This spring there was a day; a day when my feet sat dangling over the edge of a platform connecting two Indian first-class train cars.
It’d been one hell of a night of confusion, getting ripped off and desperately trying to find some way to get on this train to get to Delhi, to get on a flight to Moscow.
The horizon was beautiful in the subcontinent dawn.
I seemed to be the only one awake.
Eventually, an older Sikh man and his son came out smiling “good mornings” and enjoying the same things I was.
Trees cracking and rigid, field workers with their backs bent, swinging hand-held tools.
Rows of planted parallel things flashed by with brief moments of sight down their rows.
The smell of the day was coming up, anything was better than the smell of the passing train tracks.
For over 50 years the train’s bathrooms have emptied along the same lines.
It doesn’t rain much in India and entropy only does what it can.
They thoughtfully put up signs to not use the bathroom when stopped at stations.
It still smells like piss there too, and it seems like the nature of the universe is to become more stagnant instead of more random.
Sitting there, I began to wonder if I’d still be one of those young men who spends all his day dreaming melancholy dreams of unfound love when I returned. Of course I would.
I was already doing that and was moving to Charlottesville, Va., for purpose of old love.
My love was right in front of me though, the quiet day and the clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk of a train going somewhere, but still I thought about those painted toenails on dashboards and misguided late-night walks into unfamiliar bedrooms and the simple fact that I like pretty girls.
Looking out at those fields, a boy feigned a game which I didn’t have time, in the passing moments, to recognize.
Now, taught by the Buddha is that, on karma depends consciousness, but I seem to be unconscious in bliss.
Is that the same thing?
The smell of evaporated urine floated up to tickle my nose as the train slowed for a moment.
Dharma (the nature of things) that karma depends on consciousness and on it depends name and form.
Name and form, in a summer dress?
Since name and form depends on the six organs of sense, where does that leave one who can’t decide which cessation makes a better writer – women or traveling?
Chapter 8 in The Lotus Sutra is called “prophecy of enlightenment for five hundred disciples.”
Its gotta be in there somewhere.
Well, I went to Charlottesville. I taught nature to tykes and educated adolescence’s worst in rock climbing, rafting and orienteering, but spent most of my time taking away Gameboys and Poke-Mon cards.
It seems this generation will go further on in its demise.
When I lived in Santa Cruz, a poll came out stating that San Jose and the Silicon Valley was the hardest area in the country for a guy to get laid in.
A morning DJ offered his words of wisdom to the unsexed as I headed to work one day, “I got some advice for you guys not getting any – LOG OFF!”
I had half a mind to just tell some of these pampered brats to go ahead and start crying about the prom now.
At this camp I worked at, I made some good new friends. The last night of camp, we went out and did it up.
Raised hell and had naked babies.
Much beer, a rower trying to puke in an empty Bud bottle, jager, me making out in public with a cheerleader in ass pants, sentimental tones, jager, high fives and bad shot faces, broken sandals, the Polish guys walking up to UVA’s finest going, “I see you ba-by, shakin’ dat ass” then asking to take “photo of American girl.”
Paul and I woke up to wave our friend Dom off at 7 a.m. the next day.
It was a crisp morning.
Birds chirped, my head pounded, clouds curled and cuddled with each other.
I felt like puking, but overall it was a pretty nice morning.
We waved goodbye and the taxi took our good friend of the summer away.
As the yellow mobile eased off, slow and rickety, the fat driver taking up most of the front, Dom leaned out the window and yelled, “Look in the mirror you wankers!”
We shrugged, “Whatever could he mean?”
Sometime in the hours of passing out, the shit bird shaved my right eyebrow and Paul’s left’un. And the culprit was off to London. He was free of my would-be wrath.
I thought about what Alex, the Polish madman, told us one day after we played a good practical joked on him and his bright blue Speedos that we referred to as his “grape smugglers” or his “iron curtain.”
Alex ran towards us and shook his fist, “The laughing you do is not for me, but only for you.
I will shoot from my hip and tell you this – that revenge is like the sweet nectar of God!” I slept with one eye open that night, “Who knows what that crazy bastard and his Warsaw Pact are planning?”
Dom whispered as we turned out the lights, “It was just a joke, and he’s getting all `sweet nectar of God’ on us.”
I hadn’t been in Johnson City for months and I would be showing up with a shaved brow.
I never got the girl that I moved to Charlottesville for.
I never even saw her.
I have decided that I need to quit moving states and cities for girls.
I’ve done it three times and the outcomes have all been similar.
A lot of the money I was supposed to have saved wasn’t.
But oh well, with what I went through in India and summer camp, coming out of the whole deal with nothing more than an exfoliated liver and one eyebrow, I guess it could’ve been worse.
Damn it though.

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