If you've ever wondered...

"how does a journalist remain fair and balanced?"

...then my new story in Matador Network is probably too hip for you.

read it here: Notes on Trying to be Famous

"I’d dream of performing to sold-out crowds. Because I was what music moguls called a “specialty singer,” my plan was to start small, singing backup for artists like Björk or Meredith Monk until being discovered."

Duck Hunting in America

If you haven't read it already, hurry over to Matador Sports and check out my latest story  

How to Shoot a Duck : ...Finding the juxtaposition between shotguns, camouflage, Larry the Cable Guy, and history....

"I didn’t notice the kick of the gun so much as the water rise up around him. When it settled, the duck was half submerged, floating like a ruined toupee."


     Thank you for reading, and big ups to David Miller for another fantastic layout...

NEW!! Published in Matador Network

 This is my new story published in Matador Nights. 

    You can read it right here How to Feed Your Lover in Spain

Big ups to David Miller for another great editing job, and thank you, dear reader, for the great comments.

Notes From My Travel Diary: Going Topless

On a summer afternoon in Düsseldorf, I went to the park and sat beside a willow tree with a steak sandwich and bottle of beer. An emerald lawn, a crushed brick walkway, hedges like walls -- no ultimate Frisbee tournaments happening here. After finishing my sandwich, I wanted to get some sun but was concerned about taking my shirt off. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after two years, it’s that Germans take their park-going very seriously.

There were an awful lot of stuffy pant / jacket combos and stern expressions. I could understand it if we were in a cemetery or locked in a conference room together, but this was a park. Who were these people? One woman was wearing black polyester pants and a quilted Chinese jacket. It looked like the sort of outfit Lady Mao might have worn while she typed up “The Little Red Book.” Which was worse -- enduring the critical stares from (mostly senior) passers-by or the shame of living with a farmer’s tan?

   
Fortunately the man sitting on a bench by the fountain made this decision easier. He was tanning, shirtless, but his belly spilled over his shorts in a way that made him look both naked and pregnant. A kinky tableau. As with most unfair comparisons, he made me feel better, not just about taking off my shirt, but basically about my existence. The sun felt good, and after taking off my shirt I decided to hike up my pants legs to my knees. But why stop there? Rest the beer bottle on your stomach, I thought. It’ll feel good.
   
And it did. Throw in a kitty pool, and you’d have a scene straight out the trailer park.

**

Notes From My Travel Diary: Kebab Allah

Suzhou, China: Every Friday I’d pay the equivalent of thirty cents and ride the bus to Shi Quan Jie. This was a street in the old district, where the walls where whitewashed, and the roofs had sweeping slopes, upturned eaves, and ceramic tiles. Few of the buildings reached over three stories high. Large birch trees lined the two lane road, flanked on either side by bubble tea stands, black market DVD shops, and boutiques showcasing China’s puzzling take on high fashion.


On my way to find a wok, I stopped at a Chinese Muslim restaurant where everyone, including the child waiters, wore tight knitted caps. The menu was in Chinese, with English translations beneath it.

Some dishes sounded peaceful: “The hashed meat meditates.”
Some sounded dangerous: “The palace explodes the diced chicken rice.”
And others were downright spooky: “Digs up the beef red.”

The sun was shining. I walked to the take-out shack attached to the restaurant. The griller was just standing around with a blue filter cigarette in his lips when I arrived. I told him how many curried lamb kebabs I wanted in Mandarin. “Sanga.” I then held up three fingers.


He screwed up his face at me. Then he held up his hand, outstretched his fingers and said “Wooga.” Five.

Was this his way of telling me that I was too skinny? Perhaps, but something told me this offer was non-negotiable. I waited for my five kebabs at an outside table. The legs might have been rat-gnawed. It stood on an open area of hardened clay between the sidewalk and a canal.


For the first two minutes, the kebab griller tapped the skewered sticks of meat above the coals. Then he stepped away from the embers to catcall a girl clicking down the sidewalk in high heels. It wasn’t subtle, whatever he said, but she turned up her nose and kept walking. Real cool. He leered at her and then turned to me, thumbing in her direction as if to say Women, go figure.


The griller brought over my kebabs and a flatbread in a plastic sleeve that read “crusty pancake.” He went back to the grill station, picked up an old copper kettle and came back to sit across from me. I’d watched his assistant – the boy baking crusty pancakes – use that same kettle to brew a cup of tea just moments earlier. Steam was still rising from the spout.

I tore off a piece of crusty pancake, and when I looked up, the griller was sucking on the spout. He was really gulping it down, and, just when I thought steam might billow out his ears, he set down the kettle and belched.

After lunch, I pulled out my notebook to make a few notes, referring to him not as “the kebab griller” but as “Kebab Allah.”


Kebab Allah burned his sleeve on a coal.


Kebab Allah threatened his assistant with a bamboo skewer again.


I’m not saying the man walked on water; however, in its own special way, watching him work did have a purifying effect on me. And he made a pretty mean kebab.

How I Came Up With My Blog Title

It wasn’t something we’d planned on, but after two years in China, my wife and I picked up and moved to Düsseldorf, Germany. It wasn’t the last place we thought we’d end up: Neither of us had ever heard of it. We arrived in Germany two months before our shipment. A microwave cooked our pizzas. Suitcases doubled as tables. At night we’d lie on the floor of our empty apartment, staring at the ceiling and wondering if the Universe had sent us here for a reason. Things could have been worse, but still, I was hoping for some sort of explanation.

A few months after settling in, Takayo and I attended a dinner party thrown by one of her colleagues. I sat across the table from Hans, a tightly-wound life coach from Berlin. He had arrived late, dressed from head to toe in Eddie Bauer, with a pair of Ray Bands dangling from his neck by a rubber tube. His gray moustache screamed 60, but he checked his phone with the enthusiasm of a teenage girl. We talked between incoming texts.

"Zo," he said, "do you have a favorite German dish?"

I told him “schweinshaxe,” or pork knuckle, cooked till crispy on a wall of fire. He seemed impressed, so I told him about Dan’s Old Farmhouse, a German restaurant in China, adorned with wagon wheels and thick-ankled waitresses.

            “It got out of control,” I continued. “Everything was ‘pork knuckle' this and ‘pork knuckle' that. I saw pork knuckles in my dreams.”

            He found this amusing. “You see what happened, don’t you?  It was NLP: Neuro-Linguistic Programming. You thought about the pork knuckle again and again until—well, here you are.”

Hans sat back in his chair, seeming very pleased with his elucidation. I liked how simple he made it sound, but as it stood, this whole “flying pork knuckle” theory was a bit airy-fairy.

“So,” I said, “are you telling me that pork knuckles caused the school to lay off my wife so we could end up in Germany?”

“You would be surprised at what powers the mind is capable of.”

There was a watercolor hanging on the wall above Hans, a splashy bouquet of flowers bursting from a melted vase. As he spoke, I pictured it falling down and smashing over his head. The sound of breaking glass fills the room, and everyone looks over and sees Hans’ head bursting through the frame like a daffodil. Again and again I imagined this until—of course nothing happened.

“I ate a Hawaiian pizza last Christmas,” I said. “Now, where’s my trip to Honolulu?”
He had to laugh like hell at that, but the conversation was shot.

Usually, I make a point of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Ask the right questions, and folks will generally surprise you. Hans, however, struck me as the type who read medical journals, then, whenever someone sneezed, mindlessly named off some corresponding disease. You might think now here’s a guy that loves to hear the sound of his own voice. And he might be. The problem is—in the back of your mind—you know there’s a slim chance that he might be right.
And, oh, did I hate him for that.

So, what if I was wrong? Perhaps what we think about most does help guide, in unforeseeable ways, our direction in life. We internalize food. But does it also internalize us?
At the time, my wife and I weren't ready to leave China. There was, we felt, still more to accomplish. The pork knuckle, however, had other ideas.
Anyway, life is good. But still, I wonder what would have happened if we'd obsessed over an Ethiopian or Siberian restaurant. I’m sure they’re nice-enough places, but let’s be honest: things could have turned a lot out worse.

Bedtime for Democracy

So Sarah Palin, the President of the United States, which was subject to repossession by China, enacted the “Word Tax” to keep the White House from going into foreclosure. Citizens living inside all city limits were taxed for both spoken and written word. This was tracked by a “Freedom Chip” which was implanted in the back of the neck. The procedure was mandatory and often performed at veterinary clinics. Only politicians and pornographers could afford to be treated by human doctors. Folks didn’t appreciate being treated like animals, but under the “New Patriot Act,” complaining was deemed a commodity, and thus taxable. Someone suffering a broken arm or stroke had to wait while, say, a guinea pig had a marble surgically removed from its anus.

The only folks that survived in the real world were the Field Dwellers. A Field Dweller was someone who lived in the country. Everyone was required to receive a Freedom Chip, but it wasn’t directly enforced. Those without Freedom Chips were considered “Persons with Non-Competencies.” The tax man could shut off your phone, internet, lights, whatever, but they didn’t come looking for you. Like most people, they were scared of the real world. Aside from bullying folks on social media, digital bank accounts or email, they were as harmless as housecats.

Technology helped us think beyond our brains, but the information slowly dried up. “Selectively cleansed,” claimed the government, but that didn’t keep folks from depending on it.

My days, I decided, were numbered. After receiving the letter from Brigadoon Animal Hospital informing me of my Freedom Chip appointment, I left town. After packing a suitcase, I drove South using back-country roads and spent the night in my car. The next morning, I remembered something from my childhood: a trailer colony in the middle of a dirt farm. Growing up, our family used to pass it when we took the short cut to Raleigh. I’d look out the window of our Chevy Blazer, surrounded by soy bean and cotton fields, before coming to the cross roads. For someone who grew up on the beach, out there seemed like the most remote place in the world. The stop sign was peppered with bullets. My dad didn’t even brake—he just raised his arms and yelled “rolling stop” as we blew right through it.

There were, I remember, four to six trailers at this intersection. They encircled a large, steel-beam radio tower that you could see for miles. Aside from the laundry drying outside, the trailers looked abandoned. I wondered why anyone would live there, and so close to a radio tower. It had been an obsession growing up, these freakish people committing horrible atrocities inside. But why that? Why not thoughts of more? More money; a bigger promotion? I thought of that as I drove toward the tower. The tenacious strive toward success. It was always just out of reach. I killed the engine before the stop sign. The fields were barren now, and stretched into the distance in each direction.

I was in insurance when the government began scaling back the economy. A few folks saw it coming. Our company sold all the ergonomically designed chairs and installed coin operated locks on the bathroom stalls. They traded my BMW company car for a Chinese sedan. They did, however, let me keep my company girlfriend, who was specifically designed to “enhance” my lifestyle: She was prone to debt, prescription drug-induced crying jags, and had breasts engineered to near perfection.

Thus did consumerism and procreation go hand in hand.

Field dwellers didn’t have breast implants or bald pubic regions. These things had nothing to do with survival. Daily life revolved around the radio tower, or rather, what the tower provided. Grandma had an aluminum hip that intercepted phone calls late at night. Like I said, politicians and pornographers could afford to speak in whole sentences, and did so in great detail about anything they pleased. Overhearing an educated conversation like that would have cost five thousand dollars. That’s how much it cost to ‘unlock’ this particular radio channel. Even the rich weren’t granted total privacy. When the signal wasn’t great, we’d stick our ear directly against Grandma’s hip. This minimized the "tinny" sound so we could hear more clearly.

A low, steady hum was always present around the tower. The trailers would sometimes vibrate, but it didn’t vibrate people so much as it permeated them. We all sat in plastic lawn chairs in the back yard. Every meal was barbequed on an open pit, and little Joey would run barefoot from one trailer to the next.

“Momma says ‘the hummin’ is God talking to Himself while he’s doing his work.”

“Great Joey,” I’d say. “Now run over and fetch me a jar of moonshine.” 

It was still strange to me, hearing folks talk about God. Aside from OMG, which was changed from Oh My God to Oh My Gosh, talking about God beyond the context of Freedom was forbidden and taxable. The pornographers discussed ways to implement God into film plots, but this was done subtly, usually by symbolism, since no one understood big words anymore. For most folks, acronyms were cheaper and conveyed most thoughts.

“God microwaves our home with his love and hummin’ powers.”

“Did your momma tell you that, Joey?”

When asked a question, Joey would sometimes gaze up to the red blinking light. I had no idea he was looking up there for guidance.

“I think about hummin’ and how come other places don’t hum.”

“How do you know other places don’t hum?” I said.

“Well…look at you. I beg your pardon, but you’re dumber than a stump.”

It was true. Aside from my 30 years of life experience, I was no smarter than this child. At ten years old, he rebuilt the carburetor in my Chinese sedan. He could kill, pluck and gut a chicken in 4 minutes flat. He even knew how to brew moonshine using an old copper milk can. He’d mix in the corn and water and whatever else, pausing every so often to gaze up at the tower.

**