hallelujah!

i have been born(eo) again!

now i am all filled with the healing light of jebus and, oddly, strongbad. you would not peg those two to run together, but man, jebus likes him some teen girl squad and can you blame him? no. who could cast the first stone at jebus? besides some romans, i mean? and, uh, other people with rocks.

i am stunned by your sacrilege. stunned.

or maybe i am stunned because i just spent two weeks with my brother lumpo and by the end we had fully devolved into junior high school wall-bouncing madness. i do believe my wife has a new-found respect for my sister.

although my wife has never been conscripted to act in one of my sister's plays so...

as you avid readers will know, lumpo was joining us from new york and he did not know where he was flying to. i understand his encounter at check-in went like this:

agent: you're all set. your bags will be checked all the way through to kayell.

lumpo: huhwhat?

agent: your bags, sir, will be going to KL. no need to worry about them in Hong Kong.

lumpo: ah. uh. kayell?

agent: (still smiling) Kuala Lumpur, sir.

lumpo: right (sotto vocce) what country is that in?

and so, verily, did brother lumpo come to join us in kuala lumpur, which is in malaysia if you dinnae ken. and we plied him with alcohol. and plied him with pliers. and saw big buildings. and walked till the little feller was plumb tuckered out.

then we took him to the perhentian islands, to perhentian kecil in fact, where he learned to scuba dive and dance to really bad pop while a dj obsessively interrupted to shout "irish in the house!" it was purty great. we saw sharks and ate bbq and a house exploded and we got to carry water pails and say things like, "dude. that thing is going to collapse any minute." then i stuck some peanuts up my nose and lumpo had to pretend he had a stutter. i thought my wife was going to wet her pants. the pictures are certain to be classics of the modern age.

it was lump's birthday, and lo, he was borned again. and the lot of us flew to borneo so we could all get borneoed again. or me at least, 'cause i'd been to borneo before in ninty nine and it hadn't changed much. a few fancier restaurants in kuching. some nicer roads. some proboscis monkeys. some bearded pigs. an orang-utan. a neon shrimp. macaque on a cat (which is funnier if you say it out loud every five minutes until your wife hits you.) and yeah, the monkeys stole lumpo's condoms and ate his foot powder. we saw pitcher plants and a bright green snake that wasn't a pit viper but i'll pretend it was 'cause hey, that's cooler. and we laughed and we cried and we ate a lot of noodles.

but today, sob, lump flew back home. we're preparing to train down to singapore where we'll dally for a day and then -- golly! -- fly down to melbourne. for winter.

so it seems like yet again this trip is in transformation. a new stage is beginning. no more asia, on to the antipodes for the borning again and again. and hopefully some steak.