Greasy spoon, Mesa, Arizona, USA

It feels kind of strange to be back in the US, eating breakfast at a greasy spoon restaurant in Mesa, Arizona. I will not name the restaurant, because frankly, the food is not very good. The hashbrowns are overcooked, dessicated down to a hard, crunchy, flavorless, crisp. The omelette - it burns the tongue, not by spice, but by heat of having been overcooked. The toast is mostly air, trapped in thin filaments of scorched bread. The coffee is watery, weak and bland and cannot compare to Vasanthi's coffee - although it is better than the coffee in western India, where everyone seems to know how to prepare a superb cup of tea, but somehow the idea set in there that to make a cup of coffee, one should heat up a bit of milk and then stir in some instant powder, kind of like Folgers, but maybe not as strong as Folger's.

Maybe I should not eat breakfast again, until I can get home to Wasilla and go to Abby's Home Cooking. Then the breakfast will be good.

My mind is in a very strange, exhausted, state. About 11:30 PM last night, I became aware that I was falling asleep on the bed in my motel room fully clothed, except for my shoes and socks, and with all the lights on. I did not think this was a good idea, so I got up to undress for bed, turned out the lights and then, with the AC blowing strong, crawled under the covers.

I woke up about 3:30 AM only to discover that I was still fully clothed, lying under the covers. I was too tired to do anything about it, so I just stayed in bed, sleeping off and on, until about 7:30, then gradually wandered over here to this greasy spoon, where I took this picture with my iPhone. Unfortunately, I have not solved the dilemma I face in posting iPhone photos.

To post an iPhone photo, my blog host first cuts the resolution down to 500 pixels on the horizontal dimension, then expands them to match the 800 pixel column width, which leaves them looking blown out, pixelated and fuzzy - as you can see.

So this is a problem I must solve.

I have a number of friends in this area and I had thought I would try to contact a few during my recuperative layover here. But I am listless. All I want to do for the moment is to be alone, to retreat into my own head. Maybe I will go out into the desert somewhere, and just wander about looking for rattle snakes and scorpions, and try not to get myself stuck by the spines of cactus.

So if you are one of my friends here and I do not contact you during my short layover, please do not feel offended. I would not make very good company today, anyway. I will back again, before too long, I think.

I am glad to be back in the US - but damn, I am sad to be gone from India. I miss India! Amazing, chaotic, percolating, bubbling, boiling, roiling, crowded, ancient, modern, overflowing India.

So far, my posts contain only a small hint of what I saw, photographed, experienced and felt in India. I will never get it all down, but, I have three or four substantial stories to tell, plus a whole bunch of little ones. Over the next week or two, I will tell at least part of all the substantial stories - but perhaps not yet to the full depth that they seem to have manifest themselves to me. This was a trip of life and death, of love and loss, of reaching out to grasp that which cannot be grasped.

So I am not quite certain how I will proceed or how deep I should go into the raw material that now exists in my computer and in my mind.

I think I will try to put up one more post today - a logbook entry covering my flights from India to Phoenix. Then, I think maybe I will pull back and post no more from India until I can take the time to make an initial edit of my entire India take, so that I can better know what I am doing.