If there's nothing missing in her life how come these tears come at night?

People think a man like me, a man who is self-effacing, if beautiful, and who reportedly rolls up his shirtsleeves and has been known to swagger on occasion, a man who drinks his coffee black despite being demonstrably white, a man of contradictions, cannot love Britney Spears because any affection I would have for her and her music would be intercepted and overrun by irony. After all, Justin Timberlake's facility with and inclination towards what Arthur Miller called "the I slept with Marilyn Monroe device (irony)" reportedly broke him and Britney up oh those many years ago.

I love you, baby.

Love me...ironically?

Damn, baby, don't play me like that.

You know what, Justin, I'm beginning to think you're the one who's playing me.

I'm sorry, I didn't hear that last thing, I was writing a song called "Senorita." It is about a girl with latin flavor who I would like to get with, either because of or despite said latin flavor.

I said I was beginning to think you were the one playing me.

Fine then, let's break up (no, let's not, I love you).

Fine (Oh dearest, my heart is a reservoir of pain that only grows more full the more your words break down its walls).

Let me tell you something, people: I own all three Britney Spears albums. While I have yet to purchase My Prerogative, I have downloaded via iTunes the parts that weren't on her previous releases. So think again before judging me, is all I'm saying.

I'm back in Boston. I should have my old cell phone number up and running by the time you read this, or, in the case of Jesse Andrews, have this read to you by someone who isn't functionally illiterate. I got you!

Vietnam is not easy

I forgot to mention this earlier, but Joel and I went to Vietnam a week and a half ago when we were in Phnom Penh. We spent a night in Ho Chi Minh, and then came back. It was nice, in a profound way, sort of like a raspberry tart that tells you you were adopted but is still really, really delicious. I've been collecting my thoughts vis a vis the journey and what it meant to me, which is why I haven't mentioned it in this medium yet.

Long story short: Vietnam is not easy.

J

Dolphin Dolphin Dolphin Dolphin I Love You

One of the few things that can be said, that I can say, to the credit of the guesthouse Joel and I wound up staying at in Siem Reap is that it is conveniently located in relation to Star Mart, which is probably the best convenience store in town, and in any case has both peanut and classic M&Ms. This is no small thing, and if you think otherwise I'm going to go ahead and guess you've never travelled in the developing world for any length of time. The charm, such that it is, of meat-on-stick stalls and noisy street markets in which fifty percent of the goods offered are ceramic cats that wave at you every second faded quickly for Joel and myself, at least as far as everyday shopping needs goes. Now, with the fashionable and jaded air of savvy travelers past, present and future, we make our purchases in air conditioned comfort from polite/at-the-same-time extremely surly counter help.

We buy bottled water - 1.5 liters for 40 cents - three or four times a day. Usually Joel purchases orange juice in a rectangular, East of Eden sized carton, and sometimes an ice cream bar as well. One time early on I bought some sweet potato crisps in a bag soaking in japanese lettering, but they were not very good; now I limit myself to the occasional can of Pringles, which taste the same in Cambodia as they do in Kansas.

We're pretty sure Star Mart is an Australian chain; there were several on New Zealand's North Island, literally dozens in Auckland alone. In New Zealand, where and when we were not just budget travel(l? let's say three "l"s, just to keep Webster from getting complacent)llers but Prophets of Budget Travel, we avoided Star Marts as if they had a reputation for vomiting acid; they were overpriced, sometimes to the tune of $1 overpriced for a $4 purchase. In Cambodia, the mark up is more like 200 percent, but we just can't stay away. I won't - goddamnit, I just can't - pretend that some of the place's appeal, along with convenience and the air conditioning, is the etent to which it reminds us of home.

One of the few things diluting this effect, a last minute curb on the force of the reminder, are the Cambodian Beggar Children who loiter in front of the spotless glass doors of the Star Mart, seemingly 24 hours a day, children who wear instead of shoes tissue boxes taped around their feet - and, if you're wondering, there's no way a roll of duct tape costs less than sandals, I've done the comparison shopping while here. These children know us by now, they knew us the first time they saw us because they could tell that we were white (truth be told, Joel's the only one who looks white, I am now indistinguishable from a svelte Somoan or maybaps a husky filipino, due to my wicked suntan). When we walk into Star Mart they hold us up for a second by standing between us and the automatic doors, clasped fingers bent articulately at their mouths as if not only to indicate hunger, but to suggest that without our help they may well be compelled to eat their hands. When we walk out, carrying junk food and purified water, they murmur disconnected words in progressively quieter voices: "moneys," "sir," and "please." Failing that, they meow after us, exactly like cats. I don't know.

It's hard to express how difficult it is to separate the quite appropriate "look straight ahead and keep walking" approach you find yourself developing, almost unconsciously, to negotiate vendors, tuk tuk drivers, etc while in a place like Cambodia, and the more suspect "look straight ahead and keep walking" approach you find yourself adopting with regard to the miles and miles of poverty and suffering Cambodia brings with it into it's new tourist golden age. You don't know how hard hearted you are until you've shaken your head and pushed past a kid who's clearly operating no scam when he follows you across what should be a sidewalk, asking for help.

Another thing that separates Star Marts in Siem Reap from the ones in Auckland is that you are unlikely to find, walking into the Star Mart adjacent to base backpackers in Auckland's central city, two western men impressing their recently purchased companions with a fifty dollar snack food purchase. Which Joel and I did two nights ago, when we stopped back from this really nice Cambodian - you'd be surprised how hard it is to find an actual Cambodian place in the newly wealthy Siem Reap, although most places have a few Khmer dishes on the menu, and make them exceptionally well - restaurant across the river to get some water before going to bed.

At first it wasn't clear what was going on, in the same way it's never exactly clear what's going on immediately you jump from a rock ledge into the ocean, or in the way you've got to rely on your months of training at Fort Dix to get you safely to the trenches on the other side of the beach upon landing at Normandy, because all is blood and death and machine gun fire, and your Lt. was in the front of the amphibious landing craft when you landed, and everyone in the front of the landing craft was killed before the gangplank was all the way down. What was immediately clear was that two large men and two extremely small women - girls? No, not girls. Sex with children, the Siem Reap Tourist Guide tells us, is a crime. These women were, at the youngest, 15 - were careening through the four short aisles of Star Mart, the women gathering up cookies and skin care products, the men urging them on. Joel got in line ahead of them and watched their elaborate checkout process from a few yards away, I was just behind. It took a while for the counter lady to ring up 50 dollars in products - most of the products were under a dollar, I imagine. While she worked, the two guys stood a few feet away from their prostitutes and, I kid you not, because when it comes to sexual economics, I am pretty much "just the facts," as you've no doubt by now learned - started punching each other in the arm excitedly, giggling. Joel was reminded of little kids in a candy store. I was reminded of two overweight, 35ish guys, one balding and taller than his friend and possibly American, the other either Kiwi or Aussie, with a sort of not quite mullet thing going on and a thin, but strangely in your face bristled forward moustache that would probably - I don't know much about fashion, so let's leave it at probably - damn him to hell if the sexual exploitation didn't already, who were not at all drunk but were really, really happy to be having sex with girls they were paying for sex who were also less than half their age and probably exactly half their size. They were wearing identical stone-washed jeans, the girls. The guys were both wearing pants that, while not exceptionally tight, made their torsos, introduced by thick handles of flesh more aptly described as loveless, spill out improbably into space above their waistline. They looked like polio survivors.

As eager as they were to have the evening continue as their finances dictated, they were more eager to impress the woman at the counter and, by extension, their girls for the night, who Joel and I have been referring to as their "lady massages" because that's what we keep being offered by tuk tuk drivers when we decline their offer for a ride. Tuk tuk? No, we're just walking, thanks. Lady massage? No, no, thanks, we can massage each other. When told the bill was going to be 50 dollars and change, the two guys, who I have not named here out of respect for the fact that I have already used Fernando McGuy and Fernando McBalls in the blog entry below, staged a brief show argument over who would pay - the central argument on both sides was that both, in fact, had *plenty* of money, so it was no sweat over either one's back, before one ponied up the cash. They then loudly and smilingly assured the counter woman that yes, the fifty dollar bill they had handed her was real - after all, they were more or less experts in large units of currency, having seen so many 50 dollar bills before, before making their way back to the taxi waiting for them outside. The taxi was a car, and like most cars had five seats, but the bigger man sat up front with his lady friend in his lap, so as to give his friend and the other prostitute sole usage of the back seat on the ride back to their guesthouse.

Joel and I watched a bit of one of the fifteen karaoke channels we get in our room last night, and for a while they were playing children's music, or at least music sung by children. One of the songs was called "Dolphin Dolphin Dolphin Dolphin I Love You," and the lyrics were as follows.

I love you dolphin
can I swim with you?

I love you dolphin
can I be with you?

I love you dolphin
can I jump with you?

I love you dolphin
can I play with you?

dolphin dolphin dolphin dolphin
I love you

you and me can be together for a long time
because we know that love is
love is to share

(repeat)

The song, was played, with the lyrics scrolling along the bottom and becoming highlighted in time so you could sing along, was accompanied by pictures of adult spider monkeys playing in a zoo. There's something to be said, I think, for cultural exchange; that said, I find that the farther and farther I get from what I hilariously thought of as my "comfort zone" in terms of travellling, distance, hygeine standards, you name it, and the less that "comfort zone" seems to be a limiting factor in what I can experience on the road, the more I permanently decrutch myself from it, or whatever, the more apparent my failure to escape the subtle, apparently universal, astronomy of unkind men becomes. Or, you know, where I fit into it. So that's, I guess, the moral for this blog entry.

Milwaukee 10, Pittsburgh 2

You'll forgive the title; precariously localed as I am in the Cambodian wilds, my one connection to the United States occurs upon the occasion of Pittsburgh Pirates losses. Please try to understand, friends and neighbors, when I tell you that it is heart rending - heart. rending. - to only truly feel American once, sometimes twice, and in the rare case of a bizarre triple header, thrice a day.

Pirates = sux, is what I'm trying to say. Incompetent in the baseball department, ugly in the wife department, in short: Bill Cowher's protuberant maw cry if you want, nobody's going to save you, you got drafted by the mo'fucking Pirates scary-sad.

Today Joel and I were walking around Angkor Thom - or, as we jokingly referred to it, Uncle Tom, but stopped when Joel got the cholera and was called up to heaven besides a heavenly host - and we were having a pretty good time. After only 45 minutes of recriminations and bad blood between ourselves and the two warring moto cartels vying for our time, we were climbing about amongst the 8000 faces of Bayon, eagerly trying to spot monkeys along the 1.5 km road up from the South Gates, so as to avoid them, as we've learned that monkeys are vicious, etc.

And then we wander over past the Elephant Terrace towards the Bophuon, which is this huge three tiered mountain temple with overlapping artistic influence from both the Hindu Angkor period (it was originally built in the 11th century as a shrine to Shiva) and the Buddhist period(last night someone graffitotagged "Buddha OWNZ!") of the 16th century. And this 15 or 16 year old who had been idling nearby gloms on to us and is all "the Bophuon is closed, go this way instead." Bear in mind that the "X is closed" scam was one of the first we ran into a week and a half ago upon arriving to Thailand, and that the best way to deal with that kind of con-artist is to just keep walking until he goes away. So Joel and I keep walking, keeping up a friendly conversation with the kid and occasionally grimacing Americanly at each other. Conversation is as follows.

Him: Where you come from?

Us: The States.

Him: ???

Us: U.S.A.

Him: Big country!

Us: Yes. (Joel: Yeah-h-h. Me: It sure is!)

Him: What state you from?

Joel: Massachusetts.

Him: What are your names?

Us: Fernando McGuy and Fernando McBalls, respectively.

Him: You fly in from Bangkok?

Us: No, we took the bus.

Him: Oh, bumpy! [ the road from Poipet to Siem Reap is indeed really bumpy. We indicate agreement.]

At about this point he starts launching into some trivia about the area, the Bophuon, and the nearby Royal Palace. This, again, is stock for the "X is closed" scam. Eventually we pick up, though, that this guy is trying to become a tour guide. We pick this up when he's all - okay, you go over there, I'll wait for you take you around and you give me some money for school. And we're all, no. And he's all, to pay my teacher! And we're all, suck it, teachers. And he's all, I told you about the things and you fucking owe me/ I will tell you about the things and it will be worth it! [ it's unclear whether he's saying one or the other, because English-speaking Cambodians only use the present tense. Non-verbal cues - he was waving an axe at Joel - indicate the former interpretation may be warranted. But we extricate ourselves by walking away and hiding for a while.

An hour or so and a couple of wicked-ass spiritual sites later, we're wandering about in a Kleang, which is the name given to each of a series of temples built by the Cambodian people in 1991 to honor the evil master-mind who gave Shredder his marching orders on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Animated Series, when a little kid comes up to us and mentions that there are 40 - not 39, 40 - Buddhas awaiting us just a few meters past the Kleang. Ruh roh, Shaggy, I say to Thomas Bechtold, vis a vis Joel. Then the kid asks us where we're from. We say USA. He says: "big country!"

If you're catching on to the fact that there are at least several hundred kids with exactly - question for question, response for response - the same spiel lurking about withing the confines of Angkor Thom, you're right. When we hit Urchin Numero The Third in the gap between the inner and outer walls of the Terrace of the Leper King, Joel was quick enough to answer " a big country" to the where are you from question. No hesitation from our new friend, Sen : "USA!"

Cambodia - so goods.

We're getting off the bus in Phnom Penh, and at first glance the bus station appears to be the parking lot of one of Cambodia's few actual gas stations - most of the places to get petrol we've seen have been roadside stands with gas in 2 liter soda bottles. There are approximately 100 moto drivers waiting for us.

We got this bus as it was pulling away from the station in Siam Riep - our tuk tuk driver apparently worked for a particular company, so had gone out of his way to make sure we were late arriving for any other bus but theirs. Luckily, by pointing at Joel and asking if he would go and see if there were any seats available on the bus that was driving away, I was able to secure us a seat on that bus. 3 dollars, too. Rock on.

Anyway, six hours later we're pulling into Phnom Penh anfter a bus drive that featured several Khmer Khomedies - gay dudes in matching outfits trying to hitch rides, fat people stealing melons, women pissed off like whoa - all of which were stopped approximately every five seconds when the laser disc skipped. Also there were chickens on the bus. So we're getting off, and we're the last off the bus, but virtually all the others on the bus were either Khmer or Khmer enough not to need to get a tuk tuk, so Joel and I have become, in a very real sense, the last great white hope for these amassed moto drivers. I'm screwing around with my bag, so Joel walks to the door of the bus, looks down upon all the drivers, and asks: "does anyone have... a tuk tuk?"

The good thing about traveling with Joel is you know you will be largely blameless in your own rapidly approaching death.

Phnom Penh was good - we took it easy/expensive at a riverfront hotel and ate a lot of Italian food in between visits to the Killing Fields and the National Museum, the former of which was beyond all expectations in terms of quiet horror, and Í've seen that Sam Waterston movie, so I was expecting to be punched in the gut with it. Wé've got a seat reserved on the early morning bus to Siem Riap - Khmer, incidentally, for "go fuck yourself, Thailand," which I find pretty funny given the town's recent fame as the spiritual home of stately Cambodian architecture.

I just bought a shirt at the Foreign Correspondents Club which has a swank balcony bar overlooking the Mekong delta. I kept hoping someone would challenge my credentials for being in the bar - there hasn't been a restriction on non-press for years and years - so I could press pass the insolent bastards, for old time's sake.

One Night in Bangkok and the World's Your Oyster

Two nights in Bangkok and you think you should probably leave the backpacker ghetto - a phrase which isn't an offensively small-minded way of thinking about a well-touristed roadway, incidentally, but instead a way of subverting the tragedy of racial segregation throughout the 20th century, and is in that sense actually pretty brave, when you think about it/are an editor for Lonely fucking Planet, apparently -, Thanon Khao Sa(h)(r)(??!)n which has rooms for US $4 a night but also has

GERMAN PEOPLE WHO ARE LOUD AND 19 AND WEARING DOPEY SARONGS ALL AT THE SAME TIME! WOULD YOU LIKE TO PURCHASE A T-SHIRT WITH THAI SCRIPT ON IT IN PLACE OF THE WORDS "RED BULL" ON THE RED BULL LOGO? WOULD I EVER!!!!! I'M GERMAN!!!!

and is not particularly authentic, or nice smelling. The problem with this plan, this dream of escaping pungent Khao Sarrrrrrrn Rd. is that there is literally no part of Bangkok that isn't bad to smell. It's like living in Jesse's sock drawer. You think you'll be okay if you get away from the athletic socks, but then - oh boy! - there's the argyles, waiting to stink you up but good. Suck it, Jesse.

So Joel and I are in Cambodia now - in Bangkok, Joel and I did Wat Pho, Chinatown, and the Grand Palace ( I realized I had acclamatized nicely when I went apeshit over the 250 baht ($7) entry fee to the latter, which is huge and awesome. When we get back to Bangkok before flying out, we'll hit up the weekend market. At that point, we gather, we'll have seen all of Bangkok worth seeing if you're not into sexual exploitation, which I'm firmly convinced I'm not and many, many tuk-tuk drivers seem convinced I am. My favorite thing about tuk tuk drivers? The fact that if you say no and look vaguely disgusted when they ask if you want to go to a whorehouse, their response is to grow steadily more sexually explicit. Once again, comparisons to Jesse Andrews' sock drawer abound.

One of the things a guidebook will tell you about Bangkok is that it is full of people trying to scam you. The most famous and popular scam is the "Grand Palace is closed today" scam, in which a nicely dressed Thai dude, usually posing as a student, walks up to you as you head towards Wat Pho or the Grand Palace and informs you that the attractions you're heading for are closed. My favorite explanation for why these places might be closed was: ceremony! You can't go into temple. Ceremony! Important ceremony today. Maybe you had to be there. No entry into the temple! Important temple ceremony. Today very special for Buddhism, it is the third to last day in March, the most Buddhist of all days in March! Thus, ceremony! Perhaps you want to go whoring?

In any case, at this point the tuk tuk drivers say they'll take you on a free tour of the city or whatever, and once you're in the tuk tuk you're driven... somewhere to purchase something you don't want to purchase. You will be obligated, at pain of social awkwardness among people demonstrably without tact, to either purchase something or... refuse to purchase anything. Sounds pretty tame? It is.

Especially compared to Cambodia, which I've only been in for 15 hrs or so, but is worlds and worlds apart from Thailand. In Thailand, there are skytrains and subways and internet cafes and dudes from Connecticut named Kyle. Hi. I'm Kyle from Connecticut. This fall I will be attending Penn State. Beer is great. Will you be my friend? No, Kyle, I will not. In Cambodia, there is crushing poverty and a pronounced lack of infrastructure. In Thailand, you have to watch your step or you'll find yourself forced to pay a hundred baht to make your way out of a sex club. In Cambodia, decades and decades of unimaginably savage civil war has left an expansive, multi-dimensional network of physical and emotional scarring unlike any you can imagine. Yeah, I'm talking to you, you unimaginative and complacent farang. You don't like it? Lump it. The common thread for these two countries is, of course, their shared love of humidity and stray dogs.

Also, neither Cambodia nor Thailand seem to have Bagel Crisps, a snack from my youth I discovered anew in New Zealand, so I'm feeling pretty down about Southeast Asia