Unpacking: 2 of some

In which I continue, after a long hiatus, unpacking some of my tamer compositions. this is some prose that I, judging from the notebook I wrote it in, came up with in the late spring of 2011

My cat just touched my foot. His ears whiffed my toes like the sheerest velvet. To add to the cliche, 

his fur felt like silk.  He is a good cat. He tells me,  insistently, when he something.  In this he is better at communication and, quite possibly, inter-personal relationships than I am.  My father says that cats are "the only honest animal."  My cat is honest.  We both know exactly what he wants when he wants it, or when he does not as the case may be. . . . This is more than I can say for most people.  Everyone needs to have a cat for a cat consistently reminds you that you are not alone in the world. Indeed, a cat reminds you that you are, in fact, second in the universe.  The cat being first. This is a realization that would benefit many people. I can imagine a cat saying, if cats could talk, "what the hell are you looking at? feed me." A little humility is good for the soul because it reminds us that there is something else greater than we are.  Even if it only a mass of cat-less humanity.   

 i apparently wrote this on night during hot season when i couldnt sleep

The hot, close feel of a bed that you have laid in too long.  Not the cool feel of tired sleep, or the sweaty, lazy feel after sex.  But the claustrophobia of a sleepless night when the darkness grips you by the throat and the promise of morning brain fucks you as you feel the seconds tick away into some slow motion abyss that claws each moment out of your tossing head.  And all that you feel is that you do feel and it wont stop.

a critique on writing.  one of my tamer ones.  i once counted some 50 books i read in my first 10 months in Togo

Chapter titles are stupid.  Either offer a point of view, like [George R.R.] Martin. Or just number them.  Otherwise, who gives a shit?  Foreshadowing is the mark of a crappy writer-- one who doubts his or her ability to keep the audience engaged. If I wanted to know what was going to happen in a chapter beforehand, I'd flip ahead to the last couple pages and just read those.

i apparently wrote this on an optimistic day.  likely after i had just had my morning coffee and was sitting on my porch watching the world go by during hot season

"the wonder of the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer"

The problems of a Volunteer's life in Togo are easier to think about . .  children shouting "yovo yovo anasara bon SOIR" in unison.  Stomach problems.  Heat rash, that I suffer from writing this.  But when else in life am I going to have what I have now?  I problem solve on a large or small scale.  Read books all day if I want.  Every day can be a new experience. Not always a good one.
The hazy, dusty landscape stretches away before my eyes, not to the known, but to the unknown.  When I ride my back past children coming home from school, they all smile and wave.  People may laugh at what I say, or blow me off, but they listen just because I am here.  I can stand in a crowd and not understand a word being spoken around me . . . What is so good about the life I left behind? Here, people randomly drop dead, children get polio, noma, and worms.  Everyone gets malaria.  Traveling takes days.  Eating takes planning.  But I get to where I want to go . . .  We live in little capsules of America here.  We have most of the creature comforts of the US  . . . But unlike the US where our sense are bombarded by minutia and noise, here the next horizon is there if we look up.

the following are some selections from my black notebook, aka my later/cynical phase

My stumbling quest for something brilliant, earth shaking, or intellectually arousing to say leads me to vomit words on paper.  Much like throwing mud on a wall.  To see if something will stick.

Does time exist where there are no watches?

Of course, the only constant in life is entropy-- the entropy of self.  The entropy of ideas.  Of ideals. Of promises.  This constant spiral towards disorder fascinates me.  Or maybe disorder only of the perceived previous our thoughts were once in. 

The best part about life is that it doesnt make any sense.  And, in that, there is truth.

Truth is like a weed.  It grows in the cracks of all our bullshit.  Very well. 

Happy Pre-Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! I guess technically it is currently Thanksgiving since my computer tells me it is 0:32.

Why the HELL am I being deluged with this Black Friday bullshit?  Either I developed extremely selective amnesia in Togo, or at some point the commercial world suddenly decided it cared more about the day after Thanksgiving than the holiday itself.   Seriously, its like Thanksgiving just became Christmas Eve.

This will be my first Thanksgiving in the US since 2009.  As well as the first time I will see all of my siblings in one room since I don't know when. 

The UP was a lot of fun.  We stood on the shore of lake michigan at dawn.  It was one of those dawns when the sun didn’t bother to come up and the water and the sky interlocked on the grey slate horizon like angry lovers.  Whitecaps crowning roiling swells boiled on forever. The wind blew like we weren’t there, pelting us with bits of frozen spray and not even deigning to laugh as it went past.  I stood there on a bit of sand, squinted into the wind, and saw the end of 10,000 worlds echoing in the mist between water and sky.

Now it is cold.  I have spent a lot of time splitting wood for our wood stove because I dislike being cold.  We are borrowing a log splitter.  It is a nice machine.  Makes life a lot easier.  I can almost imagine a west African's reaction to seeing one in action.

Its been snowing off and on.  Nothing to major yet.  I love watching snow.  I forgot how blowing snow in car headlights can give you the feeling of utter isolation.  It is nice until you remember that you are going 50 mph down the road and need to watch out for stuff. 

It is the time of year when ragged clouds scurry across the face of a depthless sky on a harsh north wind like the hounds of a thousand frozen hells are nipping at their heels. 

I enjoy the feeling of getting things packed up for the winter.  Dad and I power washed the combine, cleaned it out, and stowed it and the rest of the machinery away in the barn.  Power washing in 40 degree weather sort of sucks.  And the combine has 10,000 nooks and crannies that collect dust, dirt, oil, grease, and other assorted crud.  Now at least it looks more yellow than brown.  When we were done, I closed up the barn, probably until spring. 

In Togo right now, it is Harmattan, when the trade winds shift and blow north to south and cover much of sub-Saharan Africa in a blanket of dust.  People there are harvesting, and stowing their produce in anticipation of the hot season, when nothing grows and all you want to do is sit under a mango tree and dream of rain.  Sort of like it is here, except you want to take clothes off rather than put them on.  They could never dream of being this cold.  Imagine having no idea that the ground freezes.  Or what an icicle is. 

Pines and leaves

I am sitting in the UP of Michigan watching the rain stream down lichen-crusted pine trees.  This is the kind of forest that, when you stare into it, you think it stretches to infinity

The problem with this rain means that there are tornadoes plowing through the lower Midwest.  I can say "lower" Midwest since I am in the UP

Harvest is done.  Finally.   We are still tallying the results.

Togolese farmers, around the new year, develop this vacant stare that bespeaks too many cotton rows in their near past and future. I've felt my face collapse into this expression frequently the past two months.  The constant roar of machinery dulls the senses.  The constant repetition required for successfully operating said machinery numbs the mind.  Life is reduced to the single pursuit of slugging golden grain into the elevator. 

I forgot how much the weather changes. This is the time of year when cold air washes over the landscape cackling its way south.   Sheets of clouds tumble across the horizon in its wake. The sky is capped with grey shrouds and girded in a bitter wind that spits in your face and pricks your lungs with ten thousand icicle fingers. 
Flaming red trees blossom out of the early morning mist when the sun comes out.  Frost rimes everything you can see and then vanishes like so much smoke.  And then sneaks back again when Jack Frost dances his chill midnight waltzes 

I am glad I'm back to see another fall.  I love seeing maple trees belching yellow and gold in the fall fog.  It is one thing that west Africa lacks

welcome, dear reader, once again

I've discovered that my blog has been in semi-hiatus while I farm.  This is because, when I drag myself inside about 19h00 every day, I find that I am to brain-dead to do much besides fiddle with my fantasy football settings.  Apparently shepherding 25 tons of grain up and down roads all day is mentally draining

I just got done with a bike ride.  9.7 miles in 45 minutes.  Biking here is much easier than in Togo.  it is at least 20 degrees colder here.  The land rises in short bumps, rather than long, slow swells that crest on the horizon.  And the roads are, mostly, paved

Today is one of those gorgeous fall days that I missed when I was in Togo.  Until I realized that most days in Africa are like this.  Only a lot warmer.  The sky is clear blue that shows you infinity.  The sun embraces you and the land laughs when you go by

The one difference being that today most of my bike ride went into the teeth of a north wind that grabbed my lungs with chilly fingers and snickered

I feel a lot further from the sky there though, than I did in Africa.  I cant figure out why

One thing I have been having a hard time with here are dogs.  There are three houses within a mile of mine that have a set of dogs that come running out to confront someone, like me, when he is walking/running/biking down the road.  I find that I dislike being confronted by barking dogs immensely.  When this happened to me in Togo, the dogs' owner would immediately smack the shit out of them.  If not, it was perfectly sociably acceptable to do it yourself.  Of course there dogs are usually politer, or more cowed, probably due to some innate knowledge that one social misstep too large and it would find itself on the menu for the next fete.  Here, though, people think of their dogs like their children, and of course its taboo to chastise someone else's wayward child.  Even when that child is running at me with a bristled ruff and blood in her eye    

We are about to start harvesting corn.  Each load I take into the elevator is about 850 bushels, on average.  I will take in at least 3 loads a day.  Hopefully. The average corn consumption per capita in Togo is about 137 kilo per person.  Or 302 pounds.  Which works out to about 5.3 bushels.  So every day, I will take enough corn into the elevator to feed 481 Togolese for a year.  Which would be about 1/3 the population of Nampoch. Assuming we produce at least 20,000 bushels of corn this year, we could feed 3,7775.5 west Africans.  This is not counting our soybean production

Of course, though, if we are going by the US national average, 38% of our corn production will go to livestock feed.  It takes 6 pounds of corn to produce 1 pound of beef.  It takes an average of 80 bushels of corn to raise a steer from infancy to slaughter weight.  That amount of corn could feed 14 people in west Africa for a year.  Think about that next time you're looking at a T-bone steak in the supermarket

dance! sometime in the hot season or harmattan

now

Harvesting

Since my return from England I have been playing farmer boy.  Or, as my Linkedin account says, acting as an International Agricultural Specialist. 

I have two main jobs.  The first one is washing the windows on the cab of the combine, so my dad can see what he is doing.  The other one is taking loads of grain to the elevator. 

This means that I drive a tractor, two wagons, and roughly 25 tons of soybeans 11 mph down the merrily down the road, dump, and come back at 20.6 mph.  That is the fastest the tractor will go. 

In the elevator, my grain gets weighed, tested, and dumped in a highly systematized process.  My main concern is getting my wagons into the dumps (I have about 4 feet of clearance.  total) and not running over anyone.  The nice part about the whole process is that the only time I have to leave my tractor is when I run over to the office to get my scales ticket. 

I, or my dad, makes more money on each trip that I make than a Togolese farmer makes in a lifetime.  Or in a very long time anyway. 

My dad harvests, threshes, and cleans more grain in an hour, or less, than my host dad in Togo does in a year.  My friends in Togo used to tell me they want a tractor to help them farm.  What they really want is a combine because that would save days of labor. 

Still, whenever I am rolling to the elevator, holding up traffic and listening the radio, I often space out and have visions of lines of women walking home in the dusty evening with basins of soybeans on their heads. 

The radio plays 95% of the same stuff it played when I left for Togo.  so much for "new-rock alternative".  It has been an interesting re-education though.  I am re-learning all the crappy bands i listened to in high school.

since this post kind of sucks, here are some pictures from farming

Ntifoni picking cotton.  It was about 115 that day

threshing soybeans

An English Interlude Part II: Notes from 52,000 Feet

Under my ass as I write this is 50 something thousand feet of frigid air and then the Atlantic.  Or Newfoundland.  Or something.  I am surrounded by what appear to be old, Brit, 1^st time tourists, judging by their inability to operate the touch screen TVs and handle turbulence

I am swaddled in a blanket

Don’t fly Air Canada if you can help it.  The seats make your clothes reek when you get off the plane.  Which seems like its older than you are.  The food is passable, but sparse, they give you pretzels, and professionalism isn’t that high on the priority list of their cabin staff. On the way over a stewardess spilled coffee behind my head and was like “shit!”  And looked like she had a face full of SourPatch kids.  Seriously.  

 ~update:  I did have a wonderful experience with an Air Canada baggage agent in Toronto- she was very helpful and seemed to enjoy doing it. 

This blog post may sound somewhat whiny do to jet lag and only sleeping 2 hours last night.

Saturday was a lot of fun.  D and I took the train to a town outside of London to meet up with my friend Karim and his wife.  Then he drove us to Salisbury.  He has a Mercedes.  It is fun on English roads. 

I wanted to take D to the Salisbury cathedral because it is my favorite one that I have seen so far.  For a modern person who is use to seeing amazing things, it is awesome.  Driving up into town, the spire shoots up into the sun and spikes the eye even against the backdrop of a somewhat modern town.    I cant imagine what it was like for a 14^th century peasant to see it for the first time.  The architecture of cathedrals is built to mimic and reflect a vision on heaven.  To invoke a certain feeling of the divine.  To impress on all who see it what someone thought God should feel like.   Salisbury definitely does that, even some 800 years later.  I spent the whole time wandering around goggling in some quasi-state of awe.  Then D brought up the point of what if all the money and resources that had been poured into that cathedral by a wealthy church institution and rich noblemen had been instead spent on improving the lot of the peasantry around it?  Granted, this is imposing modern values on a pre-modern society, since concepts like universal education didn’t really exist then, but cathedral-sized pile of money could have fed a lot of people.  Again paraphrasing my smart girlfriend, what a cathedral is meant to be and reflect is awesome, what it actually represents is disgusting. 

Then we went to Stonehenge.  Karim’s take on Stonehenge is that it is a heap of stones you can see just as well with a telephoto lens and avoid the entrance feels and tourists.  He has a point.  Stonehenge the second time lost its charm, in and of itself.  What is really cool for me about it isn’t the standing stones themselves, but rather the entire site.  If you walk around Stonehenge and look out from it, you can see rows of burial mounds dotting the countryside.  Stonehenge isn’t just the pile of rocks, it is the whole area.  People have been coming there for thousands of years to bury their dead and to worship because they feel some sort of mystical connection to the area 

D and I spent the last couple of days in London doing touristy stuff.  Aside from our trip to the countryside we wandered around the Tower of London.  Having recently watched the Tudors, I was more interested in re-visiting the Tower than otherwise I might have been.  It is really cool.  And sobering when you think about how many people died there as victims of the  corrupting nature of absolute power.  The Crown Jewels are about 200 yards, or less, from the place where people were executed for somehow offending the same monarchy that those Jewels glorify. 

We walked across Tower Bridge.  Which I learned was not actually “London” bridge.  It was massive and cool. 

Yesterday, we wandered around the British Museum and saw the vast galleries of trophies of Britain’s imperial heyday masquerading as archeological wonders.  Does the fact that artwork hacked from the walls of an Egyptian tomb is preserved for eternity in a climate-controlled glass box somehow justify the other fact that only wealthy or privileged Egyptians will ever be able to see it?  Did the old lady whose mummified corpse I saw really want her nude body to be gawked at by hundreds of thousands of people?  Mightn’t Sudanese benefit more from their ancient statues than we do?  Just wondering. 

On the other hand, looking at  stuff dug up in Britain itself is pretty cool . . .

. . . until my feet started hurting, and I got tired of tripping over and dodging tourists and just wanted a pub with a cold beer where I could sit and watch the world go by.  Because the world goes by in London. 

One gets an interesting sensation on red-eye flights when your biological clock tells you its 1 am and you’re really tired but your actual clock tells you its 4 am and you’re even more tired.  You lose your sense of time and space, probably compounded by the fact that you are in a tin can being shot through the air at 500 miles an hour.  I made myself a note on my phone – “staring at my jet-lagged self in the dim light of in a lavatory rocking with the bobbing of a tin can booming through ice at 500 mph wondering at how marvelous life can be”

An English Interlude

A red doubledecker bus just crawled past the hotel; its brakes squealed at the corner like a crypt door opening

It rained today.  It has rained every day since we got here.  I now understand why people used to have sun gods. I am now treating any of its appearances like minor miracles. 

I am in London with D.  She is starting a master's program at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.  To get to class she walks by a church that was built in 1850.

We have been looking for a place for D to live, so we have been bouncing all over Greater London.  Mostly in zones 1 and 2, a bit in 3.  It has been an educational experience.  10 days ago I was looking at a map of London, thinking "oh god." Now you can tell me a postal code and I can tell you what part of a city map you should be looking at.  I have ridden, at least once, on every Underground line except for the Victoria.  And on the Overground too.  In one day we went from Shepherd's Bush to Kensington to Stratford to Kennington to Euston Square/King's Cross and back to Shepherd's Bush. 

We found her a room finally.  After much stress.  She pays 125 pounds a week for it.  This works out to roughly 800 dollars a month.  A one bedroom flat starts at maybe $1200 a month. 

We're staying in Shepherd's Bush, mostly cause it was the cheapest hotel we could find and still be sort of near the center of the city.  It is a multicultural area.  I think I hear Arabic more than English on the street.  We eat at this little Arabic cafe every morning for breakfast.  It is so good.  

I used to think London fog was romantic and mysterious, now, without the sun, I wilt. Thanks, Africa.  I only packed t-shirts, jeans, and sandals to come here.  Mostly because I did not own anything else.  D made me go shopping.  I have worn shoes for 5 days straight.  And a sweater.  Who knew 60 was so freaking cold?

Getting to London included taking a train from Chicago to Detroit.  I rolled past miles upon miles of the ruins of the American dream.  Empty, rusted hulks of factories and steel mills standing as silent, shrieking memorials to the almighty corroding dollar and Moloch.  Here, I stared down solid rows of houses built for factory workers during the Industrial revolution.  Blank windows that have been staring at each other for hundreds of years.  Or scuff my feet on cobblestones that count their ages by monarchs. The buildings here exude a kind of ancient, world-weary nonchalance.  Or at least that's how it seems to an American who thinks "old" is the number of centuries he can count on one hand.  American exceptionalism is such a crock.

We stopped in a pub in Blackfriers.  Aside from the suits whining about the temperature of their Guinness, it was great.

I love London, aside from being cold.  There is always something different to think about here. 

Unpacking: 1 of some

I have not really unpacked yet.  Most of my clothes are out and used/tossed.  But I still have bundles sitting in a suitcase in the corner of my room.  I pulled some stuff out the other night and started looking through it.  I found my collection of 1/3 full notebooks in which I wrote down whatever drivel came to mind in Togo that was unfit for general blog consumption of the time and my journal.  I decided to resurrect some of these lost gems for you, dear reader, in a mostly unedited form.  Thus, this is the first of what will hopefully be a series.  If you find some of it bothersome or offensive, stop reading.

The following poem has the dubious distinction of being one of the first things I wrote in Togo that was not in a blog or a journal.  Its actually about Morocco-- about a Berber household someplace near the Anti-Atlas mountains.   Do not ask about the formatting, I do not remember.  I wrote this in 2010. During stage.  I think

Three dugouts set
    In a bank of
        A dry ditch that never
             Feels water's clammy caress
     Anymore
             Under a crumbling tower that
       Once overlooked caravans plying their way
   Through high mountains and trackless sands and
            Now the sand whispers its story to
                Bleating goats that must know
                   The secrets of their valley because
                      We lonely Americans only
                       See the three dugouts and
                             The ones in them

If I don't remember the next circumstances of this next thing, I can definitely picture the scene I am writing about.  I apparently got poetic one morning about Harmattan.  And decided to write about it.  After a couple cups of coffee.  Maybe late 2011.  

the air is white
I am in that strange place that only
a large cup of coffee and a
calabash of tchakpa can conjure.
he air is white. If I squint I
can imagine that there are clouds of snow
powder billowing between the mango
trees.  the air is white and shapes
move in it. shapes. lost desert
jinns wandering in pale green
wastelands far from their birthing dunes.
the sun is buried in an ethereal haze. 
a baptismal, or burial, shroud of incorporeal
mass. wind kicks it around. the white.
carries it over the rolling ridges and
dipping valleys.  my lips crunch white.   

To post or not to post this one?  I was apparently mad this day, especially at the ubiquitous trash that is scattered seemingly everywhere in Togo.  Many PCVs have existential crises about littering etc.  Apparently I did too in late 2010/early 2011.

Plastic candy wrappers are fucking stupid.
What is the point of a square piece of
Plastic after the candy is gone?
Environmental damage/pollution
Burn it? Bury it? Eat it?
Cum in it and see if you have toxic jizz?
Recycle it? Toss it?
The trappings of the modern world
Look so fucking pointless. 
Instant gratification is an ugly whore up close
and personal.  Because thats
all that little square of crinkly crap really is. . . .

If you are still reading, this next little nugget is apparently an epiphany I had one morning.  I think it was the result of a couple conversations I had with my neighbor, Jenn, now that I think about it.  

Living here is so much closer to being alive. So much closer to actual life.  Not just distraction shrouded existence.

These next two are from my green period during my literary flowering in early/mid 2011 

Thunder crunches over the horizon
And that's all
A million promises left unfulfilled

and. . . 

Red laterite roads gash through
Quick green countrysides

Storm cells slog over the horizon like
Wandering giants supremely disdainful
Of us mere mortals below

Green hill rising from rolling
Green ridges; so many fetishes curled
Beneath the landscape

Gray smoke smudging far
Green parks.  Charcoal burners

Ridge top vistas where the countryside
Sweeps away into bowls over hills
Through hollows and emerges laughing
Against a far horizon. Ready
To do it again

And, for your patience, some pictures. 

somewhere in southwest Bassar

a football match.  I was looking for a good picture of the dust

coming in from the fields in the evening during Harmattan

Ditto

sunset

 
 

Food Breathes Salty

It has been a while, in US terms anyway, since I have updated this.  What has happened in the mean time you wonder? Fun and games on the farm have included lifting the ATV off my dad after he flipped it and patching my parents' roof.  I quickly remember why I am no longer in construction.  I rented a car last weekend and drove up to Detroit for D's birthday and Labor Day.  That was a lot of fun.

Driving here is one thing.  Driving here in traffic is something else.   There is traffic in Lome.  But it is civilized.  Or chaotic to the point that it engenders good manners.  Here you are caught in the quandary of being nice, driving defensively, and merging like your car is constructed of egg shells.  Like everyone else on the road.  Hence, no one gets anywhere.  Too many rules.

iPhone update:  I got myself the Google Map app for my phone since one of the main reasons why I own a smart phone is so that something can tell me where I am.  Anyway, I was getting ready to leave for Detroit and I punched D's address into the app to see what route to take.  A "start" button popped up so I hit it.  Because I hit whatever buttons pop up on my screen just because.  Probably a bad habit.  Anyway, I hit start.  And this sultry voice booms from my phone "in 500 feet, turn right on to . . . "  I almost dropped my phone down the stairs.  I am not even joking.  But she got me to Detroit in good time.

D's parents took us to a Tigers game.  That was a lot of fun.  We ate a lot of peanuts.  And saw a lot of entertaining baseball.

I like having BBC and Al-Jazeera in my pocket all the time.  Except when the US is contemplating bombing Another country and I inwardly cringe and imagine what my friends in Togo are saying.  I am sort of glad I am not there right now and in the position of being the resident American who has to explain away all the stupid shit in this country.  


I may have said this before, but life here is so freaking stressful.  And we have few mechanisms for dealing with said stress except for escapist pursuits.  The worst part about stress here is how freaking trivial most of it is.  Or abstract.  Here I am stressed about student loans, in Togo I was stressed about feeding myself dinner.  At the moment I was stressing out about having dropped a $42 bucket of adhesive off the roof into my mom's flower bed someone in the world was stressing out about not having the means to buy medicine for her sick child.  I drove 350 miles yesterday on pristine (comparatively speaking) roads and stressed out about traffic.  Granted a lot of this traffic was traveling at about 70 mph scant feet from my face, but seriously.  I've ridden in cars with gas tanks in the engine compartment and whose brake pads fell out.

That didn't stress me out.  But scratching my rental did.  Go figure.

Food here is so salty.  I feel like I am eating the sea any time I get a sandwich from somewhere.  Like everything tastes salty to me.  I never noticed this before.

I just uploaded most of my pictures on to this computer.  Something like 3500 pictures.  Here are a couple more of them:

the moon

studies in goats

Binaparba.  D's house was between the minerats on the left

Petite and Muwaku dancing at some point. . . the guy behind them was the one who got bit by a snake a couple months ago

The Starry Night

One of the things I have always loved about my farm is walking down the road on one of those crisp clear nights and looking up at the stars.  The corn is this black silence that blocks out the world like cathedral walls and the night sky spews the Milky Way overhead. 

Then I went to Togo.  Now the night sky here is boring.  Well, less interesting than it used to be.

The stars here seem bland.  More familiar, because I can pick out the constellations in their "normal" places, but bland.  Stars hang low in the rural west African sky.  Drops of liquid crystal on a black satin fabric.  Some glint yellow, others blue, or brown.  Some are big, bold. and bright.  The other stars around them seem to cower away.  Some twinkle.  Others glare.  The Milky Way is a phenomenon rather than a suggestion; a glowing swath arcing across the sky.  There is one star that always reminded me of D's eyes.  They have the same azure tint.  I was curious, so I looked it up in a star book one night.  It is Sirius.  It usually hangs just over the top of Mount Bassar.

The Togo night sky is entertaining to watch.  I used to sit out in a chair when I first got to Nampoch and stare up for hours.  This was before I got my nook.  Anyway, one night I saw this object sail across the sky from one horizon to the other.  Perfectly straight line.  I have no idea what it was.  Maybe a satellite or the International Space Station.  I looked for it for the next 2+ years, never found it again until maybe a month before I COSed.  Then I timed it and realized it always passed overhead about 19h45 every night.  That took a bit of the mystery out of it, but it was still fun to watch.

Then there were shooting stars.  One of the first ones I saw was in Kouka.  Well I was in Kouka.  I was buying dinner one evening before catching a zed home when something caught my eye.  My thought process went something like this "holy shit! fireworks! oooo - oh wait, this is Togo.  And that is a meteor." 

The second shooting star I saw was memorable because it was almost the harbinger of my death.  Kader and I were motoing to Kara one night on our way back from a meeting up north.  We were going up through the mountain pass between Niamtougou and Kante, up and around a curve.  I was star gazing and spacing out because my iPod had died.  I saw a massive shooting star and looked down to say something to Kader about it when he jerked the moto over to avoid another moto coming flying toward us around the curve.  In our lane.  With no headlight.  We were going maybe 40 kph at the time, the other guy was doing an easy 60.  Kader was furious.  I still have no idea how he managed to see the other moto on the dark road and swerve in time.  But he did. 

Sometimes here, when the moon is full I walk down the road and I can see my shadow on the road, or on the corn.  In Togo sometimes the moon was so bright you can walk without much need for a flashlight.  If you are really adventurous and think you can spot a viper in your path with your cat-like vision.  In Harmattan the moon looks dusty brown, or blood red.  Occasionally I would watch the moon rise over evening thunderstorms.  Watching lightening and thunderheads glowing like alien spaceships in the moonlight is really cool. 

One of the most surreal moments I had in Togo was in 2011.  I was at a funeral dance in Kpolabol.  We stayed late and the moon rose over the dancers.  Huge and full.  It shown through the branches of a skeletal tree as dust from the dance drifted over it like a dusty shroud.   Then kids got a kick out of watching me try to take a picture of it. 

5656 Miles Away

It is 0219 and there is a hole in my chest that mirrors the darkness coming in my window.

I am laying in bed.  I was hungry before I went to bed, so I had a snack from the refrigerator.  The fan in my window is blowing cool night air and white noise across my back.  There are no bugs in my room. My body is clean of parasites and prophylaxis.  I just brushed my teeth with running water.  The bathroom is about 14 steps away.  This computer links me to the world with a couple of mouse clicks.  Earlier I skyped with D.  It always cheers me up to see her face. My cat just brought me a toy to play with.  This is my reality here. 5656 miles away, in Nampoch, this is reality for no one.

I am living better than most of the rest of world and better than like 90%+ of humanity has lived.  Ever. 

In Togo right now it is early morning.  Dawn has passed about 45 minutes ago.  The sun is burning away the last of the night mist.  Ada is probably sweeping the compound or heating water for showering.  Tefoni is sitting under the neem tree trying to wake up.  Petite is walking around talking to people, or on his way to farm. Same people, different lives.   

 Tonight we drove 40 miles to eat sushi.  Then we picked my parents up from the airport.  They woke up this morning in Paris.  It is 4198 miles between Paris and Ladoga.  God only knows where the sushi came from. Do you realize how crazy that is?

I just realized that here dust is soft fluffy grey stuff.  In Togo dust is redgreybrown grit that walks in your house and flips you off as it sits down and spits on your floor. 

I can skype on my new iphone.  That is cool.

The other day I went to go cut down a dead tree in my parents' yard.  I dug the chainsaw out of the shed and went out there.  Then I realized I could feel the breeze over my toes.  I dont have the balls to use a chainsaw in flipflops like Togolese. 

Life here is so easy and convenient that many of problems that people have are just disruptions of that ease rather than anything real. 

Nampoch is 9 degrees above the equator, Ladoga  is 39.  That explains a few things I guess. 

It hasnt rained here for maybe 10 days.  I did not think anything of this until someone mentioned it tonight. 

A Post of Milestones

Tonight I will take my last doxycycline pill.  Tomorrow will be the first day since September 17ish 2010 that I haven't taken one.  Its kind of weird.  Hopefully all the malaria has been booted out of my system.

Another milestone--  this blog, dear readers, passed 10,000 page views last week sometime.  Thanks to you all for taking the time to peruse my sometimes lucid ramblings about my life in Togo, and beyond.

Monday I caved and bought a new iPhone 5 from the Apple store near D's house.  I got a kit for it the other day, so, once again, I am connected.  Its funny, getting a phone here feels like when we got phones for the first time in Togo.  Then it was like "oh my god i am connected to people again."  Here it is like "oh my god I can talk to other RPVCs (and the student loan place) again."

Anyway, since I have read about 50 such comparisons in the past 3 weeks (the galaxy 4? ugh) I decided to compare my iPhone with my Nokia that was in my pocket when I flew out of Lome. 

~Screen: iPhone- color, touchscreen, 4 inches.  Nokia- sort of color, not touchscreen, maybe 1/2 inch. Advantage- iPhone
~Memory: iPhone- 16 gigabytes.  Nokia- some?  Advantage- iPhone
~Camera:  iPhone- yes. Nokia- no.  Advantage- tie (due to apathy.  except when my little sister took a pic of herself screaming and made it my background this afternoon.  now my iPhone looks possessed. so slight iPhone advantage) 
~Battery life: iPhone- 7 hours. Nokia- 7 days.  Advantage- Nokia
~Apps:  iPhone- thousands once you figure out how to install them.  Nokia- none, except solitare.  Which saved my sanity.  Advantage- Nokia
~Texting: iPhone- gorgeous touchscreen and cool clicky noise.  Nokia-  t9.  I miss t9 so much!  (it completes the word for you.  I could write a book using t9 with one thumb riding on a moto).  Advantage- Nokia
~Phonebook:  iPhone- all contacts are blah blah blah it took me half an hour.  Nokia- its in French. Advantage- tie
~Flashlight: iPhone- download app, push buttons= awkward  Nokia-2 clicks= flashlight that is just the right size to put in your mouth, or tuck under your jaw when you're trying to take a piss at 3 am or make dinner or look for snakes/bugs/mice/scorpions/your glasses/malaria meds.  Advantage- Nokia
~Size:  iPhone- feels like I have a have an armored thigh when its in my pocket.  Nokia- feels comforting.  Advantage- Nokia
~Facebook/email:  iPhone- yes. Nokia- no.  Advantage- I can't decide

~overall winner: Nokia

~In summary, I feel less naked when I go outside now with a phone in my pocket.  Ok, the flashlight was the deal breaker.  I could not fully accept my iPhone as a useful part of my life until I figured out how to make it a flashlight.  I felt naked without one.  I feel weird with email and Facebook at my fingertips all day.  Plus, my sister had to show me how to use my iPhone.  What the hell is iMessage? or Facetime? My Nokia was just so little and useful.  So it goes.

I've developed this problem here in the US.  I get carsick easily.  I NEVER got carsick in Togo.  Even crammed in a van with 20 other people or stuck in the back of a crowded bus.  But here, ugh.  I think it has to do with the lack of airflow or something.  Stuffiness gets to me now.  I am not used to it.  When I took the Megabus from Detroit to Chicago I had to buy dramamine cause I felt like crap.  Then I spent the rest of the trip drooling on my self.

It has been so cold here.  Seriously.  Anything below 70 sends me looking for a hoodie

My cats have gotten reacquainted with me again.  One comes and sleeps with me when I go to bed.  The other one sleeps with me in the morning. 

An elderly gentleman called me up the other day, said he saw the article about me in the local paper a couple weeks ago, and asked if he could buy me lunch.  I said sure, cause I never turn down free food, and so we met up today.  He was a PVC in Ghana- 1962-64.  He was a teacher in Kumasi.  He was sort of surprised when I was like "oh yeah, I was just there."  But it was neat talking to him.  He had a hard time wrapping his mind around cell phones.  Peace Corps has really changed in the last 50 years.  RPVCs have this weird mentality, or mindset, that Ive had a hard time figuring it out.  Like the little bit of the world in which she happens to find herself at that precise moment is sitting in the palm of her hand for her to marvel at or ignore. 

My sister and I really connected this afternoon over spider stories from 2 continents.  I think that my Night of the Camel Spiders won though. 

With D in the D

I have realized that I do not know how to talk to people here anymore.  I may have mentioned this before, but now I know why.  I am not used to talking to someone who is a complete stranger.  In Togo, I met few strangers.  A fellow PCV isn't a stranger, even if you have never met her before.  You have a lot in common before you open your mouth to say hi, you can make all kinds of assumptions and be pretty close to right on most of them.  Since I am obviously not west African, Togolese made all kinds of assumptions about me, and were usually fairly right.  Unless they thought I was French.  The point being that there were all sorts of bases for conversation and small talk.  Stuff like "how is your health? and your family? and the work? where are you from? what is the weather like there? do you have children?" etc.  Even the most formulaic conversations, of which west Africans have many because they are polite,  impart a lot of information and let you get a sense of the person you are talking to, even if its in passing.  Here though, I cant even order a coffee without feeling completely at a loss for what to say.  "Do I ask how he is? Do I make some comment about something even though he will think I am freakin' weird?" etc. I know that societal norms here dictate that it is not necessary for me to ask "how's it going" to the waitress. But dammit, what am I suppose to say?   There is this empty silence embracing many of my casual interactions here that leaves my mouth hanging open in a void.  I went from a society of polite, albeit formulaic, social interactions to a society of strangers where I am an individual entity ricocheting through a formless galaxy.   

Another thing that is weird about being back in the US is that I can hold my girlfriend's hand in public.  West Africans arent very big on public displays of affection.  Which I can definitely empathize with.  Last week D and I were going to Kroger's and I grabbed her hand.  Then we both realized we were holding hands for an extended period of time in public.  For probably the first time ever.  It was weird, but in a good way. 

There are more huge, abandoned buildings in Detroit than there are huge, occupied buildings in Lome I think.

Yes, ok, fine universe, a smart phone would make my life, in this hyper-connected yet totally atomized social reality that is the US, much easier.  Especially when one is trying to meet up with one's friend and one does not have a phone, despite that fact that this planned rendezvous was set up entirely on Facebook without an exchange of actual phone numbers that would have made it possible for one's girlfriend to use her flip, non-smart, phone to call the friend in the event of a car breakdown, which actually happened. 

On the other hand, D's parents' car is now like a Togolese vehicle, whether there is a key in the ignition is totally superfluous to the car's function.

Habits that I developed in Togo that I still do here: I still wash my feet before bed.  Religiously.  I do the two handed wave even though this causes many peoples' eyes to cross.  I do not pass things or give things to people with my left hand.  Doing so makes me internally cringe.

This might just be me, but why the hell is there a professional football team in the US called the "Redskins"?  Seriously?  What is this, the 1870s or some shitty John Wayne movie?  Use that term in any other setting and you would (rightly) be called a racist idiot, but because it is the name of an NFL team it is somehow ok?

Automatic lawn watering systems are evil.  Non-automatic ones are only slightly less evil.  Dumping potable water on the ground, which is all watering your yard does, is obscene.

On the other hand, watching live, if only pre-season, football for the first time in 3 years was amazing.

Getting recultured

I am writing this on the bus from Chicago to Detroit.  Because I can.  The difference between this and my last bus ride is the difference one finds between worlds.  Just thinking about my last bus ride triggers my incipient claustrophobia and makes me want to climb walls.

Chicago is awesome. As always.  D and I spent about 5 hours yesterday getting our culture on in the Art Institute of Chicago.  There I learned that I need to reacquire the ability to stand patiently in line . . . instead of walking up and taking whatever I am after . . . and shoving my way through people to do it. This tends to make Americans uncomfortable.

I like looking at art, especially after not seeing much of it for three years.  D and I's tastes are pretty similar, although she has less of a tolerance for modern and abstract art than I do, so that is helpful.  We spent a lot of time looking at Impressionism and early modern European/American art.  It is nice to go to an art museum with a lovely lady on one's arm- when the pictures get boring, you can look at her instead. 

Monet blows my mind.  I get lost in his colors. But the one piece of art that I can think of that provokes an emotional response in me besides "wow, thats pretty cool" is Van Gogh's "Portrait of the Artist, 1887."  It looks like his face is popping out of the canvas and is about to take a shot of absinthe while lashing me with a tortured stare. 

There were some French tourists in the museum.  I heard one girl ask her mom why there were so many French artworks in an American museum. Not really, but I would have asked that if I were her.

I dont care what anyone says, I love the public transport in Chicago.  Cars in cities are so over-rated.

 My great-aunt died last Tuesday.  She is permanently 92.  My mom and I went to see her on Monday.  She seemed sleepy, but she read an article about me in the newspaper.  Then we left to let her rest.

The funeral was Saturday morning.  I appreciated the solemnity of the occasion, and the emphasis on "celebrating" my great-aunt's life, but celebration does not happen in a somber church where silence is golden and everyone is dressed in black and sadness.  The funeral home guys in charge of the ceremonies were professional and courteous.  And resembled porceline dolls treating the occasion like a glass snowflake in which a sneeze would shatter the occasion a million jagged shards of emotional trauma.  The whole ceremony had a theatrical feel to it in which ritual mourning was more important than any sort of spontaneous expressions of joy.  As in we were expected to feel a certain way, and the service was engineered to produce that feeling.  The result was a fragile performance of mourning that seemed more designed for the casual funeral attendees than for us, the family.  A true celebration is supposed to joyous, not necessarily happy.  Grief certainly has a place in a celebration that is joyous, much like you cannot have light without dark. This point of view has probably been influenced by all the funerals I attended in Togo, where partying in memory of the departed was the order of the day.  And in which the departed was still thought to be hanging around. 

I was one of the pallbearers.  I had this urge to suggest we do like the Konkumba do and put the coffin on our heads and go dancing around the block with it.  With beer.   But I did not want to shock the funeral guys. The best part about my great-aunt's funeral is that she had requested the "Hallelujah Chorus" to be played when the coffin was taken out.  That's more like how it should be.

Since my great-aunt was buried in my mom's ancestral cemetery, my dad and I dug the grave Friday morning. D came and helped supervise.   She and my dad shouted directions as I ran the backhoe.  I have now helped dig grave on 2 continents.

I wore actual shoes for the funeral. For the first time since January, 2011.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that my suit still fit. 

The only Bible verse I want read at my funeral is Genesis 6:4 because the world is a strange and wonderful place. 

D and I went out to dinner with my friend Laura and her boyfriend Eric the other night.  It was good to see them.  3 years seems like a long time, but, with some people, it doesnt seem like any time has passed at all.  We had amazing chinese food too.

I still do not have a phone. This is the longest I have gone without owning a cell phone since I first got one when I was like 18.  I want a new iphone, but I want to buy one that is unlocked so that I can use it overseas.  Unfortunately, new, unlocked iphones are super expensive without the discount you get when you sign an annual contract.  I do not want to do this because, when I joined Peace Corps, I had to pay a bunch of cancellation charges.  All this stuff with cell phone contracts and locked phones is bullshit.  I feel like I have to chose between a bunch of noxious squid who are trying to lure me into reach of their toxic tentacles in order to suck out bits of my soul.  I miss Togo where I can buy a phone and a sim card in like 5 minutes and start talking.  I guess maybe I am spoiled, but I don't feel like tying myself to some corporation again.

All the new styles here are kind of amazing.  In Chicago I saw a lot of new car models that I did not recognize.  New phones.  Different clothing lengths and combinations.  I was puzzling over a guy's clothes on the L when D pointed out to me that we were in Boystown.  I took a picture for a woman at the AIC with her phone and the picture looked as good as my camera could do.  Crazy.

Going Quietly Crazy

This is my first blog post from my new computer.  It is a 13-inch Macbook pro.   Very pretty.  The screen is enormous compared to my netbook.  I get lost looking at it sometimes. 

Yesterday I took my meds for for schistosomiasis.  Apparently the side effects include feeling you were shat out of a large dinosaur.  That is a day of my life I am not getting back.  I had a list of things I was going to do.  Instead I ate cookies and ice cream, played video games, and tried not to move.  I had a weird sensation in my mouth that made everything taste like it was made out of cardboard, hence the diet of cookies.  Not that I need an excuse for that.  I went outside in the evening to go for a stroll around the estate.  The estate started spinning so I went back inside and read comic books.  At least I don't have blood flukes anymore.

One of the hard things about crossing cultures is that one gets lost in reality.  Or rather, the fabric of reality suddenly blooms so kaleidoscopic that it seems some existential veil is shredding.  I had this problem a lot in Togo; I have blogged about it frequently.  A fetish ceremony, a funeral, a moto ride, a conversation at a tchapka stand, any point where I was doing or seeing something so beyond the pale of my American cultural experience as to render it almost impossible to describe to you my gentle audience.  The same happens here.  Like watching a crop dusting plane buzzing mere meters over corn fields and dodging trees is an experience that most Togolese could hardly begin to imagine.  Nor is walking into a supermarket where the produce of the world is literally at your fingertips, and conveniently packaged in barrels of crude oil.  It is not so much the experience itself that renders the world suddenly strange, but rather the intimate knowledge that somewhere, on this same earth, there are people who can only begin to imagine what you are experiencing. I have a foot on both the near and far shores.

Drinking fountains are amazing.  You have no idea.  Water everywhere that is 99% likely to not make you spend the next 2 days shitting yourself is a miracle.  Why drinking fountains are right next to vending machines selling bottled water, I have no idea. 

It has been cloudy and rainy here for two days.  And cold, but that is beside the point.  I felt myself going quietly crazy yesterday when I thought about doing my laundry and I could not figure out why.  Then I realized that its because there was no sun to dry my clothes.  Then this morning I woke up, looked outside, and felt sad.  Now I have come to realize that I am like a little flower, I need a bit sunshine to make me bloom.   Thanks Africa.

I have been congratulating myself on how well I am re-adjusting to life in the US.  Then I realized that I rarely leave my parents' farm.

I love my new computer, but something about it was making me quietly crazy.  Then I changed the clock to 24 hour time and felt much better.

Yes, I spend a lot of time here going quietly crazy.  Or maybe its just a constant state of being.

Stuff has this weird way of working out.  My great aunt died yesterday.  She was 92.  In my original returning-from-the-Peace-Corps plans I would have been in the process of leaving Togo right now, and getting back to the States on Aug 2.  This way I got to see her twice before she died. 
 I finally did it.  I went grocery shopping with my mom in a supermarket.  I walked in and parts of my brain excused themselves and crawled under the bed.  I do not know which part freaked me out more, the produce section or the meat section.   I mean, the sheer quantity of options that the average American has for feeding herself is beyond baffling.   Crisp lettuce dripping water, ready-to-eat fruit oozing its syrupy guts all over the insides of plastic containers,  sterile looking egg plant glowering from a shelf, amputated king crab legs waving dismally from a bed of ice, yards of coolers stuffed with meat products at least 2 degrees separated from their animals of origin, etc. While my mom shopped I amused myself by looking at the "country of origin" stickers on things.  Pineapple from Chile (not as good as Togo), green beans from Mexico, a plethora of stuff from Guatemala, apples and things from Canada. My mom grabbed mangoes and avocados at the same time.  I felt my eyes crossing.  Neither of these are in season anymore in Togo. 

As fond as I am of refrigeration, you guys do it way to much.  Most fruit tastes better, and is meant to be eaten, at normal temperatures.

My sister ate a mango this morning from the above mentioned shopping expedition.  I tried a bit.  And was depressed. 

Another thing that has been screwing with my head is getting a cell phone.  I currently do not have one.  This is a source of amazement to most people here.  I have the choice between paying a lot for a phone, or paying a lot for an annual contract.  Both of these options can bite me. I want a smartphone, but only because I want a map app. Life here is complicated when one is not part of the system.

I took a phone message yesterday for my dad.  I wrote half of it in french before I realized what I was doing.

For most blog posts I write, I have a working title in mind as I write.  For this post, however, there seems to be a common thread that connects many of my vignettes. Hence the title. 

Finally, much ado about clothes

It is 71 degrees here.  I am cold. 

I saw a status on Facebook a couple of days ago from someone I know who just got back to the States from living in Jerusalem.  It said something to the effect of "people in the US look naked and the produce is huge."

Yesterday I went to the mall with my two lovely little sisters to buy myself some clothes.  Shopping was painful for a variety of reasons.  One of these reasons was, of course, ongoing cultural shock.  One facet of which I am about to write about.

I, dear reader, have been thinking about this post for a couple of years.  I have been hesitant to post it, but now feels like a good time.   On a base level, this post is about boobs.  On a more intellectual level, it is about clothing, standards of dress, and how these are different here than in Togo.

I remember the first time I saw a topless woman in Togo.  It was, I think, September 2010.  We were returning to Gbatope from a training session in Tsevie.  There was a middle-aged woman standing on a streak corner dressed in a skirt and streaks of white voodoo paint.  Her boobs reached to her belly button. For one surreal moment I thought I was in one of those issues of National Geographic from the 1970s that introduces Americans to "exotic" or "tribal" peoples from around the world by showing pictures of their women in various stages of undress. "Boobs! look how different these people are! their women are topless!" Ugh.  Women in southern Togo, or in bigger towns, usually don't go topless.  Then I went to village.

I might have blogged about Togolese dress before, I can't remember. So my apologies if you have read some of this before.  In Nampoch, which is by no means indicative of the rest of Togo since clothing customs tend to change between ethnic groups/regions, peoples' approach to clothes seems to be somewhat lackadaisical, at least at first.  Kids of both sexes are mostly naked, normally, until they are about 3 or 4. Then they gradually graduate to pants, or underwear to us.  Then about age 10 or so they start wearing shirts.  Of course they all have "nice" clothes that they wear when they go to the marche, or when there is a funeral or something.  But, on a daily basis, pre-teen kids dont wear a whole lot.  Once the girls hit puberty, sometimes later depending on the village, they start wearing shirts pretty much constantly.  Adha, for example, always wears shirts during the day.  At night, she may or may not.  When women give birth, however, they are free to do whatever they want.  Ntido was fairly careful about wearing shirts around me until she had Alix, then she didnt care anymore.  I could not count, in a given day, how many times I saw a well-dressed woman breast feeding a baby in a car, in the marche, along the road, where ever. Just "boom" boob and happy, usually, kid.  This, I think, is a much healthier, not to mention smarter, more natural, and less puritanical, approach to breast feeding than here.  But I digress.

Anyway, thus, I grew accustom to seeing my host mom's  boobs all day. Every day.  If she was going out, she would dress up.  If she was hanging out at home, topless.  The same with most of my neighbors.  I would be sitting on my porch reading a book, without a shirt, and some woman would come over in a skirt.  No problem. I would go visit Kodjo and his wife would be hanging out in a skirt.  This is not to say that people in Nampoch are somehow immodest.  Quit the opposite.  Women, and men, may spend most of their leisure time topless, but they always wear pants/skirts. And they Always dress well when they go out.

Compared to this, Americans, in public at least, generally look like they are naked. 

If my host mom goes to the marche, or anywhere, she dresses up.  She puts on her best clothes.  She gets her purse and wears her shoes.  She might pull out a boob to feed her child, but that is natural and not immodest. Togolese certainly see it that way.  Here, I still do a double-take when my sister goes to work wearing short shorts.  Or when I am in the mall and I see some guy with his shirt ripped down the sides to his waist.  Petit would wear a shirt like that to the field, never in public.  Togolese women wear shorts like that as underwear. 

I think the discontinuity, for me at least, rests in the fact Togolese care a lot more about their appearance in public than Americans do, yet are more relaxed about the human body in general.  It is the opposite here.  "Casual" dress has become a point of pride bordering on a quasi- "right" in which "comfort" equals strategically placed "less."  It is, at least to me, a lot simpler to take the Togolese approach- to dress well, to have pride in what you are wearing, and, by doing so, respecting both yourself and people around you.  But that is just me.   

In the same vein, shopping sucks.  I have not had to worry about matching.  Or styles. Or fashion.  Or what guys my age wear now for 3 years.  Styles have passed me by.  And what the hell is with all the tshirts having some kind of advertising on them now?  I want to wear a shirt, not be some bullshit billboard for some cooperation.  I miss being in Togo where I can throw clothes on and be "well dressed" as long as what I am wearing is clean and in good repair.  The really funny thing is that all these fashions now will be there in a couple of years.  Tommy jeans look really good after a season in the fields. 

Menus and the Persistence of the Over-Abundance of Food

Menus make my brain quietly short-circuit.  My consciousness crawls into itself and mews "help me" from some dark corner under the bed.  I frantically cast about for some shiny thing to catch my eye and point "urg give me. daniel want" This results in my acquisition of such delicacies as the Arby's Berry something milk shake.  A sickly sweet concoction of what tasted like whipped cream and some sort of viscous "berry" flavored syrup that made my teeth hurt and my head ache. Today I got a cookie-dough blizzard-esque thing from a local ice cream establishment simply because it was the first thing I saw on the menu.  I do not like decision making any more.  The overabundance of choices scares me.  On a brighter note I avoided projectile vomiting said blizzard-esque frozen treat all over the car on the way home. 

My mom made a ham for lunch/dinner today.  My reservations about eating pork are suspended until I can convince myself to stop making a pilgrimage to the kitchen every 35 minutes for another slice.  I usually eat it with my eyes closed.

There are things here of which I am unfamiliar.  Yesterday my mom scanned her iphone at Starbucks.  My jaw dropped. She and the cashier thought this was funny.  I am still not sure what pinterest and reddit are.  Or if they are actually different things.  I do not know what a frappaccino is.  Or even if that is how you spell it.  The cashier at Starbucks asked me if i wanted one in lieu of a smoothie.  I said "yes" because I felt like little adventure into the unknown.  I have discovered that people think you are weird if you are a 31 year old white male and are fingering dimes and asking your sister if they have always been so small. 

It is cold here.  I sleep under my down comforter at night with the window open.  Due to engrained physiological reasons, I can not understand sleeping without a fan on when there is one readily available.  This might be due to months of laying awake at night in a puddle of sweat wishing I had a fan.  Anyway, according to the weather men on TV, this is a "welcome cool-down" period.  I shiver.  90f + humidity isnt hot. 120 is.

Along the same lines, I think that America has fetishized air conditioning.  My mother and I went to see my great-aunt Ruth yesterday.  She is in a very nice assisted living home, is 92, and probably will not last another month.  It is a good thing I moved up my COS date.  Anyway, we walked into her room, which is larger than my house in Togo, and she was in bed wearing a shirt, a sweater, and curled up under 2 blankets.  I felt like joining her.  She kept complaining that her hands were numb.  My fingertips were cold.  I looked around for a thermostat or something, but there wasnt one.  We both would have been a lot more comfortable without a/c and the window open.  Why does a residence/facility for the elderly need to be kept at near arctic temperatures? It seems like this is less for the residents and more for the people who work there.

The human body is extraordinarily capable of adapting to many different climates and temperatures.  This is why people live in Africa as well as in Siberia.  Air conditioning, and the 68 degree standard that seems to have been elevated to a natural right by this point, is another societal myth of happiness.  Sort of like the myth that everyone needs to have a personal automobile.

Rant ended.  Off for more ham.   

Cheese & Music

I have been back on US soil for exactly a week now.  In this time I am fairly certain I have eaten my body weight in cheese.  And again in chocolate chip cookies.  Seriously, where has smoked Gouda been all my life?

I drove for the first time since being back yesterday afternoon.  I went to see my friend Lauren and her new baby.  I almost drove the speed limit. 

The trick to survive being back here, I think, is instincts.  Or muscle memory.  I have to do things on instinct and not think about them.  If I think, I go crazy.  Like trying to remember if I can make a left hand turn in a turn lane when the other lights are green but mine is not.  Or which interstate exit to take. Or that twist-cap bottles exist.

Every day I find some new little orgasmic slice of gastronomical bliss. Like blueberries.  Wow. 

Every day, at least on those days when I leave hiding and emerge from my parents' house, I find at least one culturally inappropriate thing, for the US, that I must unlearn.  Like the two handed wave. Or talking about nursing. Or drinking beers at 9 am. 

On the way to and from my friend Lauren's last night, I listened to the radio.  X-103, Indy's New Rock/Alternative.  In about 2 hours of listening I hear approximately 8 new songs.  2 of these were repeats, so I heard 6 new songs.  And a lot of other songs that I havent heard in 3 years but to which I could still sing along.  So much for the music scene since I have been away. I find it interesting that "new rock" can still be new after 6 years.

Driving, or riding in cars, here makes me quietly panic. I feel like Edvard Munch's "The Scream."  Everyone drives so fast. And there are no obstacles, like huge potholes, or washouts, or wrecks, or goats, or slow motos, or people on the road to dictate what drivers are going to do.  And there are cops.  Everywhere.  To whom I cannot slip a cadeau so that they leave me alone.

It is very nice to be re-acquainted with my cat.  He just jumped up on my lap.  When I am depressed and bored here I go snuggle him and feel better.   He does remind me of Tadji, and Nigarmi, and Ningan.  My Togolese cats.  This is sad.

The other hard part about being back, well one of them, is the feeling of uselessness.  I used to have a purpose in life.  Now I have to find another purpose.

I ordered a new Macbook Pro the other day.  This might make me happier.  I can engage in retail therapy here at least

Of cheese curds and chocolate chip cookies

I forgot how much I missed, and love, cheese curds until I went shopping in the fridge this morning.  A little piece of heaven in my mouth

Oh, and I forgot how amazing fully functioning refridgorators are too

I have been hiding out in my parents' house since I got home.  My little sister, Annabelle, has been my chauffeur as the thought of driving here makes me quietly panic

I just ordered myself a new computer this afternoon.  A 13-inch macbook pro.  I have been dreaming of having such a machine for at least the past year.  I think I weirded out PCVs in Togo when I would ask them if I could touch their macbooks cause they are so pretty

Aside from that, I fulfilled another need by getting a beard trimmer.  I did in 5 minutes what it took me a half hour to do in Togo with scissors in a comb

I go to sleep with the sweet green smell of growing corn coming in my window on the night breeze.  I realized this morning that there is probably more corn on my parents' farm than in the entire canton of Nampoch

I sleep with my window open and a fan on much to the bemusement of my dad who doesnt really understand why I dont want to sleep in air conditioning.  I sleep better with a fan and my sinuses dont feel like they have been baked when I wake up in the morning

My cats are Huge. Like, gargantuan, compared to Tadji and Ninghan.  My cat Mustafa is roughly the size of Little Doggy in Nampoch.  Seriously.  But he is a lot lazier.  Think a black Garfield

So far, I have not physically interacted with anyone here outside of my family.  Aside from my friend Ashley who gave me an awesome hair cut today. I am too scared too

One thing that I am having a hard time adjusting to is daylight.  Right now it is something like 830pm.  It is this dark about 545 pm in Togo, and dark by 630 pm.  I never know what time it is anymore, nor really even what day it is

my sister is making chocolate chip cookies. more little slices of heaven waiting for me to eat them

You Can Never Go Home Again: The Continuing Voyages of an RPCV

So. I am an RPCV. And writing this from my parents' house.

So, my dear readers, think of this not as the end. I will keep this blog going for awhile to accomplish 2 things.  First, to talk about my (attempted) readjustment to life in the States. Secondly, to bring to light other facets of my Peace Corps service that may have been heretofore neglected, or possibly unmentioned

I got off the plane in New York and got a taxi to Karen's house. . . .Just like I have been doing for the past 3 years.  I have felt, the past couple of weeks, that my life for the past couple of years has been coming in a full circle. Last night was no exception.  I got to Nampoch in 2010 and Karen was there to greet me and to tell me that everything was going to be all right.  I got back to the States from Nampoch and Karen was there to greet me and tell me that everything was going to be alright.  So I bought her dinner.

But seriously, it was nice to get off the plane and be able to franglia with someone.  Except for a couple embarrassing culture shock episodes.

On my flight from Casablanca to New York I sat next to a guy from Cote d'Ivoire.  This morning, I hailed a taxi to the airport. The driver is from Sokode.  The steward on my flight from Charlotte to Indianapolis this morning is from Nigeria (I recognized his accent).  All of these things were happy and lessened the inevitable "shit. I am back in the US" feeling. For a time.

What is culture shock?  Let me count the ways.  I have been doing this a lot in the past 36 hours.

1. Sensory overload. It is not just all the crap that is Everywhere.  Not just the constant bombardment with stimuli.  In Togo, I became used to quiet. To solitude.  When I was around  people they spoke either French or local language. If I wanted to know what they were saying, I had to listen, if they spoke French, or guess if they spoke local language.  In the airports from JFK in New York to Indianapolis I understood what EVERYONE was saying, mostly. Whether I wanted to or not.  100 different conversations blasting into my head at the same time.  And I listened to all of them because I am used to listening when someone speaks in English now. I felt like I was having a schizophrenic episode. All day.

2. Stranger in a strange land.  It was so nice to run in to west Africans because I am used to interacting with them.  I do not know how to interact with Americans anymore. I have to think about it.

3. There is so much stuff. Stuff stuff shit shit stuffy stuff stuff. Count every item you own, divide that number by like 50. Thats how much stuff the normal person in Togo owns.

Etc. More on this later.

I got off the Royal Air Maroc flight into JFK and the first thing I noticed was the smell.  That melange of clean, crisp A/C, lemon disinfectant, and new carpet.  That's when it hit me that I was back in the US

It is always a shock, returning from overseas, when I switch from an international flight to a domestic one. The planes are crappier and the service worse.  On my Royal Air Maroc flight I watched an attendant play with a little girl who was running in the aisles.  On my US Airways flight an attendant yelled at a couple women next to me for talking during her riveting safety spiel.  Seriously, if you do not know how to buckle a seat belt, you should not be on a plane. Period. On international flights you, the passengers in your section, and your attendants become like a little family by the time the flight is over. You bond.  Domestic flights- shit, they cant wait till you're gone.

I seriously saw this in JFK.  A vending machine selling bottled water next to a drinking fountain.  Seriously?

Drinking fountains are absolutely amazing.  One of my favorite things about the US. Paper towels in bathrooms? not so much.

 My cats here are like 3 times bigger than my cats in Togo.  This is a conservative estimate.

I think it will take me awhile to get used to seeing people take pictures with their tablets.

Americans are some of the dumbest travelers in the world.  Everyone speaks English to some degree.  And they still screw up the most basic stuff. 

On my Air Maroc flight they gave me a US customs card to fill out.  But it was in French.  I started to fill it out, until i realized that this would probably really confuse the Customs people.  This is not a good thing. They do not handle confusion well.  So I asked for an English one. 

Another thing that I like about international flights is how everyone claps as  soon as the plane touches down.  Like saying "thanks for getting us here in one piece"

Since when do you have to pay to switch from a window seat to an aisle seat on domestic carriers? Seriously? 

Between exhaustion and copious beer, I have become comfortably numb.  My biological clock doesnt even know what month it is anymore

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

I am no longer a Peace Corps Volunteer and it is weird.

I got down to Lome Monday morning about 6 am and began my Close of Service procedures.  Herein lies the tale . . .

Many PCVs, in our self-centered arrogance, believe that leaving village, and service, is all about us.  "We" are leaving, going "home," getting the f*** out of Togo etc, with all the attendant emotions and stresses.  We often overlook how hard us leaving is on the people we leave behind.  We've lived and worked with our communities for two years.  We've formed networks and relationships with people.  We've become fixtures in our communities.  Then "boom" we're gone.  As Kodjo said, "you come here, we just have time to know you and get used to you, then you're gone."  The look on Ntido's face as I waited for my car to leave from Nampoch was enough to tell me that me leaving was screwing with her life.

I just realized this post might not be completely coherent.  I am running on a sizable sleep deficit right now.

Leaving, logistically, sort of sucked.  I had a plan. It was a good plan.  It was optimistic.  Plans do not work in Togo.  I planned to leave Nampoch on Sunday with a morning marche car, have a leisurely day in Kouka, then take a car to Bassar, then an overnight bus to Lome. Saying goodbye to people all the way.  Ha.
About 9 am Sunday morning, it started raining.  Kodjo and Djidjil started laughing and were like "haha we called for rain cause we dont want you to leave."  I didnt laugh.  My blood was singing songs of angry men. By about 1300 the rain pretty much finished.  I took wet pictures with people then we went out and waited for the car to fill up.  Got to the marche finally.  Ntifoni and Djabob helped me take all my stuff over to the marche station.  The road looked like chocolate mousse.  Kader and Kevin came.  Kevin and I went to drink tchakpa and hang out while I waited on the car.  It was good to see him again.

Kader was coming down to Lome with me to see me off.  We waited about 3 hours for the Bassar car to leave.  Got to Bassar about 19h00.  We drove through the ejecta of a massive termite orgy on the way.  The rain prompted flying termites to do whatever it is they do.  The yellow street lights in Bassar hosted clouds of termites.  From a distance it looked like snow flurries in the lurid yellow glow.  Or at least what I imagine snow flurries to look like.  Kids were running around under the lights with bowls of water to trap the termites.  They make a good snack when fried up.

Anyway.  Kader's friend got us seats on a bus going down to Lome.  It picked up passengers at the Ghana border, then stopped in Bassar for a bit.  Our seats were  in the very back of the thing.  I hate sitting in the back of the bus, but I thought, whatever, I'll sleep most of the time.  Time came to get on and the bus filled up quickly.  Then the conductors whipped out plastic stools and started filling up the aisles.  This triggered my incipient claustrophobia in the worst way.  I was counting down heart beats to a freakout.  I was sitting by the window- I made Kader switch seats with me.  The guy in the aisle in front of me didnt even have a stool.  He just stood there.  The windows didnt open and the atmosphere in the bus started heating up.  I pictured the next 7 hours like this.  The countdown sped up.  Then the bus left and some quasi-A/C kicked on and I calmed down.  Then I woke up in Sokode.  Then again in Atakpame.  And realized that as long as the air was on and I didnt think I was not going to completely lose my shit.  Excuse me while I go shudder. 

We made it to Lome without incident or screaming

After 3 years here, I have developed the ability to be able to wake up at 230 and tell where I am in Togo within 50k solely by the sound of the wheels on the road.

Ive also lost the ability to distinguish, in casual conversation, whether someone is speaking to me in French or English.  Sadly, I have not subsequently gained the ability to speak in tongues.  I think maybe I am just tired or something.

My going-away party in Nampoch was nice.  Although not for the 3 chickens we ate.  It was the first time I've had a party and not had to pay for it or arrange anything.  We had fufu from new yams which made me incredibly happy.  There was speechifying, and toasting.  And everyone told me at least once to say hi to my parents and not to forget the people of Nampoch

You never know when you are doing something or seeing someone for the last time

My cat is gone.  Kader took him down to Saye's house on Thursday, but he missed her by about 15 minutes.  He left the box w/ my cat at her door cause he couldnt find anyone else around.  Apparently the dogs freaked my cat out, and he chewed his way out of the box and ran off.  Now he'll have a short, mean life in the bush until someone cuts his throat and eats him for a fete.  Sometimes the universe sucks.

It still does not seem like I am not going back to Nampoch.  I am getting a plane in a couple hours, but it reality hasnt set in yet.  Leaving here is so much harder than coming.  I left a life to come here.  Now I have to leave a life and go reconstruct my old one.  Or find a new one.