Fear and Loathing and The Living Goddess

Well, for another couple of minutes I’ve kept my head out of my ass and my hands on the keyboard. Spending the morning smoking hash and drinking rice beer in this opium den was a good decision.

Burning Bodies

The day after my arrival I learned that five other volunteers had arrived at the same time, and that they were all staying in Kathmandu for the week to take a “Language and Culture” Course. I decided to join them and get acclimated. During the days we visited ancient Hindu Temples and holy rivers, spun Buddhist prayer wheels, saw monkeys fighting stray dogs, smelt burning bodies from funeral pyres, caught a glimpse of a living Goddess, saw monkeys fighting stray children, got blessed by both Hindu priests and Buddhist monks, and met other travelers from around the world. During the Night, we had other adventures. 

To avoid tarnishing the reputations of those involved in the debauchery, and seeing as I don’t have a damageable reputation anyways, I’ll leave out the names and keep it as brief and hilarious as I can. I made some good friends and we saw and did some fun, bizarre shit. Gorkah and Everest beers were drank, dances danced, Nepali’s befriended, cigarettes extinguished on fingers (drunkenly dubbed Kathmandu tattoos...), and many memorable times were had. Kathmandu has a great nightlife and surprisingly great music. We saw live bands playing tons of western songs and Nepali songs and danced accordingly. The only downside was that most places closed at midnight, except Club OMG. 

One of those first "early" nights, before we understood the sad, weird, late-night glory of Club OMG, five of us stumbled back to our hotel at midnight, riled up and disappointed. We felt we couldn't give up on the night this easily. We were in motherfucking Nepal. The streets, however, were dark, deserted and hopeless. We began drunkenly shedding our clothes and preparing to sleep. Then, suddenly, two of us had a whiskey fueled, third-world inspired burst of motivation. Though beyond my personal recollection, I apparently went on a loud, nonsensical, new-age rant about how,

 "THIS IS OUR ONE, ONLY CHANCE TO EXPERIENCE THIS MOMENT!"

One Canadian was convinced. Too irrational to redress and too motivated to care, we stumbled back out into the night, seeking one last grasp of drunken grandeur. Sadly, we failed. Not barely clothed nor coherent, and after pissing off the balcony onto the street, we stumbled shoeless down to the lobby and demanded that the front desk guy take us to an open bar. Being terrible at Nepali and blackout drunk made communication difficult. We were deranged. He was clearly horrified. According to his lies, there was nowhere to go. Our demands turned to pleas, but were to no avail. After an impressive effort, hope began to fade and exhaustion sank in. Defeated, we said "Fuck the moment," staggered back to the room and succumbed to the darkness.  

At the end of the week the group dispersed, each of us leaving to different projects around the country. Ultimately, I couldn't have asked for a more enjoyable and culturally vibrant experience. My alcohol, weed, and Adderall detox was, however, off to a slow start.  The only drawback was that it shifted my focus away from the real challenge that lie ahead. I nearly forgot that I still had two-and-a-half months teaching in an isolated Buddhist monastery. 

The journey into my mind had only just begun.

Sorrow's and Bullshit

As a result of my incessant bitching and seemingly unappreciative attitude toward life, I feel I must clarify the reasons for my first world anguish. Well, fuck you, because I don’t understand the source of my discontent any better than you. Back home I always have hot water, nice clothes, delicious food, unlimited entertainment, the ability to communicate instantly with friends around the world, heat when its cold, A/C when its hot, hundreds of types of good beer to get drunk from, dank weed to get high from, and with just my phone I can read nearly any fact or idea that any human has ever written or discovered about our world and Universe. And I’m a fucking white American guy. Yet too often I wake up with a heavy, hollow, useless spirit which pervades every fiber of my being. I lie in misery. 

In February, I left. I rode over Poland with a window seat, a numb ass and a full bladder. The path to the toilet blocked for hours by a fat, sleeping American. Our flight continued south through Europe toward war-torn Ukraine, and then, for the final leg, flew into the coveted heavens above Iraq and Syria, right over, yet out of reach of thousands of bloodthirsty, freedom-hating, brown people.

I arrived in Kathmandu on February 9 at midnight and met my ride from the volunteer organization (the Rural Community Development Project, or R.C.D.P), outside of Tribhuvan Airport. We quickly threw my shit into the van and went flying off into the dark, weird streets of the city. The driver, Sujan, with both eyes glued to his phone, wove with maniacal ease in and out of unmarked lanes into oncoming traffic. One hand typed away furiously as the other steered casually and honked without mercy. After a harrowing 15 minute drive we veered into the tiny alley which led to our final destination, a hostel run by R.C.D.P. The next morning I woke to the sound of stray dogs fighting and old women hocking phlegm. So I made it. My journey to Nepal and into the bowels of my mind had officially begun. Time to start clawing up away from all the sorrows and bullshit. But I guess part of the cure is searching for a purpose, which is why I’m here. 

I’ve also had this one thought which helps keep me moderately sane. Bear with me. Human beings are animals, built to survive. On Earth, millions of different animals have lived and died with one shared goal, survival. It took about 200,000 years for our species to figure shit out, but we human beings got really, really good at survival. Suspiciously good. For tens of thousands of years we hunted wooly mammoths, fought saber tooth tigers, and lived in the fuckin dark, but continued to thrive. Every second of human progress has built up to this day and provided us with our ridiculously lavish, modern existence. This is a day and age where I rarely have to think about actual survival. My only problems are that I’m spoiled, whiney and sad. Sometimes, however, I remind myself how ridiculously unlikely it is that I get to exist at all, much less that I get to exist NOW, in this era where knowledge, compassion and creativity are cherished on a scale never seen before on Earth. That shit blows my mind. I’m reminded that no animal in Earth's 4.5 billion year history has ever had as much potential to wake up tomorrow and go watch, listen, travel, read, feel, create, help, sing, play or love as you or I do. 

So yea, I should probably quit my bitching. 

The Buddhist's

An old Monk chanted softly and farted loudly as he walked by my door. A violent gust blew through the hallway. It was the never-ending wind that came with monastery’s hilltop perch. Not the wind from his ass. The devil had squeezed his hellish claw on my intestines since the night before, and night before that. For three days I laid on my rock hard bed, alone, and suffered through the food poisoning. My fucker inner-dialogue began to sing a song of hopelessness and doubt, and the Despair sunk in. 

The last time I wrote a blog I called it “Too White To Fail”, but I never explained what the name really meant. Some people probably assumed it was because I’m an arrogant douche, or a shitty racist, or possibly even an arrogant, shitty racist douche. Those assumptions, however, were only partly true. My last journey was blind search for purpose, born out of misery and driven by optimism. When I left that December 26th, I had no plan to write, nor any expectations for what may lie ahead. Writing on my iPad was just a distraction. That first night on the road, when I named the blog “Too White To Fail”, it was a simple reminder that I felt semi-capable of keeping my shit together. 

 I stayed in L.A. for 6 months, worked relatively hard, explored the city, drank countless two-dollar bottles of wine, smoked frightening amounts of weed, grew cynical, stopped writing, developed a thick spite-based Southern accent, read some books, tried to write again, failed, and ultimately wept like a bitch. Then one day I was walking down Rodeo Drive and had a strange vision that all the rich folks had turned into goats, screaming and clip-clopping around Beverly Hills each in a fit of cunty self-absorbedness. It may have been the drugs, but I wasn't taking any chances. I bought a ticket home. 

Naturally, I got home and got complacent. Within a week, I bought a puppy. A little dachshund I named Josie. Within two more, I got drunk and almost lost her. Since then, not much has happened. I mostly wallowed in self-pity and drank too much. Of course there was a failed relationship here and there, to spice things up, but these just helped stomp on the slivers of my optimism that remained. Things got bad. Again. Too much drinking and too many drugs took their toll. It was time to be born-again from the Misery and reignited by the Optimism, but it took a couple years for that spark to come back. So I went online and found an organization through which you could pay to “volunteer” teaching English at a Nepalese Buddhist monastery. It sounded weird, hard and far away. I was in. 

Now I’ve been in Nepal for two months and although I meant to write about my trip from the get-go, I didn’t. So here I sit in the dirty backroom/ opium den of a rural Nepali cafe, drinking my fourth or fifth homemade rice beer, among the goats and chickens, and tapping out what may be  a start the cure to my endless misery. I’ll try to write something again, hopefully soon, before another 2 years passes, about the perspective this third-world country life has given me, but I’m not making any promises.