8 hours, 25 minutes left.

It didn't take too many days of driving 200 miles round-trip to and from work for me to figure out that audiobooks were probably going to save my sanity. In point of fact, it took two days. Two days of driving from Phoenix to Tucson and back, jamming at the radio station presets like the Morse Code guy on the Titanic. There's a spot somewhere out there between the two cities where there aren't any radio channels at all, none, zero, and it is Not Good. If you haven't ever driven from Phoenix to Tucson, and I know a lot of you haven't, imagine driving on the moon at 85 miles-per-hour right after the moon decides to shoot itself in the face. That shit is BLEAK. And you need to occupy yourself somehow so you don't catch yourself on the lookout for burning tire cities or diesel Jeeps full of marauding pirates.

So I downloaded a bunch of audiobooks to my iPhone. The first book I listened to was Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. I have absolutely no idea why I chose this particular book, since I've never read anything by Stephen King and never particularly regretted that decision. But this was the book I chose, right, so let's do this. I got approximately FOUR HOURS into this thing-- four hours out of a total fourteen-- before I finally and mercifully figured out that I was listening to a collection of three short stories and not a fourteen hour novel. That was the best thing about the entire book, actually, the realization that I wasn't going to have to listen to ten more hours of some dude getting eaten alive by rats.

I was feeling pretty good cruising into Story #2, right, what with the rats and the gnawing and the dead woman rotting in the well all in my rearview, but it turns out my relief was shortlived. The second story (unlike the first story) was narrated by a female. A hauntingly familiar female. I sat in my car, both hands on the wheel, listening with my mouth open as this little lilting voice introduced her character-- a young, naive, successful author-- and I tried to get a handle on how I knew her.

"She's a singer," I thought, as she narrated her way through a fictional book signing event. "Or wait, no, she's an actress." She described leaving the event, taking an unfamiliar route, la-di-da.

It was one of those stupid trivia facts you just can't manage to put your finger on-- the kind of trivia you typically bet your mate a dollar over- or a gratuitous sex act, maybe- before reaching for any one of the five Internet machines in your immediate periphery to settle which one of you gets to take their pants off. 

But I was driving, obviously, and not about to scroll through IMDB on the highway, so I had to rely on my brain for data recollection. Worst case scenario. So I'm sitting there, my brain whirring and clicking its way through the dented hard drive, while our protagonist finds herself stranded along the side of the road. And as my brain begins to isolate the file I'm looking for, this poor woman is abducted and viciously sexually assualted by a truck driver. It was right around the time she found herself strangled half to death and naked in a ditch that I realized who this woman was: It was Jessica Hecht. Victoria from Sideways is narrating this nightmare of a story. Susan from fucking Friends is now running naked and bleeding down a dark country road.

I didn't even listen to the third story. It was probably a serial killer memoir voiced by Dakota Fanning.

I downloaded the A Song of Ice and Fire series and I've been listening to that pretty much nonstop since then. I hear a lot of people lamenting the fact that once they finish A Dance with Dragons there won't be another book in the series to read for a while, and I'm pretty sure I've found the solution. Stop reading. Let a theatric British guy read that shit to you instead. Each book is fifty hours long, you will NEVER EVER FINISH, TRUST ME.

2012

Hey! What month is this?

I'm sitting here on the floor trying to force iTunes to sync music to my iPhone and perusing Google Reader in the meantime because seriously, let's face facts, iTunes is never going to come through for me, and I read that Mrs. Kennedy is going to post every weekday of 2012.

"Oh!" I thought to myself, iTunes whirring endlessly in the background like the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser trying to figure out tea, "Now that's a good idea."

And it is a very, very good idea. I doff my cap to you, Eden. Don't touch it, though, I haven't washed my hair since Friday.

I do genuinely miss this, being here. And I've gotten some sweet comments and emails over the last month or so encouraging me to be here more. So while I can't commit to every weekday, let's give "every once in a while" a shot.

I started working again a few months ago, something I'm actually NOT going to talk about because seriously, fool me EIGHTY THOUSAND TIMES. But I can tell you that this job involves a four-hour commute several days a week. So maybe I should just record myself talking alone in the car for four hours and post THAT. If nothing else, it'll put an end to the sweet comments and emails.

This spray starch is making me feel bad about myself.

A few minutes ago I blew the dust off the iron so I could press the one pair of pants I own that isn't either made out of denim or specifically designated as sleepwear, and then on a whim I grabbed a handful of my everyday shorts and stuff, too. Might as well, right, I mean ironing that first pair of pants went pretty fast once I took the plastic champagne flute out of the back pocket.

So I'm ironing some Old Navy shorts I bought secondhand in 2003 and I don't know, something must be wrong with my spray starch because all of a sudden they look really threadbare and baggy and one of the pockets just fell off.

I'm guess I'm gonna have to get some new spray starch before I start pressing these long-sleeved thermal Anchor Blue bodysuits from my junior year of high school.

But how do you get the llamas up there?

We spent so much time exploring, adventuring, and running around China-- literally running; running and flying and riding and walking and biking-- for nineteen or twenty hours at a stretch that when we finally made it to a hotel checkpoint, I immediately gravitated toward the everyday normalcy of television. It was like a tractor beam. We probably spent an average of ten hours total in any hotel room, but I spent the vast majority of that time physically wrapped around the television monitor with the remote control down the front of my shirt.

There wasn't much point. Only two channels on the whole stupid television were ever in English. One of them was HBO, which hey! Score! Except that every single time I turned it on, it was playing Funny People. Every city, every province, every hotel. Funny People. On a loop. It seemed an odd choice. Even odder, the Chinese government had edited it down to about forty-seven minutes. If you watch Funny People in China, you have no idea that Adam Sandler is sick or that Laura is married so you come away feeling strangely buoyant the first eleven or so times you watch it.

The other English-speaking channel was some sort of ongoing international news program that managed to be both hypnotizing and totally repellent. The format appeared to be simple-- four people seated behind a news desk discussing world events.

Which seems completely innocuous, right? I turned it on for background noise one morning while I was packing and I found myself concentrating harder and harder on the screen until I was sitting on the carpet, nose to nose with the lead anchor with my knees tucked up under my chin.

For starters, there was absolutely zero background distraction on this channel. No tickers, no scrolling feed, no station indicator, no weather map, no blue screen, no digitized dancing bears, no background props, no lettered signs of any type, no wall paint. It was like watching hostages debate one another in an abandoned warehouse on a hidden video feed.

Secondly, one of these people only communicated in Chinese. So when the other three people were discussing something in English? Dude Number Four would throw his two cents in there in Mandarin while everyone else sat back and listened, and then the other three would comment on what he just said in English. No translation of any of it, just moving right along. It was exactly like watching Hank Hill and Boomhauer have a conversation. Only, I suspect, more cerebral.

And I say "suspect" because (thirdly) I never had the slightest idea what these people were talking about. I think I have a fairly realistic grasp of how much I know versus how much I don't know (a little versus a lot), but over the years I've read enough about the world and attended enough college that I never expect to be utterly flabbergasted when I watch the news. I never expect to find myself perched on a hotel room floor in China with one eye squeezed shut, poking at the television screen with a shaky index finger and muttering bullshit under my cold, cold breath.

"Well, today marks the 3,529th Annual Festival of Anspi today in Bananastekistan and the parades are in full swing. From sunrise to sunset, the royal children will be gathering dragonflower vines and butternut roots to make their ceremonial capes, and the villagers have been hard at work for weeks building the ten-story llama lofts."

The other newscasters smile and nod. The Chinese guy shuffles some papers and interjects in Mandarin.

"Oh, absolutely!" someone answers, laughing. "I was in Bananastekistan two years ago for the festival and it was simply amazing. I still have my wooden pith helmet full of glitter and moss."

Then just as quickly as it started, it's over. Their smiles vanish in unison like ships lost at sea.

"The euro zone debt crisis reached a critical point yesterday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average once again fell short of wide expectations despite an overall rise in commodities trading."

But it's too late, I can't be cured by banality, I'm already curled up in a sweaty ball with my face all screwed up trying to figure out what the fuck I just heard.

Randy walked into the room then, back from his breakfast salad foraging, and he informs me that it's now 6:20am and I better get my luggage out to the bus if I have any hope of seeing it tomorrow morning in Kunming.

"Have you ever heard of Bananastekastan?" I ask him.

"What?" he answers, and I am at once smug and validated.

"Oh wait. You mean 'BananastekIStan'," he corrects, "of course I have. The llama lofts are supposed to be unbelievable."

We're also now 100% out of fitted sheets.

I woke up this morning and saw that this had happened again.

I pretty much summed it up back in 2008, there's really not much more to say about it. Except maybe to add that I'm now legitimately prepared to wake up one morning three years from now to discover the lower third of our mattress severed and lying on the floor.