You’re Still Wrong Mykel's Blog for September 2019
or We’re Number Two
Mykel’s Post-MRR Blog
September 2019
We're Number Two
by Mykel Board
"Travel is
fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our
people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable
views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one
little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
―Mark Twain
―Mark Twain
It was a more brilliant idea than
the invention of masturbation…. a bigger adventure than petting a
live crocodile… a riskier task than walking into a room of black
lesbian feminist vegetarians. Disappear! Go away… vanish. Not
permanently (sorry folks), but for more than a month. Just go off and
not tell a soul where I’m going. POW! Be gone.
By
the time you read this, I will be gone… a brief trip to help
celebrate my nephew’s college graduation. Then POW… off to
I-know-where to disappear with only a few scattered traces. Here are
the first two of a slow series of hints to my location:
1.
Saturday Night Live
2.
It’s a place I’ve never been to, but MAYBE not a country I’ve
never been to.
So
for my last blog before I go, I want to talk about travel.
While
I make the necessary preparations for my disappearance, I’ve been
thinking about my trips in the past. Once, while hiking through the
woods somewhere, maybe Estonia, I squatted to take a shit. There’s
something wonderful about being alone with nature… trees, leaves,
shrubs. And then just squatting and taking a shit. It’s a
Buddhist-like communion. I am one with the bears, the chipmunks, the
boars… my fellow creatures who shit in the woods.
It’s
a medium shit… the consistency of toothpaste… the size and shape
of Katz’s pickles. But the wipe… What about the wipe?
I
open my wallet to look for an old receipt or any other scrap of
paper…nothing… only green bills: three ones, four fives, and a
twenty. It would be a great statement to wipe my ass on hard cash.
It’s a statement I do not make. I pinch my cheeks together and pull
up my pants.
FLASH
TO GREENLAND: Until Trump’s offer to buy it from Denmark, most
Americans had never heard of Greenland. Half of those who have
confuse it with Iceland. Denmark controls much of Greenland’s
foreign policy. It issues passports and prints the money for the
country… but it does not OWN the country… at least not in the way
the US owns Puerto Rico.
It’s
2017, I step off the plane from Oslo, Norway to Nuuk, Greenland. At
the door to the plane is a roll-away staircase. The other end sits on
the small tarmac below. I climb down and follow the other dozen or so
passengers into the main building… fishing out my passport ready to
present it to the immigration officer who’ll ask why I’m there,
do I have anything to declare, and can I open my bags so he can see
if I have any booze or munitions.
I
don’t see an immigration officer. There is a guy in a sort of
uniform (black shirt and pants), sitting at a desk.
“Are
you immigration?” I ask.
He
nods.
I hand him my passport. He opens it, looks at my picture and hands it back.
I hand him my passport. He opens it, looks at my picture and hands it back.
I
clear my throat.
“I
know this is an odd request,” I say, “but I like to keep records
of places I’ve visited. Would you mind stamping my passport?”
He
shrugs.
“Sorry,” he says in better English than mine, “we don’t have any stamps. We don’t do that in Greenland.”
“Sorry,” he says in better English than mine, “we don’t have any stamps. We don’t do that in Greenland.”
So
began a journey, like all others, different from any journey I’d
had before. A country with NO SECURITY. No x-rays at the airport, no
immigration, no bag inspection, no taking off belts and shoes. A
country where people watch whales frolic from their windows… and
then eat them. Where locals can see the aurora from those same
windows. It’s a place where caribou hunters video their kills on
iphones. A place where a fine halibut steak costs $5… and a single
cucumber costs more. All the land is owned by the government. You
have a right to use the land where you want to build a house, but you
can't buy or sell it.
We
sit at a bar near the center of town. I’m with Inuarq my
couch-surfing host for my time here. I raise my glass.
“Kazuta!”
he says.
“Kazuta!”
I reply, downing the beer.
A
beautiful Greenlander enters the bar with a bunch of young men in
tow. She reminds me of those young Japanese women who die their hair
blond. Oriental-looking, like most Greenlanders, she’s tall and
thin, unlike most of the other locals. I figure she’s a local
celebrity. I figure right.
“That’s
Ursula,” says my host. “The only transsexual in Greenland. She’s
a superstar here. On television... people follow her around. The
biggest thing in Greenland since the igloo. EVERYBODY wants to be her
friend” [NOTE: I forget what her name REALLY is, so I use Ursula,
because it’s a sexy name.]
In
Greenland, the stranger, the novel, the outsider revels in her
strangeness, her novelty, her outsiderness. Rock-star status… The
way it should be.
FLASH
TO MONGOLIA: In Mongolia, at least
in 1996 Mongolia, there are
no roads between the cities.
You drive
over the desert in the general direction of the city. When you come
to a ger (one of those big
round tents Americans call “yurts”),
you ask the way, and the ger-owner adjusts
your path a bit, and you go on to another ger and get adjusted again.
When the sun begins
to set, you stop at a ger, tell ‘em you’re a traveler, and the
people feed you, put you up for the night, and adjust your direction
the next morning.
It’s
the evening, I sit with a family I’ve never met. We’re someplace
in the Gobi desert… not a city… not a town… just a ger, not
close to anything else except sand and a few mountains. It looks
about 6 o’clock from the sun and the sun is all we have to go from.
I’m
the only one here who doesn’t speak Mongolian (except for the
phrase Mongol-hun bain? (Are
you Mongolian? Not very useful in Mongolia.) Tsengel, student and
the driver on this trip, translates when it’s necessary.
Dinner
tonight is lamb, bread, and vodka. Dinner EVERY night is lamb, bread,
and vodka. Our hosts, a man and woman in their late 40s, open the
cupboard to fetch the bread and vodka. There is one loaf and one
bottle. The man pours a
rather large single glass of vodka, then dips his ring finger into
it. Holding
his finger with his thumb, he releases it spraying vodka into the
air.
“It’s
a first offering for the Gods,” Tsengel tells me.
Then
the host passes the glass among the rest of us… and we all take a
sip. Then he refills the glass, takes a drink and passes it around
again. While we’re drinking, his wife takes the loaf of bread and
cuts it into the same number of pieces as there are people. She
passes it around.
After
we finish, there is no more vodka and no more bread.
“What
are they going to eat or drink tomorrow?” I ask Tsengel. “They
have no more bread. No more vodka.”
“It’s
never tomorrow… always today” says Tsengel, “so we don’t
worry about it.”
Further
on in the desert, we’re almost out of gas. There is a small town
with a handpump filling station that will be our last stop for 2
hundred miles. I suggest we fill all available containers with
gasoline. One of them is ¼ bottle of vodka.
“We’re
going to need that container,” I tell Tsengel.
“I
can’t drink a quarter bottle of vodka,” says Tsengel. “I have
to drive.”
“Then
dump it out into the sand,” I tell him.
“That’s
vodka,” he says, looking like I’d asked him to cut off his
testicles.
“I
know,” I say, “just dump it.”
“But,
that’s VODKA!” he says. “You can’t dump it out.”
But
we do. I can see the tears in his eyes as he pours it into the Gobi
sand.
FLASH
TO NY: Gavin, a pal from Guyana, is visiting me. He’s spent some
time in the Amazon, trying to synthesize traditional music from
escaped slaves with punkrock. You can see some of what he does here.
It’s
Drink Club night at the Peculier Pub, Gavin shows up late as the
Guyanese are wont to do.
“This
is my friend Gavin,” I say by way of introduction. “He’s from
Guyana.”
“Really,”
says a friend from New Jersey, “tell me about it. I’ve always
wanted to visit Africa.”
Flash to any American patriotic
rally. I’m here because I have to be doing something ELSE… and
the rally is blocking my way. This one is on some street in a small
town between New York and Baltimore. I’m driving to visit my friend
Kesha and it’s Memorial Day (or Labor Day-- I always get them
confused) weekend.
WE’RE
NUMBER ONE! WE’RE NUMBER ONE! WE’RE NUMBER ONE! comes the shout
from the crowd.
“More
like we’re NUMBER TWO,” I think-but-don’t-say for personal
safety reasons. Then, the idea strikes me, what do these people
REALLY think is the number two country.
I
tap the shoulder of a blond girl in a blue tanktop.
“Hey!”
she says –not in a friendly way.
The
massive white guy standing next to her turns around. He looks down at
me, like a vengeful god might have looked down at Moses when he
(Moses) smashed the Ten Commandments.
“What’s
up with you, Mister?” asks the white guy.
“Sorry
to bother you,” I say, “but I was just wondering. If America is
number one, what country is number two?”
“What
the fuck?” says the big white guy. “They’re ALL number two.”
“I
see,” I say. “Well then, of all the countries you’ve been to,
what’s the difference between them and us?”
“Are
you serious?” he asks. “What kind of question is that? I’ve
never been out of the U.S. I don’t need to go. Everything is here.
Purple mountains majesty… that kinda shit. And the biggest army in
the world. We RULE! Don’t you know that? Are you some kind of
foreigner?”
“I
don’t really know,” I tell him.
One
facebook friend says he’s been to over 100 countries. Turns out he
went to most of them with the army. Spent all his time killing the
locals, so he knows how awful they are. Otherwise, he was with
Americans and it’s just like he never left home
Others
of my “friends” tell me LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. These are usually
the same guys who want to ban immigrants.
“I
can’t leave it,” I tell them. “The other countries are banning
immigrants and won’t let me in.”
It’s
a facile answer, I know. I have a cousin and several friends who’ve
left. I’ve already written about the colonies of American expats in
Mexico City, Prague, Paris, Roppongi Tokyo, Belize, Thailand… and
more. They had the courage to leave. I don’t.
Americans
don’t know who won the Civil War or that Guyana is in South America
or who was the “enemy” in World War Two.
“Americans
are the dumbest people on earth,” Michael Moore once said. I think
he was giving them (us?) too much credit.
Americans
don’t know what it’s like being able to go to the doctor when
you’re sick without having to worry if that’ll take away your
ability to pay rent. Americans don’t know how it feels when the
stranger is a hero, rather than an “invader.” Americans don’t
know how good it feels to shit in the woods.
Yeah,
there are some exceptions. But they are rare.
Is
that a surprise? In a country where school students grow up pledging
allegiance to a flag… and a nation under God… what space is there
for looking at things a different way.? And in a country, where
parents can opt-out of the school system completely, and teach their
kids that God made the universe in seven days, how can it possibly be
common knowledge that the North won the Civil War and that
Ghana is in Africa and Guyana in South America? How can there be
common knowledge at all?
The U.S. is a big Number Two. I stay
here because I have a cheap apartment in NY, a job I like, 6 weeks a
year to just disappear… and I don’t have the courage to say Fuck
You and take off for a better place.
Still,
we do share things with the rest of the world. Sometimes that
commonality loses itself in the details, but it’s in our combined
humanity. Is the reluctance to dump vodka in the desert any weirder
than the reluctance to use dollar bills to wipe my ass? Only the
material is different.
ENDNOTES:
[You can contact me on facebook
or by email at god@mykelboard.com.
Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music
or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137,
New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified
when
anything new is available. Subscribe to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo
group readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]
→ An actor in one
of my favorite
movies portrays a transsexual Thai boxer who literally kicked
ass. The actor was asked what he thinks when people say that, because
of his portrayal of a transsexual , he himself must be transsexual.
He answered. “That is the highest compliment. It means I was so
convincing as an actor, that people believed the character was me.”
That’s how I felt
when several people asked me if I really fucked a guy with two
assholes. I know I usually save the blatant lies for my April Fools
column, but this was not a lie. It was a story with a purpose. It was
a literary way to explore an opposite point of view from mine… and
give that point of view some credibility. It was a case where I
didn’t have all the answers, and wanted at least to make sure of
the questions. The activities did not take place in the “real”
world. The questions they raised, however, were real questions.
All the events
related in THIS blog are true to the best of my recollection.
→ As Freedom
Erodes Dept: The
U.S. representative at the UN made the right call. Kelly Knight
Craft, presumably on D.T.’s instructions. made the U.S. one of only
three countries to vote against a “condemnation of Nazis”
resolution. While condemning Nazi ideology, Craft voted NO on free
speech grounds. She
recognized
that denying speech to one is denying speech to all. It was a brave
act, especially since D.T. is such a Netanyahu
lapdog. But it was the right decision.
→ Speaking of
Israel Dept: Since the U.S. has
practically abandoned international news coverage (unless we’re
overtly involved) that task
has to go to the foreigners. Two of the best are from the Middle
East.
One
is Al Jazeera, from Qatar.
They have reporters everywhere, and have more real news than any 10
American newspapers. The other is Haaretz
from Israel. I don’t know how they’ve escaped government
censorship, but they continue to publish what really happens in the
middle east without kowtowing
to the official line.
The latter does, however, seem to be kowtowing to their
advertisers, refusing to show their website to anyone using an
ad-blocker. No comment here about confirming religious stereotypes.
→ Pimp yourself dept: I’m
rebuilding my LINK CONNECTION database. If you have a cool blog, or
newsletter, or something else with a URL, let me know (even if you’ve
already done so). You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. If
I like it, I’ll link to it and let you know. Then you link to me.
It’ll give us both two extra points in the Google search engine.
If I’ve linked to you in the past, send me the link again and I’ll
relist it. Send the link via email to god@mykelboard.com
Subject: LINK EXCHANGE. No YouTube links allowed.
In
the meantime, I’m pimping a couple links here. Ones that I’m sure
of.
My
spiritual foil, who calls me on my shit Richard Goldberg has a great
photo-centric blog at: https://goldberg.wordpress.com
Jailbird
noise musician and intense critic, Kyle Nonneman has a blog at:
https://apothelema.blogspot.com
See
you in hell... er… the location’s
a secret.
--Mykel
