here: 2010-03-28

“It would be like putting a bumper sticker on a Ferrari,”

A striking blonde told me this once.

Today I reply:

My tattoo is much more permanent than some shit bumper sticker. This is more ‘pimp your ride’ than a, 'my dogma ate your karma,' bumper sticker.

Did you catch that?

I said, “my tattoo,” as in me, as in,

there is a tattoo on my body.

My once bare and exposed torso is now in the firm, protective clutch of the Rwandan Lowland Gorilla. He sits, straddling the left side of my body, looking behind me wherever I go. His thick arms and legs wrap around to my right side. His feet curl around my right oblique muscle and his arms are just below my right pectoral muscle, as if cupping my breast. The backs of my legs, extending up onto my lower back, are covered in a tranquil jungle scene featuring banana leaves glowing in African sunlight, rope-thick vines, and majestic ferns. Below my left calf, among the flora, I have hidden a small ant hill-

“Hey-hey! Those ants look awfully busy!”

Oh, don’t worry, I know what you’re thinking, Mom, I can hear you say,

"Daniel,

what about a water scene?

We know how you love the water."

Well, true.

I have been thinking of turning my chest into a tidal pool, so that within the arms of the embracing primate, viewers will feel as if they are staring into a coastal tidal pool, replete with crabs, barnacles and a bubbling clam. Ooh, and a bright orange starfish. Nice. My perfect abs will form the ripples in the water…

More later on the upcoming plans for my next tattoo. I’ll take any suggestions as well.

April Fools!

For my international friends:

April First is a day for telling lies and inflicting mild cruelties in a stealth and creative manner.

In Croatia, we have the same tradition, but the proper greeting is,

"April Fish!"

Really.

Now.

I knew that if I didn’t feed Old Man April Fool his obligatory prank/lie, you wouldn’t believe this next part.

Unfortunately,
I need to get this out today.

It must be today,
so forgive me the preceding, tasteless, but final attempt at a joke.

This is serious.

Here is my announcement:

I am done with writing.

There are no answers to be found.

This is the last written post.

You will continue to see the pictures- I will post them until my supply is depleted, as a way of unburdening myself of my past life.

You see, I have not been living like I should.

I have been living in various hash-dens, brothel-hostel amalgamations, and affiliating myself with manic-aggressive, expatriate-hobos in dank, illegal encampments.

I have been stealing sugar packets, crushing up caffeine pills, adding laundry detergent, mixing this, and selling it in the hostels as cocaine, code-named 'the hostel hound.'

I have stolen a Moroccan street musician’s bride (the real reason I have fled that particular layer of hellish, African depravity known as Essaouira) in the name of a despicable, misanthropic and culturally-divisive quest to 'break the burka.’ These are a only a few of the manifold reasons that lead me to confess:

I have not been leading the life of a 'good American,'
much less, that of a 'good person.'

So I have been reflecting.

Somehow the universe knows when a person is in need, and provides answers.

Here is what happened.

While hiking in Lake Plitvice, I felt myself drawn to the edge of the cliff.

I was ready to yield to the precipice,
to allow myself to drop over,
fall past the dolomite cliffs, and
sink into the turquoise pools where
the mallards siphon the water for food.

I stepped to the edge and thought,

"What a beautiful place for to make suicide."

Even in this darkest moment I was thinking in English tainted by excessive interaction with Moroccan street vendors.

With any luck, my body would be pulled towards,
then over the waterfall, and
hopefully would lodge itself amidst the rocks,
where it would be rendered irretrievable, and thus,
I would have quite a splendorous resting place;
a skeleton embedded within a waterfall in Croatia;
I would become a part of the waterfall.
I couldn’t plan a much better death.

I took my jacket off, so that the contents of the pockets (my notebook and camera) would be left as testaments to my short, but tumultuous life.

What would be made of my notebook?

I would be leaving behind odd etchings of simian forms inside the front cover of the “Dora L’Exploratrice” notebook I bought in Essaouira. They would find incoherent stream-of-consciousness musings, scratched out Sanskrit-like, devoid of all punctuation and rife with obscenity and masochistic proclamations. They would find the notebook itself, with the illustrated renderings of Dora the Explorer in a bikini on all fours on a beach, shoveling at the sand, and inviting a foray into the world of pedophilia.

Surely there would be a sort of strange, enigmatic beauty in both the claiming of this as my final moment, and the images of the Croatian authorities scrambling to decode the remnants I would leave in their care.

As I set my navy-colored, North Face jacket on an angular rock, easily visible from the trail, two jarring thoughts:

"In the end, it’s not who you fucked, but who you didn’t fuck,"

says a friend from Belgrade.

"God is the answer,"

says most of the world’s population.

In that instant, these two disparate thoughts seemed fused in truth.
In a flash of what can only be called divine intervention, a recent experience replayed itself in my mind.

There we were, having taken the obligatory painful line of sugar/caffeine/detergent, or the ’hostel hound,’ as my partner and I called it, (this way the backpackers believed it was legitimate) and,
having, subsequently,
just unburdened ourselves of/in our ’hound pounds,’ as we called the sixteen year old Albanian girls who would have sex in return for our drugs (sixteen is legal), I leaned down from my top bunk to initiate a high-five.

“Don’ git no bettah,”

I slurred.

“Shit,”

said my partner, who we will call Karlovac.

“This is, like, spiritual, man. Excessive debauchery and dissolution of morals; it’s somehow transcendent.”

“Komaja.”

I had never heard this word before, but it carried a certain allure. I didn’t get a chance then, to learn more.
The girls, Petra and Raja had returned and led us dutifully to the showers. It wasn’t until later that I learned about Komaja.

"Komaja is translated as, "the radiant love" and has combined, "intellectual and philosophical beliefs" with "naturism." It is about polyamory, tantric sex and the path to enlightenment through sex. I encourage you to visit their site, (http://www.komaja.org/) but like them, I point out that the site is not for "those readers who are offended by the sight of a naked human body."

Sounded good, I thought, but it seemed like some lecherous ruse to get girls naked. Not until that moment on the cliff at Plitvice did it all make sense.

Since,

I have left Plitvice, and have left there my old life.

I am making a promise to never revel in my evil ways again, and certainly, never to celebrate my personal brand of evil via narrative formats of any kind.

Traveling With a Monkey, it turned out, referred to 'maya,' to delusion. I have always been traveling with this burden. This is why I am done writing.

Until I can find my way spiritually, I will refrain from being tempted to spread my delusion into the world. I can no longer tell lies. We are all conduits- what we put into the system, comes out similarly.

Until I have become imbued with goodness, I have nothing to contribute to the world.

So thank you for understanding. I have my application in to Komaja's 'Love School.' If you want to know how you can help, please chant, “OM,” three times for me, and visualize me being accepted into Komaja.

I'll leave you with a few images from the Komaja website:

Here is the guru in India: