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.