You all know what I am talking about here.

You're just about to transition completely from your day - replete as it was with moments that make that small, pearly-blue vein in your forehead pulse like house music at an East European gay discothèque - into the Land Where You Can Ride Unicorns and Eat Snicker Bars Off Trees. Then, unwarranted and heedless, you manage to dredge up a moment in your past so profoundly embarrassing that you beg the intercession of the deity to whom you cleave in base supplication so that you may actually, at some point in the night, goddamn fall the feck asleep. Something like this:

"Baby Jesus in Thy Oddly Bluish Swaddling Garments", you might begin, "allow me to sleep on this, a Thursday evening at eleven fifty-six, having taken from me the memory of urinating upon myself verily in front of eighty to one hundred amassed parents who were watching the ill-fated soccer game". *

Last night, just as I was preparing to weave a shimmering bridle out of the golden tresses of a lovely and conveniently long-locked maiden for my unicorn stallion, I managed to bring forth a "delightful" memory of my time in North Carolina from what is, apparently, the place in my mind where the Things That Make Me Want to Die Really Really Hard loiter about in slavering anticipation of acute vulnerability.

*wavy, indistinct lines and hellish harp muzak*

Many weekends when I lived in North Carolina I would drive forty minutes southeast through the aromatic bouquet of hog and turkey farms to the unfettered enchantment that is Jacksonville, where my childhood best friend Mary had become ensconsed while performing her service in the US Marine Corps. To actually visit her on base required that I procure a day permit from several heavily-armed, beetling high-and-tight-crowned young men just inside the gates to the camp itself.

I would like to take this moment to remind all of you that I am, in fact, not a girl.

The first few times I had to procure my permit Mary had driven to the gate to smooth things out - patting the shit down, as it were - but, after several trips Mary and I agreed that I knew enough about the way it was going to work to not get myself rifle-butted in the face. The process itself was startlingly simple.

1) You park your car.

2) You get out of your car, open all of the doors, the trunk, the hood and the glove compartment. Two men then proceed to seach your vehicle.

3) You proceed to a cement hut where a gentleman frowns at your driver's license and proof of registration and insurance, scrawls something unintelligible on a piece of paper the size of a postcard and asks you to put this on your dash.

The complicating factor: these were large, heavily muscled, very deadly serious men with gigantic, scary guns. The logical part of me knew that they wouldn't hose me down in a tempest of molten lead unless I did something profoundly special. The part of me that writes this 'blog, though, has watched too many Vietnam War movies.

The first time I attempted to procure my day pass alone was a sultry, mid-spring afternoon with the imminent threat of the tropical monsoons they like to call "thunderbumpers" redolent on the westward zephyrs. I passed the first guardsman who was hefting what appeared to be a Soviet-ilk surface-to-air missile, and he waved me into secondary inspection. I reached behind me and unlocked the passenger and driver side backseats, popped my trunk and hood and undid the latch to my glove box. At this point two men, each carrying an Israeli bazooka, began walking towards my car.

You will NOT evacuate onto yourself, you hear me?, I hissed to myself.

One lock remained. The passenger side front seat. I reached my tender arms towards it, taut with the mounting anxiety of being vaporized before my time {I've never been to China I'd weep as the salvos slammed into my porcine form}, and managed to

slam my elbow into the car's horn.

I did what any twentysomething male would. Namely, I shrieked like a five-year-old girl. Loud.
And the best part? Since the window was down, there is no way in hell that they hadn't heard it; this, and since the actual blast from the horn was less than a second and my shriek was about one second of utter hysteria, I couldn't hope that the horn had drowned out the sound of it.

I went to the cement hut without meeting their gaze. Yes, gentleman, I, possessed of a college degree, am intimidated enough by two twentysomethings with semi-automatic weaponry that I shrieked like a pre-pubescent girl when I accidentally startled myself with my own car horn. Nothing more to see here. Move on down the road; there's a rainforest green Ford Focus that needs tossing.

{mist}

***

Whilst browsing through the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites for recent updates (among them, the historic Turkish city of Safranbolu, comprised as it is entirely of 17th and 18th century Ottoman architecture), I became aware that my favorite archaeological site of all time had managed to make the list in the recent past.

Now, when I talk about UNESCO World Heritage Sites, think the Athenian Acropolis. Think Angkor Wat. Think the Hagia Sofia. The Great Wall of China. And, among these iconic structures of classical civilizations whose works have shaped our human experience, is the

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump of Alberta, Canada.

Scoffers can go here after they go straight to Hell.

What is the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, one queries? Well, children, the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is a natural formation - basically, a really big cliff at the edge of some vast prairie real estate - wherein Plains Native Americans (Canadians?) drove frantic herds of buffalo to their deaths by frightening them into plummeting to their collective dooms. Osteological remains at the bottom of the cliff are dozens of meters deep and bespeak of a massive encampment based at the cliff bottom, where the deceased ungulates would be butchered long into the night. You have to give the Native Americans credit: that was, quite simply, one of the most ingenious methods of dispatching these critters, who frequently were the size of a small SUV. I concur most wholeheartedly with this site being designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The most amusing thing about this, then, is the name of the site itself. There is a Friends of Head-Smashed-In Society. There is merchandise that says, um, Head-Smashed-In. And, best of all, when one calls the interpretive center, a relentlessly cheerful young woman answers thusly in her lovely Canadienne accent:

Head-Smashed-In, how may I help you?

That is poetry, sheer poetry.

***

As I near my one year anniversary as a foreign student advisor in July - yes, asses, that's four months away - I sometimes find myself watching my own interactions with students and the Indiana University community with profound amazement. I find myself saying things to internationals with a firmness that can only come with the seasoning of battle and the comprehension of regulation and practice that comes only with the splendor of getting screamed at long-distance from the Asian continent. And, slowly but surely, I am making a name for myself and building a reasonable amount of credibility within the sphere of IU.

Enter the phone call I fielded yesterday.

A foreign student advisor from a nearby school called to discuss the status of a former IU student. With the weight of regulatory knowledge and with deft maneuvering of my fork-ed tongue, I had a long, professional-to-professional conversation with the gentleman. Then, moments before we bid our see-ya-laters, my iTunes media player (which had been set at the lowest possible volume without being muted) changed track from a lovely instrumental Enya track to

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk,
I’m a woman’s man: no time to talk.

It was really, really loud; apparently, that track had been burned at a higher volume than the others.

Thank you, Bee Gees. Thank you for hosing down all of my hopes for peer chitchat with this man with your disco urea.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic




* This actually happened. To me.