When we last left our heroes, I was telling you about the opening of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. To my utter delight (and a little bit of mortification because I used my trademark irreverent tone to describe our visit), the proprietor of the museum found my blog entry and left a wonderfully good-natured comment. I love Loren Coleman.

Anyway, here are some photographs. Mr. Coleman is the one with his hand on the statue of JWER, um, I mean, Bigfoot. Rob is the one standing next to him on the other side.

Oh, you thought that just because I am neck deep in graduate school that I would not be bringing you the latest in Bizarro Living? Today, I went to the grand opening of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. I have never been to Maine or to a cryptozoology museum before, so this was a rare convergence of stellar influences. Founded by author Loren Coleman – world-renowned expert on Bigfeet, Loch Ness Monsters, and other camera-shy beasties – the museum is more like a bedroom crowded with action figures and random paraphernalia than a gallery at the Smithsonian. It is also one of the most excellent places I have visited in all of my days, and this is coming from someone who has prowled the pyramids of Mexico, the volcanoes of New Zealand, the geysers of Iceland, the tombs of Scotland, and the ruins of Rome. Oh, I just remembered I need to prowl somewhere in Africa to make my life complete. But no life would be complete without a visit to the International Cryptozoology Museum. If you go, you may well meet Mr. Coleman, a jolly fellow who will attempt to disabuse you of any notions you may have had that the chupacabra is a force to be reckoned with. He is also not a fan of living pterodactyls, the Jersey Devil, and other of Rob’s most cherished notions. In particular, I will never forget the look on my husband’s face when he gathered his courage to inquire about the Mokele Mbembe and was informed that this noble creature was most likely an unknown kind of aquatic rhinoceros and not a surviving dinosaur. People want to look for fanciful explanations for creatures that may simply be unusual mammals, said Mr. Coleman, as if there was an unknown aquatic rhinoceros in every pot. He also said that the Loch Ness Monster might only be a duck or an otter or something, which does not explain the Loch Ness Monster salt and pepper shakers arranged prominently on a shelf. (I’m just kidding: there were no actual salt and pepper shakers. The salt and pepper shakers were implied.)

Possibly because he or she is a mammal, Bigfoot was the star of this show. There was a life-sized Bigfoot inside the front door of the building and a dozen plaster casts of Bigfoot footprints on the museum shelves. There were also Bigfoot hairs and Bigfoot poop less prominently displayed, which was an odd choice because if I had Bigfoot poop in my possession it would be the first thing you saw when you walk in my front door and the subject of every single conversation I had until I die. Also featured was a shelf of stuffed Yeti toys, most of which are based upon the template of Bumble, the Abominable Snowman from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” “THE YETI IS NOT WHITE” read a sign on this shelf. If I had to pick a color for the Yeti, it would be a cheerful olive green, but I am not god.

Mr. Coleman and Bigfoot were not the only luminaries on this trip: sharing our train on the way north was Jason Hawes, the gruff host of TV’s “Ghost Hunters.” Jason Hawes was watching a movie on his laptop in the same train car in which I was watching a movie on my iPhone. I don’t know what he was watching, but my movie, Capote, was about the predatory nature of art. As far as I know, Bigfoot is not a predator, and the chupacabra is, and the jury is out on the unknown aquatic rhinoceros.

I just realized I haven’t written in my blog in about two and a half months, which is a lifetime for a world that clamors for my every pearl of wisdom. I suppose we are all fortunate that such a world does not actually exist. Hello, internet! How are you? I am well. Did you know that I completely upended my life and started going to acupuncture school? Six weeks into it, I know a significant percentage of bones and muscles in the human body, fourteen real-life acupuncture points along the Heart and Pericardium meridians, and the mating habits of several friendly crickets that have gotten into the building. One was watching me go to the bathroom the other day, I swear.

A friend, in commenting about my sudden disappearance from the rest of my life, requested that I write a little bit here about what acupuncture school is like. He may be under the impression that I have been whisked away to a secret castle and sorted into Gryffindor, where I am learning esoteric magicks and mystical remedies. He may be under this impression because that is what I told him, but please understand that SOMETHING has to get me out of bed at six-thirty in the morning, and it might as well be the conviction that I have some chance of running into Professor Snape.

Seriously, I could go into what we do, but it may lose a little in the decontextualization. It is, most unfortunately, not Hogwarts material. Five Element acupuncture (our discipline; there are lots of other kinds, too) is based upon the five very basic phases of energetic movement in nature: the gestation, the growth, the full bloom, the harvest, and the letting go. These are also called the water, the wood, the fire, the earth, and the metal; or the winter, the spring, the summer, the late summer, and the fall. While these are, to a large extent, made-up concepts, the phenomena they describe appear to be intrinsic to all life and every situation. The simple goal of Five Element acupuncture is to encourage the patient to experience these energies in a balanced fashion in his/her body, mind, and life experience, because things can get ugly on the wellness front if they are out of balance.

This master’s degree is based upon making that simple goal infinitely complicated by introducing all sorts of organs and muscles and pathways and points and pulses and what-not, so if you want to know where I’ll be for the next three years, look behind a stack of books and flashcards.

Now . . . any other questions? We might as well clear all of this up now because in about two years when my time in the student clinic starts and I have to start generating patients to graduate, everyone reading this is going to be marched at needle-point into my clutches . . . my clutches of healing love.

Last night, while watching a TiVoed episode of “The Colony,” I realized I have absolutely no survival skills. “The Colony” is a reality television show about how a prescreened panel of overachievers copes with the end of the world by drinking water from the oil slick known as the Los Angeles River. You may not have known Los Angeles had a river, but it does: it’s that empty cement gulley featured in many an apocalyptic media event. In other news, the colonists also made beds out of shipping pallets, showered using only rain water, and performed other beauty-destroying actions. It’s no wonder I would not do well at the end of the world because I’m used to organic cotton sheets, although I think my naturally youthful skin might hold up a little better than the average face if some of those lizards are any indication.

After “The Colony,” Rob and I watched “Paranormal State,” which is becoming less and less describable. It used to be about how that funny-looking guy and his friends investigated reports of haunted houses, but now it’s I don’t know what all. Last night, the team helped a hillbilly family fight off a demon, a werewolf, and a ghostly drag queen in a battle complicated by several conflicting pacts with Satan. It’s nice to know that people in rural America have not lost touch with their can-do spirit that made this country great.

A couple of weeks ago, an arts festival in my neighborhood produced Dionne Warwick out of thin air. I wandered down to witness the beginning of her performance—which was akin to witnessing a grave robbery—and caught a rendition of “Walk on By.” I had forgotten Dionne Warwick was known for “Walk on By” because it was recorded five hundred years ago, but on the way to pick up a friend at the airport soon after this, I heard an NPR interview with Diana Krall, who also sings “Walk on By” on her latest album. So in accordance with universal law, I got “Walk on By” on the brain, and because my brain is wired in a way that necessitated a metric ton of pharmaceutical drugs, this transmogrified into “Woman in Love,” by Barbra Streisand.

You must understand that I have always loathed Barbra Streisand. One of the reasons I resisted coming out of the closet was because I thought all gay men were required by law to worship the ground upon which she trod, and I was convinced I would end up a musical fugitive, hunted down by dogs in sequined gowns. So having one of her most celebrated songs running intensely through my mind was a low point in my biography; purchasing it on iTunes was an act that made me wish I could go back in time and prevent my parents’ first kiss, but I did it anyway because I am an advocate of confronting one’s fears and I have enough problems without delving into the logistics of bungee jumping.

Barbara Streisand recorded “Woman in Love” in 1980. It was written for her by the Bee Gees, probably in some sort of floundering death throe as the 1970s vanished out from under them. Something in this intersection of time and personality makes it one of the creepiest recordings ever made, including the entire oeuvre of Marilyn Manson. The song begins with a holdover from the previous decade, a soft jazz wa wa guitar, which alone is enough to put your hair on end. And then we get to the lyrics that make no sense from one line to the next: “Life is a moment in space / When the dream is gone / It’s a lonelier place.” This mixture of metaphors warrants a bomb squad, but it immediately gets worse: “I kiss the morning goodbye / But down inside you know / We never know why.” These are the ramblings of a madwoman with a rhyming dictionary, which I suppose is the point. The song is about a woman obsessed with luring men into the Venus flytrap of her affections, never to let him go. While there is nothing remarkable about a woman in love, “Woman in Love” feeds into misogynist fears of vagina dentata.

Every vibration of this recording is physically and emotionally manipulative, to the point that it is a textbook study of function dictating form. Although Streisand’s voice is as clear as a bell, it works best when emerging from behind the background singers’ in the refrain: “I am a woman in love / And I do anything / To get you into my world / And hold you within.” Here the song builds into a crescendo, intensifying as it reaches its hook (“It’s a riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight I defeeeeeend / Over and over again!”), and her tone transcends the typical human range into the realm of howler monkey.

When I approached my friend Tiffany about how uneasy this song makes me, she got to the point. “All of Babs’s songs are needy,” she declared. But it’s not necessarily the song itself . . . written by a man as the conservative god Reagan appeared on the scene, it’s not surprising that this is an unflattering portrayal of female sexuality. The horrifying part is that Streisand, a female, not only sings it as written but throws herself into it with a passion that reverberates through the ages. A quarter of a century later, Liz McClarnon of Atomic Kitten recorded “Woman in Love” as her first solo single; the video depicts McClarnon writhing in the sheets as she anticipates her boyfriend’s proposal and immediately thereafter cuts to him getting ambushed by murderers on the street. I’m not sure that we’re not supposed to be relieved that he has found the only escape possible from his fiancé’s clutches.

I can’t tell you what all of this has to do with anything other than my randomly firing neurons. Perhaps it is a graphic illustration of how you can’t stuff a genie back into its bottle. If only I didn’t feel like Dr. Bellows, caught in the codependent crossfire, I could go back to wondering what sorts of things my dog gets up to when I’m not home.

I wonder if I even know how to write anymore.

Well, the previous sentence answers some portion of that question: my fingers still work. I was having a rough time of things, but now, except for some extensively unanswered questions, I feel quite good. I just don’t have anything to say, and I haven’t really cared about anything enough to form opinions beyond my reflexive standbys. For a while, that was a generalized apathy, but now I hope that it is more of a zenlike detachment; whichever, it’s not as if I feel like pontificating, you lucky thing.

One area in which I have caused movement is that I bought a really nice camera that I couldn’t afford because I wanted to see the world in a different way. I took some good photos of people when they didn’t know I was doing so, and I have shots of one or two random flowers. One of the flowers has a bee in it, but it was not a particularly photogenic bee. My designer’s eye allows me to compose things, but I barely know how to operate the bells and whistles of the bloody camera so you wouldn’t necessarily know this from my work to date.

As for the rest of my life, I realized today that I’m waiting for something to happen. Not a specific something; it’s just that certain situations either need to sort themselves out or, if they’ve already sorted themselves out behind my back, they need to send up some smoke signals so I know what’s going on. I don’t think I’m in the waiting mood, however. I am taking steps. I am making decisions. If any of those decisions make things worse, well, at least I can boast that I avoided stagnation.

I haven’t felt like writing in a while, which signifies several things in myself but also means that I left you hanging in middle of a story.

We had just seen Person Seven. Person Five posited that it was some sort of bird, but it was not a bird. It may not have been a genetic Bigfoot, but it wasn’t a bird. It wasn’t a deer or a bear. The clearest thing to me was the shape of the creature as it ran: were it just a silhouette, I would have thought I was seeing a jogging human, one elbow sticking out behind it, but the full-body fur sort of throws a damper on that analysis.

Back at the compound we had other things to focus on. I was to attend a writers’ group meeting there that evening, featuring Person Three, Person Five, and a few other persons whose numbers are not vital to the story. This particular writers’ group was formed by Person One’s grandfather (the father of Three and Five and the husband of Person Four) before he died. I think they had sold me as some sort of expert writer and editor because my opinion was much sought after, and the meeting ran late. Afterwards, we all sat in the living room discussing how the meetings used to be. “My father ran these things with an iron fist,” announced Person Five. Conversation turned to the dead father and grandfather with all of his quirks, and never having met him, I listened in appreciative silence until I felt one of the dogs poking my back with its nose. I was sitting in an open-backed chair and assumed that one of the ever-milling dogs was trying to attract my attention by nuzzling my back three times, slowly. I reached out to pet the invading muzzle and banged my hand on the wall. My chair was against a wall, and there was no space behind it for a dog or even a cat. There were no dogs or cats in the room. Before I could say anything, Person Five said something like, “Hmm, there was just a weird shadow behind your chair.” I had seen nothing but explained what I just felt. “Oh, that’s just Dad. He’s still around,” said Person Three. The rest of the family then took turns talking about the footsteps, voices, and full-bodied apparitions manifested by Ghost One since his death a couple of years prior. “He must like you,” said Person Three. Yeah, he must.

Bigfoot and a ghost in one day. When do I get interviewed by Connie Chung? Hey, whatever happened to Connie Chung, anyway?

According to the walrus, the time has come to talk of many things. I don’t know what that walrus is doing in here, nor what precisely he happens to know about one thing or another, but in this case he happens to be correct. The time has come to talk of the many things that happened on my recent visit to Washington State; that I promised to change the names to protect the living, the dead, and the cryptozoological beasts I encountered should not hinder the tale overmuch.

Last Monday night, I flew into SeaTac airport to visit one of my oldest friends, whom we shall call Person One. Person One lives on a rural compound within easy view of Mt. Rainier with her three-year-old son, Person Two; her mother, Person Three; her grandmother, Person Four; her filthy crazy uncle, Person Five; and her autistic crazy uncle, Person Six. Also wandering around the premises are Dogs One through Three (a series of interrelated pit bulls), innumerable cats, and various other creatures, such as Mosquitoes One through Infinity, that feature tangentially in the telling.

I should describe this rural compound further, and I will, but there is the matter of Person Seven to contend with first. Person Seven was spotted on Tuesday just after noon, as Person One and I were picking up Person Two from nursery school. This was the occasion of my first sunlit view of the area, surrounded by hills and scrub trees, with snowcapped Mt. Rainier looming volcanically over it all. It was also my first sunlit view of Person Seven, who crossed the road in front of the car.

There was a slight pause as it registered, then Person One asked quietly, “Did you see that?”

“It was Bigfoot,” I said. It was Bigfoot, or some other species of Furred-American, although this had not quite sunk in at that moment. Here is what we saw:

As our car descended a decline in the road, a box truck approached from the other direction, about three hundred feet ahead of us. Between the two vehicles (but much closer to the truck, against which it was silhouetted for a moment), a humanoid creature, seemingly between five and six feet tall, ran across the road. It was covered in relatively short fur of one solid color, a dark grayish-brown, and did not appear to be wearing clothing. Person Seven emerged from nowhere on the left side of the country road, from our point of view, and disappeared behind a tree on the right side about three seconds later.

I wish I hadn’t been so stunned by this appearance that I forgot about the approaching truck. As the creature was much closer to it, observing the driver’s behavior in its wake would have been informative. I’m not even sure if the truck slowed down (I know it didn’t stop) because Person One and I were so intent on figuring out what we had seen. “It was Bigfoot,” I said again. There was no disagreement. Person Seven had vanished behind a tree, but it was one of only two trees in a field. A driveway cut between them, and a house stood about 1000 feet back from the road. There were livestock pastures to the left of the driveway, and the grass everywhere was long. Coming abreast of the trees, we could see nothing and nobody . . . even if it had been a regular person or some other animal (as Person Five suggested later), it would have had to have been visible just a second after crossing the road, but it wasn’t. The low branches of the trees were scanty and we didn’t see anything behind the trunks. My current thought is that it dove into the long grass and hid, but that is mere speculation after the fact. In truth, I don’t know anything more than what I have related in writing here and, moments after our return to the compound, audibly to Person Five, who was loitering in the driveway. Person One corroborates all of these details, but I must disclose fully: at the time, I was transitioning off two very strong anti-anxiety medications. Most likely, this fact also colors my perception of subsequent events, however it is significant that a Bigfoot sighting, real or imaginary, is still one of the least bizarre things that happened to me last week.

I wonder what the walrus would have to say about that.

You know those moments when something you absolutely didn’t intend to happen has indeed happened, and it’s over, and you’re just sitting there absorbing that, and you just KNOW, down into your core, that you can’t move a muscle, because as long as you sit absolutely still, it sort of DIDN’T happen, like you don’t have to interact with the world in which it happened, but then you eventually have to move because life goes on and also because you have to go to the bathroom?

Yeah, me, neither.

Here’s a chupacabra.

DAY SEVEN

We were, or at least I was, still determined to get to the Vatican museum, and this was our last day to attempt that journey. My previous visit to Rome, my ex and I had saved that attraction to the last day only to find out that it was closed and that the stupid pope was holding a mass. As if he owned the place! This time, after a bit of subway navigation, we found it awaiting us.

Father Craig had suggested we find an English-speaking guide, who could get us in for a private tour while avoiding the impossibly long lines, so we promptly engaged a cute American boy who was hawking that very thing. I forget his name, but he hooked us up with a group led by Stan, a laconic George Clooney lookalike who didn’t really come to life until much later, while explaining the artistic treasures of the Vatican. But first, he had to deal with the horrors of American tourism in the form of fawning Texan women who couldn’t believe his English was so good for a non-American (he was Canadian and spoke more intelligible English than they did) and one Angry Man who could not even be satisfied by one of the most significant collections of Western culture ever assembled and kept barking about how long the tour was taking.

The entrance to the Vatican museum is an enclosed space half the size of a football field, filled almost shoulder-to-shoulder with tourists. We congratulated ourselves on bypassing most of this, although not fast enough for Angry Man. We finally navigated our way in and saw all of the loot, including a bathtub (Nero’s) that is probably worth more than the whole of Baltimore, if not the state of Maryland. Each individual item was exquisite, but taken together, these treasures were dizzying if not, on many levels, nauseating. I’m thrilled beyond words to have spent fifteen minutes in the Sistine chapel, of course, and to have had the chance to bask in the works of some of the greatest artists who ever lived. And I also appreciate the fact that a major religion like Catholicism, especially back in the days before easy transportation and communication, needed to create a spectacle worthy of pilgrimage, which would then be glorified throughout Christendom when the reverent souls returned to their homes. But to stand amidst that incalculable wealth, where almost every visible square inch is quite literally priceless, really gave me a sense of what the Protestants were protesting. A church that had been truly interested in spreading the philosophy of Jesus and taking care of the sick and poor, instead of amassing as much worldly power as possible, could have changed the course of history (in a good way, I mean, not in the bloody, violent, tortuous way it actually did).

There’s a difference between capturing the imagination and controlling the mind. At best, I can accept that the generations of popes aspired to the former by building sanctuary worthy of the first of their number, Saint Peter. (And Saint Peter’s actual tomb, by the way, was the most awe-inspiring part of the place, actually radiating a palpable energy I could feel with my whole body, although I’m not sure if it originated from within or was only a reflection of what was projected from without.) But as they began to style themselves as opulent kings rather than disciples of a wise Jewish peasant, they chose to increase and maintain their power by doing the latter. I suppose, if he had a sudden change of heart, the one thing in the way of Ratzinger selling the whole place now to feed the hungry and solve other worldly problems in Jesus’ example is simply that not enough money exists in all currencies combined to do so. But I suspect that his highness is not so inclined, making the Church’s increasing irrelevance to the modern world an irrevocable trend. There’s a reason why literally all of the monks and nuns and a good half of the young priests we saw in Rome were African, East Asian, or South American. “Indentured servitude,” muttered a tipsy Father Craig when I mentioned this to him. Of the stomach, I suspect, and also of the soul.

But I’m a terrible guest, to enter the pope’s country only to complain about it. The Vatican is truly magnificent and, whatever their reasons, everyone in the world should see it in person. It’s just that my cynical mind can’t help but to make connections with another seat of earthly and spiritual power just across the Tiber, the Palatine, which, unable to withstand the forces of history, is now mostly dust.

*

The remainder of our last day in Rome was for the most part lovely. We ate lunch on the Piazza Navarone, site of the famed Four Rivers fountain, and watched the passers-by and the open-air art vendors. Soon after we sat down, however, I made Rob aware of the danger in our midst: a clown wearing a yarmulke and a red nose began setting up shop directly across from us. “A mime!” I warned, much in the tone of Admiral Ackbar’s “It’s a trap!” (Like Admiral Ackbar, I know when things are a trap.) But as in the case of Admiral Ackbar, it was too late. As we waited for our food, we were forced to watch the spectacle of the clown mocking everyone in sight, including police officers and old ladies. Most took this good-naturedly. As I was observing a different culture, it was unclear as to whether the yarmulke was Jewish pride or an anti-Semitic jibe, so I tried not to succumb to what humor there was, but luckily I was too far back from the action for my schoolmarmish attitude to attract his attention.

After our long lunch, we made our last daylight stroll across Rome back to our room. Cognizant of this, I tried to appreciate every step of the way. I also tried to talk myself out of purchasing the snazzy laptop bag I had seen the day before at the Apple Store clone near where we were staying, but powerless against my American consumerism, I knew I was going to do so. While Rob napped, I slipped out and made the transaction, my first entirely in Italian (because, until then, everyone spoke English instantly upon seeing me). Jet-lagged up until our last day, Rob continued to nap throughout the evening as I got hungrier and sleepier (I was tired but couldn’t sleep), and my blood sugar crashed. We had planned on traversing the city once more to a restaurant housed in the ruins of a theater, but once I finally roused him, Rob wanted to rediscover the corner of Pope Joan’s monumental revelation because his previous photos had not come out. Getting hungrier and sleepier by the moment, I was in short temper as I trailed after him, and prevailed upon him to find someplace closer to eat. We got into a short argument and ended up in a wonderful restaurant, on a balcony overlooking the illuminated Coliseum. Other occupants included a strolling minstrel, a guitar player, and a bridal party giving a small reception at a nearby table. The view was breathtaking, and I tried to absorb everything in my last few Roman hours, including the massive plates of food that we had ordered, overestimating our hunger.

One thing I won’t underestimate, now that I am home, is my desire to return to Italy. Despite the fact that it is basically a third-world country tacked on to Europe (mostly because of its wackadoodle political antics, incalculable bureaucratic corruption, and lingering patriarchal attitudes), there are few places in my travels that I’ve felt so drawn to as this classical Disneyland. I know that America’s history extends as far back as Rome’s and is equally fascinating, but the Native Americans, for better or for worse, didn’t leave as much of a palpable historical record. On the other hand, Italy is the land of much of my ancestry. I’ve studied the Roman Empire and can read a bit of Latin, so what is preserved of these entities leaps out at my approach. I meditated on the spot that Julius Caesar was murdered, walked the halls of Octavian’s home, stood on the very mosaic tiles that once supported Cleopatra’s feet (or more likely, those of her litter bearers). In general, I am not a fan of historical preservation as a force of glorifying the past. The past sucked, and being confined by its art and architecture is a way of being trapped in antiquated attitudes and limitations. But there’s something about seeing these ancient wonders and even the religious works, of being reminded of the capabilities of humanity when inspired by various kinds of earthly and spiritual power, that is awe-inspiring. Even that which has fallen to pieces is more interesting in some ways than anything we create today, not because the past is more interesting, but because it was built by people who couldn’t conceive of what would happen to it. No one today expects a shopping mall, for example, to last for two thousand years, and it’s not built to; it’s built to be inoffensive for a couple of decades and then paved over. But Rome was created by hubris, and Romans live under its crushing weight on a daily basis. The builders of the forums and of the cathedrals will live forever because, even when their creations are dust, they can be forever known and appreciated in a way nothing made today ever will be. By feeling an ancient marble column, we can touch two millennia of history and know that, in two millennia, if it isn’t underwater, others will be doing the same, wondering the same things. We can only hope that the future people will be able to appreciate these relics from a position of even greater social evolution, and that the lessons of history will finally be understood. That’s what history is for, and that’s what Rome is for, really.

DAY SIX

We could not go to Rome without seeing the Forum and the Palatine. There are a few different fora in Rome because Julius Caesar and his heirs kept building new ones and rebuilding the old ones. All of these are rubble now anyway. But even strolling through the ruins on Day Six, we could get the vaguest sense of what they must have been like in their heyday: grand enough to put any modern city to shame is my feeling. Relatively speaking, of course.

We actually started the day climbing the Palatine, the hill on which Rome was supposedly founded by two greedy babies and what was probably a rather startled wolf. Subsequent generations built huts and increasingly grand palaces on that spot until it became the center of the known world. So much of those structures has been lost to age, wars, natural disasters, and looters (I’m looking at you, Catholic Church), but the remaining puzzle pieces are still awe-inspiring. I’d like to see what New York will look like in two thousand years. Of course, this is where the emperors lived in luxury; the crude houses of the polloi have long been paved over. I might have been disgusted by the excesses of the Palatine as the Common Era got off the ground, but there is something romantic about a ruin.

By this time, I was starting to like Octavian more because according to his statues, he was actually sort of hot, but we chose not to wait in the line that led into the rooms of his house. Instead, after the ruins proper, we wandered around the gardens and found the steps down to the Via Sacra and the Roman Forum. Poor Rob was broiling like a lobster at this point, so we didn’t spend as much time there as we might have, but again, it was enough to give us a sense of the ancient life. We used our iPhones to snap photos like mad then exited at the far end in search of lunch.

And then: Nap Mountain.

As you have come to expect, our naps had grown to epic proportions. It was late in the afternoon before we got back to our room, but we slept and/or dawdled until nine or so, before wandering out in search of another of Father Craig’s recommendations. It was his favorite “cheap eat,” he had said, and another friend of Rob’s had confirmed this. So it was with much anticipation that we sat down to the most disgusting meal I’ve had in ages. I think we must have gotten the wrong restaurant, actually—another restaurant nearby must also have been named after an Italian bear—because the menu didn’t at all resemble what had been described. But by then, it was too late. The Roman gods had decided that Rob had avoided octopus for too long and the pasta with bacon that he ordered transmogrified somewhere before it reached our table into a plate of writhing tentacles. The beef I ordered medium well turned out to be a hunk of fat and gristle dripping with blood. Rob’s veal (which I traded him for even though I don’t like veal) tasted like very, very dry roast beef that someone had left out in an alley. After this depressing disaster, almost none of which we actually ate, we just paid and left. To cheer ourselves up, we wandered back by the Pantheon, which looked so enchanting in the moonlight that the gelatos we ordered in its shadow were a bit of an overkill. But just a bit, and they did serve to get the taste of dinner out of our mouths.

We walked home past the Trevi fountain, much less crowded after midnight. We sat for a while there, as well, and pooled our remaining coins in an effort to each toss three in. We had five, so I gave Rob the extra one and just tossed two; ten years ago, I had just thrown in one, so I figured my long journey was finally complete.

DAY FIVE

We had intended to go to the Vatican museum on Tuesday, but we got a later start thanks to the previous night’s ministrations of Friar Whiskey. Instead, we walked over to the Quirinal toward Piazza Barberini, where we had enjoyed lunch the day before. Today, our goal was skellingtons, notably those bones on display on Via Veneto in Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini. The whole thing is freakish, but I suppose we must be forgiving of the people who brought cappuccino to the world. If they want to line their rooms with the skulls and femurs and cowled corpses of dead monks and other random bodies, who are we to argue? (Actually, I don’t know if the Capuchins invented cappuccino, and I don’t even like cappuccino, but are you going to argue with five thousand skellingtons? I don’t think so.)

The church features a series of tableaux made out of human bones, the point of which is apparently to remind the viewer that he is going to die and decompose, and also that there is more to life than the physical. Although, as Rob noted, it’s rather zen, it’s also spectacularly ugly and unpleasantly musty. I was feeling dizzy afterward and we had an expensive lunch across the Veneto. Mine was a caprese salad with a huge hunk of fresh mozzarella. Take that, bones.

Afterward, we felt invigorated enough afterward to walk for miles to the Trastavere neighborhood, which is across the river. This would not have been my first choice for a destination, but Rob wanted to see this quaint area, and in fact, it was quite beautiful; much more laid back than the central part of town. We had Second Lunch at a sidewalk café, and when a thunderstorm threatened, ducked into the Museum of Rome at Trastavere to see some watercolors of Roman daily life in the 1800s. I’m not a big fan of watercolors, but it was interesting to see paintings of what some of the areas we had already visited looked like about a hundred fifty years ago (mostly the same except for colorful peasants lounging around in the foreground). This is also one of those museums that sets up terrifying manikins in life-sized dioramas of days gone by, and the viewer spends so much time being repulsed by the manikins that they don’t notice the other aspects. In general, I would say this was a FAIL, except it did keep us out of the thunder and lightning.

It was still raining when we emerged, however, and unable to get a cab, we walked the two point two miles back to our room, fending off the hoards of salesmen who sprung up out of the cobblestones to sell five-euro umbrellas. I don’t know why we turned them down because we were both soaked to the core, but there was something creepy about the way they materialized and shoved umbrellas in our faces as the first drop of water hit the pavement. The walk was somewhat romantic, but my advice would be to avoid Roman rain if at all possible: the two white shirts I was wearing turned brown upon exposure to that mysterious element, and I’ve been unable to get some sort of greasy fog off my glasses ever since.

That night, we had dinner at a place recommended by Father Craig. Once again, we went late, and my blood sugar was at an all-time low, but I did cheer up a bit over helping Rob decide whether he had just ordered meatballs or baby octopus. They turned out to be meatballs, but the gods of irony were watching, and it wouldn’t be long before they had their revenge.

DAY THREE

Walk walk walk: that’s what we did on Sunday. That morning, we swooped down past the Coliseum again, this time turning away from the Corso and heading out past the Circus Maximus to the plaza of the Boca de la Veritas. This is the famous two thousand-year-old manhole cover that is rumored to bite your hand off if you tell it a lie. (I’m starting to think that the fall of the empire was not a mystery for the ages.) We were not in the mood to wait in line to test this Judge Judy avatar; instead we hung around the adjacent temples for a few minutes then sauntered down the riverbank toward the part of town that contains the Protestant cemetery. This walled-off park featuring overlapping monuments and lush gardens is so gorgeous that I might just have to convert to some wackadoodle sect of Christianity to get in when the time comes. One end is anchored by an oddly scaled pyramid tomb, and Rob found an unassuming grave toward the other end that we believe was either a gay couple or business partners who were uncommonly fond of each other.

Trekking back through the Avatine toward our bed and breakfast, we discovered first that it was the wrong time of day to eat lunch (the restaurants didn’t open until one) and, further along the route, that there were no restaurants to be found. At all. This must have been the only such route in all of Rome. I was famished when we finally found a seafood restaurant that was friendly to my no-seafood requirements. After a two-course lunch, it was back to our room for another epic nap.

Because we didn’t do much else that day except eat dinner, I will take this opportunity to complain about a few aspects of Rome that have been pissing me off. The first is the shoes. Last time I came here, nine years ago, everyone said that I would be spotted as a tourist a mile off if I wore sneakers, so I purchased a pair of stylish black shoes that gave me blisters the size of asteroids. This time, I went out of my way to buy a new pair of non-sneaker walking shoes and break them in, and when I got here I discovered all of the Romans have changed their tune and become sneaker freaks. All of them. This casualness goes for the rest of their wardrobes, too. Most of them have foregone the fashion of my recollection in favor of looking just as dumpy as I usually do; except I only packed nice clothes and look wildly out of place. I would hate them all except I’m getting some good ideas that I will try and duplicate from the Banana Republic clearance rack.

The other thing is the racket. There is a lot of it, especially when we’re trying to sleep. I bought ear plugs, but poor Rob has been tossing and turning as motorcycle and other diesel motors roar past, tires rumble over cobblestones, ambulances and cats howl their general displeasure, horns shriek, crazy people yell, and jackhammers jack. Of course, if we didn’t try to sleep so much, this phenomenon would be less noticeable, but it’s been particularly hard to get past our jet lag this trip. We slept the rest of the day and crossed town for dinner at a restaurant Rob found on the Internet. Nobody here eats early so we had a twenty-minute wait even after ten o’clock, but it was worth it because I had artichoke pie and chocolate mousse.

We’ve walked about ten miles a day and I’m fatter than ever.

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DAY FOUR

I know you are wondering how we fit all of these wild frenzies of sleeping, naps, and jetlagging into our otherwise uneventful days. It does get better: I think we only slept for about a half an hour on Monday afternoon. In the morning, we had struck out in a completely different direction, stopping first at a Michelangelo-designed church that has been transformed, at least temporarily, into a mea culpa exhibit honoring Galileo Galilei (the church having four hundred years too late decided that he might have been on to something). We then had an early lunch at the Piazza Barberini and then wandered over to the Spanish Steps, site of what will forever be known as the String Bracelet Incident.

It’s funny that it happened because between myself and Rob, I’m usually the Bad Cop who would have no problem telling someone where he could shove his ball of string, but perhaps I was lulled off my game by being at this intensely beautiful location or because I was not used to being awake during daylight hours. What happened was, as I was taking a photo of an azalea flower, I heard Rob talking to someone and, not realizing that it was some sort of argument, turned around to join in. It turned out to be some guy who wanted Rob to put his finger in a loop of string so he could make him a string bracelet in the colors of Italy. Rob kept objecting and the other person kept insisting. Eventually, he asked me, and I just did it. I don’t know why. As the guy wove the colored strings together, he kept mumbling something in unintelligible Italian-accented English. At one point, he said something about this string bracelet making my wishes come true and bringing me ten children, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to any wish I may have ever had unless these ten children were tied together under a falling piano, but I suppose an allowance must be made for a cultural divide. I ended up paying five euros for the thing, which pissed Rob off because he thought I was being taken advantage of, but really, I thought it was nice and I’m still wearing it. Bad Cop though I may be, I think that it is a good idea for an American in a foreign country to allow himself to be occasionally taken advantage of for the sake of international relations and life experience and colorful bits of string.

After the Spanish Steps, we wandered across town toward the Pantheon. It was an enchanting, maze-like journey through alleys that, while only as wide as my living room and lined with restaurant tables, still channeled thousands of pedestrians, cars, and scooters to their destinations. The Pantheon has got to be my favorite thing in Rome and maybe the world; I wish I could have seen it in its heyday when it still had all of its carvings and before those blasted Catholics had converted it into a church. Of course, I have mixed feelings about it since it was built by Octavian’s general Agrippa, who defeated Marc Antony at Actium and set the stage for Rome’s annex of Egypt. As someone who is generally sympathetic to Cleopatra, it’s hard for me to appreciate the actions of her enemies, Octavian and Agrippa. (Octavian is sort of the George W. Bush of Ancient Rome: they gave him an inch and he took a mile.) But oh my gods, the Pantheon is simply the most stunning thing ever, even moreso because it is so unassuming amidst the other beauties of the city: wander down the right alley, turn a corner, and there it is in its own little piazza. I kept wanting to hug it. The guy who built this knew Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Cleopatra, Octavian, and any number of other figures from that tumultuous era, and he was grandfather to the notorious Caligula and great-grandfather to Nero. (Actually the building Agrippa built burned down and was replaced with the current one a few years later, but his name is still on it.) The inside is just as breathtaking if you ignore all of the baroque Christian crap around the edges; the dome is just jaw-dropping with light pouring in through the hole at the top. You simply have to go here.

We walked back to the bed and breakfast for a short nap then pulled ourselves together to meet one of Rob’s high school teachers, Father Craig, who has been living in Rome for twenty years and coincidentally lived just a few blocks from where we were staying on the Esquiline. Father Craig is an authority in Aramaic and teaches that language at university; he also lives and works at an old church that was built over the two thousand-year-old ruins of a Roman market. These ruins, which have never been excavated, are historically significant because they also housed Pope Sylvester I in the days of Constantine in the third century. Father Craig took us on a private tour, pointing out ancient frescoes and mosaics, as well as features that were added later. The church above had apparently been using the tunnels as a dumping ground for centuries, so there were also toppled columns, millennia-old ceiling tiles, and sarcophagi just lying around. From the basement, we went up to the roof for two bottles of wine and increasingly drunken conversation. Craig then invited us to dinner and up to the community’s recreation room, where he lined up four bottles of whiskey in the order of their smokiness and ordered us to appreciate them. We did, as did some of the other monks and priests and whatnot, who wandered in and created a mild cacophony of at least four languages.

Long-time readers will be aware that I have no patience whatsoever for Christianity in any form, but I confess it was a joy to be a part of that fellowship, and that’s not just the wine and whiskey talking. Craig travels the world, has the best Macintosh computers money can buy, drinks like a fish, knows all of the best places to eat, and can maintain a deeply intellectual conversation on almost every topic (skillfully, I noticed, turning said conversation away from those areas he is more fuzzy on). If this is the life of a priest, I want in . . . I’m just going to cross my fingers when those pesky vows of celibacy come up.

DAY ONE

Tell someone that in mere moments you are going to drag him to an unspecified extra-national location, restrict his movement by stuffing him into a cramped chair for many hours, introduce sleep deprivation, then enforce miles-long marches that generate painful blisters and other unholy symptoms, and it sounds like a page out of one of Dick Cheney’s torture memos. Present him with a guidebook to Rome beforehand, however, and it becomes a romantic adventure of a lifetime.

I don’t know what possessed me to try to surprise Rob with a week’s vacation for his birthday. Skulking around and making clandestine arrangements give me hives, and Rob is the sort of person who doesn’t like to go on a trip without researching it into tatters before stepping onto the plane. Still, I thought some time away would do us good, and his recent birthday presented motive and opportunity. What ensued was like something out of a mystery novel, if mystery novels usually involved wacky surprises instead of bloody murder. I arranged for a week’s worth of non-Rob coverage at work, arranged with his lovely mother to watch Goblin and provide a staging point for our drive to Dulles, and suggested his sister, who needed a birthday present idea, purchase a particularly picturesque guidebook. Then I packed three bags (including Goblin’s), hid them in the car the night before, and prayed that the dreaded swan flu wouldn’t interfere too much with my nefarious planning.

It didn’t. Everyone played their parts perfectly (even Goblin and the swans), and after a nine-hour United Airlines flight, we breezed through Italian passport control, grabbed our suitcases, and located our fleabag bed and breakfast, where we collapsed into an unplanned seven-hour nap.

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DAY TWO

Day Two of our trip dawned at 6:30 pm when we fought ourselves awake from jetlag-induced slumber. Our bed and breakfast had assigned us a room for the first night but was going to upgrade us for the second, so we couldn’t unpack. Instead, we decided to walk down toward the Coliseum, which was advertised as being relatively close to our room. This was the truth (if you consider a mile relatively close), but navigating Rome is not the same as getting around in a more sensible city. We had our iPhones with GPS-assisted Google maps, but were thwarted by the largely unmarked streets, which bore long Italian names that changed after every intersection and, apparently, with even less provocation at random points in between. We eventually found the awe-inspiring Coliseum at dusk, peered into some other ruins around the Forum, and worked our way down toward the Via del Corso looking for food. We found it, in abbondanza, near the Trevi Fountain. We ate at one of those fabulous random restaurants in the area, our table sitting on the cobblestones of the narrow alley with taxis, mopeds, and strolling accordion players passing inches away. Amazingly delicious, although getting the check in any Roman restaurant, no matter how many people they have waiting to sit down, is an exercise in managing hope and despair.

The after-dinner gelato among the throngs come to bask in the lighted Trevi was just the thing. Rob got a flavor that translated as “English Soup.” I got vanilla, which I presume they considered so boring that it didn’t have a special name. Then the long walk back to our room by the train station. We passed a gay bar across from the Coliseum called Coming Out, which by that time on Saturday night overflowed into the street, forming, as Rob put it, an open-air husband market. We managed to find the intersection near there where Pope Joan allegedly delivered her baby before being murdered by the furious crowd. I’m not one to limit a woman’s choices, but it’s possible she would have had a less bloody end if she had stuck to the husband market.

I forget where it was: Amsterdam or Haarlem, someplace Dutchish or Hollandese. Or San Francisco. Anyway, I was in an art museum, looking at all the pretty pictures, when I was taken aback by a painting of a group of townspeople focused on some spectacle in front of them . . . all except for one, a little girl, who has turned to make frank eye contact with the viewer of the painting. It was the most extraordinary thing, and I’ve been unable to get it out of my head recently, that knowing, conspiratorial gaze. You and I know better, it said, but we are paralyzed, unable to affect a single molecule of change in the pageant of human nature that must eternally play itself out. In the painting, in the world of the wise little girl, there is no evolution, no uncertain theory of Heisenberg; there is no hope in that jolly scene, no peace in that serene expression. Only horrors.

With you, dear reader, I make eye contact. I stand against a scene of torture, wars, lies, corruption, profound and willful ignorance, materialism, flashing lights, glamour. For a moment, we understand each other; that which is similar about ourselves and about our worlds pulsates, produces a chilling hum. You turn away.