I’ve written so much in Goa I don’t even know how to put it all together, so I’m just going to leave the last several days out. I’m in a terrible internet cafe, the combination of the light and screen is killing me and so I can’t really think but except for another rave there is nothing to do but listen to people speak Russian, sooo today:
1. Last night I sat in a social spot trying not to look awkward as everyone around me conversed, in big sexy groups, in Russian. I waited for my pineapple juice; the one I probably wouldn’t have ordered if it were not for the social potential of this spot. For awhile my only sort of companion was the puppy dog-eyed cow, a fatty, that, no matter how many slaps it got from various workers, clung to the roasted corn stand, using its puppy dog cow eyes on the laughing Russian and Ukrainians. Mixed messages from our species.
A guy from Mumbai(Viju) was instructing a traveler on the party scene and I must have asked him a question. He asked me where I was from, said my U.S. accent was heavy. He told me about Oppa’s guest house, setting me up for the room I’m sitting in as I write, after I told him I was staying at an abandoned house in Vagator.
Dark blue turquoise double doors fold in to reveal two beds on either side of the room. A dark maroon floor, huge tiles in nice patterns converging in a kind of star or flower symbol. The walls are white and lived in, upon. The dark wood ceiling gives the room a mossy neglected feel. The desk and tiny sky light, an exiled writer feel.
On the wall opposite the dark turquoise blue double doors are stacked two large cabinets of the same color that have a sense of having materialized within the white wall rather than being built into it. They are cabinets for secrets, of things housed and forgotten, cabinets for notes written on brown paper to other travelers.
Tiny seeds from the juggling balls that had come open and spilled all over the inside of my backpack, marking my every appearance, spread out on the bed.
Another cabinet, above the left bed is splintered, peeled back along one of its doors, looking like someone had tried to wrench it open by pulling against its edge.
Near the door is a very low sink with a 3×3 patch of tiles, where a mirror would be. Above it a broad window ledge and chicken-wired window with broken plastic shutters.
A spider webbed fan waits to stir the room. None of the switches work.
Across from me on the bed of things, leather bound layers of recycled paper are tied into the intricate cover. It looks at me expectant, haughty. When will I start?
Last night I followed Viju to Anjuna on my moped, snaking and passing, trying to imagine coming back the other way, writing the route down on the glass of my memory. It was certainly an amazing every tuesday night party, Shiva Valley, where I learned the awesome potential of psytrance and swam and spun and bobbed and writhed myself sweaty; so soberly immersed, I for a minute forgot about all the devastatingly attractive girls I had no chance with (my mind at the time). I realized it was a party I could only really let loose and enjoy with someone. At one point the long denied surrender of my knees, the sensation that has moved from a premonition to simply another sense, like sight, and smell it was an experience of doom, options falling out of the future like the boughs of an old tree.
I found my way back, feeling that manifestation and intuition is getting stronger as my frame cracks. Its an invisible limitation, revealed as such when girls afraid to tell me their age found out I was older than them.
I parked my bike in front of the house of people I had stayed with almost a week before and walked up to the forsaken dwelling just a little further up the street. Through the clingy weed and spider web yard, to the roof where I had stashed my stuff. It felt like a fort in the jungle, surrounded by its mossy stone wall and creaky gate. I stretched my mosquito net onto the crenelation and over where I had put my sleeping bag, over my backpack, tucking it under the other side. I slept on the hard fort roof in my sleeping bag and remembered why I was here, that this body has urges and how they ranked. I stared up at the stars, tree-framed, bat flecked. No one had seen me, no one would care, I told myself, shelving the input of the Indian guys who told me I could be in deep shit.
Breaking and entering is a crime in the U.S. but in India things are a bit more flexible. I thought of the man in Bangalore who told me he could have me killed, have the witnesses killed, if he wanted, and not spend a day in jail. Not a threat, just a.. letting you know.
I thought of the social ecology of this place, Vagator, and how it would be even easier here. The network I had chanced upon, glimpsed into and how delicate my situation in a sense is.
I’m in Chapora(next door), an irresistible dilapidated junkie haven, in a room filled with memories, being stared at as I stare out of a doorway that no one else sees. My knees creak, I swerve on my motorbike, I hear too much… seeds spill on the ground, broken mirrors reflecting pieces of something bigger, folded under dust to maybe be recovered later as something else.
2.
A butterfly flits by me, reminding me that life persists. I’m on a pile of dirt and rubble, surrounded by a shallow ring of garbage, surrounded by a deeper dense brush, trees, out of sight from the road, near a ragged abandoned structure that says Jai Hanuman. In front of the structure, behind me, are two stone benches that have Tourism stenciled onto them.
Across a valley that dips out of sight the other ridge is all shades of green and flecks of shadow. The haze almost drowns the lazy cumulus clouds. The winter sun is punishing.
Why am I writing this time? What is this place to me? A holy spot I think. A breath after hiking and motorbiking through this very bustling small city (Mapusa). Back and forth. Fire to flower, moving over the surface of these places looking to get snagged, looking to write a story that people will want to read though no one dies, nothing explodes, the story doesn’t end. Just an ordinary life worth living, scouring the world for what of our insides has been left outside.
The flies race around me like nascar, but considerately, they do not land. I’m very ticklish.
The butterfly shoots across the scene and out of it, reminding me that its not here for my benefit.
I just imagined all the creatures of this town following loyally behind me, waiting for me to need them. I turn, a dog rushes up. “Yes Michael, do you need me? Shall I place myself in the next pothole for your motorbiking convenience?”
Yes, dog, and while you’re at it, wag your tail and dog smile as I ride over you. Charisma, dog, thats why we keep you around.
The life on earth caste system.
Anyhow, I feel dandy, though I probably look serious, towering over the local people with my excess time and blonde lovers.
Its not guilt I feel, but more of an onus to make good use of my advantages and disadvantages, create a window into the world that no one else could have made, a diary of an experience you can’t see from the surface, a reminder of the nooks and crannies we drive too fast to see.
The haze is making this hill of rubble cool enough to be almost livable, nap-able. A place I would come to every day if I lived here.
Just realized something about my experience thus far. . little places like this, little magical spots that no one uses. Everywhere. It seems like back home all space is accounted for. The only place to sit is in a park or on your stoop. Here there are renegade beds, and temples and desks, forts, love nests and spots where its not weird to sit hidden everywhere, under titles like: trash pile, outdoor bathroom, abandoned building, street curb, construction site.
Everyday I find a spot that I could set up a base in, a factory for unpopular statements.
Moving on, past more spots to buy some cheap food for the last time, to take an ecstatic ride back to Vagator, or who knows where, to shower and sleep the heat away, 2 hours after I rightly should have.
Did I mention the hilarious futility of plans here?
See you in the realm of ideas.
3. (later)
Why do people look so serious at sunsets like this, epic ones on a ruin of lava rock bricks, looking over hills covered in golden grass where they are not in jungle. Next to a massive river like this, where thousands of white birds move as a single thought over its sandbars. The coastline bites into and is bitten back by the sea, behind us the green of trees goes on as far as you can see. Huge birds with sharp beaks, and probably claws, circle over one of the lower headlands, where the lighthouse would be. They never land, never eat–as far as I’m able to tell. They mix the sunlight with the air of motion and are sustained, straight lines with a little belly.
The ocean-shrinking boats, with their nets, return in a line, slowly, wary of the sandbars.
This expanse appears startlingly undeveloped, considering its majesty. Hills undeforested, houses empty, poor people unreplaced.
The ruffled sea gives way to the placid lake like river, a mirror of the sky carved into jungle and hills that disappear into a ubiquitous haze that no breeze seems able to dispell.
The feelings here are: pleasant with the subtlest tinge of loss, mourning for something not yet gone.
The smells are: vaguely oceany, salty fish-containing water, with hints of burning trash.
The sound is of wind, the talking, Russian and Marathi, steps into it and disappears.
The sun will set high today, over the Arabian sea, two finger widths above the horizon, into the haze that makes it somehow more beautiful.
The last three ships stagger in, boats that chased the sun and now rush back, leaving the dark ocean between them, the ancient fear of night uncoiling like great jaws beneath them, out beyond where the lighthouse would be.
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