"Wow. It must be nice to hope for the thing you wish to want."

"Jerri Blank", aka Amy Sedaris, "Strangers with Candy"

As I laid moaning like a whore in my sweat-sodden hospital bed - fever-plagued, eating my dinner out of a hole in my arm, unbathed and reeking for nearly four days - I made certain to spend my precious waking moments attempting to piece together my misdeeds to determine why I was being punished with not one, but two hospital stays (appendectomy, diverticulitis) in 2007. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that nothing* I'd done so far in my twenty-seven years merited this year's medical gang-rape, so I determined that I would need to pay a call to a local past-life regressionist/high priestess/Kroger employee named Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz to see what might be at the root of my ghastly, unbidden issues as of late.

[ring, ring]

Male voice: [urrrrrrp] Who the feck is this? It's, like, 10 in the goddamn morning.
Me: Good morning, sir! I was wondering if I could set up a meeting with Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz for this afternoon.
Male voice: Better make that next week. She's on the rag and's been giving all of her male clients "herbal remedies" that make the heads of their decks bleed.
Me: Good to know. So, how's Wednesday of next week?
Male voice: No good; that's the night we meet with our swing partners over at this dungeon across town for some -
Me: [reaching for something - anything! - to kill myself with] Alrighty then. How's about Friday?
Male voice: Yeah, I'll tell her. Hey: when you're on your way over, how's about you stopping at the Circle K down the street and bringing me a package of White Owls? You know, the kind with the white plastic lip-guard.
Me: Only if you promise to not smoke them while I am there, as the aroma they produce reminds me of that time I had to have my ingrown toenail cauterized with a laser.
Male voice: [whispers] Awesome.

Friday afternoon finds me standing next to my car, door ajar, beholding a tarpaper shanty and wondering if I'd made a wise decision. Several emaciated feral cats wended their way through calf-high weeds to greet me; finding a largish stick several yards from my person, I held the mewling, distempered beasts at bay with it long enough to broach the "porch", whereupon I was greeted by the delicate scent of pet feces, nag champa incense and Velveeta. I used the stick to rap upon the door; when several minutes passed and I was not received, I turned to hack my way back to awaiting (and unlocked) Orhan. I was about halfway across the "lawn" when a man's voice called out to me.

Morbidly Obese Man with Combover: Do you have my ceee-gars, whelp?
Me: [beholding a creature on the porch who, surely, has spent a significant amount of time hiding under a bridge] Here they are. I must insist, though, that they remain on my person until I leave, lest you begin the process of immolating and "enjoying" one. Also, you owe me $7.
MOMwC: Don't you judge me, son. Also: Shirley - uh, I mean, Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz - has agreed to knock the seven clams off your fee today.
Me: So, this means that I am paying $3 for the pleasure of her company? This is going to be one quality regression.
MOMwC: Damn skippy, motherhumper.

He bid me forward into the inner sanctum of the shanty and I, for my part, attempted to suppress my gag reflex and open my Inner Eye to the experience. This was difficult given that the inside of the home was less in keeping with my own ideas of what these places would be like (Enya on stereo, tasteful lezzie decor, a woman clad in a willowy frock) and was more as I imagine the interior of one of those hermit-apartment might be. You know, an apartment inhabited by one of those people who live for twenty-five years in a place, never go outside, have seventeen cats and when they die, only the stink of their rotting corpses alerts neighbors to their passage.

I was shown into a small, darkened room where - from the eye-stinging reek of it - the nag champa was merrily burning. Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz was sprawled in a rather unladylike position on a small daybed behind the reading table and, upon our approach (and with a deleriously sputum-filled throat-clearing from MOMwC) she leapt up, covered her nearly-exposed junk with the yards of linen she'd girded her body with and summoned her mistiest, most supernatural voice. Which, considering that she was a chain-smoking fiftyish former Jewess from Albany, came out sounding like Bea Arthur trying to talk through a mouthful of tuna.


SLUNT: [hack, hack] What brings you to Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz this fine day? Oh, wait: aren't you the guy who's trying to figure out why his twenty-seven-year-old guts are rebelling against him? Like, from past lives and shet?
Me: Yeah, I guess that would have to be me.
SLUNT: Yeah. Well, let's get started. Before I open your Inner Eye, I will need to know two things; one, do you have the three bucks? Two: are you allergic to bat guano?
Me: Yes, and most likely yes.
SLUNT: Shet. Well, how about Crisco?
Me: That'd be fine provided that I know what you are going to do with it. If I wake up and my jimmies are covered in lard, someone in this room is getting tasered.
SLUNT: Just close your goddamn eyes.

When I awoke an hour later, Sri Lakhshmiramadeva-ji Unicorn-Princess North-Star Tortelli-Berkowitz was panting like a fallow deer in heat and was scrounging about in a macrame handbag for her More Ultralight 120s. I frantically reached for my genitalia and, finding them Crisco-free and dry, I began to calm myself.

Me: How'd it go?
SLUNT: [visibly shaking] You just stay the feck over there, wouldja?
Me: Ah, I take it that it went well.
SLUNT: Look, I don't mean to judge, but your soul will need to go through at least three hundred more lifetimes - many of them involving clergy membership - before it is clean again.
Me: So, who was I in the past?
SLUNT: Well, let's just leave it with this: I'm fairly certain that you were responsible for the importation of the Black Death into Europe, the invention of the first decapitation machine, the idea for an exploding tip for whaling harpoons, the summary execution of the Romanovs, the Dutch occupation of the Congo, the establishment of the Khmer Rouge, the idea for the partition of India and Pakistan and the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.
Me: So, wait: I was Mao Zedong?
SLUNT: Well would you LOOK at the time?

I left with more questions than had been answered (and by left, I mean "was forcibly driven out of the reeking tarpaper shanty by a remarkably agile MOMwC and his butterfly knife"), but one thing was clear: it was the misdeeds of my former selves that had provided the karmic stick that roiled up my present-day innards. For this, I spent four days alone in an isolation ward room because of a raging Clostridium difficile infestation, requiring that nurses and doctors suit up like biohazard/hazmat teams to poke me. For this I had to go for three days without food, receiving nourishment via a suspended bag filled with clear liquids, only to be told that I can never again eat popcorn, nuts and seeds. For this I had to endure countless nurses and doctors asking me incredulously how old I am, as diverticulosis is very rare in people UNDER THE AGE OF 40.

I do know one thing, though.

{whispering} [down with cow demons and snake spirits!]

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (FeatherSonoftheEast) Potorti


*OK, well, selling all of those fifth-graders that home-brewed John Stamos' Proud Greek Nutsack probably had something to do with it.

A Turk, a Dane, a Pakistani and an American are driving to İstanbul.

Last week I became utterly poleaxed by ennui over my lunch hour and, seeking the sweet succor that only a series of Wikipedia entries can provide, I fired up Mozilla - and stopped. It was at that moment that I was suddenly consumed with a desire - nay, a clarion need - to Google my own precious name to keep tabs on who was spreading smack about me.

Whether I was bidden to do so by the gravelly, dead voice of one of my more dominant personalities or the decaying-corpse-reeking breath of the Hooved One, one just can never tell.

In mere moments, meantime, I was presented with several dozen links, each of which purported to contain my name in some fashion. Some I'd fully anticipated; this blog's URL, for one, and links to several articles I wrote for the University of Maine's student rag. One of the links had a funny URL, though, and purported to contain pictures.

[awesome?]

I gingerly scrolled down to the URL of the site that claimed to sport photographic evidence of me and hovered the mouse pointer over the link. The part of me that still has residual ability to feel was filled with icy dread, but, as the part of me that couldn't give a fancy fig animates my limbs, I felt my fingers tap twice on the mouse clicker-thing.

The last thing I expected to see - well, other than documentation of my supposed linkage to that Chiang Mai Harelip deal gone wrong from last August - were pictures of a twenty-year-old me taken by one of my friends when I was studying abroad in Turkey. There I am, staring back from across three continents and more than six years at a balder, fatter and arguably more educated man who is on the cusp of thirty. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - or, as I eventually did, break open a pack of apple strudel Pop-Tarts and settle back in amazement at the show.

Of course, I have my own pictures of Turkey. Thirty-six rolls of film worth of them, in fact. But seeing these - well, somehow it's different. Anyway, with apologies to Bilaal Ahmed (the photographer in most of these shots), I have taken some and put them on here so that my readership can mock my haircut and inquire as to the whereabouts of both the gray hoodie (deceased) and the red fleecy thing (also deceased).

Left to right: A twenty-year-old Domonic, Jacob HØgild and Syed Bilaal Ahmad.

I wasn't entirely sure what I should have expected when I arrived at Bilkent University. The University of Maine didn't know, either - after my application had been approved and Bilkent had sent their acceptance letter, I was informed that I was to be the first UMaine student to go there. This was news which, as you might imagine, I greeted with the enthusiasm level one reserves for scraping a rapidly-cooking animal carcass out of the grill of your car as, you know, Turkey just so happens to be in the Middle-feckin'-East. I also didn't anticipate that I would be one of only three new exchange students at the school.

Just three of us. Nine thousand Turks, and three of us. [There was an Australian exchange student who'd been there since the spring, but he didn't count, as he could speak Turkish.]

My "orientation" consisted of the young Pakistani chap who'd picked me up at the airport standing me in the middle of campus and pointing his fingers at several distant buildings.

Young Pakistani Chap: [while trying to light up his fourth smoke on our ten minute walk] So: you can eat there, there and there. You can also eat there, but it is rrrreal shet. You buy your books there. The bank is there, and the post office is there. And the library is over there. [takes impossibly deep drag] Alright then. I am getting laid in about twenty minutes and she rrrrreally hates if I am late. [begins to walk away]

Me: [misting up and becoming frantic]

YPC: Look: if you get lost, just say "Yurt Yetmiş Sekiz" and someone will tell you how to get there.

Me: What's "Yurt Yetmiş Sekiz?"

YPC: Oh my fecking GOD. It's your DORM. I have to motor so that I can bum a rubber from my friend.

Wherever you are right now, YPC, I hope your pee burns when it comes out.

This is Jacob and me in my ghastly little dorm room which I shared with a young Turk from Gaziantep. He (the roommate) was a nice enough chap save for a few minor details:

1) He let his friends chain-smoke in my room.
2) He talked on his cell-phone until 2 AM every night.
3) He BATHED in the most foul cologne that has ever graced the male form.
4) I had to hide my food because he'd eat it without asking.
5) The window you see behind me? Every morning at 7:30 AM, he'd open the curtain, open the window, and blow snot-rockets and hork lungers onto the awaiting plateau scrub below.


It was so great to live with him! Oh, and did I mention his grandmother called every other day at the precise astral moment that he'd gone to class, leaving me to try to muddle through explaining to her in broken Turkish that her grandson was a troll? Or that he called showering "douching" and would announce loudly that he was going to perform as such every single time he did it?

Fortunately, though, I didn't have to spend that much time with the Roomie of Doom because I got "adopted" by the four gents living next door. This is Jacob and my best Turkish friend, Dinçer, at the Atakule (Atatürk's Tower) in Ankara. Dinçer is from Ödemiş, near İzmir, but was born and raised (until he was ten) in Australia. He took my education in how Turkey functions to immediate task by teaching me soccer cheers which, while grammatically educational, often contained profanity so startling that merely thinking them caused the stench of sulfur to elp forth from your skin.

For example:

I am going to plant a pine tree in your mother's (feminine parts) and (make love to her) in the shade.

So genteel. As an aside, you had better either be double the size of the dude you are saying that to or else be saying it from another continent, preferably separated by at least one ocean.

The three yabancılar (foreigners) up inside the Atakule, Ankara.

Jacob's best Turkish buddy, Güneş (behind me), took us home to İstanbul so that we could behold the Big Meat on a Stick herself. We stayed at a hotel on the Asian side of the city that was - and I have to be frank - the most horrid little place I've ever laid my delicate head. Of course, that's what you get when one pays $8.50 a night. Anyway, this is us in Bolu, on the road to İstanbul, at some little truck-stop. It wasn't much to look at, but the food was great - and, as one might imagine, incredibly inexpensive.

Me, grinning at some asshole joke I'd just cracked, on the ferry from İstanbul to the Prince's Islands. The Prince's Islands (or the Adalar) belong to the İstanbul metropolitan area by jurisdiction, but the two are worlds apart, as on many of the islands there are no cars allowed. This starkly contrasts to İstanbul, where I was nearly smacked out of my skin four times by drivers - one of whom had come partially up over a sidewalk in order to make a hairpin turn.

While on Büyükada (literally, the Big Island), we met up with Güneş' old chummy, a part-time resident of the island who is distinguished in my memory for being one of the few blonde Turks I met while there. He's second from the left in this picture of us climbing down from the top of Büyükada, wherein is seated one of three of Turkey's remaining Greek Orthodox monasteries.

Jacob, Bilaal (taking picture) and I, lost in İstanbul, trying to understand some old man's animated sign language directions with little success. He really did try, though, but our impenetrable foreign retardation rendered his efforts futile.

Back on Büyükada, we were accosted by this Dutch kid and his American girlfriend (seated in the first two seats on the left) as we were walking around; their relief at finding Anglophones caused a nearly palpable reek.

Jacob pointing something on the European side of İstanbul out to me; I'm fairly certain that this photograph was staged.

Drinking something warm somewhere in İstanbul.

Güneş horsing around with Bilaal while I look on in amusement; the Bosphorus and the Black Sea stretch behind us.




An international homoerotic moment? I was clearly either intrigued or uncomfortable - it's probably safe to say both.

At the Sultanahmet Camii (the Blue Mosque), İstanbul. I am looking really, really white.

Güneş' family treated us with the hospitality that Turks are legendary for; in this particular case, a breakfast that would only see the hostess stopping bringing out more food with the sweet release of death. Just when we thought that we were going to very literally, a la the "gluttony" victim in the movie "Se7en", die from overindulgence, Güneş' mom brings out oranges the size of hubcaps and begins to peel them for us. Clearly, the hard-boiled eggs, bread, simit (bread rings crusted with sesame seeds), börek (pastry filled with herbs and feta), honey, feta, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, lamb ham, tea and chocolate weren't enough.


Our favorite restaurant in Ankara, Haci Arif Bey's. They made ayran (yogurt frappe) that makes me want to slap your mama.




Good Lord, I got a lot of use out of that fleece. Me and Dinçer on the Alle, Bilkent University.




Us (me in the background, trying not to trip on something) at Hattuşaş, the Hittite capital city. I'd thought of renting a mini-bus (and a driver) for the day to go there, and I got all of my friends up at the crack of dawn to go. We had a blast. It was, incidentally, the last trip I went on with both Bilaal and Jacob together. As our time in Turkey wore on, we each found our social niches. Mine was with the Aegean boys next door - Dinçer especially - and Jacob had Güneş. Bilaal ended up finding quite a few Pakistani buddies with whom he'd socialize. By the end of the semester we saw less and less of each other until we found each other leaving notes and voicemails, always missing each other as we went off into our own little realities.

[cue the instrumental theme from "St. Elmo's Fire"]

Seeing these pictures made me miss how I felt every day when I was in Turkey. More than that, though, I miss my friends terribly and wonder how and what they are doing.

[pausing to huff from can of paint-thinner]

Ahh. Wait: what was I talking about?

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic (weepynostalgiaisofttobecuredbyinhalinghouseholdsolvents) Potorti

Business up front, party in the back.

Thursday's dusk came the the Greenwood man-lair on gentle April zephyrs that carried only the most delicate bouquet of the Marion County (metro Indianapolis) Stench Combo, which consisted of burning tires, sun-scorched asphalt/oil refinery effluvia and a side of diesel exhaust; to drink, a glorious whiff of the Indianapolis dump which, while more than ten minutes away by car, is growing increasingly foetid in the early summer's heat. Were I to have been luxuriating in the dog-loaf encrusted yard in the canvas camping chair that was not long ago my only piece of upright furniture, I would have most likely puked a little in my mouth before wondering absently if scoring a rock would make it all better.

Instead, I found myself crouched under my desk battling a power-strip as I unplugged anything that might be part of my modem and router in a titanic battle of wills.

What I Wanted: The ability, as I saw fit, to 'blog.
What the Modem and Router Wanted: To be feck-sticks.

It was at this moment - mere seconds before I began to uncontrollably shriek and start ripping at cords like a coatimundi coming down off of methadone - that Keith, my personal deus ex machina, spoke.

Keith: Hey, I saw this weird wire that came down off a pole in our front yard.
Me: I saw that too, and wondered if it was to bring us sparky mortality.
Keith: Maybe we should call the Insight people. [pause] NO! Stop it right now!

[sprays me in the face with water bottle as I begin to savage a wire with my incisors]

Fifteen minutes and a fancy troubleshooting session later, it was determined that we would indeed have to be the recipients of a service call. Would someone be home, the computer-borg-dude asked sweetly, between 8 AM and 6 PM on Saturday? Seeing as how they had our gamete-producing organs over the barrel, we had no choice to affirm.

8:15 AM, Saturday morning

[phone buzzing in the bed next to me; it's a "317" area code - metro Indianapolis]

Me: Who the feck is this?
Voice: Hi, I'm John from Insight.
Me: Oh, gee whiz, I'm sorry! I am just drunk is all.
John: Yeah, I tied one on real good last night at the tittie bar and now I am weaving through - OH HOLY SHET LOOK OUT
Me: John?
John: Feck, I just almost knocked a twelve-year-old Catholic-school girl out of her saddle shoes.
Me: Huh. Well, I take it that you're going to be on the way soon?
John: I'll be there in fifteen. Hey - [whispers] - you got any weed?

It was only after contemplating his parting words that the part of me that is still able to remember things jogged a little bit. I'd been asked that question before.

Could I dare to dream that I would be the recipient of a divine visit from my boil-handed, Marlboro-perfumed Zippo-holstered buddy? Would I - on yet another occasion - be privileged enough to watch the early spring sun glitter off of his oily mullet? Would I - for the second time! - be forced to clean mud-clods that had liberated themselves from the treads of his size 15 blood-stained workboots from the sanctity of my home?

I'd just lowered myself onto the porcelain throne when a knock resounded through my seven-room shanty. I knew better than to have tried to accomplish The Unspeakable with someone on the way; inevitably, one gets caught with one's pants down, and not metaphorically. I hastily completed the task at hand and properly sanitized my hands to greet John, who, upon seeing me at the door, butted out a half-smoked Marlboro Light 100 [?!?] out on his heel and pocketed it.

Classy.

As I led him through our yard - mindful at all times to avoid the scatological evidence of Zeke's unheeded existence - I beheld John's Zippo holster, which carefully cradled the steely butane-filled lighter. I'd not noticed the time before that the lighter was emblazoned with a Confederate flag; how I could have missed this, I have no way of knowing. As I lifted a single pallid finger into the heavens to point out where the cable had tumbled into the tree and partly into our yard, I was taken aback by the absence one thing I'd most looked forward to gazing upon in regards to our special Insight buddy:

His mullet was gone.

I'd not have the pleasure of watching the spring sunlight dance merrily over his greasy neck-cape, and for this I was powerful angry. There's just nothing amusing about a quarter inch of hair under a tidy baseball cap unless owned by Britney Spears. As I frantically tried to reassemble the pieces of my shattered world, I looked to his hands. "At least, dear Baby Jesus in Thy hay-redolent manger, let there be boils", I mouthed. When he removed his gloves to root around in his pockets, their relative smoothness - I mean, other than work calluses - forced a single drop of brine from my left eye.

What had changed? OK, so there was still a little bit of the John from last year in there, but few people take off a mullet once they grow it in, and fewer still are able to rid themselves of gigantic, Roma tomato-sized hand-boils without the aid of a blowtorch and a witch-doctor.

The answer came when the sun glinted off something else other than what was, perhaps, the most exquisite mullet that has ever been grown.

A ring. A wedding band.

Now, whether he'd been married all this time but was unable to wear the ring because of the Clementine orange-sized pustules, I will never know. I do know that the promise of regular sex will cause gentlemen to do strange things, like cut off nearly a foot of flammable hair or go to Chinatown for hand-salve made out of narwhal placentae.

As he snaked a cable from a cable-box located several feet into our neighbor's yard - an old, bitter and, might I add, balding neighbor who has on several occasions called our landlord to tell him how we don't keep our lawn to his standards - I thought: good for you. Everyone needs someone, and the fact that somebody - perhaps that very evening - was polishing his one-eyed gopher made me feel hope for a world that will soon be bereft of a free Paris Hilton.

As he got into his truck, he waved goodbye as he prepared to light the butt that he'd stashed in one of the pockets of his carpenter jeans. He rolled down his window all the way and beckoned me closer.

"You sure you don't have any ganj, buddy?"

I assured him that I didn't and, looking crestfallen, he motored into the distance. Somewhere, perhaps in the shadow of a the Giant Sparkplug Building in our state's bullet-ridden capital, a thirtysomething man with nearly invisible boil scars on his hands will try to shake down a pat of weed from a seventy-year-old man who is barely holding in a bowel movement in the vain hopes that he'll be transported to a skunky heaven aided by a rebel Zippo. When the MedicAlert van shows up, he'll have nowhere to run.

But at least now he'll have someone to bail him out.

Until later, I remain,

Dom (unlesshewantedsomeExtraStrengthTylenolhewasoutofluck) Potorti