serial times, pt 12

The Pkg

(continued from before...)

Earlier today
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This morning, when I woke up, I felt the dull hammer of jet lag and a soju headache tapping with an alarming lack of gentleness on my temples. My stomach was doing flips and there was an acrid taste in my throat. Soju hangovers are, in my professionally humble opinion, the worst of all hangovers. I’ve had every type of hangover (the elimination of these being the main reason for my urgency to have this ganja while abroad) known to humankind (and even some not known to humankind) and I can assure you that a soju one is the worst.
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This is the only hangover that isn’t predictable; it schemes, it roils, it taunts and teases like the surf; it has you believing one minute that you’re fine and ready to confront the world and then the next minute praying for asphyxiation, crucifixion, or being burnt alive.
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Soju is the sole reason that beer was invented.
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I lay in my bed praying for unconsciousness, but it was useless. My stomach wouldn’t relax enough for me to let sleep steal off with me. The furthest thing from my mind was the pkg; what did occupy my mind was the usual self-flagellation that I took upon myself during each soju hangover: I came from the belief that if you dance to the music, you have to pay the band, so grinning and bearing it was what I believed was the right thing to do.

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(However, soju hangovers have begun to tilt my machismo toward something that I abhor to do with all of my will, although it’s good for helping speed up hangover’s departure, and that is vomiting. I hate it and refuse to vomit if I have any control at all over it, though I know vomiting to be effective in easing the hangover because it jettisons from the body all of the poisons that are causing one to have said hangover).

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So, I lay there, vacillating between vomiting and my own macho pride. No one would know it if I threw up and then didn't speak of it to anyone, but that wasn’t the point: I would know and I had trouble accepting that.

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I was just going to have to deal with it unless I was no longer unable to control the convulsive and sickening urge. This had just crossed my mind when my cell phone rang. It was my first morning back from the States, so even through my agony, I was curious as to who was calling me before noon on a Saturday. I reached for where my phone was sitting next to my bed and saw that the caller ID read the name and number of my boss. I decided I’d better answer, though I wasn’t in the mood for talking.

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After a moment or two in which I answered a question and provided an explanation, I hung up, my heart was beating excitedly.

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I closed my eyes briefly, smiled, and thought about karma.
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A few minutes later, I found myself lurching toward my office. The sun was bright and warm, though it was early spring and not time for the torpid heat and humidity that will be here soon enough. I was thankful for the invention of sunglasses as I slowly made it down the street.
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Only one thing could have gotten me out of bed in the condition I was in and remembering this kept me upright, though not necessarily steady.
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I stopped at a convenience store and bought a liter of water. It tasted so delicious as I gulped it down. I could feel my dehydrated cells and tissues graciously soaking the water up, as if I were a six-foot sponge. Though the water was like ambrosia to my lips and body, it was like sewage to my still-churning stomach. The water made me feel better and worse at the same time and I drank no more.
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I walked along the street, not more than a couple of moments from my office, amidst the clamor of a foreign land that I was beginning to feel as if were home.
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I thought about what it took for expatriates to live abroad and about some of the comforts from one’s homeland without which one lived while overseas.
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I thought about government propaganda, scare tactics, and miseducation of certain harmless issues in the world.
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I thought about the suckers that governments often took the citizens of their countries to be and about how those same citizens had allowed themselves to become suckers.
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I thought of the ways that one can protest one’s government and about which ways were the most effective.

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I thought about circumvention.
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I also thought about success.
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Less than five minutes later, I departed the elevator that had taken me to the floor where my office was.

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I walked into the office and there it was, sitting on the front desk counter. It was a familiar sight, one my hands and arms knew well. I looked the same as it had when I last saw it.
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My pkg.
Immediately, many thoughts shot through my head.
Had it been compromised?
Was everything that had been in there still there?
Was this too good to be true?
Had all that I went through less than seventy-two hours earlier finally become worth it?
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I hardly heard my boss as he spoke to me. I was busy calculating how much I was going to pat myself on the back for the next month.
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I inspected the box and saw that there were no signs of compromise to the taping job, so my excitement and anticipation level jumped tenfold. I could smell the incense that I’d bought on some of my travels and how little they had been used since I’d had them. Some Grateful Dead melodies began prowling my happy head, its obsession with being hung over a distant memory.
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I stood at that counter, a dazed and grand smile on my face with tipsy thoughts running through my head, the muted cacophony of my boss’s voice a fringed concert that had no audience.

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(to be continued...)