More on Hell

Ah, Moscow spring. The snow melts so you can see all the shit perfectly preserved. Today, while splashing through puddles made by last night's rain, I forgot that potholes in Russia can be so cavernous as to house entire Uzbek dynasties with room for all their Zhigulis, and now my left boot is lined with mud and sheepskin. Sometimes Katie, like Aldous, suggests we are in hell. "We're in hell," she says. Somewhere, sometime, on some other plane of existence, Katie and I were bad and our punishment is to be forever sentenced to Moscow. We both come from sunny places where people don't hate us and are largely -- pardon the pun -- fatter than us, so why did we come here? More importantly, why are we still here? Moscow hates us, and we hate it and want to leave, but find ourselves paralyzed by shock.

Personally, I don't like to be so negative as to think of Moscow as hell on earth. To me, it is more like a bowel, or maybe an intestinal tract. I feel as though I have been swallowed by the city, and she is absorbing from me everything nutritious, and disposing of the rest. I shared my theory with my mother, who addressed Moscow directly with "Spit her out bitch, or else!'"

Too late, Mom. I am already being processed by a sophisticated digestive system where time is just colonic muscle contractions that push me onward, where girls are gastric acid, men are bile and the dating scene is a big anus, and I will soon come out the other end as, well, as shit, basically.