Food for thought(Painful pleasures)

Five days ago marks my third year of continuous travel(woohoo!).  Thirteen countries: Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Australia, Nepal, and India, where I now reside.  All of these countries abound with an eclectic variety of cuisine.  From dosas to dim sum to som tam thai, all are enough to make your taste buds tingle, and your belly rumble with anticipation.  Japan and Australia maintain a strict level of hygiene bordering sterility.  The others, well, that’s left up to the individual’s standards of cleanliness.

Personally, I’ve found that the more dingy a street stall, the better tasting the food is. This could be for a multitude of reasons, but I have narrowed it down to two: maybe the coat of residue of thousands of previously cooked meals adds a special essence, similar to a grill master refusing to clean his grill grate since the beginning of time.  The second being that the chef feels a need to compensate for the shoddy visual aesthetic of their stall, giving it all of the culinary passion they possess.  For whatever reason, my personal experience has lead me to these conclusions, and generally speaking my nose wins out over my eyes.  My olfactory preference has lead me to the nirvana of my tastebuds.  Unfortunately, it has also lead me to experience the wrath of Dante’s Inferno as I crawl painfully to the porcelain throne.

The story that I am about to tell might unsettle a western audience.  Frankly, I don’t give a shit, pun intended.  In the east, where I have spent most of the last three years, digestive experience is just part of the natural dialogue.

Before I left for Asia, I read in numerous travel blogs and books about the warnings: don’t eat it if it’s not in a well-established restaurant.  Don’t even think about drinking the water or brushing your teeth without a 3 dollar bottle of Dasani.  Therefore, I commenced my journey with a healthy dose of paranoia when it came to consuming anything for fear of contracting some rare third-world disease.  Japan was no problem.  Considering I only got to experience the airport in Tokyo, everything was clean and up to western standards, if not exceeding them.  When I got to Singapore and Malaysia, I stuck to my guns; if it didn’t come from a restaurant or sealed bottle, I wasn’t going near it.  Krabi, Thailand is where my real adventure began.

My travel partner and I were enjoying the sunset on the beach, smoking a joint of some low-quality marijuana that one of the paragliding boys had swindled us into buying earlier that day.  We sat for quite some time, taking in all the sights and sounds of this exquisite foreign place, so different from the lives we had always known.  By the time we headed back to our hostel, we were deep in the throes of the munchies.  However, by this time, all of the somewhat hygienic restaurants had closed up shop, leaving only the option of streetside noodles.  The sheer number of locals eating there combined with our insatiable hunger pushed us to the edge and we caved.

The noodles were delicious.  We slurped down the noodles, broth, vegetables, fish balls, red pork, and bean sprouts, leaving not a morsel behind.  One bowl wasn’t enough, so we each ordered another, hungrily munching it down as quickly as the first.  Our bill came to 140 baht, equivalent to 4 usd at the time.  Cheap, delicious food; I could get used to this.  Or so I thought…

I slept soundly through the night, but woke at first light to the sounds of my rumbling tummy.  I quickly made my way to the toilet, but before I could unzip my pants, I was violently spewing from both ends.  I discarded my jocks in the nearby wastebin, and spent the next two hours experiencing the most painful cramps in my life.  They consumed every part of my body, to the point where I could no longer sit upright, so I slid sweatily to the cool tile floor.  I laid there, praying to all gods, for the pain to end.  Despite numerous knocks on the door, all I could do was groan, so I just laid there.  Minutes turned to hours.  And thus began my sweaty, charcoal-tablet filled culinary journey.

Over the next six months, this became a regular occurrence.  Though decreasing in severity, this just became a regular way of life.  I couldn’t go back to my standards of sterility; the food was just too good.  Fast forward three years later, and my stomach has become fort knox, fortified by warrior-like gut bacteria.  Bring on the greasiest dim sum, the Ganges-washed chai glasses, the shadiest chicken joint one can find.

Since coming back to Asia, starting in Nepal and then coming to India, I have been sick one time, and the experience pales in comparison to those three hellish days in Krabi.  I don’t tell this story to advocate the tempting of fate; it is up to the individual to find a healthy balance between the extremity of the west and the nonchalance of the east when it comes to hygiene.  All I’m saying is, don’t let fear dictate how you live your life.  Draw the line where you feel comfortable, and then push the boundaries.  Personally, I would take all of the pain in the world for the joy I have experienced with fork and knife.  Life’s for living, so go out and live it.

Damien Finch part 1

Damien Finch was a round peg in a square hole.  Everywhere that he went, he never quite seemed to fill the space, to stand in one spot, to feel the contentment of fully occupying that one space.  His mind was was constantly elsewhere.  He was a loner.

Damien liked to listen to music.  It did not depend on the genre – he could never fully commit to confining his tastes to one particular genre- he listened to anything and everything that he could get his hands on.  He used to joke to himself that music was his only friend, because of it’s universal accessibility, and for the wisdom that it offered to him.

His clothes and hair style were generally unimportant to him.  As a young boy, he had paid little mind to his physical appearance, quite happy to let his mother part his hair in the middle and brush it to the back with a smear of hair product, just like his father’s.  One day, that all changed.  One hot muggy late summer morning during his 7th grade year, Damien was on the outskirts of the playground, happily playing alone in the dirt amongst the bugs and animals at the edge of the forest.  Mother insisted that he not do this, as he would soil his clothes, thus further alienating him from the boys his own age that already found him quite odd,  even if he did show up with clean clothes at the morning bell.

While attempting to climb the tree to pay the birds nest up there a visit, Damien’s footing slipped.  He ended up being hung by his pants quite painfully on a protruding branch.  In order to get down, he had to take his pocket knife out of his pantpocket and cut himself loose.  On the fall down, he scraped up his knees, landing with quite a thud.  He began laughing, and pretty soon he was bent over laughing uncontrollably at his own stupidity.  When he finally recovered, there was a boy standing in front of him.  He was wearing the school uniform, only it was covered in patches, pins, and paint.  His hair was cut short on the sides, leaving only a shock of burnt-orange fur up the center of his scalp,  from rear to front.

“Nice fall.  What the fuck are you doing, anyway?”

Damien hesitated.  This word was strictly forbidden in his family, particularly by mother, who had washed his mouth out with dove bar soap on quite a few occasions before, one notable string of washings after he’d discovered South Park on late night television.

“Paying the birds a visit,” he said with confident gusto.

“Hmm… That’s fucking lame.  Have you even read the Anarchist’s Cookbook?  Don’t you know who the Dead Kennedys are?  Nature is fucking lame..  It’s all about being down with the establishment.”

“What’s the establish-…”

“Never mind, you’ll find out…”

Three months later, Damien was knee-deep in hatred for the establishment, his school, and anyone who respected authority.  He too had taken on a sense of independence, an air of rebellious individuality, so reflected in his new-found clothing and music tastes.  Patches, pins, paint, and a spiked mohawk were his uniform.  Mother dearest couldn’t get within arms grasp with the hair brush anymore.  He had seen the other side.  He had smoked his first cigarette, urinated on a bible, cut the cords to people’s Christmas decorations in the neighborhood for kicks, all out of sheer spite for the capitalistic regime and the religious dogma that seemed to dictate the lives of everyone around him.  There was no going back, or so he thought.

One day, Damien’s life of beautifully organized chaos that he had insulated himself with was torn away from him.  At school, he was busy marking up the walls of the bathroom stall with graffiti:  Fuck school, fuck politics, fuck fuck fuck.  That’ll show them, he thought to himself.  As a beautiful crescendo to his antics, he decided to light a stray m-80 that he had found while digging around in the dumpster behind the adult bookstore that morning on his walk to school, while looking for pictures of naked ladies.  He lit up a cigarette, and used the tip to light the fuse.  He dropped the firecracker into the toilet bowl, and quickly exited the stall to avoid getting splashed with fecal matter and toilet water.  It was a long fuse, long enough to give him time to prepare for the blast.  As the moment drew closer to the explosion, the restroom door swung open to reveal Mr. Mike P, the school janitor.  BAM!  What perfect timing!  The massive blast sprayed the ceiling above the stall with brownish liquid chunks and chips of porcelain from the bowl.  The report of the firecracker left a ringing in Damien’s ears, slowly drowned out by his fits of laughter at the scene before him.  Mr. Mike P however, did not find this funny at all, considering he was going  to be the one to clean it up.  He grabbed Damien roughly by the shoulders and dragged him to the principal’s office.  They searched him, and what they found shocked them to the core of their wholesome Catholic foundations.  A crumpled page of a magazine showing a naked lady, along with a pack of camel light cigarettes.

The principal was unable to get in contact with Damien’s mother, and therefore called his father.  He answered on the third ring.  Mr. Finch, at that very moment, just so happened to be in the most important financial meeting of his life.  He was catering to the most important client of his life at the time, a Russian oligarch who had five hundred million dollars to invest into diversified markets.  The meeting was cut short, as Finch felt the obligation to tend to his rebellious son, much to the chagrin of the impatient Russian on the other end of the conference call.

Finch Sr. showed up at the school to quell the flames his son had stoked to the point of hostile inferno.  His charismatic smile and a handsome donation towards the construction of the school’s new library ensured that the matter was resolved, in addition to paying for the m-80 damaged toilet bowl.  He escorted Damien home, and that night gave him the worst beating of his life, with the same belt that his father had taught him lessons with.  After that, he withdrew Damien from school, locked him in his room, only to be visited by his private tutor, a retired military colonel with early onset dementia and a passion for war, until the age of eighteen.

During his time in captivity, young Damien developed a serious interest in politics.  He studied all the great generals, spanning all corners of the globe, studying their habits, analyzing their strategies.  Sun Tzu’s Art of War became the manual for how he lived his life, aside from all of the scenarios where attacking the enemy or material conquest were not the objective; he glossed over all that boring stuff.   He also loved to watch old war movies, and every night would enjoy a double-patty cheeseburger and an extra large glass of warm milk, wolfing them down as he sat transfixed on the big screen television in his room.  Over the years of his later adolescence,   He  watched people through his window as they walked by his house on the streets below.  He would create scenarios in his head about where they would go.  He would pretend that they were his minions, there to do his bidding.  They would go out and conquer land for him, and come back to tell them about the nice things that they had done for him.  They would tell him nice things all the time, and he began to believe them.

Damien believed in himself.  He believed in himself so much, that when he turned eighteen, he decided to become a man.  His father gave him one million dollars, and he realized that he was destined for great success in commercial enterprise. He decided to start a business.  One business lead to another.  He began to tell others what to do, in real life.  He became successful in domestic and international markets, just like his father.  One million lead to five million lead to ten million.  With his financial success came power, and his childhood ambition of telling people what to do was really happening! Instead of shying away from those antiquated ideologies that involved peaceful compromise, rationalism, or playing the long game, he began to loathe them, refusing to read any book with a cover that looked remotely hippy or progressive.  He didn’t want to be distracted.  He wanted unlimited power, and he wanted it now.