I woke up with a start, like when you are still mostly asleep but in your subconscious you notice that you’re not where you expect to be. Sometimes it’s the feel of the sheets, the mattress, the sounds outside, the light; if you’re lucky it’s some long, soft hair. But I knew I wasn’t where I last was, not that I could remember where that was anyway. It was the sheets. They were that tough clinical white cotton that are designed only to get soft after a few hundred washings.
The room was dark. A few streetlights glowed through the thick curtains. I heard a cough and sat up. To my left, slumped in some metal chairs with just a bit of padding, were my parents. I hadn’t seen them in almost a year, although we talked regularly enough. Still, I couldn’t figure out under what circumstances we’d have been reunited. It’s not like I’d ever drank myself into a blackout and boarded international flights before.
Read the rest of this page »
July 26, 2010 | Categories: Photos, Short Stories | Tags: Sao Paulo, fiction, zombies, dreams, outbreaks, infection, going to your own funeral, drinking wine in a park, Parque Ibirapuera, photos, short story, bird pictures | Leave A Comment »
After a bus ticket sellout, a breakdown, a lot of traffic, and some shitty directions – whoever had the idea of naming one portion of a street after a husband and the other after the wife but using only the last name on the street signs is a fucking idiot – Sam and I showed up to our hostel a day late. We’d told Victor, a friend who’d stayed with us the week prior in São Paulo, to grab us a couple spots. Something had gotten lost in translation with the Kenyan owners, and they said they’d given the bed we’d paid for away. It took a half-hour of arguing in broken English and Portuguese before they found us space in a tiny six person room.
Our roommates were a pair of Brits that had just finished college, a 27 year old Finn who spent all his time playing online poker, and a cute Brazilian photographer. The three guys were already drinking some beers they’d been forced to smuggle in due to the hostel’s strange no beer (but anything else) rule. Victor stopped by to introduce us to a German named Ingo that he’d been traveling with. Ingo was wearing a shiny black shirt and white linen pants. He was ready to party, and a few lukewarm beers weren’t going to cut it.
Read the rest of this page »
July 13, 2010 | Categories: Photos, Short Stories, Travel | Tags: pinga, Rio de Janeiro, graffiti, Funk, Favela Funk, Funk Carioca, blonde cornrows, cachaça, sucão, hostel, street parties, Maracanã, crackheads, topless women, ODB | Leave A Comment »
It was Stan’s cousin Joan’s going away party, and as such we found ourselves drinking on a crowded mid-evening commuter bus headed to her house on the opposite end of the city. It was the first time she’d been able to head home in two years. My visa had been expired for months and any travel outside of the country would at best end in hefty fines. Returning to California seemed a particularly distant and final desination, and we were determined to send her off with as much fanfare as possible. Thankfully the small trashcans on the bus had openings large enough to fit a bottle and no one paid us much attention as we sloshed and clinked about while the driver did his best Ayrton Senna impression, probably egged on by the desire to partake in the same activity we were so flauntingly doing in his workplace.
Read the rest of this page »
June 29, 2010 | Categories: Short Stories | Tags: Flannel, Brazil, Sao Paulo, house party, L.A. girl, sidewalk parking, fiction, alcohol, drinking, bonfire, backyard boogie | Leave A Comment »
