Marathon Runners Who Date Young

There are three reasons why I haven't sent a travel update in several days (incidentally, if you haven't received any others, it's probably because I didn't have your e-mail address handy in Turkey or Georgia--directions on how to "opt in" to further updates, if you're interested, follow at the end of this e-mail.)

The first reason for the delay is that I strained a muscle in my left arm the evening before the trip--"a sure sign of aging," one DemiDec subscriber noted, with a grin--and that day by day, it grew worse lugging around the backpack, until a purple bruise spread from my elbow to my wrist. I've been trying to rest it by typing with only one hand. I can think of few better prescriptions for moderating the output of my muse.

The second is that after Tbilisi, I came across no computers until my final night in Istanbul, where I drafted the beginning of an update that I meant to complete the next morning at the Vienna airport. In Vienna, however, someone had broken the lounge's computer modem, so instead I wrote poetry for an hour. Not a bad use of time, really. In every country that I find / I find someone to leave behind / etc etc. It's hardly profound, as you can see, but then, few of my rhyming ditties are.

The last is that the lengthy update I did write on the airplane, using my Visor and portable keyboard, vanished in a haze of PDA operating system glitches. "Fatal error," the Visor proclaimed, as I wrapped up an introduction. "Mandatory reset." I'm not sure why it even bothered to advise me, since there was nothing to do at that point except turn it off and start from the beginning again. I still haven't deciphered what went wrong, though I rewrote a few bits and pieces later in the flight. Mind you, I had used some frequent flyer miles to upgrade to business class, so at least a six-course meal and lots of fresh orange juice helped assuage my sadness at the lost prose.

The passenger next to me was forty years old and had never worked a job. "I'm a traveler-philosopher," he assured me (this turned out to mean he had secured a large inheritance in his teens.) "And my girlfriend is a flight attendant." Said girlfriend dropped by a few minutes later--a recent high school graduate who bowed once, twinkled her eyes at us, then rushed back to the other cabin to demonstrate safety regulations.

"My girlfriends are always young," noted the traveler-philosopher, perhaps to preempt any questions I might pose about their very evident age difference. "This is the third. But I try not to make decisions for them, you know? I show them where the crosswalks are in their life, but not which streets they ought to cross."

"Nicely put," I said, politely, and didn't ask anything about his policy on jaywalking.

* * *

I plan on returning to bed now -- it's about 3:30 am -- in hopes of catching a few hours of sleep before the sun rises. I understand they adjusted the clocks by an hour in California while I was gone; for me that was lost in the general backwash of the 12-hour time difference between here and Georgia.

In the morning, I hope to complete the travel update I wrote on the airplane--reconstructing the lost portions.

Some things I'll try to cover:

-- how I spent the day with a Turkish televangelist

-- how I broke custom at a Georgian glass-eating party
-- how Chechnya looks from the other side of the border

-- how I was assaulted by an angry Abkhazi refugee

-- how Sasha and I learned firsthand that it is possible to overdose on cherry juice