I have attained nirvana. For serious.

So, my first hotel gave me awful shits. I ate some vegetable-and -dysentery biryani and was, the next afternoon, doubled up with mucus-like liquid running too slowly out my asshole. I managed to stay clean a week before "the wobbles" hit me, so I guess that's pretty good. For the record: you don't wobble. You shit fluid.

I spent about two weeks looking for what is quite limeily called a "flat" to discover that, as a white guy who enjoys indoor showering and doesn't care for a two hour commute to work, I need to pay almost New York (Manhattan, oh, to be Williamsburg-range!) prices.

But that's cool because my place is huge and I've got my own stove and washing machine and bed, right?

Well the bed smells like stale urine. The washing machine floods the kitchen. The stove, which I was told was malfunctioning and would soon be "automatic," actually involves turning on the gas and lighting with matches. My dad assured me this was totally OK because some people still had stoves like that when he was a kid. When he was a kid in the 1950s. The fucking 1950s. Right here, 60 years later, for your face-exploding pleasure, you goddamn shitty communist.

Then I managed to produce a solid turd. It didn't flush. I tried killing it an hour later. It didn't flush. I called a guy. He came and got it to flush. I took another shit a day later--smaller than the first, less solid. Was less proud of it. It still didn't flush. Just sat there, turning its wee (pun?) aquarium rusty. I think this may have made the water cleaner.

How hard is it to get a rifle in India? Didn't Orwell have one to shoot elephants? But was he in India in that story? I forget high school. But I want an elephant rifle. Or an elephant mortar. I want to destroy the spasmodic car alarm that activates about once per hour outside my window, obnoxiously loud, from 11 PM to 7 AM, "pee-poo-pee-poo-pee-poo-peep!" It goes off slightly more frequently than the power does. Also, I'm gonna fuck up the Airtel engineer who I sent running from my "flat" today.

Oh, him? Well you see, I'd been waiting two weeks for internet to arrive (I realize it takes a while to travel back in time to the '50s, what with Deloreans being hard to come by in Asia and Delhi traffic) and when I finally get the engineer to the flat, I'm informed that there is a "technical problem."

The engineer, you should know, is the third stage of India Internetting. First, you get a sales rep to show up--this is easy--people like to take your money. Then you get a guy to install wires. He takes about a day, and will arrive three hours late. You tip him, cause you tip everybody for everything when you're a $ skin color person.

Then, a week later, they send me this engineer. With the technical problem. So I sez, calmly, vas dis aboutta technical problem? Guy #3 sez iz technical, see. So I tell him I'm not stupid, and ask, hey, Guy #3 what's the problem? He evades, so I calmly inform Guy #3 that if he doesn't figure out the problem I'm going to rip his heart out with my teeth, and calmly remind him that us 'Murkins love red meat. He answers a phone call (was it real?) and uses it as an excuse to casually stroll out of the apartment, get on his motorcycle, and retreat.

I'm not kidding. The Airtel engineer ran the fuck away. Where is my elephant mortar?

It's hard to get red meat here that doesn't come from humans (three cheers for medical tourism!), and when I do, it gives me the shits.

So I decided to cook myself (stove permitting) a vegetarian feast--spaghetti with olive oil, garlic, red pepper, and fake Kraft (R) Parmezzan Cheeez (TM). Expat delicacy. And the garlic has gone rotten since I bought it two days earlier. And one package of spaghetti is partially open, so maybe it's not safe.

But what's this under the spaghetti? Lice?! I bought two bags of "Super-Premium Basmati Rice", one of which I didn't notice had already been opened and stapled shut again. I'm not used to looking for these things, especially in the fancy expat store where you spend 200 bucks for Super-Premium rice n' lice. The bugs were (and mostly still are) all over the cabinet, so everything not in a very air-tight can was thrown out. So no pasta, even sans garlic. Butter and Cheeez (TM) would have been nice on non-infested pasta--but hey! The butter is frozen. Along with everything else in my 'fridge, which has settings only for tepid and The Soul of Winnipeg. I'm working on putting my own personal hole in the ozone. Can you eat eggs that have been frozen and defrosted? Dinner tonight will be Pringles and liquor again.

One of the lice (they're not really lice, but sooooo creepy) had the audacity to crawl onto a sock of mine, so I burned it to death with a lighter. This took longer than I expected and was immensely satisfying. This city is turning me into a sadistic child. I think I'll move on to stray dogs next. To be more adult.

My neighbors probably know me as the white guy who likes to fuck. By this I mean yell "fuck!" at everything that betrays my expectations. The closest I came to fucking was flirting with a cute Israeli girl with acne scars on a flight back from Chennai. They sat the Jews next to each other. At one point I passed the "Swastika Hotel" but don't worry, it doesn't mean that here. Anyway, I talked to her for two hours and didn't have the courage to ask her out after, even though she was in town for only a few days and seemed both interested and fun.

Yeah I've done some good stuff too but it's all work-related and I'll brag on facebook, in the light of day. Can't upload pictures because I have no bandwidth (I'm using a carrier-pigeon-golem that I molded out of my unflushable feces to bring you this here tour de force) but if I could, I'd show you the burnt rice louse.

It's 9:30 on a Friday night and I don't know anybody my age who isn't married (with children, too) or religiously opposed to alcohol. Realistically, I haven't met anybody cool because I'm pissed off, anemic, spoiled, and cowardly. At least I'm not (very) ugly. I saw a girl today, maybe 18 years old, with a fully shaveable beard.

That made me feel better about things.