it was just a dream.

i sit in my stuffy corner cubicle pathetic excuse for an office separated from the nearest window by a 7-foot carpeted wall that divides nothing from nothing, twisting a coloured pencil round my fingers, cradling my head in my hand, when suddenly the phone rings. it’s my editor and he tells me to pack my bags, i’m headed to the Balkans to cover yet another outbreak of civil unrest that seems endemic to the region these days. it’s five days that i’m back from Niger and South Africa covering elections; i’m not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed. in my head i begin a long division equation to determine my present jet lag quotient. number of days travelling, times hours per voyage, divided by time zones crossed, minus hours of sleep lost in transit… but mostly i wonder when the hell i am going to be able to pick up my dry cleaning. i miss my pink shirt and it’s getting warm. cherry blossoms will be here soon.

back home i look online to find a recipe for pine needle tea. jenny says it cures depression, but only mild depression. i walk along 11th street for an hour and a half looking for evergreens. maybe this is why people in this city look so unhealthy.

a day and a half later i’m at an airport in a small city with no vowels in its name and one paved highway; this is the capital, i’m told flatly by my guide, a burly, unshaven man of about 60, balding in the back, in military fatigues with a McDonald’s pin on his lapel, a gift from another, more attractive female foreign correspondent, i’m told later that evening. i extend my hand and he gives me a bottle of water and a flak jacket. put this on. there is no time, he says. it would have been nice to have meet you. i’m unsure if he has misconjugated his verbs or actually spoke as he intended.

we wait half an hour to travel, until city lights are extinguished and the stars pepper the sky and draw shadows of mountains in the moonlight. our words are few and bitter in the canvas enclosed back seat of the Soviet army jeep he has commandeered to shuttle us to his operations center, a generous descriptor for what really consisted of seven or eight a-frames and a host of sweaty, noxious bodies lined side by side in the snowy remnants of scorched earth. cigarette, he offers. i see a faint smile on his chapped lips that seems to light up his face, and i notice that he has a lazy eye. i’ll smoke it in the morning, i say, as i put it in my pocket.

i never have a hard time sleeping in the field, no matter how unbearable the conditions, as they are this night. this stems from the fact that i cannot sleep on airplanes. i’ve never been able to. i can’t read, either, it gives me a headache.  all i can do is play computer solitaire. i don’t think i would really want to sleep, either, in case i miss a quiet chance to sit and stare into space and think about absolutely nothing. those moments are rare these days.

despite my restfulness i awake in the middle of the night, teary-eyed from the humid winter air and with a burning feeling of hunger in my stomach. i think about what i’ve eaten since i left washington and all i can remember is a handful of figs and a pack of life-savers. wintergreen. what does that mean, anyway, things aren’t really green in winter. you can’t even find pine needles for tea.

i’ve hardly sat up on my cot when i make out my guide crouching beside me, peering through a pair of night vision binoculars over the crest of the ledge our camp is perched upon, beyond the barbed wire fence we lean against. he thrusts his finger to his chapped lips and purses them. now he does not smile, but i really want to smoke that cigarette. i hear the cranking of rusty wheels down in the canyon below. they are constant and begin to get louder but i can see nothing. he stares devotedly through his lenses at the earth below and motions with his free hand to everyone crouching behind and eying below, be quiet, they’re close.

i don’t remember the sound, or the colour, or the smell of the explosion that immediately followed his gesture. i don’t remember seeing bodies or body parts flying about and blood colouring the dust and snow below our makeshift beds. i don’t remember the smell of burning oil from the upended improvised explosive that shattered the cold, almost suspended night air, or the screams, of many pitches, surrounding me in disparate foreign dialects. no, all i remember is the taste of blood in my mouth. that unmistakable, acidic iron flavour that doesn’t go away when you swallow. i do not remember if it was my own blood.

i do, however, remember that it is time to pick up my dry cleaning.

yes, please shut up, ass wipe.

i have come to believe, as have many other progressive folk, that Hugo Chavez, self-proclaimed ‘populist’ president of Venezuela, is little more than an autocratic, delusional megalomaniac.  he seems to have been infected from the start with the Latin American ‘Il Duce’ contagion that has swept the region in the many decades since european and american colonialism and imperialism bastardised the political elite and robbed the indigenous people of all their rights.

but yesterday, he received a well-deserved rebuke from one of the remnants of his country’s colonial legacy – King Juan Carlos of Spain – who told him to shut his face in the same manner one speaks to a child in Castilliano.  i have to admit, i was pretty amused to see it happen.

i’m now every bit as annoyed when idiots like Papa Chavez, Mah-moody Ahmadinejad and Comrade Vlad “Impaler” Putin throw around words like “Imperialist,” “dictator,” “tyrant,” and “fascist” with the same ease that Premier Bush uses American buzz words like “freedom,” “insurgents,” “terrorists” (pronounced “tersts” for my unenlightened foreign readers) and “enemies of democracy.”   I am by no means a violent individual, but I would like very much to invite these and other shit heads of state to my imaginary castle for a tea party, and then beat the crap out of them.  I will need help with Mr. Putin as he apparently knows some serious Kung Fu shiznit.  Any takers, please feel free to let me know.

seriously, has the word “freedom” been forever contaminated in anyone else’s mental lexicon?  I’ll never be able to walk through a “Freedom Plaza” or look at the much-maligned and prudently dreaded “Freedom Tower” in Lower Manhattan (anybody want 80th floor real estate?  If you want to buy that, I will sell you my fingernail clippings, because you are a moron) without conjuring up a mental image of our “folksy” president speaking with his stupid “commander-in-chief” windbreaker speaking in front of droves of tanks flanked by dozens of strikingly similar looking photoshopped troops.  I am angry that in my unfortunate mind he has usurped a word and a concept that i love and uphold and associated it with the invasion of another country.

speaking of idiots, unless you have been living in a black hole (or the East Coast) you may have heard that the Chinese have gifted our lovely Bay with 58,000 gallons of oil, just in time to seriously fuck up wildlife and delay the start of Dungeness crab season. apparently the jackass captain (who, it should be told, was not actually Chinese but a Bay Area based pilot) has a history of stupid shit like crashing into big bridges.  anyway, the incident probably caused a backlog of tankers all the way back to China full of lead-based toys, cheap colour TV sets, crappy garlic and slave-labour underwears.  just in time for Christmas shopping season!  which reminds me, note to self, see this movie when it comes out.

but alas, as i’ve argued time and time again, we are unable to sever ourselves from the incessant I.V. of cheap Chinese shit.  people wouldn’t pay $700 to include our fair-labour costs for a 24-inch CRT television made in the U.S. of A., not when they can get a perfectly good Chinese one (and the quality is improving quickly) for $150 at Wal-Mart (Wal-Mark, if you’re from Philly).  so the realpolitik can continue to bitch and moan about how China is becoming the next world superpower, whatever the fuck that means, while meanwhile we do our part to ensure it happens, and watch more and more oil-soaked Cosco Busan tankers head towards the sunset back to Shanghai to pick up more cheap underwears, whilst all we can do is watch them take the U.S. economy away with them.

as my brother is keen to point out, we have succumbed to decadence.  as with other empires in the past, this marks a heady downfall into dissolution.

i love conspiracy theorists. the insidious bastards, they’re even in australia! and look, we’ve taken England!

“and on the eighth day, God did say, ‘enough of this sh*t, i’m a go to Vegas, and bet the whole damn farm on Red 23.’ and thus God did betteth His whole Creation, and God did loseth, and the world thus began to stinketh.”

they call Las Vegas “sin city.” and if spending copious amounts of money on lavish meals with good friends and excessive spa treatments, well then yes, Mr. Post-card Cliché Man, call me a sinnah, and send me straight to hell so i can have some more green tea brought to me while i soak my patootie in a 170 degree hot spring. better stock up on sunblock and sno-cones.

Las Vegas is at least as hot as hell, and this is because it is in a desert. i remember “learning” in my religion classes (with the Atheist Jew professor who constantly told the Islamic scholars that they didn’t understand the Quran… remember that, Steve? and he called me a smartass, on more than one occassion) about how deserts are supposed to be sacred places of solitude and revelation. Mohammed went into one to be revealed to God, and so did Jesus, and Moses, and so on.

so leave it to the Church of American Hedonism to construct its many-tiered temples here in our very own desert, so we can reflect on the spiritual essence of those spinning wheels of plastic enameled with depictions of fruit, numbers and “bars” that purport to spin randomly but actually follow very specific patterns that lead you one-way to bankruptcy.

as you can tell, i’m not a fan of gambling. thus, i was hesitant about spending money i don’t have to go someplace where all you do is spend and lose money.

i arrived in Vegas with this preconstrued notion of hell on earth – strictly a metaphorical representation, but reinforced by the [lack of] air i experienced with my first breath outside the airport. if you’ve ever read The Stand by Stephen King, you know what i’m talking about – Vegas is hell to Boulder’s heaven at the Final Judgment.

America has wholly projected itself in Vegas: a land of opportunity in a wild and savage place, where one can strike gold with the fortunate push of a button and a little positive thinking. the grandiose palaces that line the Strip emanate American superiority; the lavish displays and abundant abuses of energy (probably enough to power sub-Saharan Africa for a year) represent our pride that teeters on hubris.

don’t get me wrong – i’m no Puritan – but as i arrived in this desert mirage such was my preponderance. it’s safe to say that changed over the course of the weekend. Vegas remains to me the playground of the rich, the beautiful, and those who wish they were both, but let’s be real: once you put me into a spa, my presuppositions were dissolved in the pure Zen bliss that is sitting in a hot bath as your shoulders receive a thunderous cascade of room-temperature raindrops.

yes, i did spend lots of time in pools of various temperatures, inside and outside, drunk and sober, and it did wonders for my senses. i flew out sunday night in an altered state of consciousness, and i didn’t touch any drugs. there was a point sitting in that hot tub that my mind melted and flowed through my veins like rosewater, sweetening every nerve along the way.

so, in a way, i suppose the desert did hold revelation and enlightenment. how’s that for turning a frown upside-down?

in sum, sorry, Mr. Stephen King, but i think that Carteret, New Jersey, is where hell will wind up being, when that day does come.

what happens in vegas doesn’t always stay in vegas, even though i didn’t take many pictures.  but Jon and Andy did.

i survived carteret, new jersey, and all i got was a lousy new muffler

carteret is the city that i have driven by probably more than a hundred times in my life, and every time i’ve passed it in recent memory i’ve commented either to myself or my unwitting passenger that carteret looks like what i had imagined Dis, the capital city in the sixth circle of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, to look like. it looks especially sinister at night, with unearthly smokestacks sending horrible blue and orange flames into the smog-filled skies. well, today i had the pleasure of materializing on the other side of those smoke stacks, and i found that Carteret is actually full of Portuguese people, which is not at all what i thought Hell would be like.

i heard an awful noise while trapsing along the Goethals Bridge listening to some electric blues from Peter Green and the original Fleetwood Mac at probably an abnormally high volume. a lot of old folks passed me in a Cadillac and gestured to the rear of my car. i had assumed that noise was some other Staten Island junkmobile but was chagrined to discover that my muffler had been dragging along behind me since the Belt Parkway, sending up a trail of sparks like the space shuttle Challenger. i pulled over at the entrance to exit 13 on the Turnpike and called AAA, only to have them tell me that solely the State Police can respond to turnpike emergencies. that makes about as much sense as the fact that it’s a federal crime to take pictures of the New Jersey Turnpike, about the last thing you would ever want to take pictures of. i will not miss the New Jersey Turnpike, especially the merge that some idiot designed at exit 8A.

for the record, the NJ state police that responded were a bunch of assholes. they seemed entirely unenthused to send somebody else to come and tow me and were disappointed that i couldn’t give my exact location down to GPS coordinates. the Portuguese guy who eventually came to tow me kept calling me ‘white boy’ and said there was ‘a lot more pussy in South Jersey than north jersey’ and that people were nicer there in general. i thought it was odd that a portuguese guy would call an italian guy ‘white boy.’ when he dropped me off at the Meineke in Carteret, he said, ‘these guys look like a bunch of Arabs.’ they were also portuguese. they gave me a decent break on a whole new exhaust system because i spoke a little portuguese and lied and said i had family in Corvilha, the only small town i know in portugal, because i interviewed for a job there once teaching italian and english. i didn’t know the word for ‘muffler,’ and i don’t know if they knew it, either, because they kept saying ‘muffler.’

needless to say, it doesn’t look like Spanish Justice II (for those of you who are unenlightened, this is the name of my 1987 Nissan 300ZX, pictured astutely below) will be taking any long trips anytime soon, or ever again, for that matter. so i think it will have to be Amtrak that gets me across the country. the air conditioner has also forsaken me. now, i am a hardy fellow, one who doesn’t rely on artificially generated oxygen when on the open road, especially with a convertible and a good pair of sunglasses. but i think the AC would be sorely missed, say, in Arizona in June.

i love my car, but she just keeps lettin me down. one thing after another. i think i will write a blues song about my car letting me down. i’ll post it up here.

random brooklyn memory: one day last week i passed the crotchety old lady in the shaded glasses that sits on her stoop chain smoking every morning as her granddaugther orbits her on a tricycle and she complains about the neighborhood changing to a passing hipster who pretends to care. i overheard her talking about the Second Coming. she said, ‘we only get Jesus one more time. that’s it. after that, no more Jesus.’

man. what a bummer.

music: U2, Zooropa
Peter Green & Fleetwood Mac, Live at the Boston Tea Party, Vol. 3