Check-In, Check-Out

There was always a beatific zing that kept me excited to trot along from place to place. During the time we hitched down to Batam island and stayed in the grossest squat I've ever layed my eyes on, crawling with as many street punks as there is light flowing through a ghostly X-ray of a mad-man's skull in a clinic, I was excited to move on to the next place. To see what it would be like. To board the giant ship that would take us two days across the equator in the South China Sea to Java. But don't get me wrong, the squat, Base Camp, was indeed a place that I'll remember for going through a packet of cigarettes the fastest, a place where a ukelele would get passed around and played most entertainingly by each kid (mind you, I counted about 27 of them, clad in red plaid, dingy black, stone-wash and leopard print, most or all of them under 22 years of age) a place where during the night, the tacky, buggy night, they were all softly snoring in an MC Escher-drawn tetris-globe head-to-toe in the smallest one bedroom they built themselves. The next morning, when I peeled myself up from the mattress I'd just left a body print on (reminds me of the time when I was only 7 or so and I slipped on the playground at recess because I was wearing these dainty black Victorian shoes, face planted onto the pavement and knocked out a tooth and busted a lip- I didn't get up, I just put my face back down in the pavement, right where it'd just come from because it fit so perfectly) I felt like a skink buried in a swamp. Two of the boys from the squat sweetly brought us to the ship's port where we began the next leg.