I hate extremely long blogs. I can’t stand reading other people’s good times, especially when you strain your finger scrolling down the window nineteen times. So I will break mine into three seperate ones. Read them as you wish.

On the bus, the windows are horizontally sliding windows, that you share with those people in the front and back of you. I slid my windows back six inches so I could put my arm out and catch some air. My stomach wasn’t feeling too good from the unreal back and forth driving of the Aizawl roads. I was worried what the next 20 hours would be like. Then all of the sudden, the lady behind me slammed the windows back my way, damaging my hand slightly, as she loudly puked over her husband and child. Suddenly my stomach was feeling pretty ironclad.

First, Aizawl…. Supreme was just one of my friends to visit while back in my second home. If you haven’t heard yet, his name is Supreme. His wife Mary and kids Shristi and Christopher..

The first day I saw him he promised me chicks. His words, not mine.

I went to his place for tea and his family was sick. The kids, the wife, the maid. So we had tea, I left, and came back in the morning, with his promises of chicks ringing in my head. He told me his wife, Mary, was now Sikh, so she could not attend school for a while. But it actually turned out she wasn’t Sikh, she was just in fact, sick. Difference.
He cooked me a fish curry breakfast with rice, boiled vegetables and some chilis, and after he insisted that I enjoy the mouth freshening power of the betelnut. One minute with the pan in my mouth and I was in a very firey spiral. Suddenly the mashed rice conncoction he was feeding his 1 year old son didn’t look so good. Suddenly Bob the Builder on the TV was making sense. Suddenly I wondered how people enjoyed the flavour. The spins hit me 2 hours later in the middle of a job interview at his office. A girl brought her credentials on paper and Supreme grilled the B. Ed. graduate asking what caused the lack of rain in Rajasthan and how WWII affected India. I was present the whole time, sitting next to her, staring everywhere else but at Supreme. After this he took me to a classrom where he hid one of his 27 year old teachers, she was in the middle of class. He introduced me to her, not the class, and told her I was a good man, told me she was a good woman. I think he was hoping for a proposal, I think she was hoping for the same as me, a proposal, but I still had the spins so I decided I didn’t want to make
any hasty decisions while under the influence…
He sent me home. The next time he spouted ideas of me owning and operating a professional agency where he exported Indian professionals to me in Canada and I got them jobs and because of that collected a percentage of their salary. Then he showed me his magic stove, cooked me an omlet and asked if I watched Hot movies on my iPod. Then he told me that all Canadians he had met are good looking, with the exception of Tyler and Eric. Too scrawny he said. His words, not mine.
Great man, great family. One of the best.

SPORTS SIDE NOTE: This has been a weird week. Carbo, fired? Where’s the love in that? At least give him a week’s notice and let him ‘resign’. I haven’t watched a game in a month and a half, but I can’t imagine that the problem was him. The problem was that I left the country. Bob Gainey, if you really want to win, hire me and/or give me season tickets!

Aizawl Part Two.

Supreme wasn’t the only friend I visited in this fair city. I had a birthday/anniversary party for a friend Daisy with her husband L.B. I spent way too much time with another old friend, Hratchung/Pan, Pan the betelnut man. He took me places I never want to go again, namely stupid girl’s houses and other boring locations. As well as my mother from Aizawl, a red toothed old sports shop owner, who has seen better days. You don’t care about these people, you just want to hear a funny story or clever line about how I was dry heaving out of the opposite end for two nights.

I also made some new friends. Walking down the street at night, a man from a balcony yelled at me, “Foreigner!” I was pretty sure that instantly after this I would be massacred from the back by a group of Mizo teenies ready to steal my passport and eat my flesh. But that didn’t happen. He called me up to his very hip and trendy cafe and gave me some free pop. We talked for a while, then I had to be back at my hotel for the incredibly early curfew. I told him I’d meet him again on the weekend, so I kept my word. I showed up at 7, like he told me to, and he began to give me free food, drinks, massages. This cafe was more like a nightclub, without dancing, than it was a cafe. Loud awful music, discoball, but few scantily clad women. There was a birthday party at the table beside me, and Mizoram being a dry state, there was some illegal drinking going on. At least four bottles of whisky were flying around and a karaoke party began. I just sat at my table, sent some texts (yeah, i got a phone. believe it.) and talked with the cute hostess, Tlungpui/Elaris. I met the Al Capone of India. If Aizawl was his MooseJaw, what would his Chicago have been? Regina?

But being the struggle free man of all men that I am I’d like to say that this trip has been all curry and no ring of fire. All chili and no heartburn. All squatter and no splatter on the ankles. But the beauty of this trip has been followed by a cloud of cynicism and frustration more than ever before, about my life, as well as others. I think I’ve learned more about myself this trip more than ever before, which is maybe why it’s been harder.

Or maybe I’m just thinking up things to complain about because life is too good. Too much good food, friends, weather and everything that it’s becoming too perfect and I want out. Like it’s been in Regina before, just too good so I complain and run away. I’m a complicated man/immature child so it could be either.
What I do know is that tea, nine times daily is in fact necessary, curry three times a day is in fact the best thing on earth, and if you’ve been to India and didn’t fall deeply in love then you were in the wrong places.

Of the three times I’ve been to Aizawl, this visit would rate at the bottom. Likely because my hotel closed at 9pm so I had to arrive there at 830pm because they actually closed then, so I would go to my room, listen to music alone for hours. This trip had the friends in it, but just not the with the same intensity. Also, being my third trip there, it seemed all too familiar, like being at home. People weren’t that excited to see me, beecause they saw me like three months ago. Places weren’t quite as sweet as they once were, because I tasted them three months ago. But don’t get me wrong, it was, however, an epicly good time that I will hold dear in my soul. Forever…

Next..

This is one of my favourite things to do now. My words are usless, so take someone else’s verse and suck on it.

“If they gave gold statuettes, for tears and regrets, I’d be a legend in my time.”
-Johnny Cash

“This world is a graveyard, and it’s sucking the life out of everything I love. I can’t take this, but I can’t break this.”
-Horizons. I am not 100% sure this one is completely accurate, but I love it anyways.

“We are made of love, and every fracture caused by the lack of it.”
-Sleeping at Last

“Poker Face”
-Lady Gaga/the worst name since AllSaints.

“I love this record, but I can’t see straight.”
-Some awful dance music