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Archive for January, 2010

The Ideal Patient

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

There was this one time I had a patient who was a serial killer. He was transferred from his maximum-security prison to the ER where I was working because, on that particular day, he claimed to have swallowed a razor blade. His guards were so scared of him they didn’t strip search him. It turned out he’d just taped it to his belly under his orange jumpsuit, in an attempt to escape, or at least break a skull or two. When I tried to take it off him, the guards said he was probably the most dangerous man in the state and advised me not to get anywhere near him. While he was getting ready to fight his way to freedom, we had the police come in and use a taser on him repeatedly until he submitted and let me take the razor blade off of him. It was awesome.

– Dr. Ritik Chandra

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True Tales From North Dakota

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

There was this one time in Butte, North Dakota (pop. 60) when serial killers were on the loose. Elizabeth and I were there for the summer when a murderous Bonnie & Clyde couple showed up– leaving a body in Texas and one in Minneapolis. Then, after a lover’s spat, they split up, and Bonnie was caught in the neighbouring town of Velva. Naturally the people of Butte were spooked. Bonnie’s partner Clyde could be anywhere! – the sunflower fields, hiding in hay bales, in the abandoned houses that littered the town (two of which were on either side of our house).

The men from Butte rounded up their dogs, shotguns and trucks and went hunting for Clyde.
“With what those boys will do if they find him first, Clyde’ll be lucky to get caught by the police”, we all said.
But with Clyde having temporarily slipped our minds, Elizabeth and I took a walk into the countryside one morning. Halfway out in the middle of the sunflower fields, a feeling like someone watching us returned Clyde to our thoughts.
We immediately scrambled back to our abode and locked the doors.
The next day Clyde was caught by the police.

–by Marlaina Mah

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The Cremationist

Friday, January 15th, 2010

photo by R. Chursinoff

Approximately 155,000 of us die each day; 6,458 an hour; about 2 every second.
Eight people died while you read that last line.
And for approximately 1,800 of us each year in Vancouver, Boris Gomez is our body’s final stop.
Boris looks like a gangster from East L.A.–baggy black Dickies, short sleeve black dress shirt exposing tattoos on his upper arms, hair pulled back in a Latino ‘fro ponytail.
He incinerates dead people at a Hell-hot temperature of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit six days a week, eight hours a day.
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Posted in Stranger Than Fiction | 3 Comments »

Bus Invaders

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Boulder, Colorado

I am awoken at 4am by the opening and closing of the tour bus’s back lounge door. Giggles and muted conversation follow. A few moments later the lounge door opens and a girl comes out into the hallway. I know it’s a girl because in my curiosity to find out which band member is partying in the back lounge, I peek under my curtain and see in the dim light, the bottom half of a young lady in tight, faded blue jeans. Her exposed belly button says hello to me. She pokes around in the bunk above mine– my “junk bunk”, where I keep my bag of clothes, camera, computer, wallet and all sorts of personal odds and ends.
Strange, I think to myself, what business does this person have going through. . . wait a minute. . . now she’s opening my curtain, one velcro attachment at a time!

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Posted in Notes From The Caravan | 1 Comment »

Post Central America Disorder / The Amazing Painter

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Following my last tour with Australian pop-rocker Ben Lee, which finished in Phoenix near the end of November 2006, I went to Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama. There I encountered exotic women, venomous pit vipers and Nicaraguan Rum. Thanks goes out to the Canadian Embassy in San Jose for flying me home long after my better judgment had abandoned me. I continue to dream lucidly about vacationing Midwestern nurses, oppressive humidity and embarrassing attempts at Spanglish.

Back in Vancouver, I watched disconsolate as my tan faded. And with it my vagabond aura. The wanderlust however, remained firmly intact. There’s the rub. Travel is a high, something new everyday. Home is routine. So what then does one do with the vanishing thrill of adventure and freedom inherent in travel?
We go on dates.

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Posted in Notes From The Jungle, Stranger Than Fiction | 4 Comments »

The Way I Surf

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Surfing is a curious activity for me. I can’t honestly say I “do” surfing. I attempt to “do” surfing, which is what I was doing in Santa Teresa– a backpacker friendly, 2 km long strip of surf camps, family-run hotels and restaurants on the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica’s Pacific coast.
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Travel Plans, Like Rules, Are Meant To Be Broken

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

jungle jeep

The occasional charred vehicle riddled with bullet holes is all the physical evidence that remains in Panama from the tyrannical and devastating reign of Manuel Antonio Noriega. And what may have been an anxious, paranoid and fast-paced lifestyle 30 years ago, has since resettled into the more familiar languid pace throughout parts of the country unsullied by hordes of red-faced, pot-bellied vacationers.
Getting stuck in any of these unhurried communities that dot the Bocas del Toro archipelago of Panama’s Caribbean is easy, canceling pre-arranged travel itineraries altogether is even easier. I succumbed to the latter.

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Miroslav Tichy: Stone Age Photographer and His Balls

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

“I am a prophet of decay and a pioneer of chaos, because only from chaos does something new emerge.”

–Miroslav Tichy

I wish I was a reclusive Czech photographer who looked like Gandalf after a serious bender and had the balls to wear the same clothes every day since 1968, until they resembled some sort of distressed fish-net S&M suit. These same balls would allow me to reject materialism and cling to an ascetic devotion to individuality so fiercely that if someone offered to buy me a new camera to replace my broken one I would tell them where to go, then proceed to make one from whatever trash was lying around me. Thread spools, toilet paper rolls, eye glass lenses, cardboard, chewing gum, locks of hair. Fuck it. Throw it all together and make a working camera.
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Posted in Stranger Than Fiction | 21 Comments »

Why European Hipster, Why?

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

The tropics, as you may know, are places around the world that are tropical- hot, sticky, moist and really hot.
Why then do European hipsters, when traveling to the tropics, insist on dressing as though they were still in Manchester or Bratislava or Berlin or wherever it is they come from? Is this thing the kids are concerned about, this… ‘indie cred’, is it so very important?

Canada in the winter can be unpleasant. Vancouver in the winter can be down right Blade Runner. So when I get the opportunity to wear my banana-hammock and nothing more on a lovely, white-sand Caribbean beach I do. I do, till death do us part.

So I’m laying there, adjusting my banana in its hammock when I see, through the heat waves coming off the sand, what appears to be a mirage. Strutting down the beach towards me in tight black jeans, t-shirt with skinny tie, stingy-brim fedora (a.k.a. Pete Doherty’s hat), Chucks and, what I can only assume, is a perpetual cigarette in his mouth as though it were an appendage, is a hip young dude.
On a tropical Caribbean beach? I think to myself.
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Posted in Notes From The Caravan, Notes From The Jungle | 2 Comments »