One Year Of Traveling Around The World

Sitting at a desk facing the wall and there’s a very large painting just above me. It’s mostly mustard-colored, dark at the bottom and light yellow at the top. In the center of the painting there are small figures of people working in the rice fields. They each have hats covering their heads. Most of the painting has the same brushstroke, that Van Gogh brushing his teeth madness but with a smaller, finer brush.

I’ve just finished a cup of lemon tea. Sweating in this room with a ceiling fan above my dome and there’s also an empty bed behind me.

In fact, this room isn’t much different from where I started one year prior to leaving for Rome on a one-way ticket from Newark, New Jersey. That was one year ago … and there were ants in my pants at the time.

I can remember the day before I’d left — I’d been counting down the days, each day, while working online by teaching English to students in China. I didn’t know anything about China. I just knew that they had a lot of people. Little did I know that I’d be meeting one of those people — in Chiang Mai, Thailand — a girl who is about a year younger than I. And she’s seated in the room adjacent where there is an air conditioner, bright lights, white tiled floor, mustard bedspread, mosquito net, all white, draped at the corners from a dangling expanse of what appears to be a dream catcher. But it isn’t.

I don’t feel any different from a year ago. But I am wearing a pair of shorts, hand-made, from a lady at a shop on the main drag through Ubud. Weird designs. Black, yellow. Patches. Almost like a quilt. And there’s also some light red in there and brown and blue and purple. Upon looking, I even noticed a black-and-white design that resembles the Ying-Yang. Of life.

It’s like dandruff. You don’t know how it got there. Sort of. But you saw the commercial once and you thought, well shit. Maybe I should do something different. Something’s gotta change…

Ah, and the burning incense is getting down to the thin wood. I’ll put a new one in there … and the rooms, both of them, will once again fill with the scent of lavender. (My girlfriend picked it out. She’s good with that sort of thing. Much better than I could be.)

“Here,” I’d said at the Bintang Supermarket back in Legian (down near the beaches along the western coast of Bali), “this one’s supposed to draw in money. Let’s get this one and become millionaires.”

The incense was about 14,000 Rupiah. Somewhere around one dollar.

Changing it now…

I’d like to keep this to about 1,000 words. Because my girlfriend is wearing her hair down, a sexy yellow shirt with flowers on it — I got her the shirt in Bangkok, the suburbs of that large and flowering city (bad writing) — and she isn’t wearing a bra.

It’s not worth getting into the reasons of Why or How or What For, here. But I thought of the romantic planes cruising above the Walt Whitman Bridge every day and every night which I could see from the kitchen of my third-floor apartment in South Philly. When I painted at night, usually drunk or half-drunk, listening to music on headphones, canvases scattered on the floor of shitty, drunk paintings (mine), a cockroach or a mouse would lure me out of my dreamworld. But in the morning — or even in my sleep — I always returned to it. Even now, it seems nearly impossible to keep it at bay. A wild spirit I was given at birth and the only way to tame it was to release me into the workaday world and sculpt me — or have me sculpted into — whatever it was I was supposed to be. I didn’t know. And maybe I still don’t.

But I know that I don’t care. I have this life, white skin, and these really cool Bali shorts — hand-made — from a woman who sits on the floor each night, I’m assuming, and watches something on her cell phone … toils each day below and beneath the sun, for her own living, her own life. And she will probably, most likely, never leave the island of Bali. Unless I’m dramatizing beyond all measure.

That’s one thing that helped me to reach into the unknown. That seemed better than the same thing, over and over again. Life in America can become like living in a commercial. I’m guessing the same is true in the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia, in most places on Earth.

I don’t think that traveling for a year is really worth writing about. At least not at this very moment. I did plenty of writing during that time — including five manuscripts: two short books I published myself, and three books of poetry.

First it was Italy, Rome. The coastal towns … and Napoli too … to rid myself of the American way of thinking. It was good to live with a young couple who fought a lot and loved each other just as passionately. They enjoyed food, spoke really fast, and little did I know that I was following in the steps, almost, of Julia Roberts. But I didn’t care or really know anything about that. Hollywood bored me to shitstains.

And then I flew to Thailand. Krabi, Thailand. Where everything changed. I abandoned my previous self and expelled that shell I had been carrying for many years. Still, I had some old emotions stuffed in a box in my guts and gonads. And they came out — they would come out — down the line in New Zealand with a trip there, during a trip there. You can furnish the trimmings of my grammar, fill it in with your brain.

I wanted to bite into life like a cheese. No, I didn’t. In Thailand, I just needed a beer. Or three.

I opened one up at around noon. Took a few sips. Crashed, hard. Jetlag!

It was three weeks in Italy, a week in Krabi, and then I flew up to Chiang Mai. Three weeks in a tree house for about $220. I met a girl there, a Chinese girl. She had been to Nepal. And that turned me on. She seemed smart and she used her hands when she spoke. And we went out for a beer.

When the AirBnb’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’.

Then I flew to Hanoi, Vietnam and she went to India. I got into some trouble. Left town in five days. To Da Nang. Two weeks on the top floor of a hotel. You could walk out the back door and see the waves and the surfers bobbing up and down waiting for their own … cheese?

The Chinese girl, Han. (Not her first name.) Xue.

She came to be with me in Da Nang after I’d written her some kind of a poem or limerick. Ha!

We traveled together to Ho Chi Minh City, it was hot, very. Then we took a bus after a week to Cambodia, the capital — Phnom Penh. That was cool. I was in awe of the place, the big and open park in the center of town. The heat, the food — and there were lots of expats. We finished that week at a sky bar, something like 30 or 40 floors up into the sky. My girlfriend pinched my nuts. I said, “Yes, god is pretty pretty pretty pretty good.”

She snickered.

“What’s that mean?” she asked me.

“It’s a candy bar.”

Skybar, some 30 floors up, Phnom Penh, Cambodia - Jan. 2019

We took a shitty, hot bus — cramped — from the capital of Cambodia all the way out to the western coast. Ah, Sihanoukville. A shithole. But there are beaches! WERE BEACHES.

And the sunsets of Cambodia were hard to beat. All pink and purple and yellow and red and they dove into the land each and every day without any concern for a broken neck.

We saw an island. It was hot, there were mosquitoes and drop-outs from society. I didn’t like them. I played ukulele on the beach and chased down a black lab puppy who’d nearly ran off with one of my sandals.

Then Xue and I went north to Siem Reap. Small town. Party areas. Lots of bars. Hot there too. Very. She rode a bike in a short red dress and I sat on the back smiling at all the dudes who stared at her as we passed.

“That’s right motherfuckers! She’s with me!”

Okay. Xue went back to China. Then I went to Bali for three weeks. New Zealand for 10 days. Up and down both islands. Back to South Vietnam. Then back to Da Nang. Xue and I were going to be staying there for three months — with multiple-entry visas (meaning we could come and go as we pleased). Xue had bought a small black pair … do pajamas come in pairs? … we did!

We stayed in an apartment, small place, for six weeks. Ate out a lot, went to the beach all the time, had lots of sex, explored, didn’t do very much. I wrote poems almost every night. And drank a lot. (Beers were 50 cents.) And published (myself) a few issues of a digital magazine nobody gave a fuck about. Not even me.

We fought, Xue and I. And I had my own place, one that was supposed to be ours. I loved Da Nang. And still do. Vietnam was great. Nobody cared what you did. Pho. Cheap beer. The beach. March through April to May and into June.

Then I took off for Europe, alone.

Berlin. Drank a lot. Worked a bit. Czechia — Prague. That bored me. They had weed chocolate. I kept to the Asian food and ate locally, stuck to the hostel, missed Xue, drank. Met a few people. Absorbing everything like a demented sponge you sometimes leave under the sink and you forget about it and then it attracts all kinds of ants and spiders and roaches and mice. I threw myself out there, man. Yeah.

On to Bratislava. They had a blue church there! I drank and didn’t play with myself and worked on a park bench. The city had free WiFi.

Budapest. For something like 10 days. The Danube River fascinated me. The summer in Eastern Europe was very hot. Almost terribly so — terrifying! A warming planet was the whole basis for my traveling around the world for a year. I didn’t want to wait for the perfect moment because there’s no such thing.

Danube River, Budapest, Hungary - June 2019

Graffiti in a small alleyway, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia - Oct. 2019

Sitting here and typing in a room in Ubud, north — right off the main drag. Next to the Eat Pray Love fields of doom and false bullshit, bad chemistry, and corny everything that is America melting the entire planet into a new dimension, shooting outwards from the center. There are still beautiful places, everywhere. With the right kind of eyes.

Everything is as majestic or dingy as you want it to be.

I think.

I mean, I really don’t know. I could just be saying that because I want this to end.

Now.

A month in Turkey with Xue. Istanbul pulled at my heartstrings. Antalya in the south burned like a muscle after a really long workout — something I’d know nothing about.

Then we made it to Serbia. Belgrade. A corrupt place! The taxi drivers were scoundrels, mostly. And there were big wheat fields. Up to the north, Novi Sad. I ended up being there for nearly a month after fighting with Xue. She left for Bosnia. I stuck around, found a place on the top floor — luckily, I always got the top floor. It worked out for everybody involved. Keep that fucking lunatic on the roof!

I flew back to Thailand, Bangkok this time. I wanted to take a vow of disappearing into the palm trees, dreamily, with my cock in hand, pissing on the rest of the world.

But the Thai people were so beautiful, they endeared me to their language, culture, food, and simple-mindedness that reeked of something so pure and easy, I almost couldn’t fathom it. I stayed on the outskirts. Xue came back after I had a room overlooking the city, 22 floors up, with a rooftop pool on the 56th floor.

The best part of the past year was always lying on my back in a pool or in the ocean and staring at the sky, dreaming.

Xue and I flew to Bali together. Finally.

A dream come true.

Don Muang Airport, Bangkok, Thailand - Oct. 2019

On the way back from walking around the center of Ubud, we got drinks. She ordered the local arak. I wanted a cocktail. Blue nomad. Well, it sucked. And hers was what I’d wanted. Something to kick me in the teeth, nuts, stomach, and slap me across the face. To say, man. Life is the Dream. Drink it up. Drink it again. Then take that fucking motorbike for a spin.

Actually, I just wanted to enjoy myself. If that was at all possible in this life. Yeah?

We walked up the street, it was dark. People everywhere. Some were desperate. Some were over-privileged and they didn’t even know it. Some didn’t care about anything or anyone but themselves. I saw a woman sitting on a sidewalk near a place that sold coconuts. Shit, I wanted to drink from a coconut.

“Babe, let’s get coconuts. You want one?”

“No, I’m fine.”

She held my arm.

The woman had a child in her lap. The child was arched backward, moaning, eyes closed. Cranky.

I opened my wallet after paying for the dinner, I saw I had just enough left for a coconut.

“Hold this,” I gave Xue my cool new Bali shorts.

Walking across the street, I folded the bills in half. I got to the lady, held out my hand and gave the money to her.

“It’s only 20,000,” I said.

She smiled graciously. I turned around and walked back to Xue.

“Aw,” she said, “she looks so happy.”

“I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.” I told her.

The night burned with this certain chemistry of nonchalance that’s absolutely, most-assuredly inexplicable.