My Calves

It is impossible that my calves still hurt. I finished the Rakiura track ,which is not even that difficult a Great Walk, apparently, two and a half full days ago. I’ve been popping Motrin and stretching retroactively, the second part of which may be physiologically useless, but is the closest I’m going to get to actively seeking absolution for being dumb and trying to hike the tramp ridiculously hungover and without enough water, even if I wasn’t badly dehydrated.

Hi. I went to Harvard! How are you?

It seems that it is possible, though, because holy shit, ow. Ow. Ow ow Ow ow. Microsoft Word keeps trying to change my “ow”s, at least when they’re on top of each other, to “o wow,” which is nice of it. Wonder and shock are both better than self pity. I wish I could feel wonder or shock.

But instead, I reach down and squeeze my calves, but it doesn’t help anything to squeeze bags of lactic acid It just makes the lactic acid excited. The lactic acid is all “hey, Retardo McSuck is hiking again. Let’s throw a pain party, why don’t we?” And then the other lactic acids, being sheep, agree.

Fuck you, lactic acid. I’m going to Motrin you to death for twelve hours. We’ll see how you like that. I bet you won’t like it at all.

I’m writing this from a hostel room in Riverton, which is famous for beaches that will cut your feet if you try to walk on them barefoot. Every weekend, at least when the weather’s nice, people from all over southern New Zealand drive to Riverton to cut their feet and allow their children to cut their feet, at which point it is customary for said children to run screaming into the highway so that unemployed college grads who’ve been pretentiously referring to themselves as travel writers to impressed, unclean Europeans in hostel common rooms can feel guilty for the rest of their lives after mowing them down.

A note on European uncleanliness follows. Two words, dudes: bubonic plague. Good job not learning your lesson on that one.

The night before I stayed in Invercargill, in a really nice hostel I’m happy I was able to add to the guide. Unfortunately, the hostel owners – large, jovial lesbians, formerly masseuses - heard me mention to a fellow guest that I was writing for a travel guide, and were really frosty with me, as if I had tricked them earlier when I hadn’t blown my cover. I hate angering lesbians; lesbians should be my friends, I think. We’re on the same team. Only if we band together will we be able to defeat the wily male homosexuals and straight chicks. Group huddle! Judging from the last four sentences I just typed, I don’t think that was Motrin , but my calves no longer hurt, which is good enough for me and all these cartoon chipmunks dancing around in my peripheral vision.

Anyway, I met this 50 yr. old guy named Chris, who is a comic book author (prospective) and used to be a cartoonist for a number of regional New Zealand magazines. He’s clearly insane, but it’s pretty cool that he’s spent the past 20 years blowing through the country, Kerouac-style. He showed me a punch of self-laminated posters he had made for his comics, comics for he has drawn the covers but not written the actual material yet. They were, one after the other, awful, awful ideas. He drew a picture of one of his characters – Captain Kiwi, defender of Godzone – Godzone being Kiwi slang for New Zealand (“God’s own”), with a motivational message suggesting I at least try out writing before going to law school. I drew him an apologetic little comic strip in return. Chris is now my friend, and I am glad to have him

I also had a long conversation about literature with another native New Zealander who, having spent three years in Japan, is now cycling through her home country – she had ridden 65 km. the day I met her. I thought that was pretty cool. When I told her I was from Texas she told me about a Texan who had spent the first semester of his senior year in high school on her family’s farm when she was roughly his age, who had, in Texas, been part of a family that owned one of the biggest ranches still privately owned. Apparently the woman had assumed, with that background, that the guy knew how to ride a horse; he didn’t, and as a result broke his arm and led her to believe that all Texans are all swagger, no accomplishment. I broke her of this prejudice by attempting to swagger and failing, my mutinous calves exploding in pain and forcing me to sit down. See, I told her, some of us can’t even swagger. She recommended I read “Life of Pi,” which I’m going to steal from Joel, I think, because it has a tiger in it and tigers are rad.

I also recommended a bar in Invercargill I had added to a Swedish guy who asked me, knowing what I was doing here, if there was a good place close by to grab a beer. He had a good time, he told me this morning. Awesome.

This morning I had to do my remaining phonechecks for my second copybatch from a payphone because the group of Israelis who came in late the night before were on the line for an hour ad a half prior to checkout. They had spend much of the night explaining to a British woman about how mandatory conscription in the Israeli Defense Force had left them each with valuable skills they now applied to civilian life. One woman, who had just made dinner for the group, learned to cook in the IDF. The tall, dreadlocked man with an easy smile and the worst grasp of English of the lot of them had learned to solve a number of day to day problems – leaky faucets, kittens up trees, tax forms and the like - by indiscriminately bulldozing Palestinian settlements north of Tel Aviv, was another example.

That joke was unnecessary, but I really don’t like phone-checking from a payphone, and somebody had to pay. This time it was Israel. Pray that next time it isn’t you.