Lance Olsen - Calendar of Regrets

11.17.76. Market day. Warm wet blackred slabs of meat lying out on wooden planks. Piles of unidentifiable spiky fruits, vegetables, dried fish. Open gutters used for everything from pissing to chucking out food scraps, empty potato chip bags, shreds of cloth. A vomity medieval rot general in the air. Leyna struck up the semblance of a conversation with one of the locals, asking him what the Burmese thought of Westerners beginning to descend on his country. The guy smiled madly and hemmed and hawed. She pressed. Eventually he admitted he thought we were foolish for throwing away so much good money to travel halfway around the world to be worked so hard. But your sneakers very good , he added. VERY good .

11.17.76. What I saw sans Polaroid this afternoon: a skeletal dog missing large patches of hair and covered with crimson pustules who'd had both its hind legs broken at some point. They'd mended so misshapen he had to sort of drag-hop them behind him. Yet there he was busily trying to hump an equally skeletal bitch in heat. Every time he mounted her, his bad legs caused him to slide off, only he wouldn't give up. He just kept draghopping himself after her, rising briefly, clutching her around the waist, losing his balance, toppling to the side.

11.17.76. I feel like I am always moving, Taru. Like I am never exactly where I am.

11.18.76. At sunset they begin burning off garbage across the plains. Smoke rises like mist in front of the bare mountains. Since the government doesn't see a future in these buildings, it restores them haphazardly, ignoring the architectural styles, using materials bearing no relation to the origi

Atop a temple teeming with European tourists, a sweet little Burmese girl holding a single postcard in her hand just sat down next to me. Her postcard shows the same view I am witnessing. She blows her nose into the fingers of her free hand, distractedly wipes the mess across her belly, turns to me and says: Where you from? You want buy postcard? All I want is to live these next three minutes by myself because I won't ever get to live them again. I give her a quick mechanical grin and return to the sunset, try very hard to pretend she's not there. Where you from? she says, undaunted by my indifference. Hello. Hello. Where you from? How long you be here? Mister, mister, where you from? Hello?

11.18.76. Finally gave up on me and left. I'm guilty. I'm relieved. Each of the Germans has gone, too, dispersed to watch the sun sink from a vantage point away from the others. They've gotten on each other's nerves. Tourists approach this scene with their cameras raised, framing, trying to control what and how they'll remember when they return home. In the process, they block other tourists trying to do the same, elbow the local Burmese out of the way. What in the world do they do with all the photos they take? Look at them once and stash them away in a shoebox, an album, a drawer? Show them after a nice dinner to a group of captive friends who feel the event nothing if not an imposition? Or maybe they just forget to develop them altogether? Maybe at the end of the day the simple act of arranging the shots in the viewfinder, cropping the world over and over again, is the only thing that really matters.

11.19.76. Remember Jean and Geoff, Taru? How they planned on going to Penzance, of all places, for years and years, then at the last minute decided not to because they'd read so much about it, seen so many pictures of it in travel catalogs, they said it felt like they'd already been?

11.20.76. Last night the trio came in stumblingdrunk. Hans and Werner arguing about something in German. Out of the blue Hans threw a punch, catching Werner below the eye. Werner launched from the floor and tackled him. They went after each other briefly, until Lenya and I could break them up. This morning I woke to discover everyone gone. I'm pretty sure for good. Maybe they got tired of each other. Maybe they got tired of me. Maybe they got tired of this uncanny country. Maybe they got tired of the very idea of traveling. When you're on a trip, every day begins as a possibility. It will either be one of most memorable you've ever lived or it will be one of the most easily forgettable. You never know. Nobody knows what's going to happen next.

11.21.76. I'm thinking I'll hang around here a little longer, then continue on to Mandalay. I've always wanted to see that place. I suppose I should be unnerved by them ditching me like that, maybe even hurt, but, shit, all I feel is let loose.

11.22.76. Decided what I really want today, Taru. I really want to sit down across from you in our bakery on Bleeker and Cornelia like we used to do right after college, order almond croissants and lattés, and talk about how the saddest thing is how every McDonald's smells the same no matter where on the planet it is. How some people travel to shop, some to do business, bond as a family, be alone, meet strangers, run away from something, find something they can't articulate, experience the feeling of new data rushing in, help locate the limits of their own minds. How travel is an exercise in imagining the unimaginable. How every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is always unaware.How I had that roommate at NYU. Dennis. Remember? Dark curly hair, glasses, an upper lip that protruded over the lower, a goofy smile that dropped his IQ a handful of points? He toured Europe for six weeks, had a great time, visited tons of countries, returned to the States, and never traveled again. Can we do that, Taru? Meet at our bakery? This afternoon? Let's say at two? Love, me.

11.23.76. What do you imagine the schoolkids in this photograph made of the raggedy blondbearded American who stopped them in the dusty street to ask if he could take theretheir picture? What's going through the head of the one on the far right? It's beyond a visitor's capability to hazard a guess, I guess. I find myself remembering how you can sometimes feel like you're taking one logical step after another on a journey, only when you look up you discover yourself lost — not as in gone astray, but as in over your head. And the thing is: it feels completely right. You would never have done this thing had you known in advance where you would end up. Yet under the circumstances it would never occur to you to do otherwise.