OK. This item has put me in the best mood and totally negates all the negating in the following entry. Rufus has returned and so has my sense of humanity. USA!

If you want to read a nice entry about the mind-blowing adventure I'm having, read yesterday's entry. Today I feel like the garbage which is strewn across this bullshit country. Literally, this country is full of bullshit. I track it in from outside. If I had established my room as a shoe-free zone from the get go, I would be ok, but at this point my shoes stay on until I am on the island of my bed.

I am sick. My gut is tied in a knot, my bowels bailing ship, my head feels wrapped in gauze, and I go from icy cold to sweaty. I think it's a combination of tainted cheese toast, malnutrition, being with my mother for two weeks straight, constant jarring noise, homesickness, boy-longing, not having five or six hours a day chopping things at work, wondering if my cat has lost her mind yet, cold himalayan winds, flies, more flies, so many flies you would think this country is made of feces. I need to dedicate a separate entry to the roads, the honking motorbikes and cars and hawkers etc, but trust me for now, it's awful.

I am too tired and stomach-clenched to do anything today, so I have spent nearly 24 hours in my hotel room. It's easy to imagine the room is a prison cell, being a cold, featureless concrete cube, harshly lit by a bare flourescent tube. I have a window and balcony, which prison wouldn't have, and of course I can leave at any time. But if I lie on my hard platform, shiverring in the cold, bored out of my mind, I'm in jail. I tried to imagine this would be my life for the next 20 years to life. Ari's job (Prison Abolishonist) is not an easy one to get your head around. The biggest obstacle is that I don't know what prison is. Staring at my concrete ceiling, with nothing to do but listen to my gut gurgle I can almost imagine. Really, for lack of anything better to do, imagining yourself in prison can be quite illuminating. If you have lemons, make lemonade.

I predict that I will recover around 7pm tonight. I predict I will have more pleasant things to relate after that.

You know what really bothers me about this place? People come here ready to get spiritualized, and the city is only to happy to oblidge. But most, if not all of it is fake fake fake. It's like Fisherman's Wharf with ashrams. Westerners refuse to make eye-contact because everybody thinks they are Siddartha going to sit by the ganges. When they discover a dozens of other Siddartha's heading for the same strip of sand, it kind of blows the fantasy.

There is a new age singer down the hall. She sings like Judy Collins for hours. Last night she had a date, a deep-voiced german dude. She serenaded him, scatting all over the place, giving him a preview of her throes of ecstasy. At 11:30 my mom tramped down the hall and asked her to be quiet. For the next hour I couldn't stop trying to hear if they were making out or she was giving him a blow job. No more Judy Collins, just occasional sighs and giggles.

I'm all out of vitriol and I have to get to a toilet.