The Barrytown Blues or A Cricket's Last Mistake

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Trip Start Feb 01, 2006 Previous
Entry Trip End May 16, 2006

  Barrytown, New Zealand
Tuesday, March 28, 2006

You know when you hang upside down and all the blood floods to your brain and makes your eyes swell up and it feels like someone is pressing them into your skull and all you can see is fuzz and Picaso-esque drips? And when you move or talk, every vibration pounds up to your head and thuds around until a louder, heavier one overrides it? Imagine feeling like that in Barrytown.

I was ill. I spent nearly a whole day shifting around on a bad mattress sweating and shivering, making feverishly elaborate self diagnosis and launching dramatic and misguided missiles of blame at things i'd eaten. My head had been taken over. One of my room mates offered to put my washing in with hers so i pointed to a plastic bag and threw her $5. Then an other person walked in, switching on the 120 watt light which set my head into a blaze and then the pair of them began talking furiously in German, flinging words like axes that spun and struck at speed with horrific echoes. I was sehr annoyed.

Next thing i knew an ex-dutch ex-policeofficer trainee-busdriver (or a friend called Judith) was offering a painkiller fizzing and frothing in a brown cup of water. It knocked me right out. That night i dreamt i was leading a go-kart race against thousands of clowns until the track was invaded by a parade of angry eco warriors whose placards claimed the competition was "murdering the worms". It was cracking stuff.

When i woke up i found all my clothes except the ones i'd slept in had been kindly washed by my room mate and not so kindly left on top of the washing machine festering in soggy crumpled balls like a tasty invitation for 50,000 sand flies to invade, make their homes in, live in and then die in. "Hmm" i think is what i said. Then me and a different 50,000 sand flies took a cold and drizzly shower together. Something was bothering me.

As i was packing my sodden possessions away into my backpack a bloody huge cricket hopped out of my towel and blinked at me from the floor. I bet he wished he'd never poked his sorry little head out of his egg. I stamped his lights out in a fit of aggression and rage until he was a sad paste on the carpet (i bet i would have murdered a worm then, dream crashers!)

Anyway, whatever terrible affliction had forced me into a day in bed had gone and i was on the road again speeding into something else.

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