...

...and when I open my eyes, I'm inside a house. More of a mansion, really, with high ceilings and candelabras, portraits lining the walls.
I squint to get a better look at the dim room, it must be a dining room, on account of the twelve foot, laquer-black table with accompanying chairs. Very modern gothic. Over in the corner I spy some sort of cabinet. Good. My flask could use a topping off. The house is silent--well, not really silent, I guess, I mean, they're aren't any voices, but still, it's not really quiet either. I pry open a drawer, hoping to come across a knife or something I can use to pry open the locked doors where the booze is undoubtedly kept, but it's dark and I'm not really looking in the drawer.

As soon as my hand touches it, its' not my own anymore. My hand isn't numb, it just doesn't listen to me. It's fondling this...i dunno...I can't tell what it is, but my hand, quicker than I've ever seen it move, puts it in my jacket pocket. I try to let it go. Nothing. I try to take my hand out of my pocket. Nope. I begin to feel faraway, that fugue state I pass in and out of, but I fight it back, concentrating.

The light in the house has changed, become thicker, syrupy. The portraits have lost their victorian sophistication and acquired a hateful sneer across their faces, spittle on their lips. With blackness creeping in the edges of my vision, I bolt from the room, out into a foyer, where I immediately spy the heavy wooden door that can only lead outside. I make it about a mile before I collapse in a bush.
...
Dark again. well, that's probably for the best, I think, and a thought pops into my head, a black flash, not a thought in words, and certainly not one of my own, a dark whisper that feels like cold oil dripping through my brain. Whatever it is in my pocket has been busy. My traitor hand is still squeezing it, caressing it. My thoughts roll away from it, like fish from a sinking stone. Fine. There are leaves in my hair, and as I'm reaching up to brush them off, a deer steps quietly into view. I've never actually seen a deer close up before. She's sniffing the grass, her ears twitching, and doesn't seem to notice me at all. It's a rare moment for me, quiet and still, which is what makes it so awful when the hollow-tip makes her head burst.

"Wooooohoooo! Yew see that?" shouts a voice, as several large crashing sounds draw closer.
"Boy, you didn't just shoot that deer, you damn near EX-ploded it! What a shot! Shee-it!"

I'm still sitting upright, bits of deer brain on my cheek and a cut from a renegade piece of jawbone on my forehead, lap warm with blood that smells strong and alive, when the hunters come upon me and the doe. Beer cans in their hands, their stupid hick mouths hang agape, at a complete loss for words. I try to speak, to explain, to ask for help, but my mouth won't obey. Instead, I am trapped inside my eyeballs watching the scene around me unfold. Part of me fights, but mostly I'm just so tired that this is a welcome respite. The two men, perhaps unsurprisingly, think that I too am somehow dead. They begin to argue over what to do, swearing and spitting, throwing beer. The smaller one draws a knife from his boot, a bowie with the confederate flag on the blade, and buries it in the back-fat between the other man's shoulder blades. Although it's a fatal blow, its not an instant kill, which gives the dying man a chance to use the second bullet in his rifle on his former friend, effectively vaporizing the back of his head. He gasps out a halfhearted curse to god, then repents and says an our father before gurgling his last.

I struggle to my feat, an insidious warmth creeping up my arm. As I pass by the deer carcass, the flies that are hovering in a food orgy drop out of the sky in unison. Going back to the house seems like the only option I have, so I start out back on the road. I'm not exactly sure which way is going, but my feet seem to be obeying me for the time being. My hand had stopped thrashing in its pocket, but it felt swollen and bruised, tired and full.

It's strange, seeing a road I've seen before but don't remember, but soon I am passing through a small town, and far, far off, I can see the spires of what can only be the mansion. I try not to make eye contact, fearing what will happen, knowing that this is all beyond me, I am ill-equipped for this task. As I looked down, though, I glanced at a homeless man sleeping in the crook of a building and the sidewalk. His eyes fly open, his face contorting into shapes no face should make, until he holds his chest and gets very still. I begin to run.

A dog, a beautiful white wolfhound darted into the road, right ahead of me. The oncoming truck tried to brake, jackknifed and hit the dog anyway, then plows into oak tree, ejecting the driver into a solid wood wall. I was unscathed, again. Not trusting myself to stop, I turn my attention to the road. My legs shake uncontrollably, making walking hard, but I force them to keep moving until it subsides.

The house was in view when I heard the fuel tank of the truck detonate. The whole town will burn. Staggering up the steps of the house, I pull the door, wrenching my shoulder when it doesn't move. A new voice, slow and heavy, tells me in an frozen instant of plodding color and shapes that I Have Taken The Burden It Held, And It Is Under No Obligation To Take It Back. It Is Mine To Bear, Forever.

A wellspring of fury that I've never known, a surging flood of rage burst in my eyes, and in that fraction of a second, my hand was my own again. I thrust the object out of my pocket, into the light.
...
Many people would think that time slows in moments like these, but they're wrong. It's flash-fast, its the understanding that's so instantaneous that makes you think that time has slowed. It's that you can't understand why you understand what you understand as fast as you've understood it. So everything has happened at once, but you can't fit that into you're perception, so everything looks slow so it'll make sense to you. This is what's happening right now, all in this moment, even as you're reading this.

....

My clammy hand holds what looked to be a ball of writhing yellow-white maggots, pulsing red light from their underbellies, eyelessly crawling. I know now that it is a Deathwish. My Deathwish. It the blackest thing in the pit of all mens souls, the immortal terror we all run from and never escape, fed by the fears of a billion generations crying out in the night and wondering why. It brings death and pain as naturally, as neutrally as a candle brings light, feeding off my desire for my own death, to end the suffering I cause, killing all those near mebut keeping me alive, for if I die so will my Deathwish. It is a spiraling event horizon no soul can escape.

Unless, chimes in the house, causing my nose to drip blood, Unless You Burn It. I Was Too Afraid To Try, But You....

The Deathwish surges in my hand and the redblack scream that splits my head in two drowns out all thoughts, mine and otherwise. But a tiny part of me whispers, burn it, so I pull out my flask and pour. The maggots writhe furiously, standing up somehow, growing, molting. I touch my lighter to it and it's not the explosion I would hope, its a wet sizzle that turns into a hiss that screams as the maggots begin to dance, melting and bubbling. My hand finally lets it drop, blistered and withered, where I stomp and stop and stomp until it is only a greasy black smear. I don't even notice the storm clouds release their rain, putting out the fire behind me and swirling the ashes of the Deathwish until they dissolve.

Sunday

By Dan Steinbacher

There is a boy, and he is sitting in the back of his parents grey station wagon. They are coming from church, and his father has the windows of the car down. The air is invigorating, full of chimney smoke and brisk breezes. The father inhales deeply-- he loves this weather. It reminds him of football, of childhoods. Church has briefly pierced the walls he fastidiously keeps around himself, and he feels goodwill towards most, if not all, men. Time slows to a crawl for him, during this drive, as he subconsciously takes the longest route home he can. He senses deep in his gut that today is important, a fork in the road day. Because the services were so rousing that morning, the hymns sung were such uplifting songs, and the pastors sermon, delivered in his irish brogue, was especially good, the father attributes this feeling to God. In that spirit, sensing the potentiality of the day and merging it with his faith, the father decides today is a perfect day to teach his son a lesson about doing good.

How will he do it? The father is unsure. There are so many ways to do good. Most of them, he thinks, are bound not to work out the way he wants. This experience, he knows, will color his son, will mark out the territory of his character for years to come, so it has to be perfect.

Driving past a familiar road, he suddenly knows what to do, so he takes a rather sharp left, jostling the boy, who is smart, sometimes a little too much for his own good, who carries dark circles under his eyes that make him look faraway, which he usually is.

The father is smiling. They are seconds away from the grandfather's house, a big house that has been a little too empty since his mother died. His father, not knowing how (or perhaps not caring) to clean up after a house himself, lives in a dark, dusty castle with blue-green shag carpet and cobwebbed abalone shells. But it is not the inside of the house that bothers the father, it is the yard. The yard is huge, twice the size of all the others in the area, and it is completely wild. This agitates the father, who as a teen, used to care for this yard by himself, because he hated having his house look ugly on the outside.

Appearances are very important to the father. By having the boy do yardwork at his grandfather's house, it will impart so many lessons to the boy! It will teach him the value of hard work, of caring for family. Three generations of his line will be working together, side by side, in the autumn air. They will rake leaves for a few hours, tell stories and then have hot cocoa inside. He'll light a fire in the fireplace, and his wife and son and father will all sit around it, talking and laughing. His son will remember it as a wonderful day, and when he has a son of his own, will bring him to his father's house, and they will relive the day again.

This is all as clear as day in his mind as he tells his son, "Let's go to your granddad's place and rake some leaves, whaddya say?", looking at him from the rearview mirror.

The boy, who has been staring out the window, pauses, which is hard to do because he hadn't said anything yet, and thinks not of the yard or the house, not of the cocoa or the fireplace or really even his granddad, who he loves as all eight-year olds love their granddads. He is thinking about the dog. His grandfather's dog is old, and dying slowly. Yet because he is such a good dog, so full of life and joy, he does not seem to mind his hips dislocating as he wags his tail, dying to get a single pat, some love from these people he has protected all these years. But the grandfather is too lonely and lost to pet the dog, let alone feed it regularly, and every time they visit, the dog is skinnier, more desperate. It breaks the boy's heart into a billion pieces to see this. The boy often sees the injustice and cruelty in the world and takes it in stride, but this, this is a terrifying punishment for being a good dog. The boy has played with the dog for hours when he was there before, knowing it was not enough, seeing the bewildered desperation in those cataract-grey dog eyes, understanding that there is nothing he can do. When the dog howled as they left, his parents didn't seem to notice, but the sound gave him nightmares for days.

Thinking in a way he does, by not thinking at all, the boy grasps the situation at hand. On some level he ascertains what his father is hoping to accomplish, as well the fact that his father would never understand the reasons why he didn't want to go help his granddad. The boy doubts he could ever articulate exactly how he is feeling anyhow. It feels to big for words to contain. It is fear the boy feels, not fear of death or illness, but the fear that the world contains so much hurt that one day the vibrating feeling that accompanies it, the thrum in the pit of his stomach that makes the bottom of his heart turn to cold stone will one day overload him, and he will lose control of his emotions, and they will tear him to pieces with their force. Faced with imminent death or parental disappointment of the highest degree, the boy closes his eyes and makes his choice.

"I don't want to go."

"You don't want to help your granddad?"

"No. I'm just...tired. I want to watch tv."

The father's mental picture shatters, deflates, implodes. He tries hard to be a good father, but his child is lazy. Television, video games, he has been spoiled rotten by all of his father's hard work. All that has sought to accomplish has left him with a son who is selfish. He shouldn't say it. But he promised himself that he wouldn't coddle his son, that he would dish it straight even if it was hard to hear.

"That's really selfish of you, son. I would think after all the nice things your grandfather does for you, you can't even help him rake some leaves? Too much to ask to get off your ass and help someone?" The volume and venom in his voice steadily increase.

The boy winces. He knew this was coming, and wishes that today wasn't such focal point, wasn't such a defining moment. He fights back some tears, reasoning that this hurts far less that seeing the dog, angry at situations that are beyond his control and seem to be set against him.

"I'm sorry, I just don't want to do it." he says, finally.

"Fine." The father does a U-turn in the middle of the street, sullen and silent, the tires squealing.

He ignores him for the rest of the day, which is easy because the boy spends it sitting in his room, grounded from tv for a week, reading and imagining God as a being comprised of a infinite number of ears, eternally listening to the prayers of the world and unable to stop listening to go help anyone.

Proclamation!

Dear readers (who are as numerous as grains of sand in the Ganges),

As you may have noticed, I changed the template of my blog. I like the links on the left side, but I'm not sure about the rest of it. Really, all I want out of a template is readability, but looking super-cool would be nice as well. So, googleplex of readers, what say you? I want your feedback, since you're the poor bastards who have to stare at it as you check hourly, hoping for an update. New one? Old one? Or maybe you have a link to a site w/ sweet templates?

Or perhaps you just want to shower me with praise. I'm fine with that also.

Hello? Anyone?



Anyone at all?

It's a Con(or)test!

Hello, my innumerable readers! Gather 'round! Whoa, whoa, not so fast! There's so many of you that I'm getting crushed by your billions and billion's of bodies! Simmer down!

Okay.

Here's the thing: My buddy Conor of Mediocre Extraordinare, is having a contest! A writing contest! Inspired by our mutual (and much more responsible, hard-working, overall better person) friend Mike Guardabascio of A Storied Year, who has held several very successful writing contests in the past, Conor's contest revolves around a picture entitled "Offices, Gorilla World". The stories must be fifty words or more and be inspired by or connected somehow to the picture.

Now, whats the best part about contests, other than that I always win them? Prizes! Yes sir, there certainly are prizes attached to this lucrative contest. They include*, but are not limited to:

• A full body, sensual massage from Conor and his man-hands
• Lifetime immunity from Conor's piercing wit and sharp tongue
• Conor will name his first illegitimate child after you, regardless of the gender
• A pony
• A year membership to Conor's other site, www.conorthecamboy.com, (a $200 value!)

So: Go to Mediocre Extraordinare and read the "official rules", then read my story, quiver with fear and shame knowing that you couldn't possibly write a better entry, then shake it off and take a crack at it. What do you have to lose**?

Best of luck to you all***,

Dan

*do not include

**if you beat me, you have my solemn vow that I will cut off your toes with a hacksaw and eat them like cocktail weenies right in front of you.

***You illiterate cretins don't stand a fucking chance, you hear me?

Gorilla World

I thought the choice was obvious, so I headed right, down a zig-zagging pathway lined with bamboo and paved with river rock, opening into a courtyard. It was wide, the white walls of the enclosure gently reflecting the sun onto the grassy field where a large number of gorillas were spread out. A transparent glass wall cut through the middle of their habitat, a wall that displayed, quite clearly, a cut-away vision of the office building. The apes were doing all the normal simian things: lying on their backs, scratching their heads with their toes, some were combing each others hair and carrying their kids, they were alone and in pairs and in groups, they were eating bananas and thumping chests and staring majestically into space. They were also talking.

And I could understand them. I stepped into the clearing, quietly, but not a single primate took notice of me. Walking closer to a smaller pair of gorillas, I waved. If they saw me, there was no sign of it. I leaned in to hear what they were saying better. One was a taller, heavier one, male by the look of the silver on his back. He wasn't the oldest gorilla, but he'd been around. The one who was talking was obviously female, with a smaller frame and hunched stance.

"I just think it's cruel."

"You're nuts! Those guys are having the time of their lives in there! Look at them! They get to talk all the time, and sit in chairs and drink all the coffee they want! It's paradise!"

"But they're captives! They don't have a choice! And those terrible clothes they dress them in!"

"You think that matters to them? Honestly, I wish I could do that all day. All this sitting around, eating bananas, climbing trees...I hate it. It's boring. I want to sit on chairs. I want to talk into little plastic things. I want to look at glass boxes. So don't go getting all chimpy on me."

"I'm sorry...you just know how I feel about other living things. Come on, lets go pick a fight with Chief, he looks sick, I think you can take him..."

I looked through the see-through glass, at all the people, running around, mouths opening and closing silently. They didn't look happy. They didn't look sad either, they just looked...empty. As if something inside themselves that had been burning was just ashes now. I watched the people for awhile, then, deciding that it was just as sad and cruel as the female had said, turned away. Instead, I watched the biggest silverback, Chief, give the other male gorilla (whose named turned out to be Bongo, which may have explained his lack of alpha-male status) a sound thrashing, while the others gathered around, hooting and throwing feces. It looked like a lot of fun.

For awhile, I watched the gorillas every day. You would think it was great, but Bongo was right: it was boring--the same old bitter rivalries springing up again and again, the same lofty professions of the perfection of bananas, the unending debate over what could possibly be in the little glass boxes all the humans watched all the time.


I began to ignore the apes, and started watching the people every day. Perhaps the humans really did have a paradise, even if they were had an odd way of showing it. The world on the other side of the glass looked brighter, cleaner, safer. I longed to sit in a chair, to taste coffee, but mostly to be able to talk and have someone hear me, even if it meant I could never leave. With a final look back at Gorilla world, I headed back down the path, turned left at the sign, walked down a narrow corridor, and opened the metal door that led to the Offices.

The sudden rush of noise made me jump. Buzzing and ringing and whirring and under it all was the nearly inaudible hum of the florescent lights. They saturated the Office with a flat, uniform brightness, robbing everything of its shadow. I shut my eyes and shook my head, trying to get my bearings while quietly noting that I was now wearing human clothes, what the gorillas had called a monkey-suit and holding the thin rectangular box that I knew was for putting paper in.

A man in a blue suit, who was tall and very tan, came up to me, smiling widely and not blinking nearly enough. I tried to speak to him, but before I could say a word, he grabbed my hand and squeezed it, launching into a speech with an automatic look on his face.

"Hey there! You must be the new guy! Hi, new guy! Welcome to our office. It's not much, but it's ours. Good news! You get a desk with a window! Ha! We all do! Yep, it's our one claim to fame, we're the only office I've ever heard of that looks out onto a zoo! Yep, monkeys all around, HQ thinks they help productivity or office feng shui or some shit. Anyway, lemme show you to your desk. Hey! You want some coffee?"

My flag has singed bullet holes polka-dotting it. The colors in the cloth ran a little bit after the sweat bath it was baptised in, but you can still see the blood that stained it under a cloudless sky. You can wear this flag like a cape, with your head through the ragged hole, or you can hang yourself with it. Today, I'm wearing it as a hospital gown on the street corner, yelling at passerby, ranting about my rights and their rights and ignorance and death and war and no one is listening. The shiny new nylon flag waves over my head, hanging like an anvil. No one looks my way. It's fine. I don't need them to anyhow. Flags are a symbol, symbols have power, and my flag has been bleached of all its symbolism, broken down and remade as a symbol of a different kind. My flag is charged with all the bitterness and hate I can cough up out of my guts. It's the cumrag of the world now, a hankerchief for the bloodiest phlem, a mop for all the urine and feces of a planet, kindling for fires, a fuse for molotov cocktails. I am unmaking this country with my flag, unraveling the stitches of its dream and using the scraps as tourniquets. The bigger pieces are good for filtering out tear gas. Not that I need it for that. The police officers that come to talk to me are wearing flags on their chests, just above their badges. I'm not surprised to see them, just tired. These cops are different though. Their guns are already drawn, and if could see into their car, I'd find the police report for my murder already filled out, signed and dated. My flag is about to get a few more holes. I ask one to read me my rights, which confounds the both of them, if only for a second, giving me all the time I need. I sit down into the lotus position, close my eyes, and flood my pores with memory of America I have stored up, all the greed, all the hypocrisy, all the arrogance, all the apathy, every abuse I can remember hearing about or seeing. It soaks into the canvas, hissing like acid, smoking slightly. We are at the edge now...and with a thought, I tilt us over the precipice, and my flag and I burst into flames. Once the video and pictures are online, everyone decides that I look like that vietnamese monk, except for my expression--I am not serene. I am wide eyed and laughing, an image so horrifying that afterwards, all this or any other flag can ever symbolize from then on is death and madness.

Day 10: Keats and Yates Are On Your Side...Paris, Part One

Where were we? We were, perhaps unsurprisingly, stuck in the bus, in traffic. This time it was for a legitimate reason-- Bastille Day, the biggest holiday in France, was in two days. We would miss it by one day. This brought the number of times I was leaving a major city one day before a super-amazing city/nationwide festival up to two, the first being the Water festival in Bangkok last April.

Even with all of that, MJ the tour guide came through like the champ she is, so the first day in Paris we did a bus tour...in our own bus. It was a good way to see the city and get acclimated, and we stopped for several photo ops along the way. The best part of the drive was easily when Frank, our bus driver, took on the Triumph D'arch-thingy roundabout. Roundabouts are terrifying enough, as anyone who has lived in Long Beach knows, and this one is the most dangerous in the world--apparently there's an accident every half-hour on average.

At first I was leery of taking a giant tour bus onto a crowded parisian deathtrap, but when I looked at the tiny little peugot's and smart cars, I realized we had nothing to fear. MJ put "Highway to the Dangerzone" on the speakers and we whipped into the circle. The inertia was terrifying, and I braced for a crash that never came. As quick as it had begun, we were out, headed down the Chante Lize (Say "Shant-A Lee-Zay...I think). Our hotel was unremarkable--tiny, functional. I had a baguette and a small bottle of wine for dinner, and then we were heading to the Eiffel Tower, as it was going to be insane tomorrow, the day before Bastille Day, and besides, the ET at night is a must see. The lines there were pretty long, and a few French assholes tried to cut in, only to face a bunch of irate, threadbare, mildly drunk 20 somethings: us. We yelled at them and they slunk off. Kirk, perhaps out of boredom, made the boneheaded move of talking to a Hawker-of-Mini-Eiffel-Towers, only to be rewarded with the guy refusing to leave us alone for twenty minutes. Getting to the top proved to be a series of elevators and lines for elevators, but all in all it took about 3 hours. The top is small and fenced from top to bottom, obviously, but the views are still incredible. So is the wind. I have to say, it was pretty fucking romantic and shit. We stayed up there for over an hour, but by that time it was closing. For kicks, a few of us took the stairs all the way down. Alllllll the way. It's a lot of stairs, obviously, and it really gave a much better impression of how tall it was than taking the elevators did. We even saw the resturant that's in the middle of the Tower. Sweet! It was closing time so the lights were off, but it looked very hoity-toity. I'd like to eat there some day.

We would have a long day ahead of us, so Kirk and I grabbed a cab like the pros we were by that point, and I fell asleep watching a Simpsons episode that was dubbed in French, which gave me odd dreams.

Day 9: In Which I Wish To Be Swiss

My first impression of Switzerland is that it must be where the myth about dwarves come from. Not because the people there are short and hairy (they're not), but because the entire country seems to be one long corridor of narrow fields with impossibly large mountains on either side, and a iceblue, snowfed river bisecting what little arable land there is. Because of the abundance of water, everything is green. Really, really green grass being eaten by those Swiss cows you see on cheese packaging everywhere, pockets of huge evergreens spring up from mountain ledges, but the most noticeable is me, being green with envy for not being born here.

While we're driving through the countryside (or extremely long tunnels that go through entire mountains), MJ gives us some background on Switzerland, which was pretty interesting stuff. In Switzerland, every male over the age of 18 is required by law to enlist in the military and serve for a minimum of 2 years. I'm not sure if you have to do it right at 18, but I'd bet it's within a few years. You are also given a submachine gun. This might account for the lack of home invasion style robberies there. Who in the hell is going to rob a house when you know for a fact that there's someone with a military grade gun inside? Once you're out of the military, you still have to go to target practice once a month, and do a month long refresher course every couple of years. Because it's required by law, this doesn't count as your vacation time, and you still get paid. As a result, the Swiss can raise it's military to full readiness in less than 36 hours. Pretty impressive. Due to how ridiculously rich the country is thanks to anonymous banking, apparently many of the mountains have been converted into giant bomb shelters (one of which can hold up to 20000 people for 2 years), weapons reserves, satellite monitoring stations, and so on. Oh, and all buildings are required to have bomb shelters. This might account for why Switzerland is so neutral--woe betide any country that decided to invade, because the entire population is essentially the military (women aren't required to join, but most do anyhow), and if they ever got bombed, you'd really only piss them off.

Now, this means that the cities are clean and that the citizens are for the most part law-abiding, but the large anti-authority part of me sort of worries about any government that has that sort of stranglehold on personal choice. Although on the other hand, the benefits from having an entire country on the same basic page seem worth it, at least on the surface. You could never do this with America though, we have a population that is far too large and too diverse to ever make it feasible.

Anyway, it took us forever to get to Lucerne, a small town in Switzerland, because the rain we had left behind in Germany had found us as soon as we got out of Italy, slowing traffic to a crawl on an already crowded road. The bus riding was becoming near-unbearable at this point, although it was mainly due to my skin being so dry (and thus so itchy I was scratching till I was literally bleeding) because of the nonstop recycled air, and my lack of even remotely clean clothes (read: I smelled awful and there was nothing I could do about it).

Once again, we had only a few short hours to wander around Lucerne, made shorter by the fact that every shop closes at around six o'clock. In retrospect I guess thats not that strange, but the city looked deserted by eight. Even still, there was ample time to peruse the Swiss chocolate shops...and then to go back again and again. I'm not a huge chocolate fan, which I think I've mentioned in an earlier post--not that i'm anti-chocolate, just that I'm not a fan of chocolate in the way the sad, lonely lady who has a cat calendar is. But this...this was something else. This wasn't chocolate. This was angel brains coated in children's dreams. The adorably old Swiss lady explained that the reason it was so different was because the cows ate grass that was watered with pure, mountain spring water, so their milk was correspondingly better, thus producing higher quality dairy products. After tasting about 15 different types of truffles, bon bons, and so on, I was inclined to agree with her.

MJ had neglected to mention that the hotel we'd be staying in that night was a refurbished prison. And it was themed, meaning that it still had bars on the windows, bare walls, and instead of room keys, you had a code you had to put into the door to unlock it. It didn't freak me out too bad, although I made it a point not to wonder about how many people had gotten shanked in my room. Given my impressions of Switzerland, though, I think that the majority of criminals were white collar. I hope.

We only had Paris left on our itinerary, and even though it's marked as 2 days, what that means in Contiki-speak is eight hours in a bus and about four or so in the actual city, minus check in time and dinner and all that. I'm not saying that it's bad, I just want to clarify for anyone who might be thinking of a Contiki tour.

After seeing as many cities as we did on the trip, I have to say that I prefer the northern part of Europe. Maybe its that the cities are slightly newer, but I've had my fill of streets so narrow that they can't accomodate a single person walking and a car driving at the same time. The cities we visited from the north seemed on the whole to be cleaner, safer, and more ascetically pleasing. Then again, maybe that's just my German blood bias talking.

Day 8: The Wheels on the Bus (Make Me Queasy)

Day 8 found us in Florence, which is supposedly an art mecca. However, at this point in the trip, it would be hard to impress me with anything. My legs were sore, I was sunburned, and we had a scant 6 hours to spend here. For lack of anything better to do, a few of us went to a sculpture museum, where it became very apparent that the Italians back in the day were really fond of sculpting male genitalia. Surely there was some cultural reason behind this, but there's only so many life-sized naked dudes you can see before they all look the same. The only thing I really enjoyed about it was guessing the occasional greek myth that the statue was based on. I was right about 90 percent of the time, although no one in the group except me was impressed by this, least of all my little brother.

There was a really amazing looking cathedral in Florence as well, which I would've loved to see the inside of had the line to get in not wrapped all the way around the damn block.

Included in the Contiki tour was a bunch of cool stuff to do (for an extra fee) which ended up being worth it in nearly every case. In Florence, it was a full Tuscan dinner, four courses, with a cool opera singer coming out every so often to do a song. I've never thought of myself as much of an opera fan, but seeing someone up close, singing that beautifully, I could certainly see why it's as popular as it is. Included with the dinner (which was as fantastic as one would have hoped. Italians truly do have the best food in the world, hands down) were two huge jugs of wine, which I indulged in wholeheartedly.

This was a huge mistake.

It wasn't that the next morning I was hungover. I hadn't really drank that much wine. But I don't think my tummy was ready for it, and it was killing me, from our six o'clock wake up time onward. I might have been fine if I had had a decent breakfast and a few hours to recuperate, but no. Breakfast (our only daily included meal) in Italy consisted of a hard, nearly hollow roll with about as much caloric value as a roll of cardboard. Oh, and water. That was it. What the fuck? The inconsistencies involved with a culture that enjoys four hour dinners and three second breakfasts are too great to be explored here.

Anyway, it was a wonderful coincidence that I was feeling really sick that day, as we had a 9 hour bus ride ahead of us, all the way to Switzerland. I might have been fine if not for the winding mountain roads, but instead I said goodbye to Italy by vomiting in the bus bathroom. Classy, I know.

Day 6-7: Rome- *Blasphemy Alert*

Days 6 and 7 were spent in that place that all the roads lead to, Rome. I made it a point to use the phrase "When in Rome" as many times as I could, either to myself or others, because where the hell else is that phrase nearly as applicable? The first day was mostly spent getting to Rome from Venice, but we had a nice half-day, seeing the Pantheon, which is mindblowing in its scale, not to mention how ancient it is. It's nearly impossible to not gape as you see stone columns several stories high while your brain simultaneously tries to figure out how it in the hell people would build it now, let alone 2000 years ago. I would get used to this sort of feeling during my time in Rome, as it applies for most of the ancient architecture there.

The next day was absolutely exhausting--it was hot, even for me, humid, crowded and filled with nonstop walking. Not that any of that was a surprise, I'm just setting the mood. We started off at St. Peters Cathedral, which I felt I should see simply because I'd never been in a Cathedral before.

The cathedral is big, I'll give it that. It's also gaudy. Really, really, really gaudy. Gold and marble everywhere. The inside has monuments to every pope inside it, and they're running out of room, so it sort of looks like a art museum made love with a marble quarry, found Jesus, and then puked.

"I won't blaspheme, I won't blaspheme..." I told myself, but if you know me at all then you know that that's just impossible. But, let the record show that I only said "goddamn it" only three times while inside, and they were all accidents. I had hoped that the overwhelming spirituality of the place would outweigh my utter hatred of the Catholic church, but sadly, it couldn't. All I could think about as I looked at marble statue after marble statue was how much money this all must've cost, how many cultures were destroyed, how many peoples were turned into little more than slaves in order to feed the beast that built this church. It's supposed to be a monument to god, but it looked more like a monument to cruelty and greed to me.

But the real reason we had gone to St. Peter's rather than the Vatican muesum (other than the fact that I would probably have burst into flames upon crossing the doorway) was for St. Peters dome, which rested on top of the cathedral, way, way, way up. The elevator they have will only take you so far up, and then it's just marble stairway after marble stairway. It was quite an experience, because as the staircase winds up the inside of the dome, the wall on one side begins to curve into the ceiling, and the limited space means that the walkway is such that you have to almost walk sideways up it. The steps seems endless, and their pattern changes seemingly at random, curving along the inside wall, then up some normal flights, then more curved, vertigo inducing stairs, all getting steeper by the step. Finally, you go up a staircase that is so tightly wound that they hung a rope through the middle of it to keep you from falling down it after you get dizzy from turning around. This rope is a sight in itself--imagine how many hands have touched it--it's black, sticky, and throughly disgusting, but if you don't want to die, you've got to hold onto it to get to the top. The view from the dome once you finally get there is worth it though. You can look over the entire city unobstructed by anything except the massive air pollution. It was amazing to me, given how crowded the city is, how much undeveloped land there is, huge tracts of hilly parks. Clearly, the Romans understood something about city design that we have forgotten: people need open spaces.

The roof of the cathedral (lower than the dome, but still way high up) has a gift shop that smells exactly like chicken Mcnuggets. They also sell shot glasses there. If that weren't a disturbing enough image, the likeness of Pope Hitler's Youth the Third glares balefully at you from about a million different postcards, crucifixes, paintings, refrigerator magnets, and so on. He looks like he wants to eat your face.

So: If you find yourself in Rome and you're not deeply religious, skip Vatican city. You're not missing all that much.

What you shouldn't miss in Rome is the pizza and the gelato. Pizza places there are, obviously, far superior to anything we have in the states. For example, they don't serve it by the slice. Intstead, they have one huge square that they cook all the pizza on, making it essentially one giant pizza with different areas of toppings, you point out which kind you want, sort of measure it with your hands, and they cut if off and hand it to the cashier, who weighs it. That's right, you pay for your pizza by weight! The dough is also this light, flaky amazingness that kind of ruins american pizza forever. The gelato there does the same to ice cream. I don't really go for chocolate, but the chocolate gelato I had was far beyond anything i've ever tasted that was supposed to be chocolate. In retrospect, eating anything that sugary was probably not the best choice when the temperature is in the upper nineties and water is roughly six dollars a bottle, but still, it had to be done.

By midday the heat was intense, amplified by the pollution that had no breeze to carry it away. I really just wanted to find a shady spot and fall asleep, but the overabundance of pickpockets made that option completely ridiculous, and besides, no matter how uncomfortable, I didn't get all the way out to Europe to fall asleep. Instead, my friend Ryan and I went to the Coliseum, which was...underwhelming. Sure, it's big, but not that big. What I found most intriguing were the unmistakable signs of age--stone steps with giant grooves in them, signs of untold numbers of feet climbing them. I suppose I was hoping to get some mystical sense of history, some indescribable feeling that sitting on a stone ledge that had been sat upon by people whose bones were now dust, but instead, I couldn't conjure up anything except some disappointment at it and myself. My inability to be impressed may have been a mixture of MJ telling us that this wasn't the only coliseum built, that they were built all over the Roman empire, but that this one was special because...it was Rome's Coliseum. So basically, it's special because people say it is. Also, the sewer vent's that surround the outside spew a mixture of urine and feces into the air, making stepping over them a mixed blessing, as the smell makes you instantly gag, but cool air from the sewers is a welcome reprieve from heat.

As the day wound down, Ryan and I headed to the last destination--the Cappuchin monks Monastery. The monastery isn't open to the public, so really, it's more like five normal sized rooms side by side. What makes these monks special, however, is their tradition of only being buried on monastery grounds, which presented a problem a few hundred years back when they grounds ran out of room for all the bodies. Instead, those wily monks came up with a solution: who needs to be buried? And for that matter, who needs to be kept together? Thus, the rooms are covered, nearly from top to bottom, in bones. Skulls are stacked in artful columns surrounding a coat of arms made out of femurs and pelvises (pelvisi?) in one room, in another, a withered, still decomposing monk sits on a bench made out of ribcages. Although the signs were in Italian, I found out later that each room represented a stage in man's journey through death. This was probably my favorite sight in Rome. It wasn't creepy, or morbid, it was a frank display of the human condition, a not so subtle reminder that regardless of who you are, you will one day be indistinguishable from anyone else.

Ryan and I headed back to the hotel around nine, after about thirteen hours of being on our feet. My sandals had compressed so much due to the heat and the constant pressure that I could feel every stone I stepped on. Sandals are not recommended for that level of touristing.

With the caveat that by the point in the trip I was pretty travel worn, both mentally and physically, which undoubtedly contributed to my feelings about Rome here's the bottom line: If you simply have to go to Rome, don't do it during the summer. If you aren't really that interested in Rome to begin with, skip it-- you're not missing anything that pictures won't capture.