens, were forced to run through a maze of corridors, up and down stairs, and seemingly round in a loop again. We were trained against nuclear disaster and war, by placing rubber gas masks over our faces, which made us look like a group of disfigured elephants. We were forced to carry piles of trash from one bench to a second equally useless bench, and then back again, as the Soviet bunker team bid to convey to us the pointless trivialities of past Communistic ‘work ethic.’ And of course, the outrageous slurs continued to rain on the paying guests, by the seemingly omnipresent guards.

The irony of the expedition began to sound itself in all to true a form; the idea of a Soviet prison as a venture for reality tourism. People chose, in their own wishes, to enter and be trapped in this zone, a place in time which for so many years, people had been trying to escape from.
In a dimly lit subterranean room, the smell of old tobacco engrained in every corner, a KGB interrogator (and a wonderful actor) worked his paranoid scare tactics upon the people. As this was going on, a deep melancholy sunk into my mind.
I had suddenly recollected the photographic image of a man I had never met, a Lithuanian man who was held prisoner and eventually killed by Soviet forces in 1954, named Jonas Zemaitis.

For anybody who has visited the Museum of Genocide Victims (often known as the KGB museum) in Vilnius city centre, you might have seen a photo of Mr Zemaitis hanging upon a crumbling wall in one of the cells in the building’s basement.
Zemaitis was an important figure to Lithuania throughout the Soviet occupation of the country. He was a leader of the post-World War Two resistance movement, and “the most outstanding commander in the guerrilla war,” explained an extract taken from a book about his life.
Mr Zemaitis lead the battle for the independence of his country, established the pivotal ‘Lithuanian Movement for the Fight to Freedom’ (the LLKS), in 1948, and was, among many other things, a personal friend of my (then young) grandmother, Lithuanian immigrant and writer, Elena Jonaitiene.
In 1953, Zemaitis was captured and arrested by Soviet forces. After a year of interrogations, a Baltic military tribunal sentenced him to death by shooting.
In court, when he was allowed to make a final statement, he said, “I, like all like-minded people, consider that the Soviet Union intruded upon our country by force. I consider this step by the Soviet government unlawful.”

And there we were, in a basement replica of the horrors forced upon Lithuanians during the Soviet Union, learning, watching, amazed that this atrocity could have ever taken place in real time. At the end of the three hours plus in the bunker, weary though happy, we were given a bite to eat and a certificate stating we had made it.

Everybody was given a Soviet souvenir, and we made our way towards the exit. As the iron gates clanked open, the wolfhound docile now, a burst of late afternoon spring sunlight washed over us like water.
In the car driving back towards Vilnius, the sun setting around our vista, a cheery Miss Vanagaite, who would be spending Easter painting eggs with family, asked me, “And how does the freedom taste?”
I could only sit there and contemplate how lucky we really were; and how about now, it would probably taste something akin to a nice, cold, capitalist beer.

(Unedited version of an article which appeared in The Baltic Times on May 26, titled "Trapped with no way out.")

Day 15. No Master for Margarita

2011-05-30T15:46:00.000-07:00

The Tale of the Eternal Breakfast

Dangling booze puppets hanging on tangled strings, as can well be imagined, the Swedes and I arose hungover and hobbling.
Ringing through our heads, the strobe-like recollections of misspent nocturnal mischief; returning to haunt us from the eve now gone.
Our lives were reverberating on thin and shaky lines, though somehow, our general demeanour was cheery, rambunctious, and above all, hungry.
We had awoken collectively, though in far separate beds, in our home away from homeless;
Paid-for, ready made for the brain to lay beds, at the sleepy hostel with the princely moniker of The Trouble You’re Inn, or something equally ominous.
The bunks, steel soldered to the walls in rows, were lined like army barracks; and the resemblance brought something of the psychotic soldier to Broken Bjorn’s behaviour.
“Come on, you cretinous creek walkers!” he marched the aisles wearing half a full metal jacket. I slid back under the womb of my covers as he continued his bombardment, “Let’s go get some breakfast! This ain’t no Mickey Mouse show!”
“Those Swedish certainly aren’t neutral.” I decided as the bombs went off in the basement. “Those bastards are hooking me into their own holocaust.”
And I was right.
In a seizure of synchronous teeth shaving, pant putting, and combing the lice from our eyelashes, the trio were instantly ready to hit the hub for breakfast.
Two Swedes and a Seed.
But we had to start somewhere, and the reception bar seemed the likely outlet for any advice opportunities.
“I know a great place.” Our hostelian suggested optimistically. “Margarita works there this morning. Remember her?”
In a flash of red hair, sparkly teeth and summertime all over, we all recalled in bliss.
“Yeh, yeh, I think we do. So how do we get there??”
Without a hint of the doom she was encasing us in, our master of disaster drew a line for us on a hostel map. It appeared to be a normal map.
It was more technical than a winding, gaping freeway leading beyond the crust of the earth, but it may as well have been- or just a spiralling arrow which looped around and around and a-yep, you guessed it-round.
Because that was the destination we were heading to.
And man, were we getting hungry.

Finding the restaurant was no real issue. A couple of backward steps, a mountain of Swedish slurs, but nothing abnormal in a mid-morning fast breaking search party.

And there it stood, beckoning: sucking us in, the gravitational beacon of the black hole of an art gallery limb, which sprouted flower-potted tables and lulling Lithuanian music, all in the guise of a friendly, folky establishment.
It didn’t SEEM like a bad decision. Just yet.
We took our place between the corpses and the sky, scraping out chairs to wait for a waitress. Waiting for a waitress. Waiting. Waiting.
And the clock hands began to crumble.

“What outta earth is Margarita doing? I asked for the coffee twenty minutes ago, I’m about to disintegrate!” The Swedes had already begun to combust.
And then she materialised; robed in a backless dress, and harbouring a mindless smile, Miss Margarita shot us a sorry.
“I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I’m making up for it now.”
A stunner on regular occasions today something appeared askew.
She was pretty in a clueless way, clueless in a demented form, and demented in a format which made me wonder if the menu I was reading was not my own last will and testament. For to ask Margarita for an omelette this morning, seemed like offering her all I had left.
And the numbers spilled from the face of the clock, splitting in a racket against the linoleum.
“Pleeeeease Margarita, could we get our juice now? And where are those omlettes? We’ve been sitting here an hour!”
Margarita filled our gullets from strawberry juice, to help sweeten our raw deal.
But it was all too late.
The atmosphere had solidified. We could pick at it, fumble it around and reassemble bits of the thickened air.
The Swedes were swapping heads to wile away the infinite.
“LOOK! I CAN SEE MY WORDS!” They floated stagnant in front of my frightened brow, as I tried to pick at them from dire starvation.
A distant amplifier droned an endless single cymbal crash.
The Swede had kept his promise and was inhaling toxic vapours while in mid-disintegration…when the rebel red-head burst her head back in the bubble.
“Hey! Your salad’s ready-edy-edy….” her echo sent the mystifying statement bouncing around the walls of our time cavern.
“Salads?? Margarita, we ordered omlettes!”
“It’s all part of the procedure-edure-edure…” and she faded to invisibility, all but for her off-centred smile, a cheeky Cheshire kitten.
“This is ridiculous! We’re going to miss the pig racing!” Of course, it was my complaining which was ludicrous, as a thousand hogs painted in the Flags of the World glided past, whimpering Napoleon bareback jockeying the leader.
A giant clam pulled them into its jaws like a succubus.
“Wow.”
The Swedes had completely disassembled now, their goatees wavering on parched brick, while their arms smoked cigarettes in puddles by their panting tongues.
“Oh, birds.”
I too had succumbed, shattering into lego blocks, levitating one by one in the image of an arc.
The clock was but spew dripping down the window now, burping out spontaneous ticks and colossal tocks at random intervals which each made our molecules quiver.
“Hey, sorry it’s taking so long!” Margarita stuck her embarrassed features in through the time curtain.
One of the Swedish issued a squelch of his ear against cement in retort.
I simply started bleeding from my belly button.
“It’ll be here in a minute! It’s taking so long because it’s made with love.”
At this comment, a Swede burst into flames. I was seeping at the sockets, and a feather boa was all that remained of our third.
Suddenly, a tiny door upon the ceiling creaked open. In a shudder, a vacuuming cave wrenched everything off its bolsters, tables, legs, fur coats, underwear, it all flew into the doorway like confetti, the universe swept into it, suck, suck. And spat it all out to nowhere, the middle of vacant space, the twinkling void- all there which could be distinguished was a laughing mouth, and red hair, all else gone and twisted into obscurity…
“Here are your omlettes! Sorry they took so long.” She thrust the circles with the food lying on them upon the rectangle carpet zones nearest to each of us, equipped with cutting utensils, to which we could reach from the stools we were perched on at a restaurant.
Omlettes.
Well, they don’t look so great…but it’s alright Margarita. Just keep up that summertime smile and I swear the universe will restore itself after all.
But do you have any salt?
”Yeh, of course, I’ll bring some back in a second.”
And the clock hands curved into caterpillars, and snuck off together through a crack in the concrete.

Day 14. Back to the Boogaloo- Devil Days in Kaunas

2011-05-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

In Lithuania, the Devil is a symbol of luck.
They even have a museum dedicated to the pointy-tailed little trouble-makers.
In living rooms of hamlet homes across the countryside, you might find the common crucifix, or painted icons of the Big J-fish shafted to make room for his tireless enemy-
The Diabolical El Diablo.
Surrounding yourself with demons is believed to actually defend you from evil forces, protect you and bring you prosperity through your toils.
If so, after last weekend, I must be the luckiest man alive.

Wandering neck-deep through the maze of a medieval circus, the festival known as Hansa Days, wading through the mayhem to grab a snapshot of this silversmith, or that gallows slave, relishing it in raucous fun, I suddenly realised it was all too much.
It was time to get serious.
Or, at least get down to some serious paint gargling.
Turps tasting.
Tipping down the slippery cylindrical sewers.
Time to get rockin’ down to rock bottom.
So I hid the camera and wiped away any stains of professionalism from my lips, and sauntered out to take-on the sins of the city.
And who else to help me, I figured, than a couple of Swedes I had recently acquainted.
“We just flew here from Stockholm. We came to watch a football game. We know nothing of this country.”
“Is that so?” I questioned the couplet, Swedish to their stereotypical goatees, “well, we’d better get started then.”

Cleaning our brains free of memory, we began the bender in the afternoon.
Moods were perky, each of us an island, soaking in the sights, solitary though collectively enjoying the scenes passing by.
Two beers sank in like massage oil.
Four slipped in like sandals on butter.
Ten crashed in tolling like the Titanic.
Speech patterns were speeding, slowing, ebbing, rowing, as the Swedes began conversing in what appeared to be Tongues.
Nightfall was whipping upon us, and we could hear the panpipes picking up from the park.
Busy digesting a mixture of potatoes, bacon, sour cream and mystery mush, the neat meat ovals of the national dish, known as ‘Cepelinai’

(which translates roughly as Ded Zeppelins) we lost count of the beer tally as it juggernauted into double digits.
Already by this point, I was becoming aware of those pitchforked little dragonflies buzzing around my scalp, whispering, waiting…
But I didn’t care.
“Come on, let’s find out where this music’s comin’ from”
We skedaddled our sloppy selves out to the park.
Orienteering past pods of Middle Ages maidens, safely cushioned by our own Age of Darkness, we found our way to an opening.
Fairylights or fireflies, stage lights and cigarettes, wheeled through our vistas as if from a long-exposure photo.
We focused our three dououblle viiiisions upon the centre stage.

Spiders in your eyes
Plotting to catch the flies
Build a bed
Of wicker net
And catch them by surprise

“what was that??” I span to ask the Swedes- I forgot they had left to discover the country one portaloo at a time.
I was alone.

Bouncing on the trampoline
Trying to see above your dreams
Rip the net
Break the bed
And douse it all in gasoline

“WHO IN THE HELL KEEPS SAYING ALL THIS??”
I was teetering, wavering from angle to gangly angle, with not a soul in my periphery.
Suddenly, the Swedes swept in out of the night. Bjorn was shaking his hands in disgust of the amenities, and the other laughing at something else entirely.
“Man, are you watching this band?? They’re incredible!”

Medieval Rammstein were hammering away upon a gong. Four tattooed bagpipers couldn’t work together to make the instrument look tough. But yet, somehow, their screeching hornet cacophony wielded some kind of eerie semblance to the Darth Vader death march...
I scoffed, about to resound some no-doubt redundant commentary, when-

The desperate silent chants
Of the drowning, helpless man
Breathe the bubbles
Curse your troubles
And reincarnate as an ant

My eyes roamed around savagely, searching for any enemies.
“Dude, you look concerned about something.” My friend Bjorn consoled me. “Have summa this whiskey and shut up.”
Ahh, whiskey. The devils maple syrup.
Splashed upon the pancakes of my mind, I figured it was worth it, if only to let HIM worry about anything else tonight.
Ggggglug…
I went to pass back the bottle, but horny Bjorn, the greedy Swede, had begun serenading another maiden.
Well, another sip should stop these badly written sonnets shooting round my skull.
Ahhh. And as I held the bottle up to my pursing lips, draining a slug, all was okay, then—slip a dee do da, turning, spiralling, what, sinking, PUSHED BACK INTO MY SELF, consciousness changing, ripping off into nowhere, out unto the backroads, WHA- AAAAAhhhhhHHHHHH….*

(A ream of technicolour puke burst from his oesophagus. He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his flannelette shirt. When he craned his neck back into normal position, a ghastly glow had come over what used to be his face. He had left the building. Jimmy Blue smiled and struck a match)

“Dude, pass that whiskey up!” Horny Bjorn demanded. “Dude, what’s goin’ on?”

Jimmy Blue gazed absently at the brooding Swedish chops in front of him.
A smile flickered on to his hairy gob like the Grinch.
“You know what’d look good on you? One a’these!!”
Jimmy Blue threw a vagrant right fist to rendezvous with Bjorn’s golden jaw.
Bjorn staggered backward, clutching at his face.
His nose had begun to piss blood, and he called out in confusion;
“Who the fuck are you??”
Jimmy Blue tap-danced an Irish jig- then went up close to breathe his whiskey bedevilled breath into Bjorn’s defenceless nostrils.
“I’m Jimmy Blue. You know that movie, ‘The Mask’, with Jim Carrey? Well, for Jimmy Blue, the mask is booze,” he snatched the whiskey from the Swede, and hopped upon his shoulders, shouting, “AND JIMMY BLUE WANTS TO RIDE THESE SWeDISH SLOPES!!! YEEEHA!”
Here he jumped down, and bounded off into the crowd.

(For documentaries sake, the last scenes of violence and shoulder hopping did not actually take place. But Jimmy Blue did appear [for reference as to who is Jimmy Blue, and what he wants to do to you, check Day 12], and to prove it, here are snippets out of his conversations until the end of the night)

“Who’s sitting here? Your boyfriend?
“What town am I from??” spit “CZECHOSLAVAKIA!”
“How many flowers are on your blouse?”
“One thousand? You say ONE BILLION?”
”Are you calling her fat? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME??”
“Seventeen? Hell, that’s legal.”

And so on. Black spots revisited- Again.

And once again, again, again, before the dawn raised its gruesome mug, Jimmy Blue vanished, leaving me with the dirty sandpaper mouth I deal with today. The Devils I tells ya- THE DEVILS. It had absolutely nothing to do with innocent old me.

Day 13. Hanseatic Daze

2011-05-25T08:02:00.001-07:00

As told by the nameless, homeless coma patient, waking up years before he was born.

My eyes shoot open to a coffee-coloured ceiling.
What is this? Something smells like diarrhoea.
Around me are scattered obscene torture devices; poles, magnifiers, banners, clamps.
What year is this? The sounds of yodelling drift in through the wooden window.
My dozy eyes begin to focus, and I cast my pooling gaze round an archaic settee;
Blinds of twine, sheets of bramble, a whole gallery of hocus-pocus medicines and a glass jar of leeches blocking the door as a choc.
Is this still Lithuania?
In stiff exertion, I rip the IV from my arm, the catheter from my arse.
Blimey! Slimy.
Leeches gather, sucking squeakily on the edge of the jar closest to me like tiny tadpoles.
They are watching.

Turning myself off my side, my body creaks like the opening of an ancient sarcophagus. How long was I lying here? Crumbly, off-smelling bandage around my forehead, I lurch like a mummy over to the window frame, and lunge my head outside.

Oh dear.

Either I’m in a sanatorium for severe delusions, or I’ve awoken in a different dimension.

Skinny cattle wander by unsupervised, sun shooting between their legs like the flickers of an old movie projector. Bovine belches and permeating odours suffocate the scenery, but I can’t shut my foggy eyes. Beyond the farm animals, turrets of smoke cough their way into the air, the chaos caused by smouldering barbeques. Around these fry-ups dance a collective chimera of weirdos; battalions hiding beer-bellies in suits of armour, slaves screaming from metal stocks, pelt salesmen happily bargain hunting with the whores, jolly jesters pestering a priest.

Judging by the clothing, the headgear, the gastrointestinal drifts in the air; I’ve woken up in either the Middle Ages, World War Six, or some breed of costumed fair.
The afternoon’s shadow is stretching its way out along the cobblestones; I lean out to try and decipher the situation more fully lit, then flip! My wonky hospital bedded body flops through the frame, and plonks me out on to a scabby patch of grass between the mud and the daisies outside.
I pick up my bones and assess this new world;
The plucking of lutes, boiling pans of goose meat, coquettish damsels coveted by cocky princes, potatoes sizzling to the side, and a town drunkard yells dirty proclamations.
Some kind of village festival is turning these peasants into crazed rabble!

Arms were uplifted, clutching torches, pitchforks and digital cameras (?). The crowd were circulating around a hubbub I could only hear, but not see a wink of...
Clashes of metal on metal.
The wild cries of hogs in pain.
Squeals from the bowels of bagpipes.
Fearful bellowing in Lithuanian language.
“Maybe the euros collapsed their economy,” I thought logically, “Maybe it’s not what it seems…”

I climbed a background mound, forehead throbbing behind disintegrating bandages, to gain a proper vantage point.
“ENCHANTMENT!” I yelled it, willing the cease of my hallucinations, these unstoppable scenes before me. “NECROMANTICS!”

Not a soul from the crowd turned to look at this wacko on the hill. The vision for them, two knights in full armour, clanking it out against one another, silver sumos with swords, facing off and spraying out sand, as a jester ran amok, spitting limericks, was apparently more than enough.

Members of the rabble, hob-nosed and pecan-eared, swore unfathomable curses for the destruction of whichever valorous hero their bets were lodged against.
In a 2:1 clean sprawl, it was a clear gambit; I had to escape.
But to where?
I snuck through a sewer pipe, nostalgically reminding me of long nights in London, until grimy and slime-covered, like mornings in London, I burst unto the daylight, which streamed over the city walls as if from a waterfall of liquid quartz.
In stealth, I hurried up a makeshift path, perplexed at where to turn.
A clip-clop of horses trotted toward me, yet unseen. I slipped down a side street, the vibraphone thump of my heart nearly giving it all away.
The gutters skirting my fateful alley held me tight within them, bouncing me along like a ball in bumper bowling.
Upon the fortress wall, a giant mosaic of Medusa, or a hippogriff, or some medieval monster, face twisted in a gruesome growl, startled me to my knees.
Donk- They hit against the cobbles, ricocheting, crick-crack, like a couple of eggs, so long had they been strapped and dormant in the hospital bed.
A pained yelp burst from my guts, betraying me.
Movement sounded from both directions; I had been caught out.
The feathered codpiece of a guard appeared at one end of the alley- and as I span to run toward the river the other way, a platoon of the rat-mothers blocked me off.
I was done for.
Suddenly, I caught her reflection in Medusa’s glare;

A bountiful maiden, combing her silken hair, perched atop her second story balcony. She beckoned me to her sultry side.
Her locks of brunette unfurled, cascading down into my awaiting claws- and as the flurry of primped-up mercenaries prepared to maul me, I scrambled up the locks like a nimble squirrel, up up to her scalp upon the balcony.
Puffing gritty lungs out to the maiden, I raised my shaky digits to thank her-
And her face turned the texture of a scouring pad- she HISSSSSED; her eyes redder than the pisspots of Mars. As I felt and looked for the silken locks between my fingers, I cried;
“SNAKES!”
Cobras were stretching out around my broken body, coiling into my soiled pants and parts. In a flop and a flash I dived from the balcony, into the army of the awaiting guards.
They carried me like a corpse between their codpieces, back to the festivities; and this time, I was the central show-piece; with my neck locked into gallows.

An executioner bit down on a two-by-four, splitting the plank into a shower of splinters.
I was sweating out meatballs.
He drew closer, raising his glinting axe blade to the grimy sky; it flew toward me.
I slammed my eyes shut and dreamed of the pretty maiden, before the snakes, and of all the pretty maidens back on planet earth…
SLICE.
In movie special effects, the sluicing, juicing splitting sound, the quick click of a paper cut, of a dropped melon, of a burst balloon, is what would have been heard.
My head rolled out into the basket positioned underneath.
The crowd erupted into glee, their hungry teeth gnashing in yellow unison, as my basket was carried away.
The bandages had slipped off me now, exposing the ditches in my forehead.
Lobotomy chop-marks?
Maybe it explains it all…
Then, in a blur of colour, I could feel my basket tipped; I was tumbling, rolling headfirst, and headonly, down the rivulets of a corrugated rooftop, along with another couple of curious decapitants (Swedes, I figured), until the three skulls plopped into the compost of an animal trough.
The executioner craned his neck and exposed his malformed tonsils, cackling up to the great new moon.
He pulled back his leg, and in one final insult he kicked me like a porcupine.
I flew up through the air until finally smacking down into a pile of pig-shit.

From here I could watch what would surely be my last;
A pair of muddy piglets, racing toward me, fear in their beady eyes- as a couple of gigantic (human) beasts chased them to the pen where my head lay, waiting to be devoured.
Closer, closer they tore, until they were feasting upon my scalp, tearing it to pieces with their tiny piglet teeth, chomping and gouging and ouching every centimetre of what was left of the already banged up head… and a curtain came over my vision, ‘that’s all folks’, and off I beggared, descended into a dreamless sleeping infinity.

*
As morning rose once more, I grappled for my neck. Still connected? Yes, just! Margarita and the Swedes (of who we will hear more later.) were looking sheepish, straggling and conversing in the hostel reception.
“Did you see those pig races yesterday?” I cracked into peals of laughter, nearly splintering my jaw like the executioners two-by-four, “Damn near thought we’d travelled back in time.”

Day 12. Press Play

2011-05-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Rumours are True, about Jimmy Blue, and What he Wants to Do to You...

Wow. In Vilnius’ veritable harem, Play, you’d better get yourself a hallpass, because there is something going on. If you do, and are also equipped with proper credentials such as no sense of shame and a bad set of sideburns, then clamber down the stairs, and let the show begin.

This is a story about a guy, if you can call an abominable creature a ‘guy’, I can claim to know, named Jimmy Blue.
Jimmy Blue is a late-night howler, who storms around the valleys of vice with a brainfull of mixed nuts.
Jimmy Blue walks, gawks and spaces out just like I do. But he is not me.
Jimmy Blue occupies the hours when I am sleeping, shelved away in the backroads of consciousness, where my jars of morals, routines and sensibilities stand collecting dust on the bedside table.
Jimmy Blue likes to smash these jars when I am not watching.
Jimmy Blue is a vandal.
The things which Jimmy Blue says and does cannot be repeated in the presence of God-fearing folks- so that’s why I need to tell you.
Jimmy Blue is a viper.
The only times I meet Jimmy Blue is when I awake with the headache he left me. Here we have crossed over; he passes the baton and expects I can carry on a productive day, after our rendezvous has levelled me to the mattress.
Jimmy Blue has a sickness which cannot, by means of medical science, be cured.
His symptoms are as such; a rising feeling of frenzy when guitar lines begin to grind. A loss of inhibitions, motor functions and wallet inhabitants once green lights start to lume. A giddy greed for sipping Sooey Ciders as the midnight moon dips into tomorrow.
Jimmy Blue is a masochist.
And Jimmy Blue likes to say, “The party’s jeeest getting started…”

Last night, Jimmy Blue went out walking underneath the neon rainbow. His jacket, leather, was zipped up to his dingo’s grin and his beady, iridescent eyeballs.
Jimmy slowed his pace- what was this sound he was hearing?

Bump, bump, bump.

Jimmy covered his mouth with his putrid palms. His sickness was coming on.

Bump, bump, bump.

The bassline was as heavy as a slave’s iron chains. Jimmy started to writhe and giggle.
Suddenly, the doors flew open! Out paraded a bevy of exquisite Baltic booties, all gung-ho on turning Jimmy’s mind to liquid.
His mortal enemies.
Jimmy knew fate was against him. His teeth were chattering.
He outstretched his quivering hand-
“Do you mind if I bum a cigarette?”
“Sure!” Her grape-lacquered fingernails were decorated with tiny fish.
Pulsating fantasies were swimming through Jimmy’s skull.
“And what do you do with yourself?” He managed to spit out in a moment of lucidity.
“I’m studying to be an interior designer.”
“Oh!” -started a shell-shocked Jimmy, doing his best to block himself from mentioning anything to do with designing her interior.
He hurried away from the subject.
“I like your earrings.”
“Thanks! My friend made them for me. See, one’s a boy, and this one’s a girl. They’re sheep!”
They were indeed, the shepherd’s boon themselves.
“Remarkable…” Jimmy Blue had transformed into an astro-physicist, so deeply was he entranced in studying the two sheep, and the quizzical blonde brow which lay pleasantly stretched between them.

Bump, bump, bump.

“Say, that sounds like my song!” -lied Jimmy Blue. “Shall we? Let’s go deck out this interior.” He held out his bony arm, breathing heavily.
“Okay!” She grabbed his outstretched appendage and guided him through the pinball machine maze of black stockings, knee-high boots and tank-tops, and in through the flapping door- a couple of moth monsters to the dance-floor flame.

Bump, bump, bump.

The door swung shut behind them, nearly smacking Jimmy’s arse as he entered- and the less said about what went on behind closed doors, the better.

All I know is this; Jimmy Blue stumbled outta there at dawn, dejected and depressed as his name suggests, and hobbled on up the long lonely hill home.
I haven’t caught a glimpse of him today, but if I do, I’ll beat the bedbugs outta him, for leaving me with this horrible hell of a hangover.

Day 11. Kalvariju Markets (as Captured by the Eye of the Fly)

2011-05-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

Out front the crumbled yellow gates, a haggard old lady stands bagging radishes from a bucket. Her offsider, a narrow, coily character suckles on a thin cigar.
A wheelchaired cripple, legs vamoosed, stumps before the kneecaps, tries his chances on the charity of passers by.
Upon entering Kalvariju, an odour of raw meat slaps you in the jaw like a fish.
A multicoloured umbrella shading a dispute over a bag of onions nearly falls, and in a tsunami the bulbs tumble out on to the asphalt, and roll their way to pooling puddles.
An ancient face carved into rivers of wrinkles approaches you, begging incomprehensible, or asking inane queries, and another, a Roma, smile gilded by a golden tooth, selling plastic bags, begins searching for a surcharge.
Beastern European men, shotgun blasts resonate from out their stares, wily fashion criminals, coated in army camouflage, stained shorts, questionable morals, storm troop around the edges.

Pumpkin salesmen and shoe repairers quibble, to sell or to fix, which?
The elderly women in headdresses- headscarves of electric pinks, plum purples, fresh painted fence whites, tied tight around melancholic expressions, hiding the crops of grey follicles underneath, sell fruits of various qualities and ancestry.
Leather jacketed couples meander by, sniffing at the pastries cooking on the boiling hot plates, tempted, suspicious, onwards.
The clouds are pestering, thumping a passage of rain on the ramshackle tin, a raisin coloured dog snuffles around footfalls, and ponds of water splash in a sloppy symphony.
Hooded raincoats of luminescent green appear. Slapdash baskets filled with plants and potted meat swing about all over, held tight in clasped grips.
Mouths masticate bargaining chips, down tambourine alley, teeth stained, but symbolically happy, curved into crescents.
The broom salesman stands tired, her arms unmoving, her face an old butter mill, always churning what’s inside.

Housing block homesteads filled from these possessions; mouldy computer keyboards, Russian records, Snoopy dolls, wooden spoons, candlabras, Albanian push-up bras, plastic toy racecars, race-tracks, fish tanks, cups with cracks, a beard, two curious eyes peering out, filled to the brim with a portion o’ port, which hovers forcefully by his side, guiding him, claiming reason with a clamp.
Dangling strings of mushrooms tied one by one like necklaces of Arabic jewels, sapphires, emeralds, fungus, hang spooling from stall lattice, all swaying in unison to the weather, as if shuffling to a samba.
Bundles of flower buds- and a deflowered darkness; a heavy-built man shouldering a heavier-built sack, hearty scars indenting his brow, hard-luck stories one over his nose, two on his chin, tales of blood and deceit. Walking laps, one, three; stops; now inter-coursing with a thin, long-haired sheepherder, a rustic, biblical one, riding a rusted bike.
A meeting of brown shoes and grey jacket- He picks up her shopping bags and plants a kiss unto her furry cheek. Another pair- A hug- One carries candles, the other pink violets. Combed wig wanders past, silver Elvis in a plaid spangled sports jumper. Overweight straw seller giving the crow’s eye to a creepy couple, still the broom salesman stands dormant, shade falling over her features- maybe she is wandering into slumber.
Colourful Chinese spinning wheels turning at velocity as the wind rises a gear, long legs upon high-heels, dimples, a sea of denim flashes by, whoosh, jars of beetroot, the smell of cooked chicken, an argument, the fish salesman and his protegee discuss sturgeon over sandwiches.
World’s Biggest Melon for loan, 200 percent off, skin sagging over the eyes of the depleted.
Brown leather- all the rage, perhaps machine-gun warehouses nearby?
Toothless grin, lettuce leaves flutter as a jet roars above, the frau with the tickling ponytail, swish in pink headband and blue umbrella, pointy as a sickle, the pigeons, feeding, the puddles, breeding, cigarette butts like boats in their floating quietness. And there! The meeting place of the equally disenfranchised, a collective lighter lit, laughter, but no photos.
The purple parka bursts through the mob, pummelling along to the meat man. Who will finally buy this huge pumpkin? She looks shocked nobody wants to fork out for her phoney merchandise, her lumps of lacy undergarments, people want radishes, potatoes, not randy robes, the pastry chef smokes fat cigars, coughing throughout, a Roma woman bellows ‘PRIMADONNA’ and her sidekick in woollen vest giggles approvingly.
All the sunglasses on the shaky rack reflect grey skies through their missing pupils, a fart like a warthogs honk, licks upon the air, women are gathering faster than the pigeons now, squawking, the man in a cream cap pulls out a fresh Soviet-style smoke, sucks it down, embers redhot, matching the caskets of tomatoes marching past, the multicoloured umbrella folded now, put away in tight tarpaulins, the stick salesman, her headware purple, plump cheeks a similar shade, sold not a stick today, the pumpkin, unbought? Crates of strawberries shoved into bigger boxes and into trucks off to feed granny’s grateful children by dinner tables under low wooden rooves, as daddy accepts the thought of getting back up early to hock the potates, to waver out underneath the bonnet, tomorrow dawning, beat the rush before eight, never too late, and the smoke from his quietly noble cigarette leaps to the evening like an exhalation of phantoms, out to meet their fate.

Day 10. Unkl John and the Soviet Saddle

2011-05-17T11:15:00.000-07:00

Today, let us toast a man who throughout his already long history has dived far deeper into the kaleidoscopic flies eye of the Universal Questions than many can or ever will; one who trekked through the deserts on literary ramblings; quested over hillsides as a Magpie Maniac; and headed out into blazing hemispheres if only just to knock on a door.
Well, it’s how I see him anyhow- even if this next incident, as set up by a long line of his twisting fortuities, led to my strife and near ruin.
He is my great Unkl Arunas, or John, and his ‘impact’ upon my time in Lithuania has already been quite literal…and it’s all to do with a faulty bike frame.
*
The painful procedure began at the house of a blonde Baltic cousin of mine, or perhaps she is an aunt, it is impossible to truly tell. A few weeks ago, she took me into the womb of her hospitality and home- days after the umbilical cord of my stable German existence was snapped.
Covered in the fervent placenta of my hopes and wishes, I had tossed myself blindly unto a new beginning, a fresh life, out here in Vilnius, and she, my cousin aunty, surrogated me into it slow.
Her womb stood out beside a rocky turnip farm, next to the lonely woods where tribes of homeless locals had built huts, surviving the summers on scrub mushrooms and scavenging for wildflowers which they later would sell in the city centre. Out here, between the habitats of woodpeckers, dogs and the destitute, sat the unlikely monument to comfortable lifestyle, which my cousaunt had nicknamed ‘home’.

I arrived one chilly April afternoon, treading through the trapdoors awaiting me in her treacherous parking station, and glided gradually to her glowing sill.
I sprang my pinky upon the buzzing clitoris beside her doorway. Ringaling! In a gush of movement, the labial curtains of the manor were thrust open, and this filthy baby, clutching his breast and his backpack, was guided into the peace and security of the inner sanctum.
It was white washed- like the interior of a freezer- though planted with tasteful throw-rugs, flower pots and picture frames, Atlases and brickish novels on mountaineering (the co-owner of the womb room, her husband, was a daredevil mountain climber, set upon the goal of climbing the five highest peaks of the former Soviet Republic).
Being here, I echoed the feeling of having scaled massive heights.
Here in the womb, I was sweating.
Either the heating was at volcanic temps, or I was simply longing for freedom from this chamber, suffocating.
My cousaunt lathered upon me glistening meats, syrupy wines, a smorgasbord of dripping tapas and temptations, and I thought I was lost in the gullies of comfort for a thousand years.
The heating in the room, mixed with the influx of wine, caused a schism in my system- booze going in, sweat flowing out- and it became necessary to flee, for me to travail out to the natural light, away from inside my warm cradle-
To be reborn and find my floppy feet in this new world alone.

Sorry, though not sad to see me go, my cousaunt first helped alleviate my fears of tramping down the long road out of the forest by foot.
“Come, you must borrow, borrow, borrow.”
Unknown relatives are some of the friendliest family you can ever know. Or never know.
Either way, it was all happening.
Taking me down to the bunker of her garage, she introduced me to the family slut; Loose Lucy. The bicycle.
My heroine on two-wheels.
The reason I tack to her these most unfortunate and insulting moniker had to do with her absolute usefulness rather than any lack of moral fortitude. She was a loyal, fierce force of metal, and she had done many family members before me proud, the last of whom was Unkl John.

During travels some time ago, accompanied not by his lovely wife, but with the sterling spokes of Loose Lucy, Unkl John had disappeared into the sparse green countryside of Lithuania, for many months without a sighting.
It was rumoured he had moved in with moose-men.
Upon his eventual return, my Unkl, now skirting 70, was asked by nosy relatives in angst as to his whereabouts, to which his prompt response had been,
“I swallowed a wasp and was struck by lightening, twice.”
Fair enough.
And a feasible answer; much politer than “Mind your own business.”
And all this time- whether it was her steely handlebars which had attracted the fateful electrical bolts, or if she had SAVED him from further strife- Loose Lucy had been by his side.

Now she by mine, as I sat upon her saddle.
"Woooahh, little doggy."
I waved adieu to my kindly cousaunt, and took to the pebbly roadways.
At first, Loosey was a breeze; a kindly waif, not making me peddle faster than necessary, so I could still sample the scenery, and make my way untempered.
But then I felt it; The planets were not aligned, between this bike and I.
Something was awry in the workings of Lucy- my tailbone was being tampered with.
I realised I was rocking a lot more than I should, even for riding on a path carved from dry rye bread. I tried to ignore it, this rraaattttetttt-alin’ in my brrrrrrrr-a—aaaaaaaaaaaain.
I tried by standing, to keep myself raised- then after a kilometre, like a feisty mule, she bit back-
The seat of Loose Lucy began to wobble, then to circumnavigate itself sideways, then to rock and rumble like a mechanical bullock, and I, the wobbly rodeo rider, slumped over the handlebars, and tried to steer onwards.
"WOOOOOAAAAAHH LITL DOGGY!!!"
Panic sank in. What was wrong with this accursed invention?
Lucy was behaving erratic as a teeny on tablets, spitting gravel whichever way she pleased, and making her saddled rider lunge about, wuh, wooo, wah, performing the hooplah of a spastic circus spider.
And then the bullock hopped it up a gear.
Her seat spinning wildly now, round like a helicopter rotor, flipping and flopping- she finally gave up the ghost.
The seat snapped forward in an almighty slap, the bucking of the stubborn bitches last battle, and I brayed to the trees and to kingdom come, flew through the air, and came down amid the steam of intersection exhaust, on to my temple.
CRUNCH.
Splayed over the zebra crossing like roadkill, dazed, somewhere in the foggy distance I could hear them; the haunting calls of the moose-men.
meeeeep, meeeeep, meeeeeeeep...
Like flies around me, they bleeped and blared. But as I raised myself to haunches I relaised, the moosemen were nothing but the angry bleatings of automobiles.
I grabbed the squeaky slut, and wheeled her from the roadway.
“What in the hell is wrong with you, Lucy, you stressed out mamma?” I called out in vexation at her rough treatment.
I came up close, my red flag raised. What could be the problem?
I focused my eyes; the bolts beneath her seat springs were truly, as her namesake suggests, terribly loose. Who would leave a contraption in such a dangerous state?
And the answer stared back at me in vague recollection.
Unkl John.

As my fine Unkle is a stringent anti-copyrighter writer, offering up the marvels of his mind without asking warrant or a license, I think he will not mind me sampling a few of his words here; used only to explain the ORIGIN of all these problems with Loose old Lucy.

After a week of wondering what the hell had happened to this claptraption, by fate of forwarding I discovered THIS email, linking the troubles back to my fabled Unkl. Then I realised! It wasn't I who Lucy had bitten, but he, and right on the arse as well:

Subject: Bike trip – by Arunas Zizys

“We have found an internet point in this rather small (but with cultural pretentions) town - Sirvintos. Here is the log of the trip so far. Im sending this report to Aiste (its her bike) & to Vaidas (we are only 20k south of Rimeisiai) too. Yesterday about 20kz out of Vilnius it became apparent that the bicycle seat wasnt suitable for me & my BUM was getting progressively more painfull. Before doing a longer ride you should always do a shorter one of about 20kz befor you can know if the seat is suitable but i didnt have the opportunity to have done so. I knew from previous experience that if I get deep seated bruising ON THE BUM thats the end of the trip but we had no alternative except to go on to Maisegala where I hoped to find a bike service place to buy a new seat:instead we found a depressing small town with the only cafe closed down and derelict and plenty of unemployed youths with, apparently nothing to do other than stand about looking vacant and sometimes drinking beer. There was no bike service available so we had to continue on to here with my ARSE too painfull to allow me to apreciate the scenery along the Senaji (old) Ukmerges road. With diversions weve ridden about 60ks in my case most of it in pain. Fortunately we found a bike shop here where I was able to replace my seat with a cheap (15Lt) old soviet style seat which I was warned could fall apart at any time but at least its soft and on springs. However I find this morning after a sleapless night that i have two swellings on either side of me BUM about the size of chook eggs and I can feel a degree of deeper bone bruising. So we are trapped here 20ks short of Rimeisiai hoping that by tomorrow or the next day the swelling subsides and the bruising is only superficial. Another serious problem: Ive discovered that Andrius, having led a blameless life and therefor in possession of a clear conscience, sleeps like an innocent child except that he snores continuously, loudly, and in an extraordinary variety of ways always unpredictable. Under even the most favourable conditions I am a light sleeper and once awake find it difficult to fall asleep again. It is clear to me I cannot share a room with Andrius ever again. It took much negotiating skill to find another place for tonight without PAYING THROUGH THE NOSE (Andrius has agreed to sleep on a sofa on a DIFFERENT FLOOR) so we still pay for only one overprised (80Lt:40 OZ $$: approx 24euros) room. However the new accomodation is beutifully situated by the side of the lake & a park with much statuary. Incidently there is a bar here which operates 24 hours a day ('GERIMAY VISA PARA - 24 VALANDAS')! Im going to visit the collingwoodfc.com.au site to gloat over the 1point victory over THE DOGGIES - might help fix me arse up quicker.”

Thank you my dear Unkl. For futures sake, I pray there is never a moment where I must borrow your car- as it will no doubt ricket the already ruptured radiator of my insides into a messy pulp- but it would always make for some damn fun stories.

Day 9. Euro(Blurred)Vision

2011-05-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

(The song contest, as called by a World War Two era horse race commentator, messed up on memories and blind from staring into the sun).

The starting gates were loaded, (just like the pistols pointed at the skulls of the lads down in Luxembourg), the sirens were about to wail (Just like the wanton cries of the sleeping children awakened by the air raid sCREAMS) and every independent nation and his six-legged dog was out here tonight, to claim VICTORY (just like the masked MAdonnas in the Warsaw windows)…YESIREE, any cat with a bad case a clap and a tent fulla talent was waiting for the whistle to shovel their home soil into the backa the winnin' bulldozer...
AND THEY’RE OFF!! Serbia, in all her sixties swing was seeming sturdy, built like an iron maiden and rousing the dead like Iron Madchen, while Slovenia, oh, they’re on the return with a crate full of unchecked cargo, could be machine guns? Pharmaceuticals? No, it’s just a grab-bag a good solid strangeness! A late scratch from Scotland meant all the kilted bets were CANCELLED, folks, sent off to the bleedin’ Moors...
The faggot from Finland has taken a breezy lead, bursting into first, a jarring spectacle for all audience members with less than three beers underneath their belts- an underwhelming ode to protection of the planet, which makes you wonder why we should bother at all, but LOOK! Coming up the side, sidling along like a Siamese nightmare, the Irish midget twins are running in fast as the streams outta old Kilkenny! A bonafied couple of Oompa Loompa spawn, making a break, checking their make-up, sprinting and splashing their way free from oblivion, but OOHH, they didn’t quite make it… wot’s THIS? A series of skeletons from Sweden, parading out as the repetitive soundtrack to the end of the Mayan calendar, 12, 11, 10, nine, NOW, the end, THE END, the FINALE of taste as we know it, annnnd they’re angled outta there, bundled to the bottom by Brits with better haircuts, toupees torn from the feathers of the fabled Phoenix herself, singing forgettable boy-band bland sandpaper grating this ol’ commentators weary wrinkles RIGHT OFF the side-a his gob. Touching television viewers in places cold enough to earn them arrest warrants, HERE COMES LITHUANIA! On their biggest break since the clattering fall of the iron curtain rods, there she goes! Her viking flavoured, smelting pots of opera shooting UP into the moon and promptly EXPLODING upon impact, sending out the shards to anyone at home, anyone still hoping to hear, OH, causing cataclysms to earthly ear-drums, but never to worry! Affected badly by nuclear radiation, Moldavian lawn gnomes, now unshrinking, have launched ahead, hats the size of human children, a white fairy peddling a unicycle, the best use of a woman on one-wheel since Rollerskate Annie, the one-legged pornstar, rolled her way into the record books nearly twenty years ago…but it’s not over yet folks, because here comes ITALY! The spaghetti sucking saxophonists are lulling their way into poll position, but NO!! It’s CAAN’T BE!!
By a nostril, edging the twenty-four remaining countries back to the brink of bloodshed, the WINNER! First place, the memorable performance by J-Lo's gypsy cousin, straight outta the grenadine gutters of downtown…(what the hell is the capital of Azerbaijan?) and straight on to the commercial radio of our fruitless hearts, to spin and spin on and on and on and on and off into the night……….

(Our ancient commentator hyperventilates; his aides slap him back into reality, and the bets are tabulated while an advertisement break blares. A couple of Valium later he returns to recap the events gone by).

Ah, yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.
What a breath-stealing performance to be sure, out here under the Düsseldorf smoggggg tonight. A more terrible waste of talent was not found during the Japanese tsunami, or outta a bag of sliced salami, or down the rivers of ol’ Killarny. But at least it would've been a stomping-good party for the three people who live in Ajebaijan or whichever was the damned no-good kraut crackin’ country who won.
(He drags upon a Cuban).
So much politics, so little reason.
(His brow grows shaded, as if clouds are passing above him).
You don’t know what I’ve seen, out by the fields of Dresden…Women BURNT into plastic chairs, melted to the sidewalk, I RAKED OFF THEIR BONES…but, the battle is over now, the war has subsided, the winners set sail on their sea of victory, out here under the storms of eurovision….
(He transforms cheerful, suddenly, mechanically, his head lifting upwards at superhuman speed, displaying a smile ghostly for the ages, scaring all those in reaching vicinity to his mic).
As for Lithuania, what a ride hey folks? If Poland hadn't given Lithuania those twelve lil votes, there would have been blood poured in these city streets. But thankfully, they did, and the only thing poured out HHEEEERE tonight, was way too many beverages.
(Here he became thoughtful. Not sure if he was slipping into a spasm or a stroke, his aides ran out with fresh water. He jolted the well-wanters aside, splashing his H2o over the console, and began to hum melodically, soft, as sparks of electricity circled him, radiated him, like a halo, and then his voice slipped into the wave rhythms of late-night love song dedication hosts, and his arms raised to the ceiling).
Whoever won the race, whichever country they may have hailed from, wartorn, corrupt or backwards as they might well be, the real winners were found, not in the bottom of cereal boxes, not in the neon grandstands, no. But here, (he taps at his chest with a fist) out in the squares of Vilnius old town. There they waltzed, the real winning performers, out by the fountains, staring into hazel coloured eyes as the sun rose rudely up over the parched hills, a grinning gaggle of anonymous heroes, members of the USSR- the Universal Self-Annihilating Shitheads Republic- And may their gods have mercy on us all.

Day 8. Surfing Out to See the Sharks

2011-05-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

*A buoy bouncing out on the sleazy seas to the Expo Centre (of the Universe)

Already an emotional wasteland after a long-distance feud, over the intangible battleground of skype, I was running late to attend the grey suit and sharp teeth event of the month; the 2011 Baltic Real Estate Forum.
As business writer for a regional rag (potty training puppies from Tallinn to Trakai), it is occasionally expected I suck in my downtroddy demeanour and sock out my sunken peepers to don a blazer and attend these rallies intended for the stock-market-hearted. These events are usually social soirees, chin-wag and chick-chat opportunities for members of similar shit-talking sectors. Here they can meet and greet and gossip and glow in the gloss of next week’s funny papers, after the jerk from the local press immortalises them squinting, hungover or with frosty coffee remnants hanging from the corners of their lips. (Jerks, eg, me, or any other of those corrupt press cronies I call my comrades, who will attend myriad of these listless and boring events to score a cheap angle and a free lunch).

So I was late, and owning neither tie nor car tires, I made do with my second-hand scraps and dressed in a frenzy. Even the iron was hurriedly busted out- a sighting in my household as exotic as seeing the Aurora Borealis in the bathroom- to perform miracles on a musty blue workshirt in seconds.
Evil magnets were spiralling to extend my delay, hiding my socks, toothbrush, and seemingly sucking my sunglasses into some far-reaching dimension.

The real estate conference, the shark tank of tip traders, had begun @ nine, and the clock’s hands were climbing well into the north-west of the hour.
I somehow gathered the skerricks of My Personal Wasteland together, and bustled my squeaking bike out the squealing door. The conference would be on the outlying reaches of Vilnius city, an area where bicycle paths descend into irrigation ditches.
The event was to be held at the Lithuanian Expo Centre, or as it is sometimes called, the Cultural Centre of the Known Universe. Having previously never needed to travel to this pinnacle of creation, used to my happiness in the Periphery of the Known Universe, flying like a rabid flamingo on my 4-speed, I managed to, with difficulty, find myself in a completely different universe than the one I was aiming for.

I was lost- yet somehow not far from the track. Circumvented by daffodil speckled grass knolls- a cute garden piece to the roaring concrete backdrop of highway abutments, bridges and an industrial landscape stretching to Italy- I stared in defeat at my hand-drawn sketch from Google-maps, which could have easily been an extract from Mr Squiggles experiments with methadrone. Groan.
It was time to play the, “Hello, any English,” pathetic non-native game, and try to scramble back on to the trail.
Scanning the settee, I was up the garden path with no prospect. There was nobody to ask for directions. An urgency was filling my insides and I could feel hope starting to wane.
Suddenly! A toothless fatamorgana appeared on the bike paths horizon.
There he was, my decrepit saviour;
Wrapped in a faded ‘MIAMI’ t-shirt and pulling off the best ‘I just woke up under this same bridge’ impression I had seen in hours, he seemed up to the job. Caution to the wind, I screeched my tires halted by his shadow.
“Labas! Sorry, any English?” I bared my teeth so he could see I was serious.
He started backward, and then peered into me; as if at some obscene or disturbing object.
“Where you come from?” he demanded, his shadow encroaching.
I didn’t have the timeaday for pleasantries, but I abated.
“Uh, I’m from Australia.”
“AUSTRALIA??”
“Yes, and I’m really looking for this road…”
“Yes, yes, this is road.”
“Which road is it exactly??” My discomfiture was working its way to a peak.
Mr Miami shifted his stance.
“Do you have paper?” He quizzed me.
I blurred then quickly refocussed,
“A cigarette paper? No, I’m sorry, I don’t think…” I flummoxed around in my pockets with the full knowledge I had none.
“No paper? You are not Australian.” Curt. He began shuffling away into the gassy miasma rising from the melting road tar. Then, in his final triumph, he turned around and in a fiery Litho drawl (remember to accentuate the ‘rrrrrr’ sound) he yelled out,
“Faarrrk you!”
I had no response. I had been told. I didn’t know whether to burst a kidney or into laughter.

So, with no compassionate compass to guide me, I fled off in whichever direction was deemed less deadly at the moment. I peddled the bike down into the irrigation ditches, spinning through sprinkler systems until I stumbled upon the Centre of the Universe.
As for the convention, the free lunch surpassed all expectations a free lunch can have, and served me well into the afternoon. As for anything to do with real estate, or how the event proceedings unfurled, just check the local Baltic paper, and look out for the photos of the grey-suited sharks; squinting, hungover, and with greasy hunks of chicken skin falling down their chins.

Day 7. The Boogaloo.

2011-05-11T11:43:00.001-07:00

According to wise and omniscient online portals, ‘The Boogaloo’ or when fully amped, ‘The Electric Boogaloo,’ was a kind of bizarre human mating ritual, swung by teenage Cubans and tall-talkin' New Yorkers, enacted and originated between the colourful décor of gay Brooklyn dance-floors during the 1960s.
Among the many names and guises The Boogaloo still continues to hide under (including Electrified Eel Belt-Banger and Persian Pack-Rape) it is also, as I realised today, the title scribbled on the front of a scrunched and crumpled napkin, discovered in luck before laundry, lining the grizzly depths of my unwashed brown blazer.
Sentenced to the boondocks of my dresser drawer due to elaborate cloud formations of whiskey, ash and unknowables donning its lapel, the said threads had been nary touched for a month. Not since it last coathangered itself upon my shoulders, to join the invisible posse to where my cousin falsely advertised as “the best club in Lithuania,” on my first ambitious night in the country.
Today, peeling open the corners of the crusty kerchief, amazement hit me as I found a letter within, written to myself; one of those rare bursts of calculated memory, placed in secret to later piece together the panorama of this whole eclectic escapade- from the date of its origins, just over one month ago.
So here ahead, weathered reader, lies the pocket entrails detailing a split second interlude between bad dancing and beer crimes, on a muddy night amid the pleasant concrete playground of the country’s second biggest city. Somehow I squeezed in uninvited by the side of my stork statured cousin, blonde and basketbally, and her two dazed and dazzling comrades. As the three storklets shook their Baltic booties to the beat of bad club favourites from 1997, ‘The Boogaloo’ was born, as this little piggy leant dribbling and visually vomiting over the bar. So here now...

THE BOOGALOO: FIRST NIGHT IN LITHUANIA

"After the bumpiest flight since Apollo 13, I have awakened in new surroundings. Statues of dead poets. High crime rates. The birthplace of my grandmother!
The wind howls Mary outside this Euro tra-chic nightclub here in Kaunas while I, dressed inadequately in soiled Bulgarian dinner jacket and hat made from STRANGE HAIR, hunch over the bar leering (unintentionally) at the bar wenches dressed down in pantless commie soldier duds.
Wait, unintentionally? This is 2011! I leer out of pure wayward curiousity.
How has time passed since the fall of the soviet empire?
Society is now free from the shackles of pants!
Long live the Stalinist slurries. No counter-revolutionary offence meant.
Anyway, back to my lovely grandmother.
(indesiphable mush, then-)
I left, waving in the Frankfurt dawn as the bus exhaust spat fumes into the ripping cavern between us.
Oh why say “Goodbye?”
In Hungarian, “Hello” means goodbye.
If I was Hungarian, and could forever say hello, life would be a continual embracing reunion, rather than the ever-approaching fearful tearful farewells.
…It was imminent, but now over, sweet eyes dripping salt of togetherness out on to the asphalt as we set apart…
(Again, intangible jibber, slowly descending into weepy garbage, then the last line read…)
THE SOVIET BARMAID IS WATCHING… KGB??”

For anybody concerned at how this night ended, you don’t need my input to regale you. It can be replayed at your own pace, in your own home.
Just follow these simple directions;
Self-digest a cauldron of whatever cleaning products line the shelves underneath your sink, blabber at the top of your voice to your cat (as he/she will understand you potentially better than Kaunas natives to a wasted Australian) and indulge in perverse hijinks, such as karate kicking your coffee table, whistling at your window panes, and washing your shoes with whatever falls out of your intestines.
Also, for added re-enactment realism, do the falling down dance to Tutti Frutti and try to digest the pillows of your couch.
In the final step toward replicating perfection, attempt to order a pizza, fail, then pass out only to wake and realise you were lying in a puddle of potato.
Lastly, wash, rinse, shave, and forget anything ever existed.
One month later, open your pocket, and search through the garbage to the goldmine. Bingo. You've done it.
Welcome to ‘The Boogaloo’ my friend.
Black spots revisited.

Day 6. Creature of Habit, or just a Habitual Creature

2011-05-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

Those all-knowing philosophers dubbed ‘they’ say music makes the heart grow tender. As does a severe case of pneumonia or the shingles. Listening to the latest hit shingle from the Pneumonic Sonics, a tenderising shiver blasts not only the unhealthy divets of the pulmonary pipelines, but also sends a shuddering grind through the back annuls of the brain stem.
Groan. “country roads…take me home…” a cover of the song sung by the strumster who left on a jetplane in a fiery pile of embers, Don Jenver. When this lame wind knocks the smoke into your eyes, you really feel something is lost, more important than a kidney, less embarrassing than a shoe.
And here sits bedraggled and gangly older-than-I-should-feel I, gaze floating off into the outside dusk like a kids lost air balloon levitating into electricity wires.

The dizzying sunsets and sunrises which shot off over the plateaus of the last orbital spins gone by have brought along with them some strange and unforseen slivers of strife.
The Autowasher 16 can go fish, the mice can suck on sour worms.
Sadness can pile up upon a human tick-tocker like a soiled sack of washing by only three variables.
Three causes exist to eclipse the world’s son’s sacred hearts; and I’m guessing you could bet your butter on knowing them.

The Three Scrooges: Love, death and pimples.

Not so much pimples, but they do pour plight on any preppys promiscuous park-date promenades. No one wants to pucker up to a sack full of sausage ends pissing out puss. Except of course, freaks.
Yes, FREAKS.

Anyway, nobody died or found themselves pissed on by pimple puss. But rather, a visit from the Girl of the Frangipanis, accompanied soon by the gape of her subsequent departure, blew a few dynamite holes in the fortress of solitude this old sasquatch hides out in.
“oh, here we go, fuckin’ boring pining nonsense,” I can sense the callous crows jeering, “another whimsied wind-bag letting his load loose to the sympathetic search engine squinters.”
But, hold your clucky browser trigger finger, clever clickers!
I'm about to tell you a tale of a different gyp, a muscular spinneret of a story; of sex and survival, a fateful yarn of devils, poison, trapdoors and murder.
Yes, MURDER.

It’s a fortuitous fable of the undone underbelly belly buttons, the sunken, mishappen, ashen milkshakers, the bathrobed, robust bottlebrushed robots, the saged, the savvy, the slum-bitten and the strangled, this here is a declaration to all the sleeping snot-heads and their wrinkled flesh pants, the rocket-minds of the pillowcase philanderers, the sexy sluts of South Sydney, the rockinroll spiders underneath aftershave alley, the principal of the school of Hard Cocks, the rabbis and rabbits and stingrays with rabies, and the rickety shackles of the hard-bitten would-be emperor slaves, the dusty, blustery earthquake cavity kids, and the shoot-down hooter babes from the downtown stove chambers.
It’s a story of unrequited library books, of orgasmic fabrics and fishing hooks, of bandits throwing horseshoes and bandy horse-legged shoemakers hooked on harry and coughing up glue, of the sniffing nerdy perverts trapped between the walls and warcraft, of the suffering hungry slobs too stuffed to salivate. The following fortune-trolling is a page ripped from the remains of the unequivocal rent-a-tongue, inside-outs indicating how-to-use life in between hookahs and hokum, a plant-feeder for all the crushing variables within the pooling debris of human love, laughter, sore thumbs and cut throats, an alchemists transformation of a bluebottle to a baby tooth, a stark reminder of pickled eggs and lazy seats, ridicules, miracles, saviours, sadists, serpentine statuettes and slobbering pig-farming suffragettes.
This wayward folly I’m about to relay is full of them, this hobbly kitsch little family circle, and it’s all got to do with the chuckling, chundering, chinking, ching-a-linging, wee-willy-winking, slinking, tambourine tinking, chin-chinny-chunking, blinking, hot-bed bunking, shimmying souls of the millions before who have sunken into sand, into the spinning turbines of the day to night to daytime back to darktime turning twisting whirl, and ends with the moral of ‘send ‘em home for bread without sunshine.’

And it all began, as the merman stood bare-footed in the smoky doorway, yelling TRICKERY! while the Girl of the Frangipanis fled fleet-footed along the cobblestones, starlight immersing her tread, until upon learning the art of the air-bound damsels, she tripped over a toadstool and splayed out full-belly, flying through the moon-tinted alcove, howling like a wicked witch unto the night…

Or maybe I won’t tell you anyhow.

Day 5. Hymn of the Nameless Song (or vice-versa)

2011-05-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

I’m not a big connoisseur of classical music.
In fact, I'm outta my depth even mentioning it.
The last time I met an opera singer, she told me she had a decent vibrato, so I called her a skank and she slapped me.
But this morning, oh peaceful morn, I was jagged out of sleep, from deep circadian waters, (from a dream where I was a beggar holding a walking stick, and my father was Julian Assange shovelling books on to a blazing coal fire) by the most beautific and golden, haunted strains of a piano piece which I think I had ever heard, in the acoustical abcesses of my head.
It went, da da da, da da,da dumm, dummm, da da...

I knew the sound from somewhere.

Growing up, I had lived in a house rich in the diamonds of classical music. My brother had been training as a concert pianist, always hammering away trying to channel a khachaturian or tchaikovsky, or equally unspellable composer's concerto. The household was abundant with the musk of music, piano reverberating through the chip walls as if the houses foundations were purposely sucking it in, absorbing it into its brick bastioned soul.

**As a quick side note, my ACTUAL father claims to this day that the upstairs roof tiling, on the same said house, was shingled into rhythmic sequence, bam bam bum, in cheap labour, by the drummer from sixties oz-pop square-Os, The Easybeats.**

Gravitational breaking booms shook the structure as the maestro practiced his newest rendition of some long-dead tortured genii. Plonkity tonk. The complexities of the sound structure made it near impossible for a bonobo like me to truly appreciate it, at the time.
It sounded like a buffalo herd stampeding through a windchime factory, headbutting and stomping their way to the top of the aluminium scrap heap next door where the juvenile calves would proceed to jump on every different size shard to make sure they didn’t bypass any disjointed or ear-severing sambal available.

“LUDWIG, SHUT UP!!! THE SIMPSUNS ARE ON NOW!” Was my attempted end to the talented whirlwind @ 6pm on Channel TEN!! each working weekday evening (unless the turd had some kind of examination for which to prepare. At these moments, it was time to hunker up and bunker down. Knitting needles and conductors batons are the appropriate length for severing ones own eardrums, a Bonobo professor once conferred to me).

Nowadays, as he occupies the older years of his younger twenties, Ludwig uses his piano gravitatus for party tricks, usually after being cudgelled into submission by a bottle of red. Then he’ll magnetically, majestically, let his fingers meander over the subtle and turgid time structures of the 7.30 Report opening theme, something by The Fugees, or Paul McCartney’s Yesterday.
You’ve sold out, man.

As for me, I had nothing to sell. I grew five foot eighty in this household, for eighteen odd years, hearing but not listening to the virtuosities of the dead great classical masters. Wooing to the deaf ears of the youthfully stupid and unappreciative, they sank by the wayside.
In the same household, fluent Lithuanian language was spoken on a weekly basis, and again, I heard it, it whirled around my vista, trying to locate a place to land, then finding the runways too full of teenage testosterone, trends and bratty behaviours, it spun out and crashed somewhere over by the backroads of my concentration span- near to the abandoned hangers of Latin, Religion and Math.

If I had taken heed of the Lithuanian lessons, not that they were directly at me, but if I had absorbed the words spoken around me, suckled them in, they would have been very handy for right NOW, today, as I imitate the signals of an air-traffic controller trying to explain the problems of the Autowasher 16 to Romus
(turns out, he doesn’t know what's wrong with it either).

So Lithuanian language and classical music; I know the sounds but not the names.
And I really wish I knew the name of this one, this mournful timbre tinkling between my brows.

It has lapsed into my awakened consciousness now, softly plonking a gentle atmosphere upon the morning, flooding me with warmth and depth…
“Shut UP!” I yell at my brain, “The Simpsuns are starting.”
I taped on the remains of my boots and bid good morning to the mice. Romas had left the toilet in a state of Fukushima fury, so I decided it was safer for nature t wait. I threw on my old bear-hunting jacket and lovingly transcended from darkened doorway to daylight, into the 8am air. Though there was sun streaming, a biting chill of a breeze swarmed around my neck, with the nasty reminders of a long winter.
Begone with you, scrooge!
It seemed Vladimir Pooty had turned down the thermostat, in another of Russia’s cold, cold threats upon this country.

Thinking in placid pops, I perambulate along the footpath. The piano loops and flows like a torrenting soundtrack to the changing season.
Blooms caught between roadway cracks, rustling slow. A ginger cat chases a kitten up into the branches of a cherry tree, creating a cacophony in cat-language. People walk about opening car doors in a human tapestry of tendencies, cigarette smoke, dangling key chains, mobile phone message mashing, or my personal favourite, the glazed facial ‘I didn’t sleep now I have to trudge to a job I hate’ robotic acceptance.
All the while, minor As, major Ds, crashing over these human sights, sweeping it up with its mighty suction as if the scenery is all but shells on my song's shifting tides.

What could it be? Where had I heard it?

I had reached the end of my street now, and stood beneath the neighbourhood landmark; the Russian Orthodox Church, Saint Constantine.
Its green onion domes, everyday street purveyors of sunlight, impress over the situation a certain noble statesmanship.
The masked musician of my memory had moved his fingers into the lower keys now, and his bass clefs were heavy with the indescribable volume of Russian history.
Wait a second.
I listened as the breeze stilled…
Da da da, da da, dum, dada daa…
This was not in my head. The tune was external, an actual instrument, and its notes were sifting out between gaps in the stained glass windows…As it hit the outside, I could watched its organism tumbling through the air, the bars, the treble clefs upon the chilly breeze, smiling, singing, then sucked away with the leaves as a trolley bus roared passed.

Somewhere behind the rustic wooden doors of Saint Constantine, somewhere between Russian Jesus and the water of holes, some precious preacher was jamming my song.
I rapped on the door in quick fierce successions to the beat of the tune,
Da da da, da daaaa, dum….
A silence. Scratching. A shuffle of footsteps.
The wooden door creaked open an inch.
“Taip?” She wore a moustache, and looked about as sweet as a saucepan.
“Ah, would you mind telling me what song you were just playing? It was beautiful.”
She looked at me with the vague quizzicality I had seen before often.
I slumped a little, “Never mind.”
As I span to leave, I offered her a farewell wave; and a remarkable transformation ensued.
Her ancient lips curled into a rainforest of delight, her moustache grooming her saccharine smile so gorgeous, it could have only been her playing the song. I could see her music now, as she flicked a return wave in my direction; she carried some kind of youthful soul deep within her withered package.
I turned around and began strolling back out into the chill, one hand thrust into pocket, the other scraping the litter of leaves from my wool jacket.

Classical music and Lithuanian.

If I could turn back time for today and focus on these two titbits which had been nestled by my fingertips for so long, and learn them, I would not be in this situation at all.
Da da da, da da, dum…
On the other hand, if ever I am being held at knife point by Talibandits or Nazi skin grafters, who say they’ll only release me if I can relay to them the name of the cocktail recipe which surly sleaze-bag barkeep Moe stole, and it subsequently made him famous, I’ll be walking out of there faster than you can scream,
‘TEEVEEADDICTADOLESCENTS,” into the knitting needle puncture marks of my ear drums.
(It was the ‘Flaming Homer’ for all you octogenarians or older out there).

And if anyone can help me by naming my subconscious song, please do so.
It goes da da da da dumm da daaaaa, da da, dummm…

Or, just visit me in my dreams, where I’ll be waiting for you, the carved snake on my walking stick spiralling up your arms, as we wander off over a milky horizon, whorls of wheat like amber glowing in the paddocks by our sides, hit by wind but motionless, and we’ll play it together, you and I, two hobos singing along, blowing harmonica and following the ghosts chasing up the running river bends out and around, winding the path of the serpents and sasquatches before us, until we end up back at the place where we began.

Da da da, da da, dummm, da da, da dummmdada da daaaa…..

Day 4. Are you dumber than a Bonobo Monkey?

2011-05-04T10:35:00.001-07:00

Most people are.
Bonobo monkeys are some of the foremost forward thinking terrestrials since nameless teenager twelve hundred billion discovered the combination of the soft-serve vanilla ice-cream cone upon his MurkDonals hotcake breakfasts.
True pragmatists; Bonobo apes are able to utilise such pseudo-phenomenal human contraptions as internet blogging, browsing eyePads for porn, and urinals.
Now reader, if you still remain in the competition against Bonobos after the last round test (cataclysmic and truthful fact which it was), praise be to you and your toilet trainer.
If however, the Bonobo has beaten you; thrash yourself against the keyboard and fall to sleep in a stream of your own steaming urine, and smile in knowing, dear sir, I envy thee.
“Enjoy your outlook; enjoy your luck while you have it!” A Bonobo philosopher once warned me.
“Life is like a haemorrhoid,” he continued, “It’s painful and embarrassing, and it always goes to the wrong spot. But once you pop it, and the juice is gone, your arse always feels like its missing something. You miss it you do, like sex on a Sunday.”
Sexual miasma emitted from the heat rays of a Bonobo orgy lingers around a Bonobo colony for days. Farmers have been known to strangle themselves rather than inhalate these vapours which pollute the baron soils of their Congolese pastures.
“Just goes to show you, it’s a matter of taste,” My Congolese bongo bangin’ Bonobo brother went on. “One man’s miasma is another monkeys’ mud.”
Too true, my brain bloated bosom.

Recent research (conducted between myself, three of my least murderous Bonobo buddies, and a horny pack of llamas) has screened a cutting dichotomy of the ape and human races; it PROVED, without any measure of doubt, Bonobos are blessed in the cerebral sufficiency department at least twelve hundred billion times more than man.
At least, this is what they told me, as I walked off to buy them all another round of tasty guava nectars.

”Why?” I can hear you scratching your peeling scalp, “What does this have to do with Litho-mania?”
I bring up Bonobos, not for the enjoyment, oh no.
I bring up Bonobos, because just now I have returned from the vacuumous space station impersonating a city supermarket. Oh yes.
The Vilnius Vacuum.
The Bonobo Basilica.

Searching for rat poison, I began to hear internal trombones beggaring me to ground.
Where is it? This supermarket escapade was the longest four hours and sixteen minutes since time stood still in the Kimberley town of Derby for approximately three weeks (which was a long time, even on Derby standards).
Dripping features as I rumbled along alone, I looked like I had fallen headfirst out of a Dali drawing.
I consulted the 25 clerks of the 25 nations whose language still revolves around high-pitched gargling, angry glares and the mating calls of a mastodon.

The aisles became like rotors, a whirligig of surgery fluorescents and endless padded luxury. I was doomed.
Then! As if I had solved the last riddle set by the labyrinth’s sadistic gatekeeper, I found my sack of poisonous pellets, and made to amscray like a jackrabbit to the till.

I was almost out…but no.
A Bonobo sat gawking at me from behind the lone checkout. His beady black dots for eyes radiated one notion directly into my simple mind,
“Your level of brain function is ill-equipped to deal with the diabolical Bonobo battering I am about to subject you to.”
His stare pierced through my skull like an x-ray. I jumped, jingled my pellets, and thought nostalgically of the mouse-plague at home.
“Is it worth it to wait it out?” My futile human brain stem clunked away at the decision as the crew-cutted Bonobo began chanting rabble war-cries in my direction.
“Little bit English??” I spluttered, foolish to his gaze, and detached myself.
I started thinking about how if I quickly gobble up all this mouse poison I will get away clean.
Bonobos upper lip turned upon itself like a wave, bearing a thick set of jungle jambalaya chewing chompers in my direction.
The brainy black dots shining out from his humungous brown dome penetrated into my soul. I felt raped. Brain bashed by a Bonobo.
I gulped again, wishing it was I who had invented putting the 40 cent cone on to hotcakes. He cracked his hairy knuckles. I flinched.
The future was coming on hard and fast now, like a Bonobo broad in a banana grove.

Day 3. A Far Bigger (smaller) Problem

2011-05-03T10:39:00.000-07:00

Peering out from the cloistering space of his greasy hollow- from the untouchable realm between floorboards and stove- the graveyard of fallen knives and salt shakers, where washed hands fear to reach- he snuffled his spindly nose, and launched himself into one last brave cannonball run to the light.
“AHH, ANOTHER ONE??” I leapt into the air with all the grace of a wounded zebra, and my spatula fell to the floor. In true stereotype housewife fashion, I began to tremble and squeal, as nervous dribble splashed from my mouth, as if I were a brain-zonked vegetable. The arrow of spit trembled, as if in slow motion, then drifted apart as it descended to ground, nearly hitting the mouse on his forehead.
The little rodent just stood there. He was sickly, perhaps dying of scurvy, as I hadn’t put any fruit under the oven in at least a week, and the chicken bones I’d left him were as vitamin-filled as a punk. He just sat upon the green vinyl flooring, shivering, as if he were cold, or epileptic, or about to spew or something, and my initial shock turned into jaded realisation.
“Mice die of old age in this place. This is like a Buddhist retreat for the furry vermin,” I thought it in meditative silence as I scooped him into a bucket.

I am living with a serious mouse problem. This is not funny. In previous universes I have neighboured with crack monkeys, dived head first into drunk dens, spent routine mornings brooming wolf spiders from their fertile nests behind furniture, and found renegade redbacks by the tips of my toes under the rim of the backyard kiddy pool.
But this is too much.
Not exaggerating, I have thrown three mice out of my first story window this afternoon. Count another one from yesterday, that’s four flying furballs in twenty-five hours. These are the ones I have found.
What about the unseen, the dark dwellers, the scratch, scratch, screeching at the sides of the cupboard, chewing at the chipboard of your consciousness, just as you begin to beggar into slumberland. What about them??

The first mouse I threw had appeared to be engaged in some kind of sneezing fit. The little germ bag waltzed out from his hideout beneath the refrigerator, and then he just sat, and began blowing bubbly sounds, and no doubt toxic snot, from his noisy mouse-haired nostrils. I stood transfixed from the middle of my mashing potatoes.
I mean, am I NO THREAT? When an asthmatic rodent is unintimidated by your presence, you really get a feeling as to what you equate to in the scheme of it all.
I’m actually surprised he didn’t walk over my face, or vomit on me.
I slanted up against the stove, eyes clear, wide, white, hair near catching alight on the burners, which were boiling steadily, attentively, where my potatoes were awaiting action. I raised the masher in front of my fear tangled features, protecting myself, crossed it against my scummy spatula and held it forward to act as my prayer stick, my crucifix against this brazen little demon.
And then, the ill, infested creature (not me, the mouse, you arsehole) started sneezing. Abstractedly I stared at him, wondering if I should lend him a tissue, or if he will sort himself out. THEN I remembered; the battle lines had already been etched, there were no free handouts, not today, Mickey.
Unabashed, he crawled in hay-feverish circles, ambling around the kitchenette like a doped-out don, owning the joint. I gently scooped him, with the finesse of a garbageman, into some soiled receptacle at hand.
I had captured the spook.
The little spooker of housewives, elephants, and now, he adds to the list, this Litho maniac, who runs in cold heat through the hallway. The mouse tried to clamber out of his container, but to NO AVAIL, anddddd LIFTOFF…
The fat fucker blew out into the orbit, to travail through the abyss of the afternoon.
Sniff the air, I did, in brief repose…the afternoon was accompanied by the gentle wafts of new spring shoots, I noticed as I leant out the sill, the muddy receptacle still tightly clutched in my palms. I took a far-reaching, all-endowing breath into my gullet, and gulped my fear of being entirely engulfed by pestilence away.

For five minutes.

The next feral I found, let’s call him “Big Bill”. This one, too, seemed to have a case of the willies, and was swooning spastically on the bathroom tiles. What was wrong with these things? Too many bucket billies rat features, you’re sliding all over the place. My bulging eye sockets came close to him. Ugly black-tinged hairs poked out of his back, as if he’d been misbred by a pug and a porcupine (the mouse, you dickhead). But he was in actuality, as they say in German, einen kleinen SCHMUTZIGEN mauschen, and as they say in Lithuania, it was time for him to fuckin’ fly.

Soooooaaaaaaring away into the infinite, number two went off to meet his cosmonautic fate.

In this state of war, being overrun by vermin, feeling like I was drowning in the suckers, I tried to avert my thinking by delving into some work.
I retired to my computer to transcribe an interview; A Lithuanian NATO officer who had recently returned from Afghanistan, whom I had recorded last week in a cafe. With calm, though grammatically poor, breaths, he was hammering on about “Explosions in the east,” and the “Security deteriorations caused by local Mullah,” or some such recountings, and with my headphones fortifying me from the rest of my foreboding flat, I finally felt tranquil. ”Women risk their lives just to go to school,” he drivelled on, as I swam into some disconnected nirvana. Total peace. But!
Oh no.
Just as there is peace in my minds middle east, my malfunctioning bladder decides to run AWOL on me.
It began to palpitate with drastic urgency, as I shuffled around in my seat.
“#&@**!#” (as they say in the comics), and I chucked my headphones down. The thin voice still bleating on about war torn hellholes, as I pelted to the toilet through mine.

I absconded to the depository. And there. THERE, mid-flush, between the chain yank and the woosh of water, out of the corner of my evil eye I spotted number 3.
Lucky Number 3.
This one was scrambling in the bathtub, unable to climb to freedom, trapped in a porcelain prison. His pink limbs scrambled up the walls in quick bursts, then in a fit of trying, (which probably would’ve looked cute to eyes less disgusted than these), it slid down the tubs green and hard-water tinged sidings with a cacophonous rrrrrrrrrrrrr, like a window squidgee of filth.
“Enough,” I thought in the mindset of a radical religionist, “This Buddhist temple is shutting its wooden doors TONIGHT.”
I retrieved my loyal receptacle.
Somewhere inside me, as I walked to the window, a little bell chimed, a dinging nugget of truth,
“This is oblivion. This is what it looks like,” The bell-ringer whispered.
And as he went on gonging his preposterous binging triangle, I shook and sweated, and vowed to the Starlets of the Moon and the Twenty Seals which bind them, ONE DAY, yes, one day, I will get a real job.

As I opened the shutters and sent our third astronumbat into the evening sky, (pre-warning him of aviation lesson number one, primarily to land ALIVE) I noticed a pair of glinting green eyes watching from beneath my window.
Perched and purring, a fuzzy black and blue tortoiseshell buddy was winking up at me.
A cat had taken roost beneath my ever-giving sill.
“You wait the night out, Ginger. Methinks it’s just the entrée.”
And I shook out my receptacle, departed the night air, and crawled back into to my safely dimlit spot- between the oven and the floorboards, where the hands of washed men fear to reach.

Day 2. The Cracks are Already Starting to Speak (or: Revenge of the Autowasher 16)

2011-05-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

(This first portion is transcribed from manic, misanthropic scrawling, pen stabs against plighted papers, words tumbling out in fateful, cryptic sequences, an undecipherable symphony of the mornings mundane misfortunes. As he bumbles the streets with a cardboard box loaded to the gutful with soggy undergarments and salvation army swag (his wardrobe), wet, grubby, stinking like bath rag, he monsoons pebbles of sweat, which drain from his head like a colander. He occasionally laughs to himself, cheery, mad, and these passages, it shall be warned, should not offend anyone, after they have realised this state of the author himself).

This may be a running theme throughout the next thirty days. Cleanliness, or lack way thereof.
I write this sitting opposite the Giant EGG (almost an Australian invention, a cousin of Queensland’s Mega Mango, a delicacy on the humungous hamburger, with chopped slivers of the Big Ram underneath).
Some Vikings argue like vultures over a vodka bottle to my right. The man appears to be crying… His face has been all but splayed into an omelette by some twisted adversary. One eye is black, his heart a matching darkness as he swigs direct from the bottomless pit… And I?
Stuck in the abyss of the unwashable.
Here I am carting around a ten kilogram box of wet, SOILED, clothing, victims of the Autowasher 16.
ARE WE MEN, OR ARE WE FLY-BIT CATTLE?
It seems after marching an endless loop around Vilnius…
(the writing begins to loop into circular patterns on the page)
…a bandaid on my near severed finger from a tussle with a tin of tuna- a finger which I would graciously raise in salute to the bastard lungfish creator of the Autowasher 16-
It seems Lithuanians do not believe in organised laundrymats.
Organised crime, fine, but laundry, fuck you in space.
WANT TO HEAR MORE OF MY WEARY WASHING BLUES?
No?
Well, then, my esteemed overlords, go home to your shining white laundrettes, and spin a curtsy in your effervescent and sparkling clean gowns, amassing FAB and NEAT and WAZZO powders like cocaine over your shelves, letting them touch, almost tango upon your fine fabrics, as your precious spin cycle turns like this planet, as it should, in unison with the seas gravitational pull, washing and slushing, around and around to a better, brighter, tomorrows underpants.
Then think of me with my sopping shirts in sadness. That’ll sully you up a little at least.

(Here the filthy villain returns his pen to his jacket pocket, heaves a sigh to the heavens and clods off with his oversized laundry box into the unkindly warm morning. Composure, like a cool tide, has washed and replenished him, as he goes about his retarded task of searching for a washer).

Near the carpark, away from the trappings of the Big Egg and the grim birds which swoop around her, here, where the smell of atrophied meat, maybe venison, Rudolph, floats upon the air like cobwebs.
Congealing puddles from stale morning mist reflect sunlight, and send me to squinting. I am prone to light sensitivity, like an anti-moth, scurrying into the unlit corners of dank and empty recreational rooms. Perhaps this is why I held like an amulet to my habit of habituating the dimlit corners of roustabout joints, frequenting the back tables of squalors like Sydney’s Hotel Hollywood for a quiet arm-to-mouth activity with myself in the mournful plateau of morning.

**
(A PAUSE IN PROCEEDINGS: A word on the Hotel Hollywood).

The Hotel Hollywood:

Where the stars shine like fading embers,
Where the lights short out, but who remembers
Where it could be June, or late September
But forget your sins! your woes! your gender
Just put your money down, big spender,
You’re in here now- enjoy the blender.

Any Sydney ciggie slinging slob who lives on the down sides of depravity, knows, and has lurked for many a fun evening, in the backrooms of the Hotel Hollywood.
Like a musty time capsule from 1953, flying through stagnant space and somehow defying all laws of physics, health and safety, this bar is like a lighthouse in the stony winter evenings, glowing from its porch out in flurried Surrey Hills.
The intergalactic patterns on the carpet, in their glowing neon retro fuzz, glide you into the palace where stars aren’t born, they come to croak and wheeze around on a packet of winfields and vine. And whispering, following the Hollywood beaming hope, you would trundle down there, on weekdays, (or Sunday mornings were preferred), as you could dwell in the wooded back corners, and sit upon the ripped purple cushions, and write away like a foolish wizard experimenting with spells.

The backroom of the Hotel Hollywood had about four poker machines, all from the times of Tetris, and between their humming electro bleeps, and the old time classic jazz, always jazz, which was trumpeting, kazooing, and whooping it up on a constant repeat through the speakers, you could really feel your body existing, between the peeling chipboards and the unvarnished tables, just tapping your feet away.

The owner was an elderly gal, always draped in floral picnic blankets, or moo moos, or stylish 1930s garb, her lips puckered and blazing a devil red, and her eye lids sagging in contented white-wine afternoon love. She would spin around to the mixture of Armstrong and Ellington, whisked any man young enough to call her granny by the arm, and always, without fail, grab their virgin arses. Not just a pinch, but a real perverted pluck.

The lighting through the bar wafted rather than rained. It illuminated where it wanted to, when it wanted to- and this was the beauty of the obviously fried circuit boards, as you could never tell if it was 3AM or four in the afternoon. The dim ambience was always the same. There were no gateways to natural light. And in the ancient days where smoking cigarettes was still permitted behind city barwalls, clouds used to hover through the halls, shifting around like spirit dancers, swoop, sweep, sliding out the open doorway to the grubby gutters of Central, as the next potential arse-grab for granny wanders in half-cut.

This was the room I received an important lesson of Entomology (the study of insex):
These horrible black bugs used to swarm around your beer unless you hatted your Carlton with a coaster. As soon as you let your guard down, glunk, dunk, your amber ale is filled with buzzing urchins out to reap their fill.
These are known as ‘fermentation flies.’
The buzzards of beer.
Barflies.

Hotel Hollywood.

Where silver screen
Was a madmans dream
Inside a padded box

A movie scene
Of dead James Dean
And then the doors were locked.
**

Anyway, we were leading to some sort of climactic solution for the raggy mans washing woes.
And his squinting eyes. As I was getting at, his eyes suffer from an apparently common, yet distractedly annoying, condition dubbed Blepharitis.
In the pangs of the ailment, vision remains “sharper than a desert eagle,” as one (no doubt drunken) Alice Springs doctor once informed me, but your eyelids have the unpleasant urgency of swelling up, and scratching the pupils as you blink or close them, sending them to water, leaving you in the purgatory of neither being able to shut them or spring them wide to alleviate the nuisance. All the same, to quote Eric Idle, “plenty of worse things happen at sea.”

Due to the glinting off the stagnant puddles, the pools by my feet, (the feet roped by disintegrating Timberlands), and due to the midday glare refracting off car chrome in all directions, like a strobe show, my vision was shuttered, and I didn’t notice the figure of fate bearing down upon me like Thor’s hammerhead.
“Hey, how are you doing!”
My cousin approaches. All I can see is a brown silhouette which looks like it has been chiselled by a butcher’s cleaver, strange, muddy offcuts surrounding my blindness.
“Good, good,” I repeated, coughing and cantankerous at being caught with my burdensome box.
“Don’t they have any laundries in Vilnius??” I plead.
She laughed, a joyful, booming bear cub curdle.
“What? No, not in Lithuania!!” Accentuate the accent- the curls on every letter, c’s with strange tufts, z’s with heads, u’s with little umbrellas above them.
“But why no laundries? I need to wash!”
“I don’t know, maybe Soviet scheme meant everybody had washing machine in own house. Why don’t you open new one? Yes, open new laundry!”
“Yeh, well, maybe…” I trail away.
“Anyvay, how vas rest of your day?”
“It stank,” I mumble.
“You don’t say…” She retorted in cutting haste, eyeing off the contents of my box.
Then politeness ensued, formalities quickly undertaken, then like a fox, a fox with a fever, off I squinted into oncoming traffic, ready to find the afternoon.

Day 1. The Assault of the Autowasher 16

2011-05-02T14:44:00.000-07:00

In the world of omens, the voodoo lords are always laughing when you begin a long tale with a complaint. The subterranean suckers are reeling in how easy they’ve got it for the next twenty-nine days, when the white wiggle bellyaches from the first.
Anyway, laying prophetic doom-spieling aside for a second:
Relaying the records of what you don’t possess always seems to strike a more poignant point than writing about things which you do.
For example, if I was a singin’, blingin’, well-walleted rapper, I might wish to drone on about how my pad is plastered in jangling jewels of the deepest diamond shafts of mother Africa, and how I sell all the steezy, shiny sex-groped swarthiness in all the wicked world...
...but I don’t, I’m not, and I won’t.
I want to tell you about how I’m actually a dented, rented, far-gone sap, whose pad is missing a vital ingredient to a successful routine life. What is inaccessible to me is the sacred secret to appearing on the streets in the guise of freshness and newness;
Without standing fully dressed underneath the shower spout, I cannot wash my clothes.

Yes, so ironing curtains may be possible here, but do not mention washing. Living in this flat, as mentioned, with the ever-mysteriously absent Romas (me occupying the room of his sadly deceased spouse) who speaks only the English his eight-year-old granddaughter dictates to him, (eg. Thank you, good bye, get fucked), I already have a foe.
My enemy stands menacing and mocking, in monolithic proportions, right of the bathtub, and shadowing over me, laughing, through watery bubbles, at my immense unknowing at how in Dzerzhinskys diaper I can ever wash my clothes.
The Soviet era washing machine, an (unpronounceable Cyrillic’s) Autowasher 16, is the size and sound of mating Galapagos turtles, and its churning innards are flapping about like a stack of Darwin’s encyclopaedias. Scoffing at me.
The dial has sixteen numbers on it, each relaying some sort of archaic washing notion (eg. Slapping blankets against rocks on the Ganges, number 4) which I fail to fathom…which is why I bring up Darwin.
If it was survival of the smelliest I would be heading for some state of lordship but thanks, CHUCK, it ain’t, and this KGB contraption is suffocating every inch of my will to wash. It shouldn’t be so COMPLICATED, I growl, as a fresh dump of water floods the mouse-shit ridden bathroom tiles, (after I open the machine door in presumption THREE HOURS of moaning and turning must be long enough).
“Oh well,” I think through the teeth of my waning soul, “At least the floor gets a wash.”

Did I mention, in my testing of the detested machine, the only thing spinning was a lone bathmat?
The old mans bath-rag!
It smelled like a Sudanese hospital and carried through the hallway like an out-of-work drifter, hammering on my door to COME IN…
”NO!!!” I finally screamed and wrenched the dial to thirteen, or was it thirty-four, under the code of ‘Normal Soiling,’ and left the Autowasher about its abominable business.

Actually, through the aid of hand (note, no plural) gesticulation and the enthusiastic though limited vocab of his little granddaughter, Romas had once attempted to explain the workings of the monstrosity to me. Turn it to three, then to seven…GEE, THANKS ROMAS, you may as well be running through the lymphoid rhythms of the Lithuanian miner bird for all I fuckin’ understand you!!!

Now, here I stand. Muddy, bath-rag water like belch juice over my hands.

(This next paragraph is transcribed from neurotically undersized handwriting from the fellow on a nervous outing to the nearby park, following his first run-in with the machine).

It’s me and you now Autowasher.
Don’t tempt the Devil, or you’ll end up burning, you gigantic white Cyclops!
DAMN YOUR SOVIET SPOKES!
My bag of dirty linen is backed-up and begging for forgiveness, and here I stand, or kneel, more like it, mop in left hand, right gripped tight into a fist…my mistakes rattling around in my mind like a mantra…
“Turn it to number 16, give it an hour, go to the park, have a beer, and forget about it.”
The pigeons are gathering around me and my hat now…my stain encrusted jeans soaked in the molten yellow light of sundown…wicked wretch of a washing machine, I will destroy thee before my pants are cleaned!! No, no, calm for now.
Watch the flock, peck, peck, pecking through the piles of crunching leaves, and forget about it.

LITHUANIA MANIA: THIRTY DAYS FROM BEHIND THE IRONED CURTAINS

2011-05-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

Ahh, to live in a country of the poetic and the poor. Where towering forest landscapes are unburdened by the modern monstrosities of electricity poles and hospitals, jagging attention rudely away from the magical light lingering over the landfills at dusk.

A country rich in fables, not euros, where women walk the cobbled alleys with legs like summer cranes, chased by sprightly lads sporting basketball bedazzled brains.
A land where a potato-skin shaded moon rises neatly up into the nuclear smog of an alabaster skied evening.

Ahh, for a place where the clouds not so much rain as gently massage your unwashed skin from previous blemish, and soak your soggy smile to its roots.

Ahh, for a home to hang your boot-heels where the moose is as revered as copiously as it is minced and shelved in tins at the supermarket. Where sour cream containers perch like ornaments in refrigerators from border to skulking Russian border.

AHHHHH for a spectacular, utopian countryside, where quality brickwork is as secondary to the building of a house, as keeping your vodka-riddled eyeballs on the road is to driving an automobile.

An ideal world where the woodpeckers rattle and strum against the ancient birch trees, beating out in semaphoric slang, “you…are…here…you…are…here…”
*
*

In a bid to rekindle some kind of connection with the outside, or rather, internal internetic world, I have decided to thrust away constrictions of esteem and integrity (sure), and open my filthy doors to the online masses (all four of you who read this, thanks).
In the name of stupidity, science, and all things disregarded by normal people, here I present some letters of life from a fellow plodding along the broken asphalt of Eastern European city streets, pondering what to do with the middle grounds of his twenties. The said fellow is at the present time inhabiting a slightly stinky apartment, sharing with an 80-something old man named Romas, who has but one upper appendage, and about three hundred mice, just outside of the centre of downtown Vilnius, Lithuania.
Here I spew to you what may well unfold as an ode to loneliness, madness, and communist-ness, out here on the outcroppings of time and oblivion- where cousins come popping in and out from between termite trampled woodworks- where the local paper may start begging for this boys blood- and where the sun marches up to the sky to salute each crisp May morning, shouting ‘HALLELUJAH!’ as he reaches out the window in wonder and desperation, throwing his calls to the breeze...
Here I offer the up-to-date account (albeit, a few lost weekends thrown in) of thirty days in the wilderness. Please enjoy, or go mad trying.

The Second Rule For Hitchhiking in Bulgaria

2010-07-30T03:49:00.001-07:00

There is only one major rule surrounding hitchkiking in Bulgaria, one which was relayed to me in sincerity and angst - "If gypsy stops, you don't get in. Even if they smiling at you, please, don't get in." I nodded my already sloping brow, trying to realise I may have to take heed to this strange, bearded Bulgarian stoners muddled advice.
Racism aside, it is a fair enough rule. Especially considering how I value most of my teeth, toes and fingernails. Okay, so most of the teeth are deadweight, and the toes and fingers could use a clean, but what do they care? They're gypsies, and by my imagination, they have bolt cutters. Anyway, the basic rules are set, and we were ready to take the fifty-one bus down to the sixty-four-highway, where the odds were eighty to four that we would find a ride and be able to make it to Irakly, on the Black Sea coast, anywhere before four thirteen in the morning of Thursday, ten weeks and six days from today (due to the six thousand, twenty two hours spent tied to a car radiator and choking on a gag in a gypsy basement).
So, thumbs outstretched, myself and my feline companion, Carla, we took to the desolate highway with our scrap packs and tent in tow.
We started our testing ordeal without knowing more than vague snippets of Bulgarian language, snips which didn't include "please don't kill or rape us".
And as it were, we began out in the scorching sunlight, thirty plus celsius, like unholy Jesus' marching through the desert. It made us remember the story of Peter Falconio and the Sturt Highway, though we brushed them aside like flies from a birthday cake.

The further we hobbled, the more we knew: We were hobbling along down the WRONG HIGHWAY. Just an oblong stretch of gravel obviously not a correct way for hapless trawlers as ourselves, wrong as a donkey's shlong to anyone with a tenth of a brain cell left. We were heading into a no-man's industrial graveyard, not towards the untouched kilometres of white sand on Black Sea where we were searching for.
A truck driver waved us over to him in feverish trepidation, as cars began to bank up behind. There was no obvious shoulder for a truck of its size to pull over.
I ran across. In broken english, he screamed at me,
"NO! This highway, it go to hell. You not want this highway."
Highway to hell? He must mean back to Wollongong! That's a long fuckin' way, and we'd already been scorched by that place vowing never to return years ago. Time to find a different route.
So after much discussion and ridiculous map turnage, we climbed an embankment, Goliath's back bone, and tumbled up on to the savage grey runway. This time, the right coastal road.
Thankfully, there was a decent shoulder here to flag the cars over. Though, a wily hitcher had beat us to the punch. A one-eyed gypsy, (it seemed he was either one-eyed or simply his right eye was gnarled and the skin was folding over the rest of his face like a pocket for his nose) clutching a walking stick and a plastic bag, held his thumb out in the same direction as us. Striking up conversation was not possible, as his glazed working eyeball penetrated the clothing of my female companion with a depraved and empty lear... We had previously been alerted that if we really wanted to get the quickest ride possible, Carla should be wearing the shortest skirt in her possession. As it happened, I ended up wearing the skirt (mentally, at least)and she a fine white jacket with a pack of cigerettes lining the breast pocket.
"Puff, puff?" Old one-eye motioned at his mouth with his ring and index finger, both yellowed and charred. Ah! Our hapless pervert was not a demented rapist after all, he simply wanted a cigerette. Slightly offended at not being gawked upon, she handed him three of her disgusting Romanian mixtures of arsenic and saw dust and sparked him a light.
He guffawed with thanks as we slowly, slyly, ambled ourselves as far away from him as possible so he didn't effect our further chances of getting a lift.
A fine idea this was, and our movement paid off in merits within minutes. An off-duty taxi rolled to a halt, and we poked our heads in through the window to question our potential murderer.
"We - ahh-- We go to Irakly. You know this place?" Speaking in broken english always makes you feel like you're recovering from a stroke.
"Yes, I head past there. Only, sixty, seventy kilometres. You come with me."
Success- and an english speaker to boot, and not even a hinting glint of conning gypsy from shiny silver teeth. (I truly am sorry to all the gypsies, I mean no offence, I love the way your sparkling teeth shimmer in the Bulgarian sunlight as you pickpocket my precious wallet, I really do).
We jumped into his beat-up wagon of yellow and black, and spooned off back on to the tremulous serpent of a highway, south toward the beach.
One of my tent-poles, immediately as I entered, scraped across his dashboard marking the clean stereo with a horrible sideways gash. Idiot. Terrible fucking idiot. I gulped and cursed myself mutely, as he smiled and laughed it off.
"What do I care? Only my new stereo anyway."
I gulped again. Bulgarians have a funny sense of humour...
A humour which would become not only disturbing, but confusing also. A nauseating mixture of gloom and hilarity, like mixing orange juice with milk. Some of the jokes he pushed upon us, his passengers, slaves to his sundries as we rode on toward our destination, were incomprehensible in their meaninglessness.
"Two Bulgarian brothers. One, he dig well. One, he drive tractor."
Yes, so... punchline?
"This is the joke. Want to hear another?"
I'd rather eat rat-sack, I think though I answer politely, "Sure, why not?"
"Two birds are flying. One bird flies faster than the other. That is the joke."
And he kept going, mindless riddle followed by grinding twiddle. Don't get me wrong, I was beyond grateful he stopped for us. I would bow in a million praises to thank him for his benevolance and offer him my sister's virginity in payment for his illuminating kindness (thank the world I have no sister) but I still, uncontrollably, began to grow irritated at the irrationality of it. Just the slightest. though I broke out in wheezy laughter at the bizarrity of his sentences. He couldn't be for real.
So he starts up again, "One more. Where you from?"
"Australia."
"So this is a joke about toilet. You, do you mind joke about toilet?"
He sounded like an obscene Soviet comedian asking Carla in his thick Bulgary accent.
"Of course not! They're the best ones."
"Okay! So... When you're in Australia, what hand do you use to wipe your behind with, after you're finished using toilet?"
"Ahhh, let's see... the right hand I guess."
"WELL, in Bulgaria, we not use hands! We use toilet paper!"
Ah, ha ha. Be careful with that joke fella, it's an antique, I wouldn't want to see you break it.
An hour or so after pouring down the muddy highway, in sweat and in uproar, he dropped us off at the dirt-end of the beach road we were setting up to trek along to find our infamous black sea. He waved us off in Bulgary hospital style, like a colourful doctor of the damned. So with a wink and a grimace, and chortled, "Maybe one day I see you in Australia!" and cracked his horn, which sounded like a hog on heat, and careened off back down to wherever except the travel agency to purchase a plane ticket to Australia. That would not be happening.
As we strode on down the narrow, crawling passage, the blue tinge of the water already gaping open through the shrubbery on the horizon, a vision of wonder for weary travellers; bumblebees cavorting and singing and slender storks nesting in hollow stumps, the cachanations of crows and the endless drone of the insects in the brown fields, and our sweat, and our backpacks and our longing for swim, amid all this as we strode and sang and played harmonica, and we realised, oh how it dawned, we had learnet a new rule about hitchhiking in Bulgaria.
! A rule which we must spread to the masses, however few of them may listen,
"Man, Bulgarian humour is terrible isn't it? Next time, I think it is better to ride with gypsies. It should be a rule- listen to no more opinions on Bulgarian hitchhiking" We agreed and I thought of the huge crack I had made in the poor driver's car stereo, and gulped and began to ponder possibilities for the way home tomorrow.
"There must be an ulterior passage" I mumbled as images of a foul, fish-stenched and booze-drenched Romanian bus driver picking us up for the way back fondled its way in to the frontal lobes of my mind. I quivered and shook my head in acceptance of tomorrow's destiny. Boat building was never my forte anyhow.

Bob Dylan Live From The Abyss of Memory

2010-07-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

Seperate the head from the body and what do you get?
WHAT DO YOU FIND?
Tell me! Have you discovered it yet?
There is no answer!

For these answerless queries,
They’ve cancelled the bets,
Have you got any theories?

Enlighten the severed brain stem!

As the head floats off to space,
Help to ponder this paradigm of an unfinished race;

Because a bodiless head,

Without the constraints of weight,

Surely carries a truckload of grace.

And a lone weaving body, headless,
Should in all measures create less of a mess,
And vice-versa,
A head without a harness,
Should be free to think and digress

But! Once again we have plunged into it.
The wheel and sponge of it,
Always rolling,
Always slurping,
Spooning us along,
Situations of sleepy, sideways

Pushing, craving throngs,

And so...The head,
Amputated from its body,
Flutters aloof

To keep on singing its seperate song...

...Which brings me to the next chapter of our fine saga:

BOB DYLAN IN SOFIA, BULGARIA at the National Palace of Culture

(as recounted through train blurry sleep deprived hallucinations)

"Ahhh am a ma-an of constant sorrow, I've had trubbble all through my days...."
Bob's piercing alligator moan dribbled through the speakers as we rode into Bucharest on the night-train. To my left, the girl of the Frangipanis and the Tulips slumbered in a peaceful, melancholic haze while I, Pontius Pilate with my legs dangling gangly up through the window, hummed like a malfunctioning radiator to the music of Robert Z.

The sleeper train aids the meandering thought process; it gives leg room for the legions of forgotten memories and troops of triumphant ego black holes to bubble up and find time to ruminate on the surface.
And so it was; together with Bobby, and my relaxing hobby of chewing sunflower seeds, the tulip girl to the side with giant great ZZZ symbols leaping from her forehead, together with all this jumble and malarkey, the trip was told and my thoughts were free to wander.

"Robby Zimmerman," I pondered, spitting seeds into my shoes, "How the fuck did he manage to stay alive, the old gutter bird..."
The train whistled through side-alleys and strange towns, with no names at the stations, where indescript passengers strode off to find their fate and families in God-knows-where near to the baltic border of Bulgary and Romania.
Anyway... How did Bob Dylan stay alive through all those years? Did we really just witness him, this ancient relic of clandestine times? This monsterous marrionette, still plucking away in his own grotesque tune to the same creaking songs?
Was it real? Onstage, under the red lights blinking like buoys out at sea, old Bob wandering around like a dementia patient, in Sofia, Bulgaria, three days prior? Was it?
Perhaps it wasn't! Perhaps those sounds, those rickety, rackety zimmering zaps, were coming from some escaped loony of the Bulgarian nut house. Somehow the loony, (Bob Robber) figured a way in to the National Palace of Culture, disguised himself as a decrepit curmudgeon cowboy, and sung a few of the hit Dylan songs he knew through the radio, in a drawling hullabullo. Easy to imitate, I can't see why he couldn't have. Many famous musicians have their identities stolen in precisely this way (for example, when a tone deaf, schizophrenic, peodophile replaced Sting onstage in the fearfully remembered 1999 tour of Oslo... no wait, heavens... that was the real guy...).

Although! Chance aside- on this evening, it could have been, just as the world makes its twenty fifth squillion (approx) rotation of the sun, on this exact drifting evening, that the real Bob Dylan stepped on stage to wow the crowds who never thought the wind would blow that old geezer into Sofia, Bulgaria anytime soon, and for their eyes only.

It was the first time Bob and his entourage had flung their so-dubbed Never Ending Tour in to the sunny shores of Sofia. The first time the Bulgary mass of Dylan fans (approx 6) were able to catch a glimpse of the wounded war hero himself, battling it out with the microphone for an hour in the death-ring that was The National Palace of Culture.

National Palace Of Culture, Sofia, Bulgaria.

"Hmmm, I never heard this track before..." A grating Dylan track jars my ear drums. The sky keeps changing colour outside the train window. It has fallen from a thick green into an omnipresent grey, the all encompassing grey of the lowlands. And I realise...the music player has switched off, no batteries. The sound I thought was Bob Dylan was actually Frangipani, beginning to snore amid her snoozing. Oh well, easy mistake. Where were we, chew chew, sunflower seed, spit...Bobby, coming on to stage...

He stood there, looming as if he were a shadow who managed to become a man. Donning his trademark ivory cowboy hat, with a face as long as a highway, Zimmerman stridled up to the mic stand to greet his audience in a fond murmur.
"eohfehjkn...he he...zzeeeee plasss, de de de" he stuttered in baby talk. Without further ado, he launched into his song Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat, one of the better numbers from his 1969 album, Blonde on Blonde.

We immediately noticed something. There was one spectacular difference between those old recordings and the way this almost septuagenarian (69 years old- the scruffy revolutionary of the nineteen sixties is now a crusty evolutionary entering the drop-end of his sixties) sounded nowadays; his voice was shot into oblivion. Singing like Tom Waits scrubbing a toilet bowl, the whiskey gutted vibrations made us chuckle with an incredulous fever back in the ninety-ninth row where we were positioned in the Palace of Culture.

Listen to him go! He rattled on, the old steam train, and was cracking out foggy dance moves (the ‘Where are My Spectacles Boogie,’ the ‘You’re Old Enough To Be My Daughter Or My Wife, Tango’ and the ‘Giddy-Up Cowgirl, Pappas Got A Brand New Hip’ jibbering fandango got the audience jumping like fleas at a dog fight).

Bob rarely speaks at performances. People say this is because he is rude, or perhaps because he is actually dead and strung up like a puppet on strings- a corpse forced to dance by Sony to make up for all the unsold shitty Wallflowers records his son made. Whatever the case, we didn’t need to hear him speak. No sir, he did fine just wobbling his jawbones out there to make our bunch and the Bulgarians happy beyond our weirdest fantasies.

He spat, gargled and chewed his way through ‘Things Have Changed,’ (one of his better nineties releases, off the album Time Out Of Mind) but it still came across as bad-arse as the Mississippi school kids who used to pick on him back in the old jew-lynchin’ days. Yes, he sounded mad. It made you think of his childhood, the days he never talks about in public, but everyone suspects they existed. Bad Arse Bob, getting his revenge on the little hokie anti-semites by slugging it out through the wires.

Bad-arse or bad singer, all this aside, there doesn’t seem to be a ‘going through the motions’ ethic with Bob. He really wants to affect the crowd, if only because he hates them so much.
And he was right on the mark. Despite his aging, alcos voice, Just Like A Woman can still cut through the foundations of gender, the foundations of love badly burnt, right to the core.
“With her fog, her amphetamines and her pearls...She fakes, just like a woman...Yes she does! And she aches... just like a woman...” Bob wheezed on and we were hooked in. You can sell emotion in contemporary times with a catchy hook and a sexy look, but back on Bob-time and the world seems real and not plastic or bought over the counter with condoms and a sparkly ribbon and a barcode. Real, love tearing hurt.
I look over at the tulip girl, and she smiled back over.

Then, casting a disgruntled look at the audience, Big Bobby D-fect mumbled some incomprehensible bunk, and, with a wry wink, hopped into A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall, sending us into an uproar.
Songs with fifty thousand verses! Where was this these days? Beat poetry fuelled by society in chaos, the anger at boundaries of genre and a head full of drugs and ideas.
Ahhh Bobby. Standing up there, his silk shirts, his cough and his cowboy hat; there is a man who has weathered many a storm, highly publicised as they may be, to keep himself away from the prying eye of the media. And how did he do it? One of my favourite Dylan media quotes is when he said, “Why would you want to be happy? Everyone can be happy.”
He just wanted to be different in everything he said, the little bastard, different and difficult. That is why watching his early interviews and his later documentaries; you can really sense a gifted PR student coming through the glazed old vessel. Dylan gave birth to the modernity of PR- the clever management of stars and sellebrities to mould them an image. I would say Bob likes to say he coined that idea.

Even as the cheeky larrikin everyone remembers with his curly hair and battered smile from the black and white footage, standing onstage and playing his blasted harmonica all over America, even then, as we do now in Sofia Bulgaria, Bob really makes you think about things you yourself have been through, with him, around him, his words curling through your mind like a tumbleweed.
As Allen Ginsberg stated in the Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home, Bob Dylan’s fame can be attributed to “Maybe it was like Jung’s theory- Bob Dylan somehow managed to climb inside society’s collective unconscious...and once he was in there, no one could get him out.”
Now I don’t know if this is the quote exactly, but watching him up there, butchering his own song (Highway Sixty-One) though raising the whole audience, including myself and my two teammates, you can tell for sure this guy has some kind of magical influence. Holy or not, or just the good drugs he seems to have been indebted with, it is something, kind of, woe to say it, spiritual.

This is the guy who sung on the steps of the Whitehouse moments before Martin Luther King Jr would orate a speech from the same podium. This is the same man, who in 2010 sang The Times They Are A-Changin’ in Washington, USA for the first black president- this strange and stoned man, with an eerie countenance who probably couldn’t walk down the street in any continent without getting hounded; this is the man who stood before us tonight. Butchering Highway 61 with his apparent emphysema.

And then he was gone. A creepy bow and an introduction for his band, and he was whisked off stage and back into whatever iron lung or cryogenic tank was waiting for him.

Or did he? Encore, he appears!

Stumbling back out on to the small cardboard square the Bulgarians are calling a stage, (which was lit up by a giant video of a red eyeball), the familiar plunks of the keyboard sounded the beginning of Like A Rolling Stone.
The weary champion on the night, Bob, strode on back, clapping his hands together and picking up his gold shining guitar.

“HOW DOES IT FEEL?? TO BE ON YOUR OWN! A COMPLETE UNKNOWN! NO DIRECTION HOME! LIKE A ROLLING STONE..."
We helped him out, my friends and I, perhaps a little too wildly for the patrons in the rows in front of us. Never mind, they smiled onwards, and we kept screaming an’ a-shouting an’ a-hollerin’ out the lyrics which Bob himself had probably forgotten during an acid binge three decades ago.

One more track left for the night. A jazzy rendition of Blowin’ In The Wind. The much touted ‘hymn of folk music’, a celebration of early hippies and their free loving ideals, a recurrent catch cry for equal rights movements, a sweet, gentle poem sung by an innocent little kid.
While I watched him up there, his Napoleon rags of age shining through now, I had to fall back in the chair, and I could see, I could see with my eyes, as he rambled on up there, so vividly, the young 20-something kid of the black and white television clips singing the same damned song with its rhetorical limericks about “how many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?” and I wondered to myself, on the verge of meltdown,
“How many indeed? Too fuckin’ many Bobby, too many by half... look at you, angular, though hunched now, decrepit, alive, how many until people call you a man, a real, whatever it should be, man, a vision of your fathers eye, and look at me, look at us all, who will ever know, are we men or are we just sitting and watching our heads depart from our bodies in sick bliss, perpetual, day in, day out waiting for somebody to turn off the lamps, waiting for the sweet goodnight complement of, ‘you made it, man, glad you could be here, glad you found the room’, just searching, constantly forging our ways through smoke and fire and hazy winters to find whatever space there is left for us, for the individual, amid the ever-growing populous of a globalised world, where, where, where, how many roads...”
And how many seas must the white dove sail, before she sleeps in the sand... the answer my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Blowin’ up your arse Bobby, play one more!
The tears subsided; the old crooner left the building and was whisked away before Bulgarian bandits had time to steal the hubcaps off his Cadillac.
Sitting in his car he probably stares out into the dark mountains which surround the inner city of Sofia, looks back, in wise contemplation, into the review mirror at the fading image of the monolithic Stalinist era National Palace Of Culture and says to his driver, in his grinding gutter charm we love him for,
“Christ, Benny, what was I doing coming to this place? It’s fuckin’ weird, too weird... did you see those people? I’m gunna be on the phone to fuckin’ Jenson by the mornin’... ahh let’s just get the hell outta here... You got a light up there, B-B-Benny?” and the car whisks off into the crippled eve.

B-boom, b-boom, b-boom, b-boom,

The endless thumping of the railway rafters were suddenly coming to a slow,

B-boooom, B-boooooooom, B-booooooooooooooom,

We were pulling into Bucharest. Jagging me out of my strange fantasising, I shook gently the shoulder of the Tulip Girl, and told her of our standing.
The train whistled, signalling our arrival and the early sun signalled the inauguration of a new day- a new country where we, as travellers, had no idea of the language, the currency, nothing. We pulled on our bulky backpacks, our priceless though meagre possessions and hurried together out of the rusty train carriage. The platform was already crowded at six in the morning, and I could see the hovering gypsies waiting to try their luck at scavenging our money. I sighed, and tried to lug the bags on to the other shoulder as Tulip navigated on the map. I hadn’t slept, due to my cloudy night-daydreams... and there was but one line which made any sense to me, out of all the english language writings in the universe, and it was Bob, articulating his wheezy heart out,
“My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet, I have no one to meet, and the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreamin'..."
And with that, Tulip girl leading the way, into the jingle-jangle morning I went following.

Review for the Hostel Mostel

2010-06-14T02:02:00.000-07:00

Praise be to the Hostel Mostilians!‎‎

By mattgarrick - Jun 14, 2010

We reached Sofia, Bulgaria in the orange-peel sunrise of an early summer morn. Lurching through the wooden door frames of the Hostel Mostel, sweltering in the Bulgarian heat, fresh, mossy gravestones for eyeballs, weary and jangled from bizarre Turkish border crossings- seeing the buzzing fluorescent of the hostel lights and the noticing the fragrance of fresh coffee, we felt like we had arrived at 'The New Oasis'. The curly headed counteress behind the desk ushered us in with such beaming amiability, I had the impression we were about to be scammed. Not so! The staff at this ex-Communist storage facility are among the friendliest and most helpful people of anyone gainfully employed, anywhere. They sit you down, practically spoon feed the free breakfast into your deformed jowls, then proceeded to wash your plates. Wash your plates! At a hostel! When this incident transpired, I turned to my partner and whispered something about the Twilight Zone. Then, Damien, the young Bulgarian skater assistant will sit you down and regale you in detail every single item of interest in the entire of Bulgaria. After his four hour long lecture on the invasion and quashing of the Ottoman Empire, the liquor Rakia and the workings of sexually-ambiguous Bulgarian folk music, you will be risen, like a levitating Buddha, to a vast and unsurpassable level of enlightenment. As the nighttime set in, as will happen to you, our free beers were far and merry down our gullets, and we prepared to sleep in our cheap as lard loft bedroom, shared with twenty other hopeful Mostilians. In a manner perhaps too loud for a couple of Frenchmen, (who my friend later dubbed as homosexual frogfuckers to their faces) my friends and I sat and bantered about the greatness of this hostel, and the utter selfless helpfulness of the staff. One staff member offered us his beer which he was drinking! Amazing! Another took us out on to the street, hailed us a cab and waved us away as we went to the casino! Unbelievable! One Hostel Mostilian powdered us with Colombian cocaine and lavished a harem upon us! (This never happened, but they were really almost this generous!) "WOW!" screamed our inebriated companion, Piggy Bardust, "THIS IS THE BEST HOSTEL IN THE CREAMING FUCK UNIVERSE!!!" (And was replied to by a bad French accent) "WHY DON'T YOU SHUT UP YOU AMERICAN PEEEG?" The Frenchman hollered, eyes enraged, from his bedside. "AMERICAN?? I'M AUSTRALIAN YOU FUCKING SNAIL!!" Piggy retorted utilising his endless wit. Needless to say, sleep wanted to come fast before a fight. So, anyway, despite intermittent invasions by hedonistic Australian's and swampy Frenchmen, this hostel is by far one of the best for value and friendliness in Eastern Europe. As my partner and I left, jangled and weary once again though now for entirely different reasons, we asked our beloved curly headed counteress to help point us in further direction for travel. "Oh, well, there's another Hostel Mostel in Veliki Tarnavo. I can give you the address if you like." And so it was as it will be for you- Off to number two, ready and gluttonous for another whirl of the famous Hostel Mostel hospitality. Thank you very much. I only hope they build twenty more. « Hide

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Wrestling, Whipping and Wine, IN THE WEATHER WILDS OF ČESKY KRUMLOV or Brothers In Arm (locks)

2010-05-22T04:39:00.000-07:00

"...Yes! The absynthe first, THEN the whipping. After! Yes, after the liqour, comes the ritual, ha ha yes, where the towns men go into the women's bedrooms to come at them with the whipping."
KWPISH! She jokingly imitates the crack of a cattle whip, not realising into what fearful realms the two brothers were falling.
"Usually our clothing is thin, as we just woke up, lying in bed, morning sleep crusts our eyes, yes then KWPISH! The whips cut into us, and we laugh. Then, from underneath our dresses, we throw them chocolate! Then the men, they leave, tie a new coloured ribbon around their whip and go to the next girl's room. The hero, the man with the most coloured ribbons by the end of the day, is the most masculine male in the villiage!"
Ludwig and Mutt glanced at each other as her diatribe continued.
"Haha yes! Also, after midday, the women are able to throw water on the men, to extinguish their flames, their passionate BURNINGS...but only cold water. The men must be allowed to keep whipping, without scald."

Our fellow passenger to Prague, blonde and tall, typical for Czechish women, carried a dizzy composure to match her dialogue. As we sat, uncomfortably wedged between a bratwurst-breathing German and a cricket clamoring Hindish, we, the two Australian travellers listened in perplexity to her diorama unfolding in front of us- of this ancient Czech Republican Easter tradition.
"Ah huh," I pondered what she had just told us, wondering why in fact, on this Easter Long Weekend, we were heading here, rather than, say, anywhere else on the planet.
I surmised, "So, basically, the men get boozed on hard liquor, and then beat the town women?"
"Yes! Exactly." Our Czech counterpart was excited: we had grasped the concept.
"And the women throw them chocolate in retaliation?"
"Yes! It is great fun, especially in the villiages!"
Not to sound culturally insensitive, but isn't this a bit like the savage Huns used to act around pillaging time? Ludwig leant over, close and out of earshot of the Czech girl, who was by now jabbering away to our moustachioed driver, Milan.
"We have to find this whipping thing." In seven words, Ludwig had ushered in the weekends mission.
"I'm dubious," I replied, louder than needed. "Something smells weird about it..."
Milan turned his cold Sovietske granite face to stare at me whilst still driving.
"YOU THINK MY CAR SMELL LIKE STINKING SEWERAGE??"
No, No, raging Russke, Mr Milan, your car smells like heaven overgrown with roses, please, let's just get there in the same form we left in, what'dya say, stranger, can we??

Easter in Prague? Jesus Christ. We were on our way to the resurrection, the rebirth of plague in the hearts of Australians, and there would be no return, no tumbling, not backwards, not now. The ancient red of the European sunset descending over the hills, as goats and roadhouses flew past the windows, reminded me of the Australian desert, or somewhere similarly stark and unfriendly. We crossed the border into the land of strange signposts and breweries, and then it was,
"HERE WE ARE!" Yelled our hitch, Milan, "PRAGUE! CAPITAL OF ZE CHHECK REPUBLIK!!" Milan beckoned us out of his stinking Volvo. Queue the empty wasteland. Nothing there except a KFC and a postbox.
"Umm, is this is? There isn't really much here...Isn't there supposed to be a castle or something...?"
Milan chortled at us.
"You must get train 30 kilometres from here. Then it is main centre."
Okay! So thanks for taking us to Prague Milan, enjoy the rest of your strange existence on the outskirts of nowhere. And to you, dear lady, I pray they do not leave any lasting scars from the whippings on your smooth and dangling legs. Okay, see you then, take care!

Ludwig, his ridiculously oversized bag and I, had reached the cavity known as the Czech Republican capital, Prague. Well, nearly. But the story today is not about this medievial museum of a town, a town known for Kafka, Absynthe and being a tromping zone for every dictator and his dog to roll the tanks on through. No, we want to get to the whipping, and that deep, eccentric earth exists around the Austrian/Czech border, in a old villiage called Czesky Krumlov. A town of lesbians, mud wrestling and whiskey. And no, all you perverts out there, not at the same time.

TWO DAYS LATER
Streams of melting snow blocked off the causeway as we waited between dogs, shifty schoolchildren and old men, potentially former Czech Republican dictators, on a rocky torpedo of a local bus. Winding and wildly careening, the guard rail seperating the wheel's of the vehicle from an abyss of 700 metres into vertical, picturesque countryside, was little assurance. The road to Czesky Krumlov. My brother's mood was even more turbulent than usual, and he refused to sit down. I was heaving in my own head and my functions were operating at base level (Eg, sitting, staring, howling like a spider monkey).
Through the fault of almost disaterous lateness, we had been the last to passengers to board the bus. There was only one seat left for two of us, and it was next to a dribbling Alsatian. Typical. "Better than sitting next to a Spider Monkey," I could almost read my brother's glare.

Ludwig was peeved because we almost missed the bus. We ran from the centre of Prague, mulled wine in hand. Spilling red over my soiled shirt, thanks a lot. We had decided it was prime opportunity to stop, discuss the weather and enjoy a amiable drink with a Lithuanian counterpart, precisely fourteen minutes before we were due to take our (paid for) tickets on a rural districts bus. We were escaping the skyscapers, the hustle and moan, of touristical Prague, and heading for the medieval crater of Krumlov near the Austrian border. That is, if we made the bus. Barrelling passed digified Asian photo fiends and teacherous tourist traps (Museum of Sex Machines and Torture anyone?), Ludwig with his spastic suitcase, and me with my hobo sack and boderline brindle, hacking my lungs in exasperation.

We had to catch a train to get to the bus. An elaborately webbing transport system of a foreign country, where their backwards letters mean exactly bupkiss to my map deciphering dementia. I had established how to order a beer, and that was enough.
"Quick! Platform 3" Ludwig sprang into being, still panting from having to lug the Taj Mahal around on his back.
We sprinted, leaving Ussain Bolt in our muddy wake, and made the Number 3 train to Hell. Gathering our breath, now we had to figure out where in the fucking crocodile creek of a backwater we were heading to would be our waiting bus.
An middle-eldish female, snout like a truffle sniffer to be sure, sat, red-coated opposite me and I attempted to ask her directions in my broken, shabby German. She replied in English,
"I am German, and I have no idea what you just said,"
"WherethefuckisthefuckinbusstationFUCKya?" did she understand my reply? Not by choice.
A helpful Czechish broad gave us some hints, we thanked her, departed the train, and were sprinting once again.
We had one minute to get to the train, I kid you not, we were already on tenterhooks, and now they were dangling over lava. We had made it! The bus station. Now a maddened dash to the platform...or....
"I'm going to go to the toilet!" Ludwig announced sprightly.
"Great! Can you get me a beer while you're at it?" I retorted, smiled, then ambled amicably off to the platform...
Wait, what freakish Chinese Checkers are we playing at, there is A BUS THERE WAITING! By this time Ludwig was whistling and zipping his fly, somewhere, distant, guzzling the atmosphere down at the bus station.
The bus driver started fuming, screeching at me in Czech jabber and slapping at his watch with his knuckle. I kept saying,
"Hold on! My brother, my...ahhh brother, he's coming!!!" and I blockaded the doorway from closing, even though he had lit the engine and was ready to fly. In retrospect, I don't think he would've cared if I had been dragged for miles caught in that door jam, bouncing along the tarmac like a disused sleeping bag... So as Ludwig was searching out to fulfil his brother's alcohol hankering, I was getting angry yabber hurled in my direction... Then, he appeared on the horizon, oh so far away...
"LUDWIG YOU FOOL!!!" I bellowed, coarsing my ribs, "HURRRRY THE CZECH UP!!!!"
"Maybe you should shout louder." A helpful Czech youth suggested to me.
Ludwig caught sight and starting running, a girlish gait without the zeal my emotions were crying for, and we climbed aboard our tumultuous transport. Doors closed, we were off. No seats. Dogs. Moustaches. Many.
"Fucking hell Mutt, there was no fucking beer anywhere, fucking shit, I think it's a fucking Czech fucking holiday or something, you and your fucking alcohol, Jesus fucking Christmas, you should get a holster on that fucking problem, fuck."
As he hammered on, as Ludwig spoke with the colour of a radioactive rainbow, all I could envisage was opening a fresh beer to drown him out.

WAIT! Hold on to your helmets vikings, wasn't there some theme about pussywillow whipping we were wandering towards? Some kind of bizarre spanking tradition, we were going to delve deep into, a Bohemian fetish, an excuse for the Bratislavan babes to get a little sexual satisfaction, a whip or two on their svelt and exercised arses by the gruff Czech louts looking for a laugh, weren't we getting somewhere near there? Or maybe we should let sleeping cultures lie...
Though we did witness the whipping. I believe, in the soggy dredges of my memory, it was in the days between two brothers wrestling in the mud for an American pornographic princess (TAKE NOTE- IF YOU SEE THIS ALLEDGED 'PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTIST', DO NOT SUBMIT TO HER BIDDING. YOU WILL END UP SWEARING AND MUDDY AND COLD, AND SHE WILL NOT EVEN SHOUT YOU A BEER) and one brother forcefully booted, mud-caked pants and a dirty haircut in tow, off a train heading south to Wien... I guess, it was...somewhere, in this ether of events over the Long (Lost) Weekend, lay the whipping.
It is probably better to eradicate these memories than transcribe them and scare others. It's just not fair. After all, it was Easter. Couldn't we have just bought an egg?

For those interested in further reading in Czech traditions and freaky perversions, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_the_Czech_Republic will answer your queries on the whipping frontier. Don't take notice of the wiki phrase, "cheerful and lighthearted holiday, " as we saw the trees for the hiding eyes, and know what they really meant was "fearful and plighthearted horrordaze." Or something similar as we rode on, muddy and plighthearted, over the dying red sun and into Austria.

Camden, England, and the sunken ship of The World's End

2010-05-21T03:34:00.000-07:00

As I arrived in the dusky basement, time was already amassing aftergrowth; I was late, and everbody was as carved as lambs at the slaughterhouse. Lead down there by some Swede or Turk or incomprehensible Cockney cowboy, I thanked her and then shrank- they were already into their fifteenth jägermeister shot, and bellowing like walruses to reach the hundred mark. Hungry Centurions. My comrade, Piggy Stardust, had fore-warned me this would be happening- they had reached 200 hundred beer shots the week prior, maybe twenty-five penguins the week before, and now wanted to try for the 'big guns'.
"One hundred guzzles of that brown death goop," I assured myself as I heard their retches and witnessed their gratuitously withered eye sockets, "Is never going to happen".
-and as I descended those stairs, like the arrival of the sooth-sayer, my prophecy spoke truths.

It was the first time in over two years since I had set gaze on my dastardly friend of childhood, Piggy Bardust, the soldier from Mars. And by the look of him, it had been two years since his gawking features set gaze on any type of showerhead, unless it had been one which bilges out mud.
As I neared him, he growled and staggered upward, aghast, throwing his arms in the air and cheering my name, or praying for rain, or something, at least, into the heavens. My welcoming into the fen.
Alas, this chivalrous greeting was as short lived as a midget drug overdose- *BAM* out of nowhere, a girl alledging faction as his girlfriend, mowed him over and on to a metal bucket, in a fierce spear tackle, as only an Australian woman knows how.
"ARRRR BLUUUUG!!!"
Piggy was groaning, unholy, un-soldier like- it coupled with the wincing trepidation building in my psyche, churning in my system, trying to prepare for the days ahead.
Suddenly, in a wild dawning of the damned, Piggy cracked one bloodshot peeper open, registering my outstretched hand cast out as a ballast, and took the leverage of welcoming. A smiled crept on to his hairy face, he cringed from his wound by the bucket, and he shot me a "Mate... how ya doin'?" We were back.
Within one minute of this rekindling, the jäger's were pouring, severing the brains from the brain stems of these already twisted bar barbarians. Needless to call it, nobody lasted the hundred shots. Piggy was vomiting over my shoes and his own hallway within the hour, leaving me to disappear out into the Camden night... but hold the train, we are jumping ahead here...

This was the basement of The World's End. World's End- the illustriously touted 'metal bar', in the epicentre of dishevelled ol' London, opposite the Camden Eye, hour's past closing time. After forging my way past the Cockney Turk to the downstairs nightclub (The Underworld), a club of reknowned seediness, I was haggling the locals for info. This was a venue infamous for a crime against drum-kits, commited by Kurt Cobain in the early nineties- a club where the cockroaches looked better than the indie ladette patrons, and where instead of telling you to watch out for the urine puddles torrenting the dancefloor, the bouncers yelled 'SURF'S UP!'

Swines. But, to the defence of the World's End grimployees, they were trapped like galley slaves, toiling day and nights, twenty-four-nine in this limey mug-palace, and upon finishing hour, they would slurp on beer and vodka until midday. Then, remarkably, day after day, they would rise and purge and work again. Time was a bending, shifting vortex (as one may expect at the end of the world). Their concaving cerribelums was proof enough. All the crew here, the bearded Frenchman, the Manga charicitured Swede, and Lula, the Spanish (about as sexy as stricknyne) waitress, were all lost up to their nostrils in work and booze. But not me. Oh no, I was on holiday, and I would be spending it footloose and frenzied. Living in the upstairs portaloo my fine friend called a room, (which I was later informed were the slave chambers back in the bad old days of segregation), I rang my week out, living it up and out in The World's End. With a death-clattering cough and a camera, I crawled along the streets of Camden, searching for Amy Winehouse's bloated corpse to snap and make my millions.

Next days, ailing from algoes and aches which could have only been born in a murky wonderland like the Underworld, I was blessed with the week's finale, the final blazing firework display of atrocity. It came one morning around 6AM. A Thursday I believe, as I dreamed haplessly of deserted paradises. Amid this sickened visage, an eclipse swept across my desert sun. Awaking, I found the fattest, hairiest, drunkenest crazy meat torpedo of a World's End worker named Frank or Dave or Freddy, proceeding to try and get into my bed and pass out. At this moment, I was IN THE BED, and believed I would be crushed within seconds. A flabby pick-up truck of flesh barrelling towards me, I squawked, "DAVE, YOU FOUL FUCKER, WATCH OUT!!!" Then the proliferating bag of protoplasm plunged down, in a volcanic lunge, to fall asleep like a wee baby under my covers. I was standing on the bed, woken by this fearful attack, and thanking the moon he didn't shatter my spleen in my slumbers. Now, how to get rid of him? This took some serious thinking, not to mention water and beer pourage over his gargantuan head. When he finally lumbered off, naked as the new day calling, I felt the sheets- they were wet, and yes my friends, they were yellowed. I felt a dirge inside me rising.
"Really? Could he...?"

By the end of the week, I left with a bag full of sopping wettened fabric I previously called clothes, a ruined copy of Dostoyevsky, a bile-stained wallet 300 Pounds the lighter, and a headache the weight of Pavarotti's tumour.
But if I were called back into Camden, the fluctuating, multi-faceted, ever-astounding suburb hounding LIFE LIFE LIFE into all corners, then yes, I will go. If only to break Piggy out of his dungeon.

Kimberleyland: Distant Disneyland for the Depraved

2009-03-07T18:41:00.001-08:00

My god. Out here on 'The Last Frontier', the weather is warm, the females are scarce and the goannas are copious. Kimberleyland. The the name of the holiday park where I am now habitating. It stands alone as a distant disneyland for wilderness, an untapped field of vision where nature finds itself free and unhindered to traipse all over us.
Talking to two Germans (Germans are a staple of Northern Australia- some sick longing for return to the ancient wilds away from highly evolved society brings these Krauts in droves) living in their mosquito invaded tent for a couple of weeks made me realise we've got something special going on. There are crocodiles, freshies, less than thirty metres from their campsite. You are not going to find this kind of looming threat of natures bridal in any five-star Berlin Beerhall (Unless some unlucky lout gets a little to close the wrong pair of Leederhosen, but THIS is severly off the topic).
Of course fresh water crocs are counted as 'harmless' by the grizzled eye-patch donning locals, but there was conformation in the Kimberley Echo this week that a large and disgruntled 'Salty' is living, lurking, around the moors of Lake Kununurra. Now, this could mean kudos and farewell to these Germans for sticking it out under these circumstances. After their Bratwurst scent steams out of their pours overnight and floats into the muddy shallows enticing our happy friend to have a closer examination, their work at the Sandlewood Farm may come to an abrupt ending. Much like the woft of French perfume clogs the minds of hapless males into a toxic shock, crocodiles are driven to the stech of sleeping Germans. Thus, from my caravan, oh so high and estranged from these tent dwellers, I experience the thrill of Space Mountain as the Tea Cup Ride disintergrates into a bloodbath. No more Weiner Schnitzels for those two. In their defence though, if they were able to harness the croc and set it free into my humble campervan, there would be no more stuckpig cliches or hackneyed stereotypes from me. So quickly disneyland is descending into Lord of the Flies.

While stepping out to take on the world from the stool at whatever bar I chose to frequent (the list is limitless out here) I heard this booming rave music thumping through the bushes. I was taken aback, feeling as though I should have read somewhere that the Moorowong Gadjerong tribes were to be holding a spaced out ecstacy fuelled Western Styled corroborree tonight, and I would surely like to hide. But no, peering over the fence of the Country Club, the music was neither a traditional dance event nor a rambunctuous evening at the Sporties Club, but rather a carnival featuring full rides and colours in the middle of the football field which is set on to the backdrop of the red mountains manifesting the jagged landscape behind them. As the chair ride span at full belt, the Indigenous children had something fun to do for an evening.
I found a chair at the Sporties Club and could not fathom how they brought the equipment into town so silently, set up between Boab trees as the Kimberley moon surfaced out of the haze from the heat. I noticed a man next to me, possibly from the Torres Strait due to the low accent, also feeling the obscurity of the situation.
"How long has this been there?" I asked, a naive new tourist.
He laughed.
"I don't know man, but I can't stop looking at it!"
It definately seemed as though we'd stumbled upon some kind of fanciful decoration for the middle of nowhere. Almost similar to if Robison Crusoe tripped over a log and found himself at the gates of the roller disco.

I was warned before stepping on my town bar exploration tour, there were a couple of infamous places to steer clear of. I am still looking for them. One bar not reeking so much of infamy but rather the odour of one dollar pizza slices and (ugh) children, is the Kununurra Country Club. I have been informed this is the Yuppies Paradise. Needless to say with my D & G belt buckle I sauntered my way in comfortably and sat to indulge as the sun sank weary over the red hills and the lights of the carnival in the field were glowing. Modern neon under the timeless serated lanscape.

A ballast would be handy...

2009-03-02T22:44:00.000-08:00

It's a sad state of everything when the bearded gut-toting outback bush nazi is looking more upbeat than yourself. With his kakee linen draped over his body, comparably to the days of wearing lizard skins, his miserly eyes stare over my decrepit body like a chainsaw. I am visibly melting in this Darwin heat, my eyes are pertruding out of my head now, I get looks from old folks who are surprised to see a fish so indignent that it can march around outside of the water and even use the payphone- probably alerting Neptune the Jap subs are gone now, and Darwin is free once more. Swamp fish, good for nothing. Blisters on my fingers and bubbles coarsing my throat prevent me from dialling any numbers, so i decide simply to maintain soundless dialogue using foot taps against the glass until one of the unhappy looking Indigenous people decides to throw me a grin. A grin, a wince, a grimace, I'll take what I can get out here, all i really need is some kind of sign to varify my being.

Okay, the complaints are lodged, and for no good reason, as out here on the Northern Frontier, life is as it should be. Tropical Winds are beginning to stir up a frenzy. The roads heading towards my destination are blocked by floodwaters just out of Katherine, causing disturbance and ill-feeling towards taking the trip in whatever bombed out wrecks the backpackers around this town are pawning off. Only a 4WD would be suitable for the break-neck conditions. I saw a cheap mammoth of a troupie for $4000, which I am lead to believe is somewhat of a bargain, although the interior looked much like it had been used previously to cart large bleeding boar carcasses around to clan meets. Needless to say, this was right in the vain of what was needed. Unfortunatley I don't think I have been out here long enough to retain the kind of savagery necessary for disembowling pigs with kakee warlords out on a dusty section of the Stuart Highway...yet. Two weeks in Kununurra and I'll be hog-tying with the best of them. Maybe not the best, but around the mid-level. Enough to make them squeal, just like little German tourists, haw haw haw, hear that Frauline?

My poor ditched wagon would be feeling the strain, in fact it would probably disintergrate and leave my feet strumming against the ground at a hundred ks and hour, hands still clutching the wheel as I begin to feel the humming of infinity spinning around my eardrums. The Flinstones had muscular thighs to maintain the kind of speed they ran those cars at. My legs would shave down to the stubs. Yabba Dabba Do.

Next stop Kununurra.