Seriously?

Go to Zieglr.com instead. Trust me. It looks better and everything.

OK, normally I wouldn’t bother writing anything that wasn’t strictly tongue-in-cheek, let alone something political. I am a clown; when I’m not dancing for everyone, I feel naked (just go with it). However, I’ve heard enough about this particular issue, and the glaring problems with some of the arguments surrounding it have simply become too much for me. I’m tired of simply responding to other people; time to make a positive contribution. Oh, and I don’t have much else to do at work right now.

So, here we go. “Redistribution” of wealth. This should be “entertaining”.

A little while back, Obama made some comments about spreading wealth, or spreading joy, or something like that. Unfortunately for him, he made those comments to a guy with a very generic name that was easy for both McCain and the mainstream media to pronounce, who was quickly pounced upon by both the McCain campaign and the media at large, both eager to ruin one more average citizen’s privacy.

The McCain campaign had just conducted a briefing to remind Johnny boy that this is “the first true Internet election”, so they responded as anyone lucky enough to get the first post in any forum topic would - with a half-crazed, “ZOMG! SOCIALIST!!!!!!1” The catch is that, by trying to fit in with the culture of the Internet, they had inadvertently developed the same problem from which everyone else on the Internet suffers – they were wrong.

Now, I’m not going to beat you over the head with statistics to get my point across – like, for example, that, in 2001, a little over 91% of America’s overall wealth was concentrated in the top 20% of the population, or that the only Western country to have a population with a wealthier top 10% was Switzerland. I’m not a math guy; I’m a words guy. So sit down, and let us reason together.

First off, let’s get some definitions out of the way, since those tend to undercut successful discourse at an alarming rate. As we all know, politicians are fond of “spin” – using words intended in one way to mean something totally different. In doing so, they’re attempting to manipulate the starting point of the discourse and undermine any positive input the other party was trying to make by turning their words into a character attack. This is exactly what the McCain campaign did with Obama’s “spread the wealth around”.

In effect, Obama’s tax increase for the wealthy does spread the wealth around by putting a somewhat larger burden on the upper class to pay for public programs – programs which they might, in fact, opt out of because they have the money to afford private programs which are either objectively or subjectively better for them. What it does not do is compare to Socialism or Communism. At all.

For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that Obama’s doing little more than reversing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy and pretend he just pulled these numbers out of some willing economist’s posterior. We’ll start from scratch and say he’s just deciding to charge the wealthy more money for living here and having so much blasted money. It’s still not Socialism or Communism, and here’s why.

The driving force behind Socialism is Communism, and the driving force behind Communism is total and complete equality – of wealth, class, and education. Socialism is a midway point between capitalism and Communism. To that end, all private industries are seized by the state (completely owned, not just invested in – the bailout plan might have been a bad idea, but even it didn’t turn us into the USSR). Who even knows how the ideal of Communism would look – it hasn’t exactly worked out the way it was planned.

Here’s how it looks so far:

Socialism: Have you started a business? Too bad, the government owns it now and can (and will) tell you how to run it, down to the smallest detail. Does your business make you more money than your neighbor makes at her job? The People’s Republic thanks you – your paycheck will have the same numbers on it as your neighbor’s, but you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you contributed to an egalitarian culture. Don’t you feel good about yourself?

Obama: Own a successful business? It’s time to suck up and give back a little. You’re making a heck of a lot more money than everyone else, and just like the world doesn’t work if we force everyone to be equal, so also it doesn’t work if the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – eventually a large portion of your market won’t be able to afford what you’re selling, and then you’re both screwed. Your hard work and intelligence still puts you above some of the rest in the comforts you’re able to afford, but you might have to save up another year for that boat. Sorry.

Seem similar? Didn’t think so.

Now that we’ve settled that, let’s move on to the arguments that don’t resort to petty reactionary labeling. The one I hear most often amounts to the claim that “redistributing wealth” takes people who worked hard to get the money they have today and throws them under the bus, giving all their money to people who are poor because they don’t want to work for a living.

Aside from gross oversimplification and over-generalization, this argument has a couple flaws so blinding that most people apparently don’t look directly into them.

First – I reiterate, Obama’s “redistribution” is a simple tax increase, not a leveling of salaries. He’s not making everyone’s bottom line read $50,000 of gross income/year. He’s taking the people who make five times that or more and making them pay a few thousand more dollars each year. The benefits of their hard work are not being removed; they are being lessened. This does not automatically encourage laziness – hard, intelligent work still gets you almost infinitely further than asking for a handout or otherwise coasting through life. I can’t emphasize this enough: The wealthy will still be wealthy.

Second, without going too far into a field that I have studied precious little, economic advantage and disadvantage are not a simple matter of hard work. Yes, living within your means and making good investments go a long way, but some people simply do not have the opportunity to do either of those things. This is especially hard for some people (dare I say, most Republicans?) to accept, clinging as they do to the American Dream, that idealistic concept that is only loosely based in reality.

The sad truth is that plenty of brilliant, hardworking people who have contributed far more to the human condition than GM’s CEO die penniless, even homeless. There are myriad factors playing into this, and the situation’s different for everyone, but don’t – do not – pass off the lower class as lazy. It’s insulting, and it’s ignorant.

OK, now for what may be my favorite part – the part where malcontents disagree with themselves. I’m both amused and incredulous when I see people my age, around my income level, complaining loudly about this tax plan and about capital gains taxes in general. Here’s a little-known fact about capital gains taxes:  If you make under $50k/year, chances are very good that capital gains taxes don’t affect you in the least.

The general line of reasoning seems to be that capital gains taxes and Obama’s tax hike for the wealthy amount to the theft of hard-earned money that the wealthy are due. It stems from a sense of entitlement – if you perform at a certain level or in a certain capacity, you are entitled to the standard of living people in your position have enjoyed in recent years. You look out for yourself, and everyone else should do the same, because everyone’s trying to get ahead.

This is where it gets funny:  The people who aren’t wealthy but are making that argument anyway are apparently defending some possible future in which they, too, are wealthy for one reason or another. By doing so, though, they undermine their current situation and, consequently, their chances of becoming wealthy. Apparently they’re fine with the taxes they’re paying now and don’t want them to increase when they eventually fulfill the American Dream and live in a mansion somewhere on the coast.

Reasoning like this doesn’t exactly support the embedded “me first” premise on which the argument itself is based. You want the wealthy to have more money to invest (or spend – whatever) so that…you can have less money to use to create wealth for yourself? That’s what we call self-defeating behavior, and you might want to get it looked at. It’s not officially a personality disorder, but I’m sure the big pharmaceuticals could offer you an attractive deal on some Restless Leg Syndrome medication in recompense.

Alright, enough for now. I hope this has either helped you to work out your own responses to these ridiculous arguments or fed your rage at the Pinko Commie bastards who want to give control of our country to the Black Man and take all of your divorce lawyer’s hard-earned money and give it to your no-good ex-brother-in-law…that lazy SOB*.

*Like how I took both the gun-wielding racist and the slimy executive conservative stereotypes and melded them together into an almost unrecognizable super-Republican? This is why these over-generalizations and simplifications about Obama and his plans make me so angry – they’re not even entertaining as rhetorical devices. Put some thought into your word-twisting; otherwise, you’ll never get one past me.

Dedicated to Lisa, who was there via a small window on my computer screen through much of the situation to offer practical advice and, more importantly, laugh mercilessly at my pain and embarrassment.

When I was in high school, a guy came into class one day with a large purplish-reddish mark on the side of his face. When asked what had happened, he replied that (and I'm still not sure why he answered honestly) he had been ironing clothes, the phone rang...and he answered the iron.

Now, things like this are never funny because they're so physically painful. They're not funny at all; they're hysterical. Slapstick was so popular because it's human nature to laugh at somebody else's stupidity, even when (sometimes, especially when) it results in some measure of physical pain for the other person. The iron-qua-phone incident was the closest I had come to real-life slapstick and was, hence, the most amusing example of carelessness resulting in severe unpleasantness I had personally experienced - until last night.

It was a dark and stormy night - or, at least, it would be in a couple hours. I only say that because I place any responsibility I might have borne for this event on the brewing electrical storm. My girlfriend likes to talk about how we all have magnetic fields around us, so there you go - easy out for me.

Anyway. I was cooking dinner, as I am sometimes wont to do. For me, "cooking dinner" is a once-a-week process that involves marinating a bag of chicken breasts and broiling them while a pot of something resembling a side item is cooking on the stove. When it's all done, I wrap it all up, put it in the fridge, and heat up leftovers combined with some frozen vegetables in the microwave for the next week. It's relatively healthy, and it means I only have to wash one pot from all the cooking I did - a win-win.

This time, my side item of choice was a pot of Mahatma brand rice. I mention the brand name because I think it's the only true example of institutionalized racism that's gone unnoticed in this little PC country of ours, complete with a caricature of an Indian (dots, not feathers) on the front of the bag. I buy it regularly.

So I was upstairs, letting the rice and chicken do their thing on the stove/in the oven downstairs. I went down to check on everything toward the end of the cooking cycle and noticed that the pot of rice looked dry. This is the goal, as rice is supposed to soak up the water you cook it in, but I didn't know if all the water had been absorbed or, if so, how long it had been dry. I turned the pot sideways over the sink to see if any water would come out from beneath the rice. Nothing. OK, fair enough. And this is where things got interesting.

Somewhere deep within the rumbling clouds, a stream of positively ionized particles made its way down to earth, through my back door, and triggered the neurons in my brain that serve to inform the rest of my body that water makes things cooler. Given that information, the subconscious line of reasoning that followed was, the best I can tell after the fact, that if I touched the bottom and it was cool, there was water in the bottom. What would happen if the water were all gone was apparently of little concern.

Thus, I proceeded with my moderately scientific touch test. The millisecond it took me to confirm my hypothesis that the pot was probably dry was also enough time for me to realize that, either way, the bottom of the pot would probably be fairly warm, as it had been sitting on an active stove eye for the last half hour. I removed my hand from the pot, did a couple brief jumping jacks, and began my post-mortem analysis of the situation.

"Post-mortem" is a fitting title, given the soft tissue damage I had just suffered. My first conclusion was that this was the most blatant act of stupidity I had performed in recent memory, putting to shame all the times I've splattered food on my lap while trying to cut chicken on a plate balanced precariously on the edge of my computer desk. Next, I realized that I would probably soon be in a fascinating amount of pain.

Check.

I found my freezer's easily accessible rear air vents to be a very present help in trouble, but I couldn't just stand there with the freezer door open the rest of the night, though I may have briefly considered it. I grabbed a bowl of water and an ice pack and slunk upstairs to my room.

Actually, at first I just grabbed an ice pack and slunk upstairs to my room to make the cardinal mistake of bodily harm - ask the Internet for information about my malady and what I should do about it. I know this isn't a good idea, but I did it anyway: strike 2. I had planned my usual strategy of neglecting to consult a doctor and ignoring the problem until it went away, but the Internet of course had different advice.

After becoming convinced that, thanks to the ice pack, I now had frostbite and would certainly lose the use of my fingers (if not the fingers themselves), and that I might lose them anyway even without the help of sub-freezing temperatures if I didn't go to the Emergency Room RIGHT NOW, I sheepishly went back downstairs to prepare a bowl of cool water in which to immerse my hand.

For the next little while, I sat with a bowl of water on my lap, tapping away at my keyboard with my good hand, and feeling no real ill effects of the soft tissue damage - as long as my hand was fully inserted into the water.

Eventually, I realized that, having only normal bandages on hand, I would have to cough up a few dollars and go buy some gauze in order to hopefully avoid the kind of infection that would eventually leave me looking for the most menacing hook-shaped prosthetic on the market. I warily removed my hand from the water, put on a shirt, and hopped in my car.

If you've never performed all the functions necessary to drive to the store using only one hand, I recommend it - that is, if you're a halfway decent driver when you're using both of them. It's a wonderfully diversionary exercise in prioritizing - do I put my seatbelt on first, or do I turn the car on? How does the turn signal lever work again? Hmm, the headlights...yeah, um, let me just reach through there, and...sweet; I didn't run into anything.

At the end of the evening, I ended up with four fingers slathered in antibiotic cream and wrapped in tubes of ill-fitting gauze secured with paper medical tape - which, I'm learning, is like real tape in that it comes in a roll, but unlike real tape in that it doesn't stick to anything, especially when you really want it to stick to something.

By the time I was ready to go to bed, the pain was virtually gone; all that's left now are a few painful-looking (though not really painful unless I press the issue) blisters on vital parts of my hand that, if infected, could lead to unsightly finger loss. I should probably stop typing, as the average keyboard has more germs than a toilet seat. Oh well...

Yeah, most of this is about a week old. I’m just now finishing it. Sue me. 

My unique position as someone relatively disinterested in religion who nevertheless works for a very religious organization gives me a sometimes fascinating, more often disturbing, inside look at part of the underbelly of the massive beast known as the American church.

Take, for example, my organization’s biennial international conference, wherein pastors and members alike gather in a sporting stadium to discuss and vote about weighty matters such as why women should not be allowed on their debate floor. Panem et circenses – both abound. 

This same overgrown church service, boasting so many participants, is also prime opportunity to exercise what is quickly becoming the primary goal of the American church – shrewd entrepreneurship (with all profits being properly stewarded, of course). In order to fully take advantage of the space afforded by a convention center/stadium combination, there is an exhibit hall at these conventions filled with booths that range in purpose from promoting different church departments and ministries, to offering resources for the local church, to selling jewelry. Yes, jewelry.

The combination of history and irony is tough for these people to imagine. 

For someone like me who’s always watching and comparing people and the circumstances they create for themselves, another interesting interplay I get to witness in my job is that of the church and popular culture.

“Relevance” is a term that’s bandied about frequently in religious circles. Mostly, it’s in the company of words like “creating” or “maintaining”, concepts on which the church (albeit unbeknownst to them) largely gave up when they collectively decided that Augustine had a lot of pragmatically useful things to say. 

With a few rare exceptions, the only relevance to modern society enjoyed by American churches today rests in whatever charitable community-based programs they host and, occasionally, in their childhood indoctrination/daycare programs. The rest of their efforts are typically laughable, desperate grasps for something their own puritanical ideals will never allow them to attain.

There are websites that look like they were designed a decade ago with all the web development tools that AOL 4.0 had to offer. There are parodies of popular entertainment stripped of any words or undertones that could possibly be conceived to be offensive and thus painfully eviscerated of any previously existing entertainment value. Throughout, there’s the attempted repurposing of a society that adherents are taught to emulate, but not internalize. 

This gets taken to ridiculous lengths, often bordering on outright trademark infringement. Shirts sporting 7-up logos but somehow proclaiming the good news of Christ, popular bumper sticker mascots kneeling before a cross instead of urinating on an automotive logo - the list goes on.

Right now, I’m at the annual Dove Awards in Nashville, an awards ceremony created to honor the artists whom the music industry at large is loath to recognize*. Actually, the ceremony is tomorrow, but we’ve been here since Saturday to be part of what’s known as GMA (Gospel Music Awards…I think) Music Week…which is fairly similar to the aforementioned international convention, except it happens every year, and instead of thousands of self-righteous old men in suits, it’s thousands of idealistic young musicians purposely dressed like blind street urchins. 

GMA Music Week has its own den of money-changers/exhibit hall. There were apparently a few different sections to it; I only made it down to one, and that only because I heard of what may be the greatest intersection of church and popular culture I’ve seen to date…and I’ve seen plenty.

I didn’t think it could go quite this far, didn’t see any point into trying to tap into this market. I appear to have underestimated both greed and stupidity. 

Earlier today, after an interview, a guy we were working with picked up a can that belonged to one of the band members, looked at it, and tried to hand it back to its owner, who refused it, saying that the company sponsored him and that he needed to leave it behind.

The can was labeled 1in3Trinity, and if the package design and printing hadn’t been so clearly professional-grade, there’s no way I would have accepted it as anything more than a poor joke. Alas, I had no choice but to admit that 1in3Trinity, a Christian energy drink, actually exists. 

Under the main label are printed the words “fused with fruits of the Spirit” and, as if that weren’t enough, the names of said fruits are sprinkled across the rest of the label – love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control – all the tranquil personality traits of which an energy drink is typically supposed to relieve you.

There is little to say about such a product, except that I’m mildly surprised they didn’t actually monkey with the ingredients list and nutrition facts to make it claim to have 23% of your daily recommended value of sanctification and 12% of your daily recommended value of soulicin. 

I mean, seriously? An energy drink? Was “Red Bull” too suggestive, or was it that your extensive market research indicated that what today’s on-the-go Christian needed and would be willing to pay a premium for was a little more caffeine in their diet? Actually, judging by the warning labels on the packaging, I should probably make that a lot more caffeine.

After a little research, it turns out that 1in3Trinity isn’t just the name of an energy drink; the energy drink is just one facet in the 1in3Trinity brand, which is largely dedicated to fashion – umm, godly fashion. 

I don’t recommend going to their website unless you enjoy being involuntarily bombarded by the latest in Christian punk rock music – a band by the name of Alakrity (clever, I know), who came nowhere close to living up to their name when we were interviewing them earlier and started asking questions about the Bible.

So, there you have it. If companies like this can truly stay afloat, then PT Barnum was absolutely correct, and I’m going to dedicate my life to becoming filthy rich by selling products that cause physical pain to people with 5 sequential functioning neurons. Too bad all the good ideas, like bottled water, are already taken. 

I leave you today with words from the first track that plays on the 1in3Trinity website, brilliantly titled, “What is it with words?”:

“What is it with words? All they’ve ever been are letters so precisely put together, and they never seem to make things better.” 

Well put, boys. So profound. And here I thought that our high schools were turning out kids less capable of critical thought and common sense every year, but such a stunning reflection on meta-language theory is clearly evidence to the contrary. 

*Here’s where I’d say that this is largely due to the lack of Christian artists actually contributing anything that could be considered art, but even I can admit that the ratio of original and worthwhile talent is about the same in both the religious and secular music worlds. Seriously, someone somewhere needs to write something even as good as a Billy Joel song. It can’t be that hard.

Goodbyes are often described as being “bittersweet”. The only sweet part of our last day in Bosnia may have been our host family’s relief at finally getting rid of us. Jim and I woke up and finished packing our things, which we loaded into the Wagon, but not before we each got a pair of handmade thick woolen socks as a present from the family who had opened their home to us for the week.

We were shuttled over to Bojana’s house for one last giant Serbian meal, after which was a parade of goodbyes and well-wishings from family member after family member. “Good luck, have a good trip.” Bojana faithfully translated the same sentiments over and over. “Thank you” being one of the few things we knew how to say in Serbian, we made liberal use of it.

After the farewells at home, we left for Sarajevo to get in some last-minute shopping before heading to the airport. The scene as we left Bojana’s neighborhood could be straight out of a book of Hollywood stereotypes: we drove slowly (thanks to the ice), and as we passed by each successive house, we saw people outside watching us leave. Our driver honked (a common form of greeting here), and everyone waved. We returned the gesture, and it continued like this until we reached the main road. Families at the tops of hills with sleds, friends gathering for an outdoor meal and smoke, fathers and brothers preparing slaughtered animals for tomorrow’s Christmas feast; all turned to wish us the best – this is what The Truman Show would have looked like if it had been set in Bosnia.

Once in Sarajevo, it was back to the outside market, and this time it was my turn to change pants behind a glorified bedsheet in below-freezing weather. When I pulled the curtain back to display how they fit, Bojana had left to help Jim haggle over a jacket 5 sizes too big for him, leaving her mother and Matt to tell me if I looked like an idiot.

The general consensus was that the pants were “super” (pronounced SOO-pair), so I replaced the modesty curtain and changed back into my own pants. When I emerged, rather than asking me what I thought of them, Bojana’s mother simply handed me a shopping bag with the jeans folded inside, and that was that. New pants for Josh.

Before I had a chance to track down any “Welcome to Sarajevo” souvenir shot glasses, it was time to head to the airport to catch our plane.

We made it to SJJ roughly an hour and 20 minutes ahead of scheduled departure and were greeted by a mass of passengers that spilled out the door in a haphazard, harried blob, otherwise known as a European line. Asserting our places, we hoped to make it to the desk in time to check our bags.

The group began to move, and we got our boarding passes in plenty of time, so we headed upstairs to find a seat. What we found was another mass of humanity; far exceeding the modest allowance of chairs, there were groups scattered across the floor – sports teams, families, international travelers of all kinds.

After waiting for some time, we began to hear announcements. Other flights were being delayed indefinitely due to fog. The only help they could offer was “more information in 30 minutes”. So this is why the airport is so full.

A couple hours of trying to find a comfortable sleeping position later, the other flights started changing, one by one, from being delayed to being cancelled. A glance outside showed why – the fog was so thick it was almost unsafe to drive.

Our pilot was determined, though – after making a pass or two at Sarajevo, our flight headed to Croatia to drop its load of passengers and returned in a couple hours to attempt another landing. It proved impossible, though, and after waiting a few hours past scheduled departure, our flight was finally cancelled.

After picking up our bags, we headed to the information desk along with everyone else on our flight. British Airways had a robust staff of one on that particular day, so it was a good hour or so before we heard anything – and that was because it took that long to help the first person in line.

Said customer happened to be an English-speaker, and as he walked off, clearly frustrated, someone else asked him what happened (what arrangements had been made, what the airline was doing for us, etc.). He shrugged a bit and said very deliberately, “As we say in Scotland, ‘fuck all’.”

Personally, I would have been OK simply grabbing our bags and going back to Pale right then, but Matt and his sister had jobs that they considered important for some unfathomable reason, so we continued to wait for a resolution, Matt and Bojana standing at the counter while the rest of us lounged around wherever we had room.

Mladena had been with us the whole time along with a small contingent from Bojana’s family, and eventually she wandered off to buy a magazine to keep herself occupied. Some magazines in America come with a CD of bonus content, some come with tear-out activities; this Serbian magazine came with an oven mitt and a packet of Nescafe hot chocolate. Matt and I spent a good 10 minutes playing catch with the Nescafe, trading the oven mitt back and forth to see who would be more adept at hunting if suddenly transformed into a lobster. Such are the activities available in Bosnian airports.

After a total airport waiting time of around 5 hours, we ended up with two options:  Stay and wait for a flight the next day or two days later, depending on weather; or take a bus to another city (at our own expense) and fly out of there. We were originally scheduled for a 19-hour layover in London, and we were eventually able to calculate a bus route and consequent flight that would get us to London in time for the flight on which we had booked passage.

This is where our day switched from great to fanbloodytastic. Our only option for a timely return depended on a bus ride to Zagreb, Croatia, that was estimated at between 8 and 9 hours. “Thrilled” does not begin to describe my reaction on hearing of our spontaneous exotic travel destination.

Bojana had sent part of her family home to get us dinner, and when they got back, they drove us to the Sarajevo bus depot to secure our tickets before we ate. An exchange of local currency and a few minutes later, Jim and I were checked into the system as passengers Juoshoa Ziegler and Jum God-only-knows-how-they-spelled-“Hughes”. Everyone else got tickets too, but apparently ours were the most interesting.

We devoured sandwiches around the side of the van for awhile, passing around a bottle of mineral water and one of Coke as beverages, then it was time to head to the bus – and if we weren’t having fun yet, we were about to start.

See, it costs 2 marks to put a piece of luggage into the bus’s cargo hold, and they’ll sell you as many spots as you want to buy. Unfortunately, physics doesn’t agree with their business practices. There was a good number of people in a situation similar to ours who were forced to take this same bus ride to Zagreb, so not only was the bus booked, but the baggage compartment wasn’t big enough for all the luggage that people should have been checking into the cargo hold of an Airbus.
Eventually, the decision was made to ignore good sense and said natural laws:  Instead of unpacking and repacking the cargo hold and probably gaining room for a couple of the leftover bags, we had to get this bus on the road now (as if we weren’t already late). The remaining bags would be put in the aisles of the bus. OSHA and your local fire marshal would love this place.

This new customer satisfaction policy didn’t affect me much, as my bag was put on the first level, and I sat upstairs. Matt, however, had one of his larger bags right next to him, forcing people to step on him as they went up or down the aisle to get around the bag. Eventually, this prompted him to give the bag a home on his lap, an almost equally uncomfortable solution.

My main problem was that the seats were made for Europeans – tiny Western Europeans. My knee was smashed into the seat in front of me, and my airspace greatly overlapped with Jim’s in an awkward, fleshy Venn diagram. Still, this was home for the next several hours, and as we set off, I settled into what little seat I had, my contacts still in place and promising to be uncomfortably dry in the morning.

It’s probably best that I was seated on the inside aisle, asleep most of the time, and the windows were fogged up. Most of what I’ve heard from Matt involves sheer cliff faces on one side of the road and 90-degree drops on the other on roads less than wide enough for even our bus.

I continued in half-consciousness for the duration of the trip, waking up every couple hours when the bus stopped for a collective bathroom break. At one of these stops, I was designated to run inside the nearby restaurant and ask someone to refill our now-empty bottle of water from the sink. Somehow I accomplished this without a hitch, got back on the bus, and went back to sleep.

At some point early in the morning, we reached the Croatian border. A border officer entered the bus and checked everyone’s passports, then he unloaded the bus and had someone else scan the passports, this time using electronic means.

All these assorted delays meant that we finally reached Zagreb without a moment to spare. We rushed our bags over to the two nearest cabs we could find and booked it to the airport, already racing against inevitability.

We got to the airport 15 minutes behind our scheduled departure. Luckily, the flight had been delayed ½ hour, so we were just able to get our bags checked and head to the gate in time to wait a little longer for them to clean the recently-arrived plane.

From there it was a 2-hour or so flight to London and a hustle to the next flight, which was set to leave in 40 minutes or so. Somehow Jim and I made it through the security hoops with our tickets that, by now, could serve up a rousing game of airport code-bingo; but Matt and Bojana were pulled aside.

We headed for the gate, telling ourselves they’d either catch up, or they wouldn’t (a logical conclusion, we thought). We made it as far as the gate agent before they found out that we weren’t properly checked in either, and neither were our bags. Yippee. We gave our passports and the double sets of luggage tags we had gotten in two different departure countries to a large, soft-spoken man named Sven, who told us to take it easy at the gate while he went and made sure we were checked in and that our bags were, indeed, on the plane.

We listened as all the boarding calls were made, watched as the late arrivals to the gate hurried towards the agents, checked in, and rushed onto the plane; and we waited for Sven. He made it back to where we were sitting before the plane took off and assured us that everything was right as rain. We thanked him and got on board the 777 for the second-to-last leg of our journey, another 9 hours in a seated position.

Fortunately, there was no problem landing in Atlanta; the problem came when we got to baggage claim and found that everything was not, in fact, right as rain; our bags weren’t there, and the airline knew it. An agent approached us, calling Matt by name, and we made arrangements to have our bags mailed to us. At this point, we were just glad to not have to lug them around (and answer potentially awkward questions at customs).

Finally, we made it out to the parking lot, where we decided that we would stop for dinner at the first Cracker Barrel we saw. After dinner (thoroughly disappointing chicken and dumplings – where was my suvog mesa?), I did what I do best – slept through the entire drive home.

So it was that, after 40 hours of travel for what should have been a 10-12-hour trip, we made it back from Bosnia alive, only a little the worse for wear (and without large pieces of our wardrobes, but hey, who’s keeping score at this point?).

Now I just have to figure out how I’m going to get back there.

Good weather during a Bosnian winter is hit-or-miss, with a clear bias towards “miss”. The sun that had shown so brilliantly the entire day of the wedding and, just for good measure, the day after had once again retreated behind a wall of gray. Clouds and fog once again dominated the horizon, making skiing ill-advised.

We drove up Jahorina anyway. This is the mountain best known for its appearance in the ’84 Olympic Games, and even in the fog, which turned into a windy snowstorm by the time we were high enough to park, it’s easy to see why it was chosen. Even someone with no skiing experience such as myself can sense the smoothness of the slopes, vast, treeless expanses of white just waiting to be hurtled down at breakneck speed (and if I were to do it, I’m sure I’d find out just why it’s called “breakneck”).

The blowing snow and low visibility kept me from being able to write a story about how I spent 6 months in physical therapy in a Bosnian hospital after a freak ski lift accident, but we made the best of it. We stood at the edge, gazing out as far as the fog would allow, then we followed the call of the natural beauty by which we were surrounded. It was telling us to throw snowballs at each other, and after an invigorating (read: frostbite-inducing) little romp, we piled back into the Shaggin’ Wagon and headed out for the rest of the day.

I spent most of the drive up and down the mountain in silence, which prompted questions from the others, but I simply had nothing to say. I was too busy staring out the window at scores of tree branches sagging under the weight of pure, glistening snow, taken in by the peacefulness of a landscape devoid of color save for muted dark greens and browns, simply grateful to be there.

Some time later, our next stop was in the village outside of town where Bojana was born. Just getting there required 10 minutes or so of driving on a strictly one-way path on the side of a mountain, surprisingly well-kept given its location, but still prone to patches of solid ice and 30-degree or so downhill grades. We’d have to let the Wagon leave ahead of us and walk back up the path; we’d never make it uphill with a loaded van. Our driver once again proved he knew exactly what he was doing, and we made it to the village just fine despite the absence of guard rails or chains for the tires. Chains are for wusses, apparently. Real men make their own liquor, then they drink it while driving downhill on icy mountain roads on whatever tires they happen to have around. Take that, physics. (He wasn’t actually drinking during this, but I suspect that was because he noticed that the Americans were already nervous enough.)

We finally reached the house where still more of Bojana’s family lives. You couldn’t dream of a more perfect mountain getaway – nestled into a slope, overlooking a wide valley, more mountains on all sides, the very definition of wilderness. The lot of it at this time of year was speckled white and brown – add the sheep being herded into a barn in the basin below, and you have a gorgeous cover photo for the creatively placed National Geographic staffer (creatively placed I was not, and so far National Geographic just tells me to stop sending them pictures). At one point, we went outside with Bojana’s father, who gave us a set of binoculars and pointed out her little brother onthe other side of the valley, which must have been a good mile away. The two then proceeded to have a perfectly intelligible (to them, at least)conversation, their voices transmitted by echoes from countless rock faces.



Inside the stove-heated main room of the small house, we happily gathered for a special lunch – special because it featured excellent hot food. For the first time since we’d been in the country, we were treated to chicken – fresh chicken – accompanied by potatoes soaked in so much oil that they were summarily disowned by the vegetable food group, but I made sure to give them a loving home.

After stuffing our faces, we settled down for some more quality family time, then it was time to make the trek back to the crossroads at the end of the path where the Wagon could safely collect us. Having conquered Everest the day before, this particular hike was child’s play, especially considering I had my tripod along to use as the world’s most awkward walking stick.



We reached the top of the path and found we had some free time. I took a few pictures, we talked a bit, and before too long, our ride arrived. By the end of our drive back into Pale, it was time for dinner (and if it hadn’t been, dinner would have been ready anyway – after all, we’d been in a car for more than 10 minutes; we must be hungry). This time, though, I had genuine stomach problems, so I was given tea and graciously excused from further testing the elasticity of one of my favorite internal organs by partaking in dinner. The tea (and a trip upstairs) actually helped quite a bit, and by the time everyone was done eating, I felt much better.

The night didn’t end at dinner, of course; I simply have to decide if I’m going to recount the rest of the evening, and if so, just how I’m going to do that…

By the time Jim and I were woken up today, it was time to get to headquarters – immediately, for lunch waits for no man. This meant that I wouldn’t have time to take a shower, but such is life. I hurriedly applied some deodorant and cologne, thankful for the low temperatures outside. When it’s this cold, it’s difficult to smell bad – everyone else’s noses are too busy just trying to keep the air warm to worry about its odor.

As I rushed to get ready, I noticed a strange sensation in my shoulders – muscle soreness from the day before. Apparently 8 hours of dancing in a circle using shoulder movement to overcompensate for foot failure results in a bizarre yet somewhat effective workout.

Like I said, we went straight to lunch when we got to Bojana’s house. After the meal, everyone left to go do more of whatever they had been doing without me and Jim for the past week. Mladena was at work, so Jim and I were once again left to our own devices. We took this priceless opportunity to go upstairs and go back to sleep.

When Mladena got home from work, she came bearing another American movie, which we started to watch. This one had the potential to not be a steaming pile of excrement, but we hadn’t gotten very far into it when Bojana and Matt returned with Matt’s family, and Bojana insisted we all go for a walk.

We headed down the road toward a fish restaurant, a homey little place nestled among ponds and trees at the base of a hill. It was mostly empty at this time of day, but Bojana mentioned that it was a popular hangout for foreigners.

I noticed a path up the hill behind the restaurant that promised a view of the whole town, so I couldn’t resist telling everyone that I was going up the hill and would be back soon. I was stopped, Bojana telling me we’d all go when we’d gotten those who couldn’t make the climb settled inside the restaurant.

I wasn’t planning on a long-term expedition, but I had unknowingly opened Pandora’s box. My quick jaunt up a hill turned into an exercise in casual mountain climbing, steep, snowy slopes giving way to a brush-and-rock-covered summit. Burning lungs, heavy breathing, and the sweat I would never have thought possible in such weather conditions were rewarded with a spectacular view of Pale. Unfortunately, the time it took me to get up there in shoes that were entirely inappropriate for the occasion sapped most of the useful sunlight from the day, and I hadn’t brought a tripod. We made the best of the situation, rested for a few minutes, then headed back down.

The one benefit of being on a mountain in dressy-casual shoes with no real tread comes in the descent, as they serve as excellent sleds when strategically placed on the snow (This also applies on the ascent, but we’ve put that behind us now; let’s not speak of it again). The side effect of this, though, is that one ends up with prodigious amounts of snow in one’s shoes.

Frostbite, though, is a chimerical concept to me – one of those things that I’ve read about but that could never possibly happen to me – so I didn’t mind the snow. This meant that by the time I reached the bottom, said snow had been partially melted, compacted, and re-frozen, leaving me walking on literal blocks of ice that I was forced to knock out of my shoes before I joined everyone else for tea inside the restaurant.

While we had tea, our socks draped over the radiator next to our table, our clothes began to thaw; however, we still had to walk home. By the time we arrived, our pant cuffs were frozen stiff around our ankles, forcing us to change into dry clothes. Jim ended up with a pair of Bojana’s father’s pants, which were a good 6 inches too long for him; I got one of Matt’s, which were almost exactly my size. Our shoes were placed in the stove to dry while we sat down to dinner.

Yes, the stove. Amazing things are done with wood-burning stoves here. One appliance is used to cook food, dry things that need dried (and, I suppose, aren’t terribly flammable, though the concept of fire hazards doesn’t seem terribly popular here), and heat the house through a series of ducts and copper piping extending from the top of the stove, around the ceiling of the room, and through the ceiling to the upstairs. Central heat at its finest – and deforestation doesn’t appear to be high on the list of problems here.

After dinner, another movie was put in, and we watched this one in its entirety. Following this, it was time to go out for the evening, because spending a night at home is heresy (for the single, at least – the married couple were simply trying to get the rest of us out of their room so they could “sleep”).

Jim and I each got Mladena to call a girl we had talked to at the wedding to see if they would join us – Jim’s girls was “sick”, and mine was “tired”. Figures. A few minutes later, though, Jovana (the tired one) called back and invited us to her place.

This was an awkward situation, as she might have just wanted to be polite and not really wanted us to come; Mladena argued with her sister about it in Serbian for awhile, and eventually a decision was reached. What that decision was, Jim and I had no idea; we just knew it involved going to Jovana’s, since Mladena told us to bring along a bottle of wine.

We got in the car with Mladena and a few of her friends, and within a few minutes we had figured out the (perhaps ill-advised) plan: Jim and I would be dropped off at Jovana’s while Mladena and co. went out, and we would be picked up at some point later in the evening.

This ensured a complete wash for all involved as far as romance was concerned, given the unbalanced ratio and time constraints. We made the best of it, though, Jovana using the wine to show us a local delicacy by caramelizing some sugar in a pot and mixing in the wine as it simmered.

(This was after we discovered that we didn’t have a corkscrew, forcing Jim to dig out the cork with a knife – two knives, actually, since he broke the first one.)

We spent the rest of the time talking and looking through Jovana’s hand-written book of English song lyrics. She sings as a hobby, and her collection ranges from “Eye of the Tiger” to Wham to Madonna. It’s always depressing to see just what American music makes it overseas. No wonder everyone hates us.

All too soon, we were collected by Mladena’s friends and taken to our host’s house. Tomorrow’s supposed to be the day we finally go skiing. We’ll see how that turns out.

Weddings will never be the same. From now on, length and intensity will be judged solely in comparison to my new wedding archetype, the Serbian wedding. After every decent ceremony/reception I attend, I will gaze wistfully at the stars (if it doesn’t end at night, it won’t even be considered a contender), and I will sigh, “Well, it was fun and all, but it was no Serbian wedding”.

We had been told that we would be woken up at 6 in the morning to get ready for the day, and we were under the impression that the wedding would be starting at 10. We heard voices outside our room somewhere around dawn, so we decided to get up and check on the time.

7:30. Fantastic. We rushed through our showers and other preparations, the rest of the family suspiciously absent for people who were supposed to be making sure we don’t miss the festivities. An hour or so later, one of Bojana’s cousins came upstairs to tell us we had about an hour left to get ready.

Alrighty, then. We’re, um, kind of already ready, since we thought we’d be leaving ½ hour ago, but it’s all good. We’ll be, well, right here. Just come get us.

About 10:30, we all piled in the family VW bus, which by this point we were affectionately referring to as the Shaggin’ Wagon (a joke that Bojana had somehow managed to accurately translate, and now the whole family was in on the fun), and we were off.

Car trips are rarely a point-A-to-point-B endeavor here, and we made a stop or two on the way to the wedding. The first time we pulled over was to pick up a cake (yes, a cake…there were several). Stores such as this one, though, don’t have much in the way of clearly delineated parking, so we simply stopped behind another car, and our driver got out and walked into the store.

When the people driving the car we had essentially blocked in got back to their vehicle, they apparently failed to see the bus three times their car’s size that would surely have taken up their entire rear-view mirror, had they looked. The car backed directly into us, which prompted our driver’s wife to step outside, waving her hand and shouting some things in Serbian. No one appeared all that bent out of shape at the fender-bender, though, and after a minute the car simply maneuvered around us and left. We followed soon thereafter.

We ended up at the hotel ballroom around 11:00. A second-story affair, the ballroom was really three rooms separated by partial walls. A staircase dominated the middle room, and long tables were set up everywhere there happened to be room. We were greeted, pinned with traditional wedding corsages, and ushered to our seats in the far room, near the throne-like chairs that the bride and groom would later occupy.

Then the eating began. We knew we couldn’t avoid it for long, and soon the tables were filled with plates of meat, bread, pickles,peppers, and more meat. As expected, the liquor was brought out with the first course; Matt told me that the couple hundred guests would be sharing roughly 100liters of alcohol, which had been purchased for around $900 US dollars (just in case you’re planning a wedding and still looking for a location…).

It was around this time that I discovered that my camera battery was about to die and that I had left my spare in my other bag. Score 1for forethought, Josh. I noticed that the local cameraman working the room was sporting a Nikon as well, so I managed to somehow get my plight expressed to him. He had no Li-Ion batteries to spare, but he did happen to have a charger, so I entrusted my battery to him, unsure of its eventual fate.

After we’d been eating and socializing for about an hour and a half, the bride was introduced, and, with renewed zeal, we continued to eat. When in Bosnia…

Eventually it was time for the festivities to get (more?) underway. Everyone who was present at the time filtered outside and into their cars, forming a formidable wedding motorcade. We pulled up in front of the city courthouse and piled into an auxiliary room in city hall far too small for a group of our size, where a judge took care of the legal aspect of the marriage. Her reading of the documents was translated by Bojana, and Matt faithfully delivered his “Da” when prompted.

The document signing took about 20 minutes, then we were off to the church, where Matt would be baptized into Orthodoxy. This is where things got interesting, as I pulled out the video camera we had brought on the trip for the first time. Not wishing to commit some sort of heresy (which I was sure would be punishable by death), I stuck to the back of the room for the first few minutes, until the family quietly yet clearly urged me toward the front.

At that point, I gave up on being inconspicuous and decided to simply do what years of my current job have taught me to do well – make a fool of myself in public. For the next hour, I made my best effort at shooting a wedding ceremony without a tripod, having no idea what would happen next.After several separate instances of genuflecting, icon-kissing, and following the priest’s censer around the room, family and friends lined up to congratulate the couple. The smart money’s on Matt having no idea what church he just joined or what kind of arcane vows he made in that sanctuary.

The couple being married in the eyes of man and God, the wedding party returned to the ballroom, where my camera battery was returned fully charged, much to my pleasant surprise. Fresh plates of food were on the table, and the eating was soon mixed with dancing, the live band filling the room with traditional Serbian music, which is apparently very popular among the Serbs.

The misshapen-circle dance I mentioned a couple days ago is called the kola, and it’s pretty much the Serbians’ national dance. You learn it, or you go home. It’s not really that difficult for someone with a basic sense of rhythm and rudimentary muscle control – step, step, you put your left foot in, you put your right foot in, step, step, repeat. I was blessed with neither social nor physical grace, and even I picked it up eventually.

The problems start when the people on either side of you are dancing at different speeds, which has the unfortunate side effect of making every mistake in the line look like your fault. Then a faster song will come on, and all of a sudden the kola is half-Riverdance, eventually convincing you to give up on life and go have some more whiskey. This happened to me several times.

Speaking of whiskey, I gained a new hero at the wedding. I already liked the father of the bride, but for a good 8 hours, he worked that ballroom, whiskey glass in hand, going from table to table and toasting the occasion, stopping only to dance. You could tell he wasn’t made for a suit and tie, but the man was a party machine.

Also of note was Jim, who did an excellent job of pretending to be trashed, alternatively doing the can-can with elementary school-aged girls, trying to swing dance with everyone else, and doing his interpretation of traditional Russian dance by himself when he invariably flunked out of the kolas.

The one aspect of the wedding I’ve studiously avoided up to this point is the availability of wedding hookups with the opposite sex – the reason for this being that putting me at a dance party and telling me to pick up a girl is like putting a bull in a china shop and telling him to make origami.

In situations like this, the camera is your best friend, but it will only do so much. Going outside “to talk” is a less plausible front when there’s a distinct possibility your tongues could freeze together should anything develop. Now there’s something I’d like to try to explain in Serbian.

Sheer numbers didn’t even come to my rescue, as I had to have struck out on at least 3 separate occasions. Such is life; perhaps I will be repaid in purgatory for my sufferings. That is how purgatory works, right?

At any rate, the eating, drinking, dancing, and social failures continued until around midnight, the occasional handful of guests filtering out as the night wore on. For those keeping score, that’s a 13-hour wedding (and was, incidentally, about 2 or 3 hours short of the time I had been quoted ahead of time). Until then, I had been unable to sleep before 3 AM or so local time; as a result, I had only slept a few hours during each of the previous 4 nights, and my sentiments at the end of the marathon wedding can only be described as “So. Very. Tired.”.

By the end of the night, the men of the family were prodigiously, well, buzzed; yet they were to be our drivers for the night (keep in mind that the roads are covered in snow and ice, and the hotel’s on top of a hill). My lack of regard for safety of life and limb served me well, as I happily climbed in the Shaggin’ Wagon, ready for a ride that I was sure would be nothing but good, clean fun.

As it turns out, liquor doesn’t work the same in Bosnia. It makes people happy without making them idiots. Our guy handled the ice as he had every other time – like an absolute pro – and held his booze down while he did it. We got home in one piece with very few, if any, aberrations on the road. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel just a twinge of morbid disappointment. Lousy American lightweights.

In Bosnia, plans are, to put it lightly, flexible. We didn’t end up going to the mountain as planned – due, supposedly, to hazardous fog (which isn’t that implausible of an excuse). Instead, we ended up lounging at the house again after lunch while Bojana, Matt, and Matt’s family headed off for more pre-nuptial errands.

This being our third time watching “I Witness”, I decided to actually watch the cinematic gem this time. All I can really say about the movie in general is that James Spader was cast in the same roles 15 years ago as he is today; he just looked more awkward doing it back then.

Most of the way through the movie, Mladena was called away from the room to run errands (she left saying she had to go to the store and wouldn’t be long), and her little brother Miro left as well. Jim and I were left to watch the heart-wrenching fate of Jeff Bridges and his love for the downtrodden by ourselves then wonder aloud to the indifferent walls what in the heck we were supposed to do for the rest of the day.

We waited for Mladena, who after an hour or so was nowhere to be found, then sifted through several ideas, including writing poignant yet vulgar suicide notes and leaving the house. Eventually, we decided on simply taking a walk. By the time we made it downstairs, Bojana and Matt had arrived home, and dinner was being prepared.

Jim and I left anyway, but I soon discovered that it was just starting to get too dark to take decent pictures without a tripod, so we walked for around 20-30 minutes camera-less then decided that avoiding frostbite might be a good idea and returned home.



Dinner was followed by the arrival of neighbors and family members we hadn’t met yet, as has seemed to be the case for most of the meals we’ve eaten so far. We’ve noticed that Bosnia is a great place to be a lazy cook – all you really have to do is show up at an acquaintance’s house around meal time, and you’ll be automatically fed. One would suppose that you’d be expected to return the favor, but I’m sure there are ways around this; they have only to be discovered.

Some conversation came next and went mostly over my head, then the radio was turned on; we had tuned in just in time to hear tomorrow’s wedding being announced over the airwaves, followed by a song dedicated to the couple. After the song, we heard what sounded like the same announcement followed by another song. We found out that this would be going on for a couple more hours, each successive song being dedicated to a different member of the bride’s family. Tears ensued on the part of the ladies at the table; the rest of us sat patiently and waited it out.

Crying was followed by impromptu living room dancing, another practice I’m neither familiar with nor skilled at. With or without my approval, though, this was how the evening was going to be, so I decided to join in, and after almost mastering some steps and failing others miserably, dancing evolved into picture-taking, which evolved into picture-reviewing.

Just when I was on the couch pressed between two girls, both of them looking intently at the back of my camera, I was hustled onto my feet and out the door to go to bed early. Muttering words of praise to the universe for its impeccable sense of timing, I put on my jacket as I was surrounded and told to shave and dress nicely in the morning in two different languages. We then headed back to our overnight house, completely unable to even think about sleep at 9:30 in the evening. Tomorrow’s the wedding, hence the early bedtime, so that should at least be interesting.

Two things you will never be when staying with a Bosnian family, or at least this one: cold and hungry. The radiator next to our heads was on again during the night, causing me to wake up sweating despite the snow falling on the other side of the wall. The radiator taught me another valuable lesson: do not leave contact lenses sitting by themselves on top of a container of mints in front of a heat source overnight. We had been unable to return to Bojana’s house (which serves as our headquarters) before going to bed after the party, so I had been forced to take my contacts out and simply put them somewhere for the night. In the morning, I discovered two shriveled, crispy lumps of plastic where my contacts had been the night before. I would be, for all practical purposes, blind until we got back to Bojana’s house.

Finally being roused around 11 AM, we were taken to headquarters and rushed to the table to eat lunch. Dinner (or, as they put it, “second lunch”) was scheduled for a few hours from then.

As long as you are seated at the table, you are expected to be eating, and it’s a physical impossibility to finish all the food that is set out, no matter how many participants the meal may have. If your pace slows, you are offered bread; if you stop, you are offered juice or brandy; once they have filled your glass, you are offered meat. You can say you aren’t hungry anymore, but regardless of the sincerity of your pleas, resistance is futile. We have determined that the way to beat this system is to eat slowly from the beginning of the meal and to leave the table as soon as you feel the symptoms of a distended stomach descending upon you, but somehow this seemingly foolproof plan rarely works.

After lunch, we were again treated to some time to ourselves as the bride and groom, the reason for our trip, left to pick up the groom’s parents at the airport (after a series of confusions about what day they were actually due to arrive). What could we decide to do besides go back to sleep? Sleep we did (or tried to do), Jim in one upstairs room and me in the next.

Not content to leave me on the couch with just one blanket, Mladena came in from time to time to tuck another layer on top of me. I eventually ended up under 2 blankets and the thickest comforter I may have ever seen, bearing a strong resemblance to a small child and the magical fortress he has constructed in the living room. I woke up to said coverings and a tray of hot chocolate and candy she brought in to keep me company.

In what must have been a maximum of 3 hours, we were summoned back downstairs for second lunch, the half-digested remnants of first lunch still threatening my intestinal tract. This meal was followed by Bojana and Matt leaving again and the rest of us being offered (read: handed) a generous portion of traditional Bosnian cheese with which to wash down the meal that was lodged somewhere at the bottom of our esophagi being refused entry into our stomachs. By “generous portion”, I mean our adopted mother brought out a wheel of cheese the size of a birthday cake and lopped off at least half a pound for each of us.

It was actually fairly tasty, but my digestive system had just started to replicate itself for the purpose of adapting to its new circumstances – the process wasn’t complete yet, and I simply didn’t have the room for a brick of solidified dairy. Jim stuck it out despite having received the largest portion of cheese by far, and I went to sit in the corner of the room, shamed in my defeat but at least secure in my ability to keep the rest of the food I had consumed from decorating the interior of the house in a most unpleasant fashion.

Before leaving for the evening, I engaged in a somewhat brief (and, I’m convinced, mostly fruitless) English/Serbian lesson with Mladena, then she left to get ready while Jim and I stayed downstairs, already being as prepared as we were ever going to be. A respectable amount of time later, she returned, and we left for another night of Bosnian clubbing.

Bosnian clubs are like American clubs, except I can’t understand the music, dancing doesn’t typically involve grinding, and you can’t hear a word anyone says…OK, so they’re pretty much exactly like American clubs for me. The music is definitely louder here, though – in order to talk to someone, you’re forced to get a maximum of 3 inches from their ear and yell near the top of your voice in order to be heard.

That’s about all that can be said for tonight’s experiences – the first club we went to was crowded, virtually no one was dancing at the second club, and we were chauffeured home early by a tired bride and groom around midnight or a little before. I was just getting warmed up for the evening, so here I sit at 3 A.M. typing my story, having seen the other two members of the family we ran into at the first club come in separately and head off to sleep. My journal has caught up with the calendar now, though, so I’m off as well. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to head up to a mountain for skiing/snowboarding lessons, unless our plans change again as they did approximately every 5 minutes today. This should be interesting.

Sleep was surprisingly fleeting for one so justifiably exhausted. Beds on either side of the radiator ensured that the sub-zero temperatures outside were anything but in the bedroom that Jim and I shared. The gas heat activated the radiator with all the fervor of the Ghost of Christmas Past banging on the pipes of a church organ – luckily, I was already awake. A couple hours later, our wake-up call was another knocking, this time more rhythmic – repair work on a door downstairs. Several hours passed – or perhaps it was minutes; I was too busy slipping in and out of bizarre dreams that had nothing to do with my actual life to tell time – and Bojana came to rouse us from the slumber that had never come.

After rushing through showering, dressing, and breakfast (and finding that the day had started without me and Jim – the perils of our sleeping in a separate house), we headed back to Sarajevo for a shopping expedition.

Hostilities are far from settled here. As we drive to the town, I’m told gravely by Mladena, “This is Musselman town. They are not good people. They lie about Serbians.” The fighting may be over, but the scars remain, both in the hearts of the people and in the walls of the city. Bullet-riddled concrete and bombed-out buildings stand next to modern business complexes, the pain of rebuilding more than clear.

We went to the marketplace, which turned out to be a mass of individual stalls pinched together in close quarters, the clothing seeming to huddle for warmth in the biting cold. After what would have been a quick stroll past several stalls were it not for the crowds and diminutive hallways, we ended up in front of a sweater vendor, where Mladena insisted on buying us presents “to remember Bosnia”. Having received our dose of European fashion, we were to accompany her as she bought clothes for herself for the big night tonight.

Now, I’m incapable of dressing myself, let alone a female; and I think Jim, my partner in this little escapade, was right there with me. We watched as she tried on 4 or 5 different pairs of pants (changing behind a modest curtain hung across the back of the approximately 6’x6’ stall), asking us our opinion each time until we eventually settled on the first pair she had tried. The top was somewhat easier to pick out, as she simply held each one up to her shoulders in succession, and we could tell her much sooner to just go with the first one she picked up.

The clothes chosen, we sat down at a café in the shopping center only to be informed by cell phone that we were returning home for lunch, dinner, or whatever it was at this point. On the drive back, I was again struck by the natural beauty of this place, the sun burning red-orange through the fog as it began to dip behind the mountains around 4:30 in the afternoon. Houses are stacked on one side of the hill, jostling for the best view of the city, while the vista turns to complete wilderness on the hillside facing away from Sarajevo. I was distraught that I couldn’t use my camera to capture all that I saw, aware that I would get either a terrible moving-car picture or a close-up look at the dirt flecked across the outside of the window.

After lunch, we had an as yet unheard-of block of free time. Jim and I went upstairs with Mladena to watch what turned out to be a pretty awful movie straight from the 80’s. I’ve found that much of the visual entertainment here is imported from America, with apparently none of the critics’ advice following it. While we learned about Charlie’s problems at home and his ultimate redemption through his work for a kindly elderly lady and her mentally handicapped sons, first Mladena and then her mother force-fed us fruit, the fact that we had just eaten a meal seemingly escaping them entirely.

Instead of getting in a quick nap as per our original plan, our departure time was bumped up by an hour or so, putting us at the bar where we were to celebrate New Year’s around 8:30 or 9:00 in the evening. Once everyone who had reserved a spot got there, we were told, they would lock the door, preventing any interlopers from ruining our fun without paying.

We were also soon informed that it was the custom in Bosnia to drink slowly, which put a severe crimp in my plans for the dancing that would surely begin as the party got going. Rhythm is the ficklest of mistresses for me, more fickle even than an actual mistress, so the proper Blood Alcohol Content is absolutely crucial – not to mention the fact that I had yet to see a meal here that wasn’t accompanied by at least two shots of hard liquor, no matter the time of day, which had increased my tolerance ever so slightly.

That said, I could do little about the beer-nursing situation, so I was stuck occasionally glancing at the table of girls who were checking us out from across the bar, wishing I had the courage to dance as terribly as they were. Alas, it was only table dancing at this point – everyone was standing around their table pretending to dance.

Eventually, Bojana took the initiative and simply dragged our table across the room so we could be socially out of step closer to the girls’ table. Apparently she had a friend among the girls who happened to speak English, so we were by default introduced to the rest of them – a process that was ultimately futile given the deafening music. At least they smiled at us, right? We took our places, bouncing awkwardly along with the music we didn’t understand, feigning excitement at what may have been either choruses or particularly moving verses.

At some point during this fools’ circus, Jim and I noticed a somewhat portly guy of average height in a tan suit who appeared to be in his early or mid thirties. His dress alone set him apart from the rest of the crowd, but Jim also happened to notice that he was the only guy in the entire place who had a bottle of liquor reserved for himself. It was serving him well, as he was working the room like a champ, dancing with every girl he saw and just generally getting the party started.

Eventually, Jim got the brilliant idea that having a picture taken with Liquor Dude would be the sure way to secure a place in the party hierarchy – perhaps not as lords of the dance, but at least as favored jesters.Thus was Liquor Dude approached, and thus was Jim put in a headlock by a smiling, drunken Serb who slurred terms of completely platonic affection into his ear and posed happily for the picture, insisting that Jim participate in the traditional smashing of a beer glass afterwards.

Bojana then clarified the situation for us by explaining that Liquor Dude actually owned the bar, which only gave me more reason to have my picture taken with him as well. Somehow he had learned that we were from America (was it the fact that we didn’t look like anyone else in the bar or the fact that we asked permission for the pictures in English that had given us away?), and after this photo shoot he offered to play an American song next in our honor.

Umm, yeah. 50 Cent would be fantastic. Couldn’t think of anything I’d like to hear more right now than 50 Cent. You, sir, have made my evening.

“OK. I see if we have it.”

When the obnoxious, aesthetically offensive rap finally came on a few songs later, an amazing thing happened. It turns out that I’ve seen enough people dance like idiots in movies (and the one time I went to a club in America) that when taken in context with the rest of the evening, I actually know what I’m supposed to do when rap plays. Luckily, I happened to be next to Mladena, who appeared to be the only girl in the club who understood the dynamic of American grinding, so for a couple wonderful, terrible songs, I felt right at home – the kind of home you run away from at 16, but home nonetheless.

At midnight, there was no dropping of the ball; rather, someone in the corner of the bar started a countdown, at the end of which we all did the traditional Bosnian triple cheek-kiss with about 7 other people in succession while shouting, “Srećna nova godina!” in order to be heard over the music. It may be the most action I’ll see this entire trip.

The party atmosphere was just getting started at midnight,though, and it stretched on well into the wee hours of the morning. Of note were the semi-frequent Bosnian conga lines, which involve everyone willing to participate holding hands and dancing around the bar in a misshapen circle, stopping every few steps to do a muted version of the can-can.

Outside of that, the night was divided between us dancing awkwardly with the table of girls (Bojana occasionally present to remind me that I’m allowed to actually touch the girls I’m dancing with) and hanging around our table wishing we had muscle relaxants for our legs.

Around 3 or so, the party started to wind down – or at least several people in our group wussed out and decided they wanted to go home. Liquor Dude had already made out with the cutest girl in the bar to wish her good night, we had already been upstairs with Liquor Dude to participate in his alcohol-inspired American-style conga line, and we were gathering our things to go home when Bojana got the second brilliant idea of the evening.

“That girl you were dancing with, she likes you.”
“OK…”
“Go get her number.”
“What?!”
“Go get her phone number.”
“But I’m only going to be here until the end of the week, I don’t have a phone here, and I’ll never see her again.”
“I’m telling you, go get her number.”
“But this makes no--“
“You have 3 seconds to go over there and get her number, or I will smash your head.”

Every girl I’ve met so far in Bosnia seems to have a black belt in some form of martial arts, so I decided to go along with her suggestion, still completely in the dark as to the point of the whole endeavor. I attained the other side of the bar, where the girls were talking amongst themselves, and, after some additional convincing from my side of the room, began to talk to her (the one on the left).

Three words into our conversation, I was interrupted by the English speaker of the group and informed that the girl in question didn’t speak English. That’s OK, I said, I was asking her in Serbian (and thanks for interrupting; I screwed up that first verb anyway). I may or may not have butchered the Serbian system of noun declension, but somehow my hesitant, “Da li mogu da imam tvoj broj telefonski?” seemed to be readily understood; I was met with an almost instantaneous yes, and together we typed what may or may not have been her number into Bojana’s cell phone, which I had borrowed for the occasion.

Unfortunately, I had just about reached the limits of my knowledge of Serbian with that exchange and the following “see you later”, so were I ever to call her, the best I could do would be to ask her how she was, if she had a sister, and if I could have her sister’s phone number. It became clear that this was not part of Bojana’s original plan, as my explanation of how things went was met with, “You asked her in Serbian?!” followed by an exasperated palm to her forehead.

All in all, I’d have to mark the evening down as a mild success which could have been better only if I had been able to speak the local language, as I had convinced myself that I would actually have spoken to a couple of the females if I could have done more than ask them if they were cold and inform them that I wasn’t hungry at the moment.

Ed. note:
I just got back from a week in Bosnia, a trip that came about as a result of somewhat unexpectedly being invited to a friend's wedding over there. Our stay happened to involve New Year's Eve as an added bonus, and experiences like this don't come around too often. Thus, for the next week, I will be breaking with two of my common practices - first, there will be a new entry each day corresponding with a day in the life of an American in Bosnia (unless I get absolutely buried by work and can't write, an eventuality I don't expect to come for another couple weeks). Also, for better or worse, not all of the tales will be in my usual tongue-in-cheek style. Most of them, probably; just not all.

In the interest of character development I don't feel like doing in the actual entries themselves, Bojana and Matt are the bride and groom and the reason for the trip; we lived with her family all week. Jim is another of Matt's friends whom I met the night before our plane took off from Atlanta; he and I shared a room in one of Bojana's uncle's houses for the duration of our stay.

The shower is technically too small for someone of my particular height and girth, the overhead water heater threatening blunt force trauma in exchange for quick movements, but somehow it’s home. Besides, were I to suffer a concussion, I would surely be rushed to the hospital and cared for like any other family member, for I have been adopted. I’ve only been here for an hour or so, but it took only the smallest fraction of that time to understand the welcome I was being offered. It’s one of those things you can tell as soon as you walk in the door – or, more accurately, as soon as you pull up in front of the house – you have come to their country for a week to stay with them, and though you may each only understand one out of every twenty words the other says, you are a part of each other now.

We flew in this morning over a blanket of pure white cloud, the snow-capped mountains gracefully cresting the expanse and creating a realm all their own above the flat land we were assured was below us. Sleep deprivation had overtaken us a couple hours prior; laughter could no longer be predicted or controlled. Our trip had taken us across two continents and an ocean, and we were ready to be at our destination, though none of us truly had any idea what we were getting ourselves into.

Just as if we had made a reservation, a gap in the cloud cover opened over Sarajevo, and we glided downward into the smoothest of possible landings, our vessel’s shadow following us through the fog.

Customs was a rather informal affair consisting of one of our passports being checked and the other two of us being waved through by an uninterested official. We were greeted by two members of our new family and ushered to a car that proved to be too small for us and our luggage.



The first greeting we were given by the outside world was a Coca-Cola billboard reading “Welcome to Sarajevo!”, a stark contrast to the city’s more-than-checkered history. Sarajevo is Western in its own way, with roadside advertisements you might see in any American metropolis; the barrage of Cyrillic lettering I was fully expecting didn’t even come until after we had left the city proper on an icy, narrow road that would lead us to Pale, a small town nestled in the mountains whose local charm was surely lost on me and my slack-jawed gaze at the rich blue sky showing through the snow-dusted trees on every mountainside.

After meeting the family outside in the barely double-digit weather, we were hustled inside to a table full of food that they anxiously watched us eat, spurring us on with cries of, “More, more – here; have some meat!” as they pointed us toward the fruits of a pig fresh off the spit, the centerpiece of the spread. They refused to eat at the same time as their guests, breaking character only to laughingly show us how to properly polish off a piece of pie or combine the suvog mesa with bread in just the right way.

We were given shot glasses filled with rakija, a local favorite, and after the clinking of the glasses and the traditional “Ziveli!” the three of us did what any American would do – we threw our drinks back in one gulp, much to the chagrin of our guide, Bojana, and hearty laughs and congratulations from the men at the table, who were disappointed that they now had to sip their drinks alone.

After being thoroughly stuffed and welcomed into the family by an ever-widening group of relatives, we showered and prepared to go out on the town, an endeavor that involved lectures on the necessity of both a sweater and a jacket in subzero temperatures. Not wishing to argue with local wisdom, we suited up and walked out the door, the 4 hours of sleep we had among the three of us during 20 hours of travel and 6 time zone changes giving us courage.

Our first stop was a kafana, a smoky yet attractive little place where we sat down to some juice and conversation with Bojana, her sister Mladena, and one of their friends. “Conversation” is probably too generous a term for what we three recent arrivals had to contribute, as we were generally more focused on simply not falling asleep. We had been told that we had to stay awake until evening to properly avoid jet lag, and stay awake we would.

When we had been nearly overwhelmed by the warmth and sedentary nature of the kafana, we moved the party to a local club, which we quickly found to be both small and empty. We headed back outside to go somewhere else, decided there weren’t that many other places to go, and promptly went back in, sat down, and ordered more drinks.

It’s at this point that I should probably mention what cold weather does to me. I enjoy it, but the treatment I receive in return is…well, on par with what I’d generally expect from something I enjoy. My limbs quiver, my skin cracks, and my bladder shrinks to the size of a pea. I spent a good part of the day weighing the pain of a distended bladder against the embarrassment of using the restroom every 5 minutes.

That was a somewhat minor concern, though, as before long a young guy sat down at a keyboard in the corner of the club, another picked up a guitar, and a girl with a microphone joined them for backup vocals. They were talented, and despite not understanding a word they were singing, things started to make sense.

Somewhere amidst the rhythmic swirling of the pink and yellow squares thrown by the disco ball, I reaffirmed what I want out of life – I want to sit in close quarters with people I’ve never met, staring at the ceiling, breathing in the smoke of a dozen lit cigarettes in a room with no windows, not being able to hear a word that’s said over the music, and I want to listen. When your mind gives up trying to parse it, your heart can hear the voice of the world, the voice of life itself. The music bypasses your ears and seeps into your soul, and you can feel, if only for a fleeting second – for true consciousness is elusive – what it is to be human.

I’ll admit, it’s been quite awhile since I’ve had anything to say. I’d apologize, really I would, but what good would it do? I’ll just hurt you again. My life has been boring of late (despite an opportunity to spend New Year’s in Bosnia, which I’m sure will spawn its own tales of intrigue), but tonight the fates conspired, and when the fates conspire, you do not defy them, for the fates are powerful and fickle…umm, things.

Tonight my cell phone rang, bearing word from a friend who doesn’t call very often. He doesn’t call often because we have a unique relationship – when we see each other, we swear at each other and mock mutual friends and acquaintances, and when he calls me, it’s for one of two reasons:
1) He has a computer question, or
2) He has a get-rich-quick scheme

Now, the last several calls have been regarding technological issues, so my male intuition told me that this could be my lucky night. Granted, listening to my male intuition is somewhat of a hit-or-miss affair, as it usually advises me to do things like mocking a girl’s hairdo – only later do I find out that she was wearing her hair that way on that day as a tribute to her dead grandmother who wore a similar beehive throughout the Great Depression as she supported her family harvesting potatoes in the Irish quarter (half? three-quarters?) of Boston. This time, however, it was right on the money.

After the typical awkward small talk that usually precedes trying to talk someone out of their hard-earned (in my case, more like ill-gotten) money, he proceeded to tell me the story of Leo Wanta. Now, I had never heard of Mr. Wanta, and really, the story is hilarious in its unembellished form, but that would just be lazy of me, and I’m not one to…leave a joke half-written, so I’m going to give you my friend’s delightfully bits-and-pieces version of this “pretty unbelievable investment opportunity”, adding the benefit of my commentary along the way. Try to be sitting down for this one.

First, he told me to Google the guy’s name, that there was a ton of stuff about him online. He told me to ignore any mention of him in conjunction with the Illuminati, because obviously those are conspiracy theorist nutjobs. Obviously. This is when I knew that the story I was about to hear was destined for ignominy on my site, to forever be ridiculed by the five people who read this.

According to my friend, Leo Wanta is a James Bond sort of figure, a guy who worked in deep cover in Russia during the Cold War. His goal was to devalue the ruble, in some part by buying it out. Hence, he ended up with an obscene sum of money, all in rubles. With all the largesse of the federal government expanding a nonproductive farm subsidy, he decided to open up a trust with this money, a trust on which he sold bonds.

Trouble is that all the bonds were in rubles, which was now a non-viable currency. The bank holding the bonds has consistently refused to release the money, there have been lawsuits, etc. This is where I interject.

A glance at his (rather brief for such an important figure) Wikipedia entry reveals that he was charged with defrauding a bank to the tune of $81 million. He was jailed on unrelated tax charges, and his lawyer gave up on him, saying that “his client was delusional, and really believed to be a secret agent of international central bankers, being disappeared at the behest of powerful figures”. Oh yeah, and somewhere in there he tried to sell arms to Noriega. So far, this is golden. An autobiography I’d read for sure.

So, we have a bunch of normal people with bonds that get more valuable every day that passes but who can’t get at their money because the evil banks are withholding it. There was a decision in the court case earlier this year, and the judge declared at least some of the bonds to be valid.

At this point, I’m guessing that all I have to do is pay a simple wire transfer fee, and I’ll be the proud recipient of a cool 9 million rubles. Or something. But wait, there’s more.

Apparently, my friend’s uncle knows a guy in Florida who owns one of these bonds (but then they found out that his wife had been dead for 3 years…wait; wrong urban legend). He went and got himself an expensive lawyer to certify his bond, and he’s traveling this weekend to make sure of the certification and get the paperwork started on releasing the money.

Problem is, he’s an expensive lawyer. Dick Cheney’s lawyer, actually (Could this get any better? I submit that it could not.). In order to pay Dick Cheney’s lawyer, this guy’s raising funds from interested parties, and for every thousand dollars you invest, he’ll pay you back ten thousand when he gets his money. Sounds great so far, right?

“Now, he’s not going to sign a contract or anything to that effect, but trust me, he’s good for it – my uncle’s known him for 20-odd years, been to his house several times…if he says he’ll do it, he’ll do it.” As a bonus, my friend added that his uncle told him that the question he shouldn’t be asking himself was whether the guy would pay him the money, but if the funds were going to be released. Because that’s comforting.

My friend sent me to a “news” site to corroborate his story and kick off my research. I use the term loosely because www.worldreports.org appears to be more of a subtle in-joke than an actual journalistic endeavor. The article he told me to look up reads like a schizophrenic grad student’s outline for his dissertation on how the government came to be run by megalomaniacal cephalopods. On top of its appearance, the article’s writer saw fit to quote a Bible verse in the middle of his (I use the masculine pronoun not out of chauvinism, but because there’s no way this wasn’t written by a bespectacled man in his mid-thirties living in his parents’ basement while loudly complaining about the lack of Little Debbies in the house) news story, and he consistently refers to Wanta as “Ambassador Wanta”. There’s actually background for this appellation that I left out earlier.

Remember those fraud charges? Wanta tried to dodge them by claiming diplomatic immunity, saying he was Somalia’s ambassador to Canada. Problem is, Somalia didn’t exactly have a single recognized government at that time, let alone thriving diplomatic relationships with the first world. Brilliant. I’m totally doing that some day when no one’s looking.

So, in summary: A guy wants to get people to give him money by trading on the name of a man given up by legal counsel – traditionally a group of people who will do absolutely anything for money, something he was supposed to have in spades – as mentally impaired. I’m supposed to take this guy’s word for it – his word as passed through two other people. And hey, it’ll only cost (at least) $3,000, and I might get paid back ten times that!

In the immortal words of Homer Simpson while having a crayon forced up his nostril, “How can I lose?”

I grew up going to church at almost every opportunity that presented itself; I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Somewhere towards the middle of high school, around the time I was just beginning to think for myself, disillusionment with the sermons I was hearing over and over started to set in. I’d heard just about everything they had to say, and I began to wonder how everyone else managed to go week after week and find some sort of instructive value in it.

Luckily, I wasn’t the only one. There were a couple like-minded guys at the (rather small) church my family was attending at the time, so we began to do something about it…if you consider actively ignoring everything that went on around us “doing something”. During the services, we would carefully analyze the Sunday School circulars available in the foyer. These were syndicated mini-magazines of sorts, usually around 8 pages in length, that carried stories about everyday people to illustrate important moral principles.

We didn’t read them (that was a last resort); we were looking at the often painfully generic pictures the circulars printed to go along with the stories. No matter how poor the pictures were, the publisher had to print them – who’s going to read something with no pictures?

By the end of the service, the three of us would have written several captions to go along with each picture – the more inappropriate, the better. Children frolicking with their parents by a lake would turn out to be frantically telling their parents about their sibling drowning off-camera; smiling elderly folk would suddenly remember they left their oven’s gas turned on – but they would be too late.

As the sermon began to wind down, we would swap papers in order to be amused by our colleagues’ takes on the same pictures. I was frequently frustrated to find that my captions weren’t the cleverest of the bunch; fortunately, I think the other guy may actually be lazier than I am regarding writing, so I still have a shot.

Sunday School with us was just about as enjoyable; we treated it as any other class, holding covert contests to see how long we could completely derail the intended course of conversation by whatever means necessary. I think we spent the first portion of class collectively reading the sports section of the Sunday paper on more than one occasion. We were, as they say, a handful – much like I imagine Dennis Miller would be at a dinner party, with the exception that our tangents didn’t often provoke boredom-cum-murderous rage in others.

Sunday nights, the pariah of church services nationwide, were entirely lost on us, as we eventually reached the point where we rode to church with our parents but left the building before the service started to play video games in the neighboring Sunday School building. Most of the credit for attendance, none of the hassle. Keep in mind that, at the time, I was sincere in my beliefs – I was just also sincerely bored with the way they were being addressed.

This is all to say that precious little that went on during church actually came to our attention. As it turns out, this thick mesh of voluntary ignorance formed the perfect filter through which to glean the few precious gems communicated during those interminable Sunday mornings, and I’m not talking about Biblical exegesis.

See, churches, particularly denominations that are predominately Southern, are the last great bastion of organized colloquialism. Here and there you have your exceptions, mostly the churches that have sold out to “modernism” (some even calling it “post-modernism”, completely ignorant of the definition of the term) in order to be financially solvent (bless their hearts); but the majority of churches are still small community endeavors led by a guy who does it because he feels like he’s supposed to.

Not to call them simple-minded, because at least some of them aren’t, but many of these are simple folk. They tend to be easily impressed, easily moved, and that’s why they show up week after week to hear what generally turns out to be a fairy tale-esque moral or a constantly repeated directive wrapped in anecdotal stories comprised of reworded e-mail forwards and punctuated with a burst of energy or a call for response so ludicrous you can’t help but do a double take – unless, of course, you’ve been listening the whole time and just take it as the end of the story.

This is where we had our real fun with this particular church. Our pastor grew up a good old-fashioned farm boy from Indiana, and I’m not sure where his assistant pastor was from, but his age was beginning to show.

The assistant pastor led the weekly offering, and one week we were captioning as usual when we heard him stand up on the stage, pause for effect while looking around the sanctuary, and say in his quivering, gravelly voice, “It’s shakedown time.”

We looked at each other and did our best to bite our lips to keep the outbursts to a minimum. Had that sweet old man just threatened us with concrete shoes? We began to picture having a finger cut off for every week we neglected to tithe, and any sense of gravity that sanctuary had for us was gone forever.

The assistant pastor will live in infamy for that milestone remark, but the pastor far outdid him in quantity and absurdity. One of his classics was ending an inspirational tale with, “If that don’t bless ya, your blesser’s broke,” which, despite being innocently manipulative, is highly ambiguous. Is a blesser an instrument, like a thermometer? Is it an internal organ? And so on.

That little beauty, however, is at the austere end of a long continuum that extends all the way to the crown jewel of pastoral excellence, a paragon of profundity that, taken in the context of a church service, may possibly be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t remember the morality tale it accompanied because I don’t need to – the point of him telling whatever story he was telling was so he could accentuate the epiphanic nature of the lesson by saying, “Now that’ll hit you like a squirrel in the face.”

Hit you. Like a. Squirrel. In the face.

I’m not sure what kind of farm he worked on as a boy, but it seems to have been sufficiently ecologically diverse to support both flying squirrels and pigs being forced to attempt to walk on ice (“slipping like a pig on ice”, or something of the sort - another wonderful simile whose context is rendered all the fuzzier in my memory for being overshadowed by the squirrel comment).

No pastor since then has been able to speak to my spirit quite the way he did, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons I don’t go to church anymore.

Now then. As is my custom, that feature article-length exposition was, despite being thoroughly entertaining in its own right (at least to me, putting me as it did into the throes of a blessed nostalgia for a simpler time as brief as it was amusing), predominately for the purpose of recounting a brief recent event.

Yesterday, in one of the occasional duties of my job that gives me both cause and opportunity to make an in-depth consideration of possible methods of suicide involving small blunt objects, I was forced to babysit the sound board during a meeting of the denomination’s international council.

Somewhere towards the end of the reading of resolutions and their subsequent debating according to Parliamentary procedure (yes, Robert’s Rules, because that’s the way the apostles would have wanted it – like C-Span for C-H-R-I-S-T-I-A-Ns), one of the older gentlemen (though that doesn’t really narrow the field much) began a sermonette, as pastors of his persuasion are wont to do when given the slightest opportunity.

My consciousness was fading quickly, but he managed to save me. In the middle of explaining why we need to do what God told us to do (or something), he paused. I perked up, and, sure enough, his next sentence didn’t let me down.

Completely out of the blue, his next words were, “As my daddy used to say, ‘If syrup goes to a dollar a [unintelligible – presumably a turn-of-the-century slang measurement of volume], I’m gonna eat all I want.’”

I immediately analyzed the few surrounding parts of his little speech captured by my peripheral memory, but I could find nothing that related to his father, inflation, or the sugar trade. A tiny spark of twisted joy inside me that had long lain dormant was revived once more.

It was quickly snuffed, as the speaker resumed his former train of thought, but the effect remained. Oh, to have lived in the past. To have experienced the thrill of being hit in the face with a squirrel, to have spent afternoons fantasizing of burying my face in a barrel of thick, sweet, brown. Before the electronic noise of the modern age, before the decay of good, clean fun.

How the youth are robbed. How we are robbed.

Ah, North Carolina – land of a small, unimpressive portion of the Appalachians; slightly decrepit nature “resorts”; and, in times long past, my dying grandfather. How I’ve missed you.

This weekend was a trip to Charlotte to capture special moments from – you guessed it – church services. Initial logistical challenges included the facts that we needed a certain amount of large, specialized equipment to get some of the shots we wanted and that our particular organization doesn’t like paying for us to rent things or buy plane tickets. Hence, we borrowed what equipment we could, did without the rest, and drove.

Since we had to get there during the brightest part of the day to get some of the exterior shots we wanted, we’d have to leave fairly early on Saturday morning to make the drive in time. Hmm, a red flag already.

Another guy (hereafter referred to as “Larry”) and I got our borrowed jib out of storage and waited with it while our resident videographer/engineer/PPD sufferer (“Curly”) picked up the car. This was our first mistake, as Curly started out at the wrong rental car office. He eventually showed up, though, informing us that the “large SUV” we had reserved had turned out to be a Jeep only a small step up from the 4-cylinder wonder we took on our last trip to NC. He requested a change, and we ended up with a Chevy Uplander, an awkward vehicular deformity resembling the incestuous bastard child of a small SUV and a minivan.

The jib (the case of which measures roughly 7’x2’x1’ and weighs in around 500-700 pounds) fit in the back after we removed all but one of the rear seats, and that was all that mattered – though I decline to comment on what hoisting a case like that into the back of a modern vehicle does to its cosmetic appearance and the structural integrity of its mostly plastic fixtures.

The drive was uneventful, save for calling our host to tell her we’d be late. We cited “car trouble” – which was remarkably close to the truth, as the Uplander had cost us extra time in retrieving it and had died when we parked it on an incline to load our equipment at the office. Apparently Chevy designed the fuel delivery systems in these models as a form of protest to the effects of gravity; parking them at the wrong angle tends to cut off the engine’s gas supply, which is unfortunate since the engine’s so fond of gas.

We finally rolled up to the church around 3:30, which had the double benefit of being both the brightest and the hottest part of the day. We could think of nothing we’d have liked better than to haul out the jib case and put the 18’ monstrosity together.

Halfway through that intensely enjoyable process, we realized we’d need a way to power the jib’s electronic components…about 200 feet from the nearest power source. Luckily, we had our 100-foot extension cord with us. Unluckily, we’re bad at math. We’d need to dust off an old field shoot tradition and go buy some more extension cords to add to our massive collection at the office (it all evens out, though, as most extension cords we keep at the office end up being stolen anyway).
Larry and Curly were sure they’d seen a Wal-Mart on our way into town, so Curly and I left Larry to finish up assembling the jib while we went on an extension cord/beverage run. After driving all the way back to our hotel and seeing no Wal-Mart, we decided to ask someone for directions – which ended up involving getting back on the interstate and driving down a few exits, an endeavor for which we simply didn’t have time. We saw a Costco in the shopping center where we had happened to stop, so we went inside, unaware that Costco is a members-only warehouse. Oops.

Fearing that we would run out of daylight, we made a desperate stop at an Office Depot we had passed earlier and managed to make it out only paying an arm and half a leg for 150 ft. of extension cords, fully intending to return them after the shoot. Hey, if it’s good enough for the Beastie Boys, it’s good enough for us.

We returned a mere ½ hour or so after we had left, bearing precious electricity-conducting cable and a 20-oz. bottle of water for Larry’s trouble. It was only 95 degrees or so outside; what more could he want?

Our equipment finally in place, we got the ½ hour of footage we needed and began to pack up. I suggested that Curly get some non-jib exterior footage, so he went back to the mini-UV to get a tripod, only to have one of its legs fall off as he pulled it out of the bag. Planning to fix it later, he looked for the other one, only to realize that we had, in fact, only brought one tripod – a fact that would cause a small problem in the morning when we would need 2 cameras rolling and getting nothing but steady shots. To be fair, this was in no way my fault. That’s fair, right?

Curly decided to make his exterior footage steady by lying on the ground, then we finished packing up and headed to dinner then back to the “hotel”. I use the term loosely, as the Quality Inn where we stayed was just this side of the Salvation Army in the middle of a power outage. Granted, they were “renovating”, but I don’t think rolls of carpet and stacks of tile in the hallways had much to do with the 2 non-working ice machines I visited before I finally found one that filled my bucket, the 21 channels of television we were afforded, and the fact that I didn’t have hot water.

Actually, I didn’t figure that last one out until about midnight, which was an added benefit, as it was too late to do anything about it before my 6:30 wakeup call. I had decided to take a shower at night, as setting up a jib outside at 3:30 wasn’t the driest thing I could’ve done with my afternoon, and (perhaps less sanitary) I had been sitting on the hotel bedspread for the past couple hours. I got in the shower, and after a few minutes of patient waiting, I realized that no hot water would be coming. I was immediately overcome with nostalgia for my old apartment, where one month (which happened to be January) our landlord neglected to pay the gas bill, leaving the giant boiler in the basement completely inactive. Good times…good times.

The only thing that kept me going through the ice water was imagining Larry and Curly discovering this adorable hotel quirk the next morning. I would later find out that they had no such problem, further strengthening my theory that my life is a series of punishments for crimes my spirit committed somewhere in the ether at the beginning of time. If only I could remember all the delightful prehistoric larks I must have had.

We woke up the next morning and left the hotel around 7:20 to begin the largest part of our work there. Curly hadn’t exactly done anything about our tripod situation the previous night; luckily, the broken tripod was easily fixed by popping the broken leg back into its joint and hoping for the best. As for the second tripod we still needed, we somehow decided that the best solution was to use the tripod I had brought along for use with my still camera.

Let’s clarify here: I brought my own camera and tripod along on the trip. When I bought the tripod, it was for the sole purpose of holding a still camera…well, still for a few seconds at a time; as such, it’s not exactly the paragon of solidity or anywhere near the top of the price range. Not to get too technical here, but there’s what I would call a “marked difference” between a $30 photo tripod and a $1,000 video tripod. For starters, one is built to handle the weight of a professional video camera, and one isn’t.

Despite my protests that we should strive for the Bourne Ultimatum look during the church service, steady camera work be damned, we stuck Larry with the photo tripod and wished him the best of luck. That pretty much left me standing around looking pretty with my still camera through 3 church services, as I had no means of getting decent pictures in such low light. I was crushed.

I can think of no reason why the rest of Sunday’s events would be of interest to anyone, so that’s about where this weekend’s adventures end. Once finished with the evening service, we set out on the 5-hour drive home; thanks to Curly’s morning class, we couldn’t stay at the luxurious Quality Inn the extra night for which we had already paid. Oh well. We let him drive most of the way home as punishment.

I really don’t know whether to consider this weekend a learning experience or just another step in my by now irreversible mental downfall.

It all started awhile back when I decided that I wanted to modify my old Xbox and give it new life with the oft-touted Xbox Media Center. From what I knew of the process before this weekend, I would need a certain game to start the process, a game which I did not have. Being far too cheap to actually go out and buy/rent the game for myself, I asked my boss if I could borrow his copy. Then I waited.

The waiting part is typically where the process of getting something from my boss stops, and this time was no exception. On Friday, however, a friend told me that he had modded his Xbox by switching its hard drive cable. That’s something I can do, I thought, so I resolved to make it a weekend project.

Unfamiliar as I was with the specifics of console modification, I started where one should always start when seeking insight into uncharted territory – by, as Stephen Hawking put it, standing on the shoulders of giants. Now, the title of that particular Hawking book refers to a quotation of Isaac Newton; unfortunately, the giants of console modding are found on the Internet and, instead of writing things like, “To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me,” their pearls of wisdom are more along the lines of “omg wtf r u nubz dooing! get it rite lol”.

When one sets out on a search like this, one quickly discovers that acquiring the appropriate tools for modding an Xbox is a little like acquiring a dime bag of cocaine (or whatever the kids are selling them in these days). The procedure is the Internet equivalent of strolling up to a bar, casually mentioning the weather in Scotland, and being led into a back room, where a man with an eye patch winks at you (he might have just blinked; you’re not sure) and nods toward a curtain in front of which you lay your money – a gloved hand reaches out from behind the curtain, takes your money, and replaces it with a note that gives you directions to a drop point 2 blocks away where you will find your drugs the night after next – all you have to do is unbolt the municipal trash can and retrieve them from its underside.

Eventually, I had all the tools I’d need (or so I thought), so I took the cases off my Xbox and my computer, ran jumper cables (in the absence of more appropriately-sized wire) between their metal chassis in hopes of avoiding electrocution from the ridiculous electrical situation I was about to create, and set to work. Step one was to organize a personalized software package to replace all the wonderful code that Microsoft put on there to keep people from doing what I was planning on doing. That’s when I realized that I had an old version of one of the programs. After searching for probably an hour, I gave up and called the friend who I had talked to on Friday; he pointed me to a completely different method, which I tried and promptly failed.

Neither my Xbox’s hard drive nor my computer liked me at this point, as I had been feverishly unplugging and replugging vital components without shutting down either system for the past few hours. Determined to finish the task, I pressed on despite pangs of hunger and common sense.

I returned to my original plan and resumed my search for the proper version of the software. Turns out that a simple Google search for that version took me right to it – I’m still not sure how I had been searching before; I think there were stars in my eyes from the technological luminaries whose illegible ramblings I was trying to decipher, and I momentarily forgot how to do things for myself.

Eventually I had my software compiled, so I unplugged my hard drives, went through the surgical procedure of unlocking my Xbox hard drive before unplugging it from the system, booted up, and installed my new programs. When the files finished copying, I took my Xbox downstairs to see what would happen.

Lo and behold, a new welcome screen loaded. My Xbox was now officially modded. All I had to do now was install Xbox Media Center, and I’d be good to go. Sounds simple, right?

Well, all you have to do is change the name of this file, put it here, put the rest of the files here, and edit the xml and cfg to point the system in the right direction. OK – check, check, check…check. Power off, power back on. Wait. That’s not supposed to happen. Son of a…that does it; I’m going to bed.

What I actually did is eat the first meal I’d had all day (it was around 10 or 11 at this point) and go upstairs to the Internets to complain that I had fried my hard drive. After a little more searching and getting pointed to a friendlier release of Xbox Media Center, I decided to try the process again from scratch. The files copied, but a few odd errors popped up along the way, and in the end it was all pointless. Utterly defeated and feeling none the wiser for it, I went to bed around 4 AM.

Somewhere in the foggy soup of the night’s cool embrace, the delusions of a universe of dreams, and the healing light of mid-afternoon (when I woke up), I devised a new plan. This time, I was going to follow directions. I took everything apart and got back to work.

I’m still not sure how, but when I did what the words on the screen told me to do, everything worked like they told me it would. I revived my old new welcome screen and proceeded to install the Media Center correctly this time. Within a couple hours of starting with a malfunctioning system on Sunday, I was doing what I wanted to do all along – watching videos from my computer downstairs on my TV.

The moral of the story? I win. Oh yeah, and something about perseverance, following instructions, and the almost existential absurdity of spending an entire waking day in the pursuit of a ridiculous goal that will only encourage further laziness.

But mainly, I win.

After awakening several times at what many would consider normal hours of the morning and forcing myself to go back to sleep (knowing that no one else would be awake), I finally roused myself around 11:30 AM. In the ethereal daze of half-sleep, I thought I heard the labored sounds of mortal combat coming from the bedroom below me, but I told myself that it was just my imagination and went about the business of getting ready for the day. A half hour later, having showered and eaten our gas station-fresh cereal cups, Alex and I found ourselves alone in the living room watching TV, Chad conspicuously absent.

Unfazed by the latest example in an ever-lengthening list of ways in which Chad is unreliable, we went to his bedroom door to interrupt his peaceful slumber. We didn’t get the chance to hear him yell at us for waking him up, though, because before we could knock, the sounds of strangulation that I had assumed to be after-images from a particularly gruesome dream involving myself and everyone who has ever annoyed me resumed in force. I, of course, would have broken the flimsy doorframe and rushed in to rescue him from the ghost, but I quickly realized that these were not the sounds of a supernatural attack but the culmination of severe nausea.

Apparently eating a meatball sandwich from a restaurant down by the river, literally and figuratively, was not the best decision he could have made. We listened to him dry heave for a little longer then asked him if he wanted us to wait or just go out and start shooting footage. As the retching had been an ongoing experience for him throughout the night, we decided the best thing would be for the two of us to go out and make the best of it.

Alex and I got into the Jeep and left to explore the campgrounds in the daylight. Did I mention we were in the mountains? There’s a reason you don’t see many Jeep Patriot commercials featuring terrain that’s anything but level. There are also reasons we don’t let Alex drive anywhere with cliffs or sharp corners. Those two conditions converged to form an even mix of the 4-cylinder engine straining for all it was worth to climb 40-degree grades and me, for lack of a more obvious gesture of mortal despair, genuflecting while pointing at the label on the sun visor that read “higher risk of turnover”. Higher than what? Well, according to the accompanying line drawing of the Patriot tipping over like a lightweight at a frat party, higher than most any other vehicle we could have chosen.

Somehow we survived, getting an impressive 3 minutes or so of footage and approximately 10 pictures out of the adventure, and returned to the lodge to meet up with a group of students about to go white water rafting. After following the bus several miles down the river to the departure point and taking our gear down to the river, what would be more appropriate than a nice, refreshing summer rainstorm? Rain it did, but it let up just before the rafts floated away, so we were able to get a bit of material at departure and a little more a couple miles downriver.

We then drove back to the end of the river from which we had come and decided to wait for the rafts and get footage of the kids getting out of the river. This required wasting over an hour, so we did what we do best – we ate lunch. As it turned out, we ended up missing most of the rafts coming ashore, and the ones we did get were captured through a relapse of the rainstorm.

Thoroughly pleased with our day’s hard work, we went back to the house, turned on the TV, and went to sleep. It was about 5 PM at the time. A couple hours later, physically unable to sleep any longer, I grabbed my camera and set out to find the spot on the mountain trails advertised as offering a “bird’s eye view” of a lake below, thinking this would be a great place to take shots of the sunset.

I walked for about 10 minutes before I found anything that resembled an overlook and promptly called Alex, who was still asleep at the house. He gathered the video gear and started out to meet me, and I forged ahead to see if this spot were truly the only way to get a picture of the sunset. Turns out it was, and after 20 more minutes, I had accomplished nothing more than going down a hill, back up it, getting sweaty, and circling back onto the path I came down initially. I trudged back to the clearing and begrudgingly took some shots. See that little speck at the bottom that’s not green? That’s the lake.



We let a half-hour or so pass before we congratulated ourselves on another job well done and hiked back to the house, where we took the trusty Jeep out on the town to find some dinner. Being grossly far from civilization, however, we ended up at the Pizza Hut next door to the gas station where we’d bought all the other food we’d been eating so far. Surprisingly enough, the pizza tasted slightly better than deep-fried grease, and we even had leftovers.

While at dinner, I got a text message from Chad asking for medication. We went next door to the gas station, which didn’t even carry Dramamine, and were informed that there was a Wal-Mart the next town over. Only 20 miles, we said to ourselves; what else are we going to do tonight? Sure enough, 20 minutes or so later we were in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart Supercenter in the middle of nowhere, North Carolina. It’s only a matter of time before they unite the world’s governments under a banner of low prices and lower expectations. We found some Emetrol and headed back to the house for a sleeping experience as uncomfortable as the previous night’s.

We had set an appointment to go horseback riding in the morning in order to capture for posterity all the majesty embodied in beasts of burden consigned to carry small children and wondering city folk through tame mountain trails for the rest of their lives. I was able to take approximately 2 pictures of the family in front of us getting on their horses before it started sprinkling. Again. We debated on taking our equipment in spite of possible rain but eventually decided to leave it in the Jeep and go on the ride anyway. Why, I’ll never know.

As soon as we were far enough away from the stable to make turning back seem like a chore, the heavens opened, and the wrath of Loki, my patron Norse god, fell upon us. For the next 45 minutes, we would be sequentially drenched, soaked, and sopping wet. Had we brought our gear, we would also have been collectively $7,000 poorer. The horses didn’t seem to mind; after all, we were keeping most of the water off of their backs. My wallet, however, will never be the same. When we eventually exited the trail and rounded the corner on the road in front of the stable, my bitterness at life eased momentarily then returned with a vengeance when the rain suddenly stopped. At least we were able to walk to the Jeep in peace and passive-aggressively punish it for its performance by soaking its leather seats as soon as we sat down.

After changing clothes, we headed out again to catch a round or two of paintball on tape. This presented unique challenges, as we clearly didn’t want either of the cameras getting hit, but we also wanted decent action footage. We took the middle road, getting in the middle of the game but raising our hands whenever we were visible. The upsides: I only got hit once; and we got to wear face masks while carrying cameras, allowing us to pretend we were part of a special ops camera crew sent into enemy territory to capture footage of an opposing general eating at McDonalds so we could demoralize his anti-Western army. After the game, our imaginations were still in high gear, so we went back to the house, built pillow forts on opposite sides of the living room, and reenacted the Battle of the Bulge using Bugles for ammunition.



OK, so what we really did was have dinner at the on-site restaurant. It’s another of the resort’s highlights, so we needed footage of the chef creating his masterpieces. What we got was footage from several angles of a guy in a tie-dyed t-shirt poking a steak with his index finger to see if it were done. Oh well; the food was good, and we probably didn’t violate too many sections of the health code by being in the kitchen.

A worship service for a group of kids at the resort for youth camp followed dinner, so we headed over to the pool deck to get footage of it and some testimonials for the resort from the attendees. While there, Chad called us for possibly the first time since we’d been there and asked if we were planning on going home after the service or the next day. We had planned to make up for lost time by going back to the stable and getting more horse video in the morning, but we decided we’d rather leave that night.

We finished our work with the kids and drove back to the house, where we all packed our things (read: rolled our soiled, wet clothes into a ball and stuffed them into our bags) and drove off, happy to be heading back to what passes for civilization ‘round these parts and the sufficiently-sized mattresses that come with it.

About 20 minutes had passed when Chad (who was feeling well enough to take the wheel in order to ensure that Alex wouldn’t be driving) looked down at the dashboard and promptly cursed at us. Apparently, driving deeper into Deliverance country the previous night to get him drugs had taken our fuel reserves somewhere below ¼-tank, and we were roughly 40 minutes from the nearest thing that could be considered a town. We were too far to turn back, and we had no idea when the next gas station would be.

Ten moderately tense minutes passed while I considered that the horror movie might just now be starting, that we would become stranded and be forced to rely on the nearest farmhouse for help. Upon knocking, we would be greeted by a kindly yet toothless man in his mid-thirties who would tell us to go out to the shed, that he knew he had a gas can out there somewhere. We would split up and look in different corners of the jumbled mess of farm implements for the can, using our cell phones as flashlights, when one by one we would be chloroformed and dragged outside too swiftly to make a sound. We would regain consciousness with our hands and feet tied to trees grown in a circle specifically for the sort of cultish rituals performed in the hills of North Carolina where the lawmen are all part of the game, either members or paid for their silence. Our loved ones would receive cryptic, poorly spelled notes detailing our demise, a casualty of war in the crusade against the Democrats and their evil, baby killing ways.

Alas, we soon reached a gas station nestled at the foot of a hill outside of any discernable town as if placed there specifically for thoughtless, almost willfully ignorant travelers such as ourselves. The tank was filled, we purchased more convenience store ice cream, and we headed home, relieved to be sleeping (or, in Chad’s case, throwing up) in our own beds.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

-Henry David Thoreau

I, on the other hand, went to the woods because we were hired to take pictures and shoot video of them. Same basic principle, right? I’m sure that deep down, we all expected to learn something too.

Our story begins, as it so often does, with preparations for leaving. See, if we’re going to rent a car for a trip, we prefer to reserve it as close to departure time as we can – the day of, if possible. This time the luck of the draw landed us behind the wheel of a brand-new Jeep Patriot with a mere 3,100 miles on the odometer. We didn’t know how long it had gone on its most recent tank of gas because it didn’t have a triptych. Also on the list of features this particular model didn’t have were power locks, power windows, and an engine capable of doing 0-60 in less than 3 minutes. Every time I got out and swung the door shut, I was afraid I had bent the frame.

Somehow we managed to fit three of us and all our clothes and equipment in the less than generous cargo space offered by the Patriot, and we were off – about 2 hours after we had estimated leaving, as is our custom. It was nearing dinnertime, and we were all hungry, so we found a restaurant just outside of town on our state highway-only route to the wilderness and stopped to eat. The only reason we didn’t stop in town at a familiar restaurant was to keep the receipt from saying the name of our town, which is apparently a bad thing when using the company card. Dinner’s location will be important in just a bit.

After dinner, we resumed our journey to the wilderness of North Carolina. I say that instead of giving a specific location because the directions given to us by this particular organization were the Internet-age equivalent of “don’t trust the durn map, just go ‘til ya see a tree what’s been struck by lightnin’, then it’s about 3 an’ a half mile on up the road, take a left when ya see the sign”. Somehow, around 10 PM, we managed to find the place anyway, pulled up to the front lodge, and went inside to check in.

We were greeted at the front desk by no one, so we wandered around the lodge’s hallways into the kitchen of the adjacent restaurant until we at last found a human being. We told him who we were and that we were there to check in, and after finding no record of us under the 4 or 5 different company names we gave him, he gave us the keys to a house on the property anyway.



Upon arriving at the house, we immediately decided that it was haunted. A quick glance inside served to confirm our suspicions. The house was a good century old, complete with missing window screens, 4-foot-high door frames (some crooked at the top), and a walled-in second-story balcony that must have served as a particularly uncomfortable time-out spot in its day. When we got to the master bedroom, we found an abandoned pair of sunglasses on the mantle - “the ghost’ll be coming back for those,” our boss mused. We knew our fate was sealed when we opened what should have been a closet door to find nothing but a wall behind it.

By this point, it had been about 2 hours since we’d last eaten, so we were getting understandably hungry. Unwilling to accept our certain deaths at the hands of disgruntled Civil War veterans just yet, we set out on a quest to find food. In the middle of nowhere. At 11:00 at night. A few miles up the road in the direction of “Bryson City” (chosen because it had the word “city” in its name), and we were certain we had stepped into the beginning of a horror movie set in an abandoned town populated only by auto boneyards and dilapidated houses. Eventually, we found a grocery store – which, despite its front doors being wide open, was closed for the evening.

A kind employee pointed us in the direction of a nearby gas station (after insisting that her store was “’die of hunger’ closed”), and we ended up there for our shopping needs. 20 minutes and $60 later, we were well-stocked for the week and on our way back to the haunted house. What’s that? Surprised that anyone could possibly spend $60 on gas station junk food? Well, the house had a kitchen, so we felt well-justified in buying enough potato chips and Gatorade to fill the space allotted us. Sure, my Choco Taco was a little stale, but that’s the risk you take.

Alex killed a brown recluse spider on the car as he was getting in, and we headed back to the house, where I killed another while minding my own business in the bathroom. If the ghosts didn’t get us, the insects would surely lay eggs inside our heads. After organizing our food (read: putting the bags on the table and the Gatorade in the fridge) and satisfying ourselves that we were, to the best of our knowledge, alone in the house, we went our separate ways. That is, Alex went into his bedroom to ignore us, and Chad, our boss, decided that he wanted to play with my camera and the house’s antique furniture. What resulted can only be described as something that I shouldn’t be posting on the Internet.



Once my manhood had been sufficiently eroded, we opted for bed. After resigning myself to the fact that either my head or my feet – not both – would be resting on the mattress, I was able to fall asleep. This would be, however, a short-lived victory, as I proceeded to have some of the worst nightmares in memory involving bloodthirsty snakes and poisonous insects, at one point causing me to wake up swatting at my pillow violently. The problem of non-continuous sleep was compounded by the fact that sleeping on this particular bed could be likened to sleeping in a wrestling ring – I like firm mattresses, but I’m not sure that putting two sheets of plywood around some springs and sewing the whole thing up in a burlap sack qualifies as a mattress. On top of whatever wakefulness the nightmares were causing, I awoke every couple hours in order to turn over and make the other side of my body numb for awhile.

And the evening and the wee hours of the morning were the first day. Or at least they seemed like a full day.

Next time: Why the location of dinner is important, and how to ride a horse in a hurricane

I couldn't have said it better myself.