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Driving has always held a special place in the hills of my personal hell.
a Mexican wave of incompetence that rippled back into the playground.
“White people in a rickshaw!” said its driver, a boy barely of drinking age. “Where are you going?” “To Goa.” “Goa!”
locals held a forecourt meet-and-greet, peppering us with questions and requests for photographic proof that we had, albeit briefly, shared time and space.
She had the beauty of a Disney princess but the brains of a senior Disney corporation lawyer.
“I haven’t even told my parents I’m doing this,” she said. “They’d kill me. Assuming this doesn’t.
She was a confident mind trapped in an apprehensive body.
Yet she kept breaking free somehow—digging a hole, picking a lock, bribing a guard, jumping a fence. She kept escaping my expectations.
Germany is too direct a culture to have something as nonconfrontational as roundabouts.
I assumed something would stop me, turn me round, pat me on the behind, and send me back to my ordered, in-control life. Secretly, I had wanted something to do just that.
imagine a glass bottle, blue, with an aged cork. On its label is a black skull and crossbones, and under is one word, in all caps: DOUBT. In that bottle is poison. Whenever I feel jealous, an icy hand grips that bottle, yanks free its cork, wrenches open my mouth, and pours that poison into me…
Story is the cleanest drug, the greatest high, university for the soul.
Wasn’t that like turning myself in for a crime I’d never gotten the chance to commit? Or robbing myself at gunpoint and giving the money to a bank?
I liked truth fine enough, but in a battle to the death with story, I’d cheer for story every time.
I was a toddler in a man suit but happy she’d not noticed.
A keep off the grass, don’t feed the ducks, I before E except after C kind of rule.
more surprised than annoyed—I stopped. I had overestimated the worth of my privilege.
Their approach to the queue is fluid and involves surrounding whatever they want and pushing their will upon it as a loose, jazzy mass. It’s not an efficient solution. It’s perhaps not even a solution. But they’re committed to it.
Window two was the only empty window. Exactly how I liked my windows. Few people wanted a ticket to go almost nowhere.
Her wide eyes, tightly closed mouth, and pronounced forehead creasing suggested that she was being held hostage by herself.
I think I’m done and I hate this and I want to kill myself or go home or both.”
A runaway-mine-train of a headache was roaring through.
three mechanical burps
I inhaled, and a blast of cardamom, incense, petrol, and sewage thudded up into my skull. The humidity was as thick as day-old soup.
It was even an exhausting place to describe; a marathon of a culture to run as you pulled people along behind in a chariot of words, pointing out all the incredible sights and views and weirdness appearing on the left and right.
India is everything good about humanity throwing a raucous, several-thousand-year-long party for everything that’s bad.
reality will always be obfuscated by the black box behind our eyes.
The journey had given us ample time to put on our overalls and hard hats and mine each other. From her rock face, I’d excavated the following lumps of fact:
“Maybe they have less forgetting luxury?” She often translated from German, which resulted in some creative nouning. German is all about the nouns in the same way Imelda Marcos was all about the shoes.
“That’s… that’s… timeism! You’re totally, massively timeist! You’re discriminating against me!”
a bus vomited humans onto the pavement.
rolling out on three wheels into this cluster fudge of humans, machines, and, sometimes, even cows.
almost exactly like the spaceship in Independence Day and the spaceship I also planned, independently, to use in Independently Day.
I’d tried to hide my excitement at this but felt it had leaked out at the edges of my body language, at the slight spring in my step.
She looked like someone trying to tame the Amazon with a robot vacuum cleaner.
what they’ve been told is a vehicle of prosperity but looks more like a joyride off an urban cliff in a free-market bus with no brakes.
squat modern malls drenched in the shrill, neon promises of phone companies and clothing brands.
progressive 14.5% “fat tax” on certain junk foods.
His speech crept like a prowler through the bushes of the night.
“No.” Each no doubled in size.
Travelling is always a negotiation between the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.
A dozen flies, elated at having someone to irritate, irritated. This was what they’d trained for.
She swept the restaurant with her eyes before realising it was far too dirty for just one sweep.
Everything we do changes everything we are. Drug is a mostly meaningless word.
He was like a Beastie Boys song bought to life.
I’d yet to find a drink she couldn’t defeat in under a minute of enthusiastic slurping.
Toby handled the word like Sisyphus his boulder.
released wafts of spicy heaven. Did I say heaven? Sorry, I meant hell. I’m a vegetarian, remember. Mostly.
We didn’t do confrontation in our family. Well, my dad did, but just by screaming and throwing things.”
It was the worst idea since the mullet.
