Sovereign Nations

So, on 09/09/1999 Dena and James signed the papers for the sailing vessel Sovereign Nation and effectively sailed off into the sunset…

Wow!

…Now here we sit at the top of the food chain, at the top of the second decade of the 21st century exactly ten years after we set sail on our first boat together 10,000 nautical miles later and still loving each other, our lives and the decisions we’ve made together. I know, I know not exactly a world record but a record non-the-less for the two of us that’s for sure!

Whenever we (as humans) reach these land marks in time we tend to get all sentimental and shit and recap those adventures in our heads and for us the word “adventures” really does fit the bill. So for all of you out there that have just recently joined our program let me just give you the “Sports Center” style recap of…

!!!The Amazing Adventures Of Dena and James- A Decade at Sea!!!

(the sound-bite version)

9/9/99- bought our first boat together a wooden fifty foot, William Garden Sea Wolf ketch rigged sailboat that we named S/V Sovereign Nation and upon boarding her for the first time Dena slipped and broke her left arm…

10/25/99- Our first big adventure aboard SVSN… We’d planned to go to Doe-Bay on Orcas Island (were we’d been married the year before) but got stuck in Oak Harbor, WA after getting hit by a terrible storm in the Saratoga Passage between Whidbey Island and Camano Island. The storm lasted for four days and was the worst storm in 25 years with winds reaching 65 knots with fallowing seas from 10 to 13 feet. We had a wet boat, a ton of bruises and a dreadfully sick cat. BUT, as we rounded the last channel marker a local T.V. crew caught us on camera and interviewed us after we made landfall. After describing our adventure to the interviewer She asked me if I’d ever do anything like that again, my reply; “Are you kidding me, we live for this shit!”

11/15/1999 to 12/31/1999- Our first haul-out of SVSN. After replacing the deck with a drunken fuck-up as our “ship-wrong” we splashed our Sovereign Nation and headed for Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island, WA.

01/01/2000-07/01/2000 We lived aboard SVSN as “sneak-aboards” for the next six months… (high lights include; rowing across Eagle Harbor every morning to the Ferry terminal and taking the ferry into Seattle every day and sailing our ship in Elliot Bay with friends and family.)

07/01/2000-09/09/2000- Gunkholing in the San Jaun Islands! A beautiful sailing adventure all throughout the Islands of the Northern Washington coast that ended with the two of us at anchor on an island looking at a bright spot on the horizon saying to each other “That is our next home!”

09/10/2000-07/15/2001- Blaine, WA. This was our first official Port-of Call… After making land-fall we quickly got jobs with the local newspaper, me as the photographer and Dena as one of the features writers. I also got a job at the Inn at Semiahmoo as the woodworker for the Inn. We made some great friends, shot some great pictures and started building our first website… “sovereignnation.com”

07/15/2001-09/16/2001- We sailed from Blaine, WA. to Eureka, CA. Our first off shore adventure together!!! Highlights include; Sunfish, dolphins, Orca’s and two airplanes smashing into two buildings in New York City…

09/16/2001-04/20/2002- Wet, tired and broke we made land-fall in Eureka, CA. and got work at the only place in that crappy little town that we could find… Dena sold glasses at the mall and worked the graveyard shift at a local breakfast joint and I worked at SEARS as a stock-boy… (After we’d had enough of that horrible little bum-fuck town Dena got a job in Oakland, CA. working for Toys in Babeland and we left SVSN in Eureka and moved our bodies to downtown San Fransisco…)

06/17/2002-09/17/2006- San Fransisco, Emeryville, Richmond, Berkeley and Oakland, CA… On the 17th of May in 2002 I got a phone call from the Eureka public marina saying that SVSN had been hit by a plastic-destroyer at the dock and the taft-rail, mizen boom-gallows and mizzen boom had been torn off the boat!!! Dena and I took the weekend off and went down to Eureka to sail SVSN down to the San Fransisco Bay… We Jerry-rigged the boat and sailed her down to SF.

On the 21st of May in the year 2002 we sailed our broken boat out of the Humbolt Bay into the Pacific Ocean once again… As we rounded Cape Mendocino we had 40 foot seas for ten hours!!! “WAVES the SIZE of WALMARTS” We watched our beautiful 6ft wooden lapstrake dory get destroyed by one of the biggest of those aforementioned monster-waves and made land-fall in Emeryville, CA. at 0201h on the 23rd of May 2002, just 55 hours after setting sail in Eureka… 55 hours that are as real to me today as if I had just lived through them yesterday!!! 55 hours that we will NEVER FORGET!

…We lived in the San Fransisco Bay for four years on two boats. After repairing SVSN we sold our Sovereign Nation to three sailors from the Czech Republic and they sailed her to the Mediterranean Sea from Richmond, CA. in the spring of 2004. We bought our next boat, S/V Sapien, a 1989 Gulf-32 pilothouse sloop, from Dena’s dad and put over 5000 nautical miles under her full keel over the next two years as we made her ready for our next big adventure, (highlights include, a two week sailing adventure up the California Delta and an incredible off shore sail down the coast of California to Monterray, CA.),  San Fransisco to Hawaii!!!

9/17/2006- 10/06/2006- San Fransisco, CA to Hilo, Hawaii!!! Yes we sailed a 32 foot sailboat 2040 nautical miles from the San Fransisco Bay to the Big Island of Hawaii, it took us 20 days and once again confirmed that, not only were we invincible but sailing around the world was the way we wanted to spend the rest of our lives!

10/06/2006-10/18/2007- After living on the hook in Hilo for four months and NOT finding work there we circumnavigated the Big Island of Hawaii to Kona where we lived for another four months before sailing to Honolulu, Hawaii on the Island of Oahu. We were able to find pretty good jobs there and a permanent slip for S/V Sapien but found that living under the shadow of debt-culture and across from an airport in “paradise” wasn’t the life that we had planned so we sold that boat, paid off all of our debts and briefly moved back to mainland just long enough to fall in and out of love with a fucked-up alcoholic hairdresser… Anyway, that is another story all together!

…Then we moved to Moses Lake, WA. saved up enough money to move to India (see India blog entries)…

12/25/2008-Present- So there we were in Trivandrum, Kerala, India looking at boats on E-Bay when I stumbled upon a beautiful 1961 Phillip Rhodes Chesapeake sloop rigged 32 foot sail boat. Dena and I had spent the last 6 months exploring the Indian subcontinent and writing our separate works of fiction and we both knew, at that moment, it was time to go back to sea. It took us a little over a month to sell off all of our furniture and our Bullet (our Royal Enfield, Bullet motorcycle) but we did and thus moved back to the USA to Norfolk, Virginia to take possession of our new boat.

…Well, yesterday was the 9th of September 2009, our tenth anniversary of living our dreams and once again we made two profound decisions that will forever change our lives…

1) I will spend the next 6 months finishing and preparing my manuscript “!RADIO! Vol-1″ for publication and…

2) We will name our new boat, S/V Sovereign Nation as well…

…So from this point on, we will start preparing ourselves for our next big adventure, Norfolk, VA. across another pond to circumnavigate The Mediterranean Sea in our new SOVEREIGN NATION!!!

So,
Saturday July 25th 2009 was the 35th annual Rebel Marina’s Crab Regatta!
It was a spectacular sailing adventure and the Willoughby Bay in Norfolk, VA was riddled with hundreds of sails with almost as many different kinds of sailing vessels!!!

We’re in the process of re-powering S/V Itinerant with a larger prop for our Yanmar 3GM-30 so unfortunately we had to (got to) sail both out of and back in to our slip for the “race” (note quotation marks). When we “sailed” out we got hit by a few variable gusts that spun us in circles three or four times, got us caught up in the rigging of S/V Norfolk Rebel, bumped us into the tide wall and really set Dena and I off on a bad foot but of course once we got out of the marina entrance the sailing was amazing!

The “Race” is one of the most interesting and hilarious experiences that one could have on the water! Each year they change the rules and the course to fit their needs and the only real rule is that you !!!MUST NOT!!! take the race or the rules seriously!

The flag ship for the regatta is, of course, The S/V Norfolk Rebel, the worlds only “Tugantine”, a 68 foot steel gaff rigged schooner/tugboat that carried the first marker on her starboard aft quarter for most of the race, meaning, all the racers had to (got to) follow the Rebel in pretty much single file until she dropped the anchor for the marker (affectionately known as PHRED, a recovered aircraft carrier fender).

Each of the boats in the “race” is given a “handicap” prior to the race and you are disqualified if you don’t follow through with your handicap as described and implemented by a panel of judges that are hell-bent on applying their rules, unless of course you bribe them with pretty much anything BUT MONEY.

Our handicap was a relatively easy one being as though we were “Virgins to the Crab”, we had to (got to) make our own “Crab Hats” and ware them for not only the race but the after party as well. Unfortunately, my crab hat was blown off my head and into the water as we exited the marina so we were disqualified before the race even started.

Some of the more interesting handicaps were; one boat had to have it’s entire crew (even the men) ware coconut bikinis and hula-skirts and every time they passed a marker the crew had to give a hula dance for the judges on the comity boat. Another boat had to splash any passing boat with a bucket of sea water and I got hit by them with a full 2 gallon bucket of warm Willoughby Bay water. At one point I was laughing so hard I thought I was going to pass out!!!

After the “race” was “completed”, a mind boggling event in itself, a party did ensue! 400 pounds of Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab, about a ton of side dishes and as much rum as any of us could consume, was indeed consumed and the docks rang with the sounds of sea shanies well into the night.
The Crab Regatta is by far the best sailboat racing experience the crew of the S/V Itinerant has EVER had so if you’re in the Southern Chesapeake Bay in July I highly recommend Rebel Marina’s annual Crab Regatta!

The hangover was glorious…

I wrote the story below  yesterday to my friend Dean moments after coming back to my home on the Rebel Marina aboard the Sailing Vessel Itinerant… I mutated the story a bit (like I do) but believe me, the facts are all there! Anyway here it is…

I delivered a boat to a marina today for a haul out and got deeply humbled by the weather AGAIN!!!
She’s  a little S2, 24 foot racing sailboat with no memorable name, “South Wind” or “Weekend Wife” or some shit  and we, meaning, me and the guy I’m replacing at my new job, got our asses handed to us on a paper plate!

< "Here, here's your ass, now go over to that corner for a spell and think about how you'd do it differently">

With about 14 long tacks through the bay we flew a 150% Genoa off the fore-deck with the main all the way up, clipping along at a little over 6 knots  for most of the day. Although it was really intense looking in the sky the wind and weather were lined up for perfect sailing from Long Bay Point in Virginia Beach Virginia (N 38 degrees 54′.15 W76 degrees 04′25.47)  for the first 6 hours. After all that time of what seemed liked no more then a few moments of absolute perfect sailing we approached land  and our speed increased to 8 knots on a highly stretched broad reach.

At that point I decided to start the “‘Ol Iron Jib” and round her up into the wind to down sails. Out of no where, and I do mean right (the fuck) now, we got hit by a squall packing about 35 knots of wind with stinging raindrops the size of quarters! As we rounded up into the waves the seas were instantly 4 to 6 feet with a howling misty chop. I climbed up on the fore deck to down the genny as my shipmate took the helm and after about 45 (bone-pounding) seconds I noticed that the “kid” couldn’t quite keep her into the wind and that was why I was getting my ass beat by that big-ass flapping sail. When I looked back to see why I noticed my shipmate hanging over the side of the transom ass-first looking limp!!! I ran back to the cock pit to catch him before he went completely over, lower the main and get us under control when I saw what it was he was doing, he had hit a crap pot as we headed up and the damn thing was fouled up in the prop… Then the big jib that I had left (not quite) secure forward went in the water and we started to heal over with all the weight from the water filled 150% genny, I thought for sure we would be dismasted in the next second!!! After much rodeo style fore-deck highjinx I got the waterlogged sail back up on deck with the weather (of course) getting steadily worse every second of the way. But, just in the nick of time (!What AGAIN!) the “kid” got the engine running and I got the main sail down and we were out of danger just as fast as we got into it.

About45 minutes later we motored into the Dandy Haven Marina in Hampton, VA (N37degrees 05′ 37.79 W76degrees 17′ 51.66) on glass water and soaked to the bone.
…We lived

Once again I gave it my all and once again I could not make it happen with the tools at hand.

And really that’s all’s to be said about my Virginia art debacle!

…When ever I come back to the docks to clear my head of a bad art-exsperience I get paid back ten fold in return!

Spending a few days on S/V Itinerant’s main saloon put my head in the right place to interview with what seems to be a very cool company that says their “about” customer service… I remember Dan Milman saying something like, (in “Way of the Peaceful Worior”), there is nothing more gratifying to a human then the service to ones own species, perhaps he’s right. I am the new “Sailing instructor” for the “Carefree Boat Club” in the Salt Ponds Marina and Resort in Hampton Virginia.

(Ok so, it’s still a little weird to say Virginia as opposed to Trivandrum, Kerala, India…)

…I like being on the docks, I like the people, the dogs, the million dollar view, it works for me.

I mean really, getting paid to sail and take pictures of it is about as successful as it gets for me.

So, once again, Dena and I sail into a port and score some great stories and some spectacular images to pass on, here’s the best part, it’s all so… Itinerant!

It’s amazing how the time flies when one sets his mind to “the long haul”.

We started the re-build project on the port side saloon and just like that it’s been two weeks and now we have a great big hole where there used to be a port side saloon…

My birthday has come and gone.

The winter seems to never want to give way to spring but the inevitable longer days are forcing the old man to give a wide birth to the beautiful sailing weather ahead.

We are seeing India pass from the now to the safety of our distance memories and I can’t help but hold on with all my remaining strength to that beautiful place that taught me so much about reality, life, myself and the mass of humanity that invades my dreams.

The future…

…Is coming soon!!!

We have entered a contest to photograph the entire planet Earth under sail!

http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/the-ideas/popeye/the-circumnavigation-of-every-land-mass-on-the-planet-earth

Please go to the above link and vote for us!

It’s a way for us to win $50.000.00 bucks for the adventure and a bunch of photo/video equipment!

Please help!

On Friday the 13th in 2009 we signed the paperwork and bought a beautiful new (to us) sailboat henceforth to be called, S/V ITINERANT!

…Once again, at sea at last!

S/V Itinerant is a (we think) 1961 Philip Rhodes designed “Chesapeake” sloop rigged sailboat.

She came equipped with 180 watts on 3 solar panels and a Rutland 913 wind power generator,

we are now officially OFF-THE(Mythical)-Grid!!!

Fair Winds And Following Seas, Sucka’s!!!

Saturday the 14th- V-Day! Our first night aboard S/V Itinerant and all is well!

Our new marina, the “Rebel Marina” on the Willoughby Spit in Norfolk, VA. is a real gem in the sea of iffy Chesapeake marinas! It’s not only beautiful it’s friendly and has incredible access. For cruising sailors they offer free wi/fi, a loaner car and a very intensely hot, hot-tub!

Once again we’re down to this!

Dena went back in the hospital today… And that day was January 15, 2009. No longer today but this day is identical in so many ways.

…The hard part!

The doctor informed her that if she ever conceives again it could kill her, no good, Dean concurs and that means a mini-laparotomy tubal ligation was in the works, words I didn’t even know until today.

I hated it all ‘cuz I was alone with no one to talk to.

To, for, with, my self-pity made me mad as well, what about the easy part?

Things are starting to spiral away from our safe little jungle flat and I find myself clawing at my immediate environs for security and since all I do here is write it’s the only thing I can do to feel comfortable…

At 5:00am we’re on the motorcycle in the pitch blackness of Kovalam road heading north to the Manacaud Junction and our fifth Indian Hospital experience. Our first elective one, we chose to do this. Obviously I’m still working that one out in the moment, blinding lights on a coal black street, the continuous honk of an India highway.

Dena’s doctor, an amazing physician, Dr. Kavitha, is calm and smart with a wicked sense of humor who was seemingly well educated in (if I understood correctly) Mumbai with a stint in New Delhi and another one in Tamil Nadu. She made us wait, a lot. (Really, that’s not a complaint, it’s an observation and one that is all doctor encompassing.)

… Anyway, I trust her, she’s cool! She wears the most amazing silk saris (INTO SURGERY!) and takes no shit in any of the 6 languages she speaks fluently, English not being one of them but she does a bang up job trying! …And now!

< !A story I wish would take the four hours we waited for the Dr.!>

(It’s funny, the Dr.’s daughter (I can’t for the life of me remember her name) found out about my exotic wife with her full body tattoos and her nipple piercings and went ape shit crazy until she got to meet Dena. The doctor said she cried and threw a full-bore tissy-tantrum from the not-eating-dinner to the faking-sick-as-a-dog, to the full-on-dupatta-drenching-sobs! That great big beautiful no-nonsense, over-educated, take-no-shit, Ob/Gyn/Phd/M.S./B.S./OMG, et-cet… and dot,dot,dot, is a slave to that little girl! When we came back to the hospital to ask about The-Tubal, Dr. Romper Whipped was terrified at how much we paid for the cake (which we brought for all the Sisters who helped make Dena’s miscarriage not just an event in her life to remember, but a profound one) because she knew she wouldn’t be able to talk about us without talking about the expensive chocolate cake that the strange white people brought for us for no obvious reason so she would have to buy a piece for her daughter so she could tell the story of how Dena, the rock star, is coming back in for an elective mini-laparotomy. We all had a very nice visit.)

(…The good Dr. was very much aware of the fact that she had just told us [seconds before meeting her daughter] that we would NEVER have children of our own and the fact that we weren’t crying and ‘it’s ok baby’-ing and freaking out was cause of great concern for her. And this is where our good Dr. started getting creepy to us. She told us that rather than talk about Dena’s reproductive issues with her 9 year old daughter she told the girl that Dena had been mysteriously shoved into a desk by some ‘bad men’. No fucking way, my knee jerked, “What bad men?” All of the sudden Dena and I were brought to a very intimate part of the our doctor’s life. We were all to conspire in the lie of human sexuality that our good Ob/Gyn Dr. wanted to perpetuate at our expense to her progeny. )

(Happy Endings: the good Dr. is happy because she doesn’t have to talk about the evils of the flesh to her offspring today, Dena is happy because she’s feeling pretty good and The-Tubal-thingy is going to be cheap and not be a big deal, right?)

(The good Dr. and daughter have officially invited us over to their abode to test our curry tolerance levels. Now, Dena can put away the spices with the best of ‘em and the locals dig it! Like I’ve said many times before, she is a huge rock star here, which is no surprise to me, I mean she’s beautiful and healthy and round, can eat the spiciest Indian peppers with a hunger and smiles at everyone! There is nothing not to rock out to.)

So I got Dena admitted in to the hospital and rather than waiting some more for a Dr. who will show up when she’s damn good and ready, (Not true, just how I felt!!!), I came back home to write down some thoughts (via this thing). Ok, so I walk it to the office and sat down at my desk right next to one of our local residents, THE BIG ASS SCARY SPIDER FROM HELL!!! Yeah, oh…. They’re about 6 inches around but they move really fast. They are the only spider in all of Kerala that can really fuck you up…. Oh, I got ssoooo creeped out! Of course they are afraid of us, we’re bigger, but the last thing I need is to get on that plane with a freshly fixed (?) girl healing while I’m gimped from a bad ass creepy spider bite!!! uhuhhghgiuuhghghg, that’s my creeped out mumble!

IT Was In My Desk! hgughghgughgugh… Between the gaps in the wood it lived, operating word here being, ‘Lived’! That spider died quickly.

Dena went under the knife at (India-on-or-around) 11:00am so I thought I only had about an hour to get my shit cleaned up and composed enough to make her think that I’m thinking this is Nutt’n!

I’m cool….

I think pulled the ‘you look wonderful’ real-time fabrication off with strained conviction at best but looked forward to discussing my reservations about general anesthesia with her very much after the fact.

She came to, two hours later… She was a train-wreck of run-on sentences but warm to the touch with a pounding heart rate between 91 and 95 bpm. Her lower jaw would shake almost violently at the “end” of each of her progressive streams of dawning revelation. It was slow going but she made steady improvement over the many hours I sat and stared at her. That night, last night, tonight, hm, she slept through that night with me as close to her side as I could get on my 16 inch wide, very “comfortable” slab of hell.

Ten minutes after I (so wish I was exaggerating) fell asleep, the nurse who wrote last night’s illegal Diazepam prescription rouses me with a barking, “You have to wake up, I need you to do something for me!”

“Ok, ok, what do I do?” humbled hunched down behind her she leads me by the REM-state from my sleeping apparatus all the way to the foot of Dena’s bed where awaits my prize: a balloon sized/shaped, totally full catheter bag.

“You will empty this catheter bag for me.”

“For you, ur, yes I will.” Ok, that seemed to be the correct response.

“Good, you will wait and I will bring back (she makes this sexy phallic symbol with her hands in the air) a vessel.”

I was crusty-mouthed and wrenching my eyes into focus, on my knees at the foot of Dena’s bed with my face a stretched tongue’s distance to Dena’s catheter holding tank, trying to figure it out before our cute little felon of a nurse came back with my, umm, “vessel”.

She enters the room, looming. “Here is vessel.”

I smiled and shook tiny affirmatives out of my chin, by that point awake enough to say, “What the fuck am I paying you for!” But I didn’t. I poured the contents of the bag into the vessel until it was brimming with our heroine’s golden excrement. Two trips was her mighty volume and I don’t know what that is in metric units.

“Now you have to leave,” shooed “Sister” felon. “You have to eat breakfast now, I will wash the missus and you will come back well fed, you are leaving. Now (!).”

Yes, that is exactly what I did.

The day that was today when I wrote this is coming to an end and Dena slept, woke up, got shot, slept and I watched, paced, read (Shame by Salman Rushdie) and watched Dena. I’d go out for a while, come back, and Dena would invariably be awake and looking better by orders of magnitude each time.

I learned to hate the moaning, groaning, howling, bawling, singing, laughing, shouting, 7 fingered simpleton next-door neighbor. All night long, he wailed as the “Sisters” injected him with the chemistry of their trade. On my many trips past his door I witnessed fleeting moments of his reality and it was too much to deal with on my own so I’ll share.

He was about 35 years old and starving skinny with large lesions of what looked to be healing road rash on three large patches of his upper torso. Two in front and one on his back, it looked as if he had lost three fingers in some kind of industrial accident, an industrial saw perhaps. I believe he was retarded or rather mentally challenged to a young child’s understanding of the profound pain he was experiencing. There were about 6 people in the man’s room; two large men, one on each side of him incapacitating him at the arms and legs, a Sister shooting him up in his IV tube and an assortment of what appeared to be family looking in as many directions as their numbers allowed. He howled and freaked the fuck out all night. Dena had the opiates outweighing the fluids by that point and slept through the man’s digit-less lament. I got to listen; there was nothing good about it.

By the second “vessel” emptying of Dena’s sunny discard I was having fantasies of paying Nurse Felony to knock him out with something strong… On me of course!

Subduing fantasia I resolved to help where I could and stay out of the way until Dena said it was time to go. Once she gave the thumbs up I was activated! From the mild-mannered guy who came in with the sick white girl to “!NOW PLEASE!”

On top of the freshly extremity-trimmed howling man in the room next door we had a saw mill cutting an endless stream of workable lengths of teak from 8:00am on throughout that day, (when was that?) so when Dena said, “I can’t take the saw anymore!” I went to work and an hour later she was soundly sleeping in her own bed.

“Doctor, between the grinding of the industrial saw in the building just north of here and the howling lament of the psycho-patient from hell next door, Dena and I have decided that this environment is no longer healthy for her so we are leaving. Please have your staff put together our final bill, thank you.”

“What is your problem, Mr. Dena’s Husband I don’t know what your name is. Why are you making fusses over little things?”

“Doctor, please ask your staff to put together our final bill, we are leaving now!” Like most of the exchanges I have now had with Dr. Kavitha we both said the same things a few times leading inevitably down the dusty, dead-dog riddled, road of misunderstanding to a smiling stalemate.

Dena limps in with rigid determination on her face! Nobody likes to fake well but she pulls it off.

“Not this time, Dr. Nonchalance!” Dena’s sudden appearance gives me a boost of adrenaline. “Little things!? You are accusing me of making big noises over little issues? How can the total and complete comfort of a convalescing patient be anything less than the most important thing to your hospital?! Between that saw that you can’t even hear any more from your desensitization to it and our neighborhood psycho-crooner, we have decided that our home is a healthier environment for the remainder of Dena’s convalescence. Please note Dr. that I am not criticizing your treatment of Dena, quite the contrary, I believe that Dena has received impeccable treatment under your care in this facility, but this facility is no longer a benefit to Dena’s health so we are leaving, !NOW PLEASE!”

“Yep!” Dena says with a big ‘we’re out-a-here’ grin.

And now I’m looking at her sleeping in her bed and she is healing at home with me. She is the most beautiful thing in the world. And we are, healing that is, from this entire Stranger be’n broke-down in a Strange Land experience. I can honestly say that pretty much all of my pre-conceived (no pun intended) reservations about elective surgery in India were unexpectedly and pleasantly changed by this experience, but in the end the hospital staff’s lack of ability to communicate with me on key components of Dena’s future care made me feel completely out of the loop at many different important junctures throughout the entire experience. For some reason, the good Dr.’s repeated emphatic insistence on our misunderstandings being all my fault was a major bummer to me. The nurse that was so set on watching me pour piss while I was asleep, who forged a prescription for a sleeping pill for Dena, was a bit disturbing but, I admit it, I am a stranger to their system. I believe I tried to humble myself as much as I thought was safely possible under those nothing less than intense circumstances… There, that’s all the excuse I can muster for our speedy exit from the Zensa Hospital.

Dena’s ok and doing the trudging through the process of healing thingy again but we’re through the hard part, the rest is easy.

I saw a ga-gillion men…
a billion Cops,
A million beatings,
A thousand tiny cars bearing aforementioned men,
A hundred or so large lightly educated inebriated Australians,
A dozen puking sunburned Japanese [men]
6 of one kind of fight (drunk men)
Two Very Freaked (the fuck) out scantily dressed English girls.
…And one very nasty motorcycle wreck about four feet in front of me.
Sweet Home India…