Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.

One of the most unpleasant things about the post-September 11th world (other than, you know, the “waiting to die at any time” thing and monitoring the fancy color-coded alerts) is that you have a lot less fun at airports. If we were not even to mention the whole “Dom gets molested like a mail-order Siberian bride bound in the trunk of a Buick LeSabre every time her steps into an airport, sometimes even by the luggage handlers” aspect of me *personally* going there, the atmosphere has changed from one of delicious anticipation to one where you wonder as you eat a rubbery, $17 cheeseburger at Ye Olde Salmonella Restaurante and Speakeasy if you are going to be vaporized several miles above the earth only to be interred in a container no larger than a standard Good n’ Plenty box. More importantly, umm, there are no more Hare Krishnas.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure, you’ll be sitting down trying to not fantasize about snuffing a two-year-old who is shrieking like s/he is being impaled with hatpins while watching the neverending loop of CNN-Airport Edition, bathed in the stench of “cheezy” airport concessions and faux designer perfumes that the wig-toting hag who, no doubt, will be sitting next to you on the plane, has been embalmed with, when a shave-headed youth wearing bells on his/her ankles and clad in sackcloth approaches you and places a “gift” on your lap. It’s usually a keychain or a woven artifact of some kind, and if you are lucky it contains none of the nits borne by the crofter. Accompanying the craft is a note, usually written in a childlike scrawl. They say things like:

“This is a gift for you. Should you accept this gift, we ask that you kindly make a donation to the Krishna Consciousness Society. Umm, like, $5. Hare Rama! Hare Krishna!”

So, it isn’t really a “gift” in the strictest sense of the word. My first impulse was, of course, the impulse I assume any one of you would have had: run into the men’s room and hide in a rank stall with the “gift” until the glassy-eyed freak gives up looking for you, whereupon you will have a new object with which you can amuse yourself whilst awaiting for your thrice-delayed connection flight. However, I decided to slake my insatiable thirst for utterly useless random knowledge and wait to see what’s going to happen.

Now, at this point, the businessmen fussing with their keypad-cellphones have only given their new treats a cursory glance, as they are attending a proxy merger meeting online; gripping their styluses in a tangle of whitening knuckles, they stab the minute LCD screens with rabid vigor. The Middle American housewives are trying desperately to wrench it from their unbathed children, who are grimly trying to ingest it. The elderly put on their reading glasses and gaze at the note as if, by staring at it intently, they will magically understand what the hell the Krishna Consciousness people are all about (“no good” is the consensus). The college coeds are desperately trying to fashion it into something with which you could smoke a pat of weed, and the inner-city youths are declaring that the robed acolytes are “fat-ass whacked-out crackahs.”

Five minutes pass, during which time the devotee stands quietly by as you make that all-important decision: a) run and hide, b) pay $5 for a woven keychain your five-year-old cousin could fashion out of dryer lint, or c) give it back and incur the wrath of a deity with eight arms and whose devotees smear graven images of it with purified butter. Most give it back; the look of disgust you are given could freeze beer. Me? Well, I take the cue from the dirt-baby in the seat next to me. With a little bit of the old H20 from the nearby fountain, that keychain takes a free ride to Colon Town (county seat of Polypopolis) where it’s 98 degrees all year long and where nobody lives for longer than 24 hours.

The terrorists may not have won, but they did make it so that I can no longer watch a hippie rend his robes in anguish as he watches me open my maw to masticate a hand-woven “gift.”

*in another part of the forest*

Now, tell me you don’t know this sensation and I will call you a liar. So! You’re drifting off to sleep, thinking, perhaps, of cheese, when suddenly a jarring thought comes to mind. No, not about the unmitigated horrors that await you at work or something petty in your pitiful, friendless existence as it is now. No, you’ll be just about at the threshold of slumber when you remember things like:

*How you rankly soiled yourself at a school dance because you didn’t want to seem unfashionable by actually attending your uncool natural needs

*How, after launching into a tirade about how simply dreadful someone is and how you’d like to have seen them sodomized by Cape buffalo, they told you that the person in question was their mom – and that she had cancer

*How, after a teacher appropriated a note you’d written, she read it out loud – a note wherein you’d professed to wondering about how human flesh tastes and whether or not the recipient had ever had naughty thoughts about barnyard beasts

*How, while eating at a local Asian restaurant, you were caught by the waiter making strangled mewing noises as you feasted on a “Pu-pu for Two” appetizer delight – and how he brought you some complimentary “egg drop soup” afterward

*How, during your first college kegger, you projectile-vomited three microwaveable Bean n’Cheez burritos onto your friends’ mothers’ heirloom Faberge egg

*That one sultry night in Bangkok

I heartily believe that 99% of suicides are not caused by soul-crushing depression and utter despair; no, as Arthur is flinging himself into the icy river hundreds of feet below, he’s thinking about how, when he was ten, dressed in his mom’s bathing suit, he drank a pint of warm human urine for a nickel on a dare to impress a skirt.

It all catches up to you someday.

************

It’s dusk in my neighborhood. The cicadas are thrumming almost supersonically in the diseased tree in my dooryard; in the distance, the corn sighs after baking in a relentless Indiana late-summer’s day. Two doors down, a singularly fascinating drama is unfolding: about an hour ago, my neighbor came home to realize that not paying rent for the past three months has dire consequences. Having watched the slump-shouldered complex-lackey change the locks with my own eyes, I knew this was inevitable, yet I wasn’t quite prepared for the show. The human part of me that still remains aches with a measure of empathetic pity, but the uncharitable part of me that knows she was probably selling Afghani smack day and night wonders how she wasn’t able to pony up the $450 a month. That, and her tiny white poodle irked me by merely existing; it had an insipid name like Mitzi and yipped uncontrollably every time a sparrow broke wind in Nepal, and I often fantasized about it being taken by the largish birds of prey that lurk menacingly in the nearby “forest.” As it is now, though, the woman – girded in a ghastly purple tubetop and second-rate Jesus-sandals – is standing on her stoop, lowing like a harpooned manatee about how she is “gonna git them” and how “they always had it out for her”, chainsmoking Capri Ultra-Light 100s and talking loudly on her Zach Morris-sized cellphone. It’s only a matter of time before she gets a pizza delivered (with a side of them there Cajun Spice hotwings) and erects a puptent. By the time she starts putting up a loom to “spin herse’f some panties”, I will be out of here to the Greenwood lair.

Ah, Greenwood. Greenwood, Indiana, is a southern suburb for the Big Cob on a Stick herself, Indianapolis. As you may have read in previous ‘blogs, Indianapolis and I have a rather sordid past – one that has not cleaved this, the nation’s ninth largest city, to me. In fact, I seem to recall saying that I would "rather orally pleasure the homeless" than go there. The simple fact of the matter is that, at least for the next year, it’s my brooding, smoggy northern neighbor, and there’s not a whole lot I can do about it. Sure, I could bitch about it until my hands wept crimson lifeblood and my larynx disintegrated, but in the end, when I drive to the end of my road and look north, I can see the skyline etched against the prairie heavens. And maybe, just maybe, I am being unfair. Just because people who’ve psychically gutted me call the Speedway City their home doesn’t mean that I can’t make the most of living so close to a major metropolitan area. To be sure, within three miles of my home, there are three dozen restaurants, innumerable stores and one of Indiana’s biggest malls – not to mention a Rhode Island-sized SuperTarget, and three miles in the other direction, I am in the Indiana I love: the corn. So maybe, just maybe, I will give Indianapolis a shot. After all, everyone, everything, deserves that. But I will tell you one thing: for the next year, I will be packin’ heat.

Long ago, in a Chinese restaurant on the other side of this continent, I got a fortune cookie following an entirely too delightful meal of Hunan chicken and hot and sour soup. I believe that this fortune, more than anything, has determined my destiny. Written in tiny, red bold-face upon the slip:

“Because of your melodic nature, the moonlight never misses an appointment.”

Chew on that, my dear, patient, faithful few. Oh yes, chew.

I remain, as ever,

Dom