Goulash's Great Adventures

So I spent several hours of the day, naked in a hot spring with Steggy, and our friend Danny...No, really, there's no punchline here.

I woke up early, and had a productive writing/e-mailing morning. Around noonish, just as I was getting into "Choking Tiger, Himelayan Dragon," Danny shows up to take us to the hot springs. On the way, we make a stop off at a natural food store where I stock up on Paul Newman's stale-ass organic pretzels, and fruit flavored water {since when is water a flavor of water? My water tasted exactly like water, not even a hint of anything else, and to top it all off the damn water had vitamins in it, I've never been so furious.}

Anyway, stop two was a cool little pub called Los Ojos. We munched on lime/salt covered nachos, while listening to the owner building a bomb shelter in the kitchen.

Stop three was the mountains. Beautiful beautiful beautiful. It was all very...mountainous. We walked for about fifteen minutes through muddy red clay and melting snow, and arrived at the hot springs, where many naked hippies were sitting around talking about where they were from, and how they found out about the springs. {Yawn}

To spice things up, we started asking people where they were from, and how they found out about the springs. Many of them found out from "The Internet." I don't what that is, but when I find out, I'll let y'all know.

Eventually the hippies were replaced by a few mid-twenties girls, a dentist from Illinois (you though I was kidding about asking everyone where they were from?), and the mother of the twenty-something girls, who dipped her toes in the hot grotto, and refused to look in the direction of the naked people. She is from South Dakota.

We passed around a bottle of wine, some people actually drinking from it, for about another hour or so, before Mama and her girls headed back to some place away from the scary naked poets.

This was when the naked musicians who wanted to hear poetry showed up. They had heard about our show, and had wanted to come, but they were performing at the same time, elsewhere. So Danny performed a couple poems for them, I hid behind a rock, and Morris got out of the hot springs and rolled around in the snow for a while.

After the naked musicians left, the real fun began. Chuck the compulsive liar, Jeeves the sincere British guy with the Native American tattoo, and another compulsive liar who claimed he was from Hungary (which he probably would not be able to point out on a map) all showed up around the same time. They quickly got naked, and hopped in the springs.

{now I interrupt the flow of the narrative by letting you all know that nudity is a violation of state penal code 3046C, and I am now a wanted man...clearly they didn't see me naked, or I wouldn't be as wanted}

Once in the water, Chuck, Jeeves and Goulash began to answer our exciting "Where are you from? How did you find out about this?" questions. Goulash didn't seem to remember the name of the town he was from, so I think he made one up that sounded remotely Hungarian. Transylvanian, perhaps. Definitely Eastern European.

He proceeded to tell a story about how he'd once been living on a couch in a tree (I'm not making this up...he did). One night he awoke to the sound of a rabid raccoon. Except it wasn't a raccoon, it was a panther. No wait, it was a mountain lion. Whatever it was, it had red eyes, and when he shined his flashlight on it, he ran 400,000 miles to the nearest coffee shop where he had a Chameleon tea (he didn't know what chamomile was, or how to pronounce it, but that's what he had).

Some of Goulash's other great misadventures included catching a black bear by making farting sounds. He said this in a very sincere way. Even showing us the head gestures the bear made in response to his farting call. {author's clarification: it has to be a sharp farting sound for black bears...SBDs attract grizzlies.}

And this one time, he was in a hot spring in Hungary {author's note:¿?¿?} when a bear climbed in with him, and made a comforting growling sound when it got in (think, the noise your Dad makes after a healthy, cleansing dump). The bear didn't bother him, because {the following is a must-have piece of information for warding off attacking bears} he was reading a newspaper. Surprisingly, the bear didn't ask him for a cigarette, or steal his picnic basket.

My theory is that this guy is being stalked by the guy who plays the bear in the Labatt's Blue commercials.

Eventually we left Goulash, Jeeves, and Chuck to their tall tales, and headed back to civilization (after donning our clothes).

Civilization was a wonderful way to cap off the night. We ate at Toucano's, a fantastic Brazilian restaurant, where a woman named Merle (who had seen us perform Sunday night) bought us all dinner. The food never stopped coming. Blood sausage, quail eggs, glazed pineapple, mango battered whitefish, sirloin, rosemary pork, if we hadn't run for our lives, we would still be being brought food at this very moment. I have never been so full.

All in all, it was a wonderful day of talking smack about slam (that's right jello shot, I'm talking about you), relaxing in hot water while the trees threw snowballs at us, and eating way too much food. I'm going to roll myself towards a bed now, and pass out.