Zombie Flowers & Mouse Bones

2/13/2008

I’ve been in a funk since I got back to village. It’s hot; I’m sweating. I may have a fever and the only cure is—no, not more cowbell, but early 90’s dance music: Technotronic, Amber, Cece Peniston. Not even my raver cohorts have seen me dance like I do when I hear Automatic Lover by the Real McCoy. Fine. Go ahead. Snicker. I don’t give a F---! I embrace it with the ferocity of a crack ho who has been with out a fix for… What? A day, or two?

Warm water trickling out of my ear has the potential to throw me into a fit of lunacy, which is why I relish jamming Q-Tips into the waterslides of my ear canals despite the warnings from Johnson & Johnson.

All the mundane details of your daily grind life, I want to know. I don’t care if you tell me whether you had to choose between Captain Crunch or Golden Grahams for breakfast (always a difficult choice, I know) or what a-hole cut you off on the way to that job you just love or what’s on sale at the grocery store this week (I especially want to hear about fresh produce, no frozen dinners, please). I have none of that here. Do you hear me? Are you listening? None of that. I live very differently (err, mostly) here. I often wonder how it will feel to drive a car again after 27 months of being chauffeured around by drunken moto drivers. I stand in my shower looking up at Orion’s Belt almost every night, dousing myself with water, wondering what you all are doing over there. What new product has Apple come up with? What new movies are coming out that you think I would like? Remember… I wanted to see the movie Hot Rod before I left. What new music? Ahhh… music. That makes me ache to the core. The only media I am really exposed to on a consistent basis is Newsweek (International version), the BBC on my shortwave radio and Radio Dawool 99.2 FM (Togolese). Give it up! I want the juice!

As independent as I thought I was or am, one thing is sunshine bright to me now– that insufferable need of other people… in a desperate kind of way. Humans are naturally gregarious animals. And while it is still true that I appreciate being alone from time to time, there are many times when I wished for someone by my side, so I could slap them and tell them to shut the hell up—at least that would be something.