Editor’s Note: Josh Kinser is an ETSU student who will be doing an independent study while traveling through India. He will be sending a travelogue to the East Tennessean which will print his articles. This is the first installment.
Ahh screw it, I’m going to India.
I was upside down when I noticed her Birkenstocks lying on the floor. This morning stand-on-head routine of mine is performed to get some fresh blood back into my dry, pounding cerebral area. The cup of tea and breakfast was poured down my throat and she was still upstairs.
Ironic, how I was just mindin’ my own business and then accidentally, just like that. I should be well aware by now that irony goes to its greatest lengths when dealing with sex.
A hint of that virility that belongs to those “morning after’s” of those situations got me to campus fairly quickly on my bike.
Professors had to be met for the last time before my journey. This whole thing started back when I was a kid and contracted the needatotravelous virus, but more acutely this summer at the Appalachian Writer’s Conference.
The first night I ate at the conference, I dreamed of travel to the Himalayas, as I was reading Peter Mathiesson’s The Snow Leopard. I stuck out like only a sore opposable could, being the only college-aged one in the line outside the Cave.
They broke out all the stops for this conference I tell you . undercooked potato salad, hamburgers (soaking in some sort of what-the-au-jus is that?), bottom-of-the-bag fragments of potato chips, congealing baked beans and kerosene pickles. I shrugged and thought, “Ahh, screw it . free grub.”
I’m pretty sure I was the only one hungover the next morning at the conference, but … ahh, screw it.
After one of the morning sessions, a teacher suggested that I should have taken an independent study for all of the writing I did in Baja.
I said “really?” and then daydreamed all day about the prospect . hmmm, I could be some Dharma bum and still get college credit.
After the lecture I took my butt to Books-A-Million and bought an India/Nepal guidebook as well as a cappuccino. And so let it be written.
And so let it be done and six months later, it is now . it is time to hop on a flight and head to Moscow to catch a flight to Bombay to catch a train to Delhi to catch a bus to Dharamsala, which will be the base of my little Himalayan jungle gym.
What are those Tibetans gonna make of me?
So, I returned home from my last day at ETSU for quite some time, to find a nice little “Dear John,” or “Dear Josh” in this case, letter on my bed that said something about being good to see me and give her a call if I’m ever down her way. I hopped in the shower and started to finish my packing like nothing was astray.
For the next couple of weeks, you all will be getting little anecdotes from my whereabouts and I ask two favors to be granted in my three-month absence from this country and its idioms.
I ask you all to please join in my long-running boycott of these stupid Survivor crap reality shows. Hopefully after my return the fad will have passed.
And lastly, make sure to belly up to the Otter’s bar . for I’m sure its taps will miss me “like the deserts miss the rain.

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