The tornado is not a metaphor.

Moritz Aust | Watching The Storm - Day Seventeen

A little note known fact is the alternate title this photographer considered: "Let's go put on matching suspender outfits and watch the tornado tear up our corn. #nohomo"

People have been asking whether I had trouble adjusting to humdrum life after Burning Man. And it's vaguely embarrassing to realize that I do not have the right to notice much of a change, but this is because (1) I am funemployed and (2) I live in a co-op, (3) in Oakland.

I come home through ganja fog to smiley strangers handing me fried okra and pancakes on the regular, so yeah, it's a little dry out there in Nevada.

The not-working part of my life is certainly going splendidly, though it has only been almost two weeks. This means that it is still socially acceptable for me to tell everyone, "All I did today was climb, go to yoga, and pick tomatoes while half-nekkid in our garden."

Soon I'm going to say it less cheerfully and people will wonder if I have a trust fund. Or met a hippie sugar daddy, let's be real.

Life really is very much on the side of awesome, even if I occasionally feel like I'm off-track, whatever race we're running. I just know that currently I'm being paid on the side to write a screenplay about the Holocaust, I'm camping away, and I really want to complete the whole wave-soaked meander up the Lost Coast trail soon.

This past time was a scouting trip basically, and while it's a little tangled and mangled in some parts, the Tolkien views more than make up for it.

Our campsite on the last night of the backpacking trip

There were just a lot of surreal moments where you think, "So this is nature, eh?" The five of us slipped and sliced our way through immoderate amounts of wilderness, made camp in little glens fit for Bambi and his dead mom.

Places where some nice hobbit boy might run off with ya.

Just this month, I literally won four sets of free tickets to plays that I would have otherwise paid to see anyway. This year has been an excellent haul for my uncanny ability to win chance contests and drawings, an iPad and a trip to Canada for three being the highlights. And I swear that most of the time, it's because I'm the only that cares about winning.

And I was vindicated recently when I won tickets to a film festival by filming my stuffed Thai cat Dinga as he gyrated to the Scissors Sisters for fourteen hot seconds. I can now add "award-winning film-maker" to my list of titles, but again, I found out at the screening that I had been the only person to enter the contest.

Woo, go me, go.

So I'm applying for a few jobs on the daily, figuring that I'll land something ridiculous again.

Eventually.

The past two years since law school have been amazing experiences, so I'm trying to continue this upward trend toward whatever I'm supposed to end up doing with my life. I've embraced the fact that I'm somewhat off track for most lawyering, but if I can get people to continue paying me to do interesting things around the world, I'm pretty okay with that.

Next steps will mean a solid chance I'll be leaving the Bay Area, which will be interesting since it's been home for twenty-three years, if not twenty-seven for all that I remember of Hong Kong.



Not that I haven't considered it before, but it's much more real when I'm looking at postings in Bangladesh, South Sudan, and Afghanistan. I'm in adventure mode, and I want to get out and tilt at windmills.

And it's simply been easier to think about it once close friends moved on to other places: Danny to Japan, Erik to Madison, Tristan to his own jetsetting adventures, etc.

While I still have a good circle of amigos here, it's hard not to think about leaving too when you have to hug a friend really hard, realizing that tonight is the last night you'll be clinking beers for a while.

But we're still on the hunt to recruit for Musketeers. I just might take the search abroad.

Dark Horse creating his "Chris Kosienski" identity while I stand amazed.

Soup dumplings, then goats at the zoo, and then Dolores Park make for an excellent Saturday.

Feeling rosy today, Mysterio?!

We have a habit of fitting both of us into small places. Or big chairs.

Okay, I have to go back to tending my cardamom kombucha. And in other news, we have fleas in our house.

I have spent two months with permanent night-time itchy leg, and more than one morning has me waking up and watching small black dots bounce on my blankets.

Again, remember that part about how normal life presents no culture clash?

Motorists, this is the last stop for gas and outrageous lies before Black Rock City.

Cloud construction

I suppose every gas station near Gerlach can be the last one from its own frame of reference. 

Dusty feet up on the window, and the four of us are driving in an exit caravan formation at 5 mph through a pure white dust storm. And as we're pulling away from the playa, I'm watching various camps folding up to go. I'm still feeling like I'm made out of buttery sunshine and warm honey, and I don't even care that that's probably an Herbal Essences scent of shampoo. Can't stop grinning like a maniac Cheshire, and the raggedy little book I've been scribbling in all week is just covered in kid-like serial killer font.

And I'm jotting down images and memories from the week, knowing that it's all running by me like the tide and waves, and that I'm writing some down in the same way that you'd run your hand over sea foam. 

I played My Heart Will Go On in this organ in the desert. 

I remember dancing like a gerbil on crack next to a two-story pink sheep that pulsed with the beat of the DJ riding its flank. And being upside down in yoga when a massive sandstorm hits, and everything is blinding but completely illuminated. 

Buying into a roda in center camp when I saw the berimbaus headed into the tent. Planning my days about snowcone camps, foam dome DJ parties, and the occasional hemp bracelet weaving class. Being chased into a side alley by the Running of the Bullshitters.

I don't think Burning Man is about changing your life, but just a way to remind yourself that there's a lot of happiness and humor in just about every situation and with almost anyone.

Burning Man is like discussing at midnight (on a school night, gasppp) how churros would make awful sex toys, musing about whether they would be easy to fry up, and then churning out a few batches of lemon verbena churros in cinnamon-sugar beds to surprise the house. That giddy kiddy joy both churro maker and churro-ee glow with  is basically how Burning Man feels, but for eight consecutive days in the middle of a dusty desert.

And we did make churros like that last night.

But back to BRC:

Yes, joy and thrills, but also tiring. and there are days where you're convinced that the past two days were just dreams you're having from Monday. And I know that in the future, there will be days when it's great to be able to tap into this deep storehouse of memory and good times, of how it feels to watch sunrise while biking through dust devils.

Timing of things was excellent since (1) my nonprofit had just told me they were out of money and would need to drop me like a hot potato and (2) there is a sweet boy who I could actually see myself dating.  No job responsibilities, potential beginnings, and I'm already sufficiently steeped in the Bay Area granola. Which is to say the Burning Man culture felt like a jazzed up Big Daddy version of what living in an Oakland co-op is like. Tasty food popping up with no warning, new people circulating your house all the time, occasionally being dirty but A-OK with it all. By Tuesday, Chris and I had gone native and Dark Horse & Wombat were prepared to live out their brave new lives in Black Rock Desert.

I recall that I spent one full day with a boy named Sasha that I will never see again, and that it involved an Orgy Dome, breakfast waffles, and a giant narwhal.

I'm not going to try documenting it all in detail, both because I don't think I've fully wrapped my mind around it all, but also I don't know that I want to. There's just a pleasant haze over it all, of dust storms and mayan pyramids, cold apple pie and getting lost, being found.

There was a lot of , "wow, everything that I ever wanted to do all in one place." And then someone hands you a cornbread waffle with ice cream.

I thought it was amusing that my handwritten journal during the week devolves in legibility like a parody of Algernon. I start in neat and tight cursive rows, and by mid-week, it peaks in there being pages of one giant scrawled letter per sheet. 

I'll definitely be back, and next time with reinforcements and the cavalry! 

Quebeckerin' Goodbye

Our final train ride to Quebec City, and we're seated next to some teenaged québécoises ladies. The swapping between English and French is more distracting than anything else: "Tu sais que I already bought it?"

I pay for my coffee with Canadian dimes, and the train attendantrix yells at me, “You think I like change?” She smiles and threatens to give me salt with my coffee, but we compromise on her giving me two heavy creams instead of the coffee whitener I wanted. She's a feeder.

I end up making my way through a third of City of Night, and somehow I’m committing myself to a one-man festival featuring Disillusioned Gays Finding Themselves Through Meaningless Sex in Urbania.

We hop off the train and after a sweaty walk that left a racing stripe across my chest, we check into Chateau Laurier. Our room is a boiler room from the Titanic, but we have a visual line of sight to the jumbotron of the concerts across the street. We again have not eaten anything that day again, so Yelp leads us towards a bistro called Le Hobbit. Based purely on the name itself, I was sold, but I was somewhat disappointed that it wasn’t a cozy nook in a grassy hill served by furry people about yay high. We’re told by the maître d’ that there is a forty-five minute wait for plebes with no reservations, and when we assent, she scoffs.

The time is spent well, and I pick up half a dozen French novels from the used bookstore for eight bucks. By the time my birch beer is swigged and we swag our way up the street, we’re seated at Chez Hobbit. For a decent price, we split duck leg confit and boudin noir.

As the shadows get longer in Vieux-Quebec, we wander down the cobbles towards La Korrigane. It’s empty when we enter, and I excitedly claim us a corner lookout, but we find that the locals are on the patio. Candlelit and tired, I have an excellent cream ale, something that gives a strong tea kick at the end, nothing of cream froth. I’m sad later that I missed out on Coeur du Pirate while we were in the lower town, but what can you do with insufficient information and opportunity costs. Little french-speakin' blond sprite spirit with a piano, and I am sold.



We head back like homosexual salmon against the throngs of concert folk going home, and we’re picking out potential mates. I don’t understand it, but there’s definitely a big part of me that wants the dark-haired orphans of the world. Points if they have cockney accents. Think chimney sweeps with stable income.

Poutine pops into my head at this appropriately late hour, and with a negligible amount of advocacy, we’re in Chez Alston, getting ready to feast on the emblematic dish of Quebec. Chris somehow manages to almost pick a fight with a large Tabarnackin’ bro, but we exit unharmed, vinegar and curdy gravy fries in hand.

Erik has the one fry he restricted himself to, but because no food must go to waste, he saves us from a dozen more. Who says chivalry is gone from this age and world?

Our second day in Quebec City starts off meeting a 400-year-old woman named Guillemette who guides us on a tour of Vieux-Quebec. UNESCO heritage site! We’re told how 40,000 cannonballs once destroyed 90% of the city, and about the French victories that involved rain, snow, and very little fighting. Lunch is with a little crazy pig, and I get quiche’d up before we wander the touristy outgrowths tumoring the old village square. Tire d'érable happens, though there are no pickles or coffee on hand.

We find the well-hidden hot tub on the roof before having a picnic worthy of Downton Abbey in the cemetery beside St. Michael’s. Tins of foie gras, pesto mustard, salted mackerel, pickled anchovies, olives, smoked meat, all on baguette. We toss a Montreal bagel to the punk barely has enough English to ask for something to eat before taking an epic nap at the hotel. Night wanders us towards different bars and in the deserted streets of Vieux-Quebec again. We clink cherry beer’d glasses to our last night in Canada at Sacrilege, which of course has a sweet patio out back.

Erik heads off to Grand Rapids early in the morning while Chris and I walk down to the water so I can pick up everything in maple flavor that I’m unclear I ever wanted. The little vendor lady outright lies to me when we have a brief conversation in French about whether beurre d’érable can be taken onto airplanes. Maple butter is what I was explicitly told to get in Quebec, and by the old gods, I was committed to picking up a family-sized tin of it. “But isn't it considered a liquid?” “It’ll be fine,” she murmured as she pocketed my loonies.

Chris and I split a enormous (and undoubtedly healthy) pie of curried lamb, a second basket of the best little strawberries I've ever had, and another two beers from Dieu du Ciel. The taxi driver is somehow okay with us paying him in a mix of currencies, lint, and prayer. The maple butter also magically survives two Canadian security checks, both because I decided to keep my birch beer bottle as a kombucha fizzer and it is an adequate distraction for both bag checkers. "This is not the maple butter you’re looking for."

We’re now an hour from SFO, and I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed with Dinga, and spooning some maple butter onto some co-op bread.

Toronto & Montréal: Mist maidens and angry god-lamb

Our quest to conquer Canada started bumpy when it took us an hour to escape the Toronto airport. Alchemizing our American gold into Canadian loonies, racing from floor to floor, we would have barely made it onto the finish mat for Amazing Race. Speaking true-true, we were bleary-eyed and I don’t even remember what we had eaten that day besides katsu’d Tomakazu porker.

Toronto feels to me like New York: humid warmth, garbage bags spilling into alleys, shwarma late night. At 2:30 am, we each have a quarter of a pizza and then flop down onto Holiday Inn beds to wake up again for platters of breakfast at Daybreak Diner. With real maple syrup! Somehow our hotel is in the gay area of town, and we pass so many rainbow flags and ambiguously gay duos and trios. We’re even down the street from a bar called “Zippers,” and on Friday nights, it is “Where the Bears (and otters, wolves, and boys) Run Free!”

A big bus picks us up from a little bus in the morning and we’re at the back with a little Latina terrorist who alternates between achingly cute and screamingly lacking in volume control. We’re disgorged at Niagara Falls and commanded to throw our faces for an hour at a buffet that overlooks the waterworks. Post-gorge, we are handed neon blue ponchos before filing onto one of the Maids of the Mist.

Somehow the New Yorker cartoon that won me this free trip to Canada failed to adequately portray how packed these ships are as they take you to the all-encompassing embrace of Horseshoe Falls. Even Monsieur FriFri donned a protective layer of hot plastic as we’re all hosed down. I can’t even see as I aim my camera sight unseen at the water.

We dry off quickly despite the humidity and we’re given some time to poke around a questionable gift store situated above some Class 6 rapids swirling into a whirlpool. Next destination was Niagara-by-the-falls, a sleepy tourist explosion of a town that sells pastries, souvenirs, bad beer, and adorable stuffed animals. We finally end up at an awful winery that has won somehow three hundred golden prizes (and a hall to display them in), but at least their wine plus the long day of seeing-all-the-things is roofie enough to knock us out for the journey back to Toronto proper.

Dinner is at the Dumpling Queen, which I assume turns from Taiwanese family-run joint into a gay bar catering to a specific clientele after dark, and then we peer into Zippers, mulling the fun of a nearly empty gay bar while the abyss of a drag queen peers right back at us with a grin. We ultimately hit the sack early to make the train to Montreal at 6:40 am. There will be more and better beers in our Canadian future.

Montréal

I’ve wanted to do a long train ride for a while now, so bucket list takes another hit. The responsible thing to do would have been to catch up on sleep, but I wanted to finish an emo movie, write a bit, and instagram all the blurry Impressionist paintings outside. It never got old to lean against the window, the countryside and farmland flashing by as our train blitzes towards the City of Saints.

As soon as our bags hit the hotel floor, we’re hauling ass towards the Basilique Notre-Dame. A fiver gains you admission, though it is free if you attend services. Everything is lit up by spotlight, candlelight, or tourist cameras. I take my obligatory picture of the baubles upon Catholic baubles at the front, but my favorite was the side chapel with the God-Lamb ready to do battle. It’s clear that He is sick of your whining after all that He has done for you.

We’re ready to eat a small Canadian child after the church, so we crash land into Stash Café, a Polish joint that has old church pews as seats that fit 3/4ths of your arse. Red demi-lanterns lit up the table as the server brought us pierogis, pickled herring, stuffed cabbage, all washed down with the first decent beers we’d had in Canada.



As post-script, I later regret not finding out about the brewery Dieu du Ciel until we were already out of town, not that I didn’t manage to successfully have five of their brewed wares by bottle proxy later. Best coffee imperial stout I’ve ever had. Péché mortel!

Our early wakeup is starting to ride us now, but we rally by sinking into the hotel pool and sauna contraption. Post-dinner, we inhale some shish taouk, the Montreal take on Lebanese kebab, as we make our way towards the Jacques Cartier Bridge. It was perfect timing for the International Fireworks Festival that night, and my homeland of Hong Kong was flaunting its pyrotechnic chops down by the amusement park across the water.

We camp out on the bridge’s early span and watch as giant fireballs set off car alarms and make children scream. I make everyone nervous by sticking my phone out past the bars, but all went well, and on our way back, we didn’t even dropkick any children.

The night wraps up in the Gay Village, where strands of pink baubles dangle over all the twinks reenacting Lady Gaga dance routines. The possible bars are just so plentiful that we drift through the gayborhood for a long time, pausing just to wonder why gay bars with “eagle” in the name are always Daddy dens. In this case, L’aigle noir was ready to suck Chris into its furry sweaty clutches.

Pink baubles above Gay Village

I suppose we all can’t expect that an Irish neighborhood in San Francisco to suddenly become a sufficient mecca for gays from all across the States. As a light sprinkle starts at the end of a fire dancer performance and for lack of smartphone guidance, we walk into Sky Pub Club, which turns out to have a sweet drag show in progress.

“Is there anyone here who speaks only English still? Fuck you!” said the cheerful drag MC, and we are immediately enraptured by her twirling and lipsyncing sisters. Katy Perry and Rihanna scroll by before a Cabaret montage steals the show. We stumble into the misty 2 am night in search of Erik’s perfect old man cocktail before bed.

We have a lazy morning before the next train voyage to Quebec City, so it’s off to Al-Baghdadi Pastry, a Middle Eastern bakery for some kanefeh variations and cardamom-drenched coffee. My eyes are sucking up every allergen it can at this point, and I’m just leading us around the city blindly.