more rum for me...

i wish i could explain the appeal of waking up @ 3a.m., dressing in the smallest pants one owns- the pair closest in size to underwear unless you want to sacrifice your actual underwear for the occasion- and an equally small shirt, both articles considered disposable clothing, going out to meet up with a large group of probably-drunk individuals by 4a.m. (1% of whom you may actually know, and your 1% may or may not coincide with the 30% in drag or wearing fake penises or pottys on their heads), covering yourself in paint of various colours, then spending the next 5-6 hours dancing a marathon-length route with these drunk, weird-looking strangers that you wouldn't even drive with a friend unless you had to, with 1 foot in the drain at the side of the road and the other in the road, such that you always at ankle-bending angle (goes great with the drunkenness), far too close to humungous trucks blasting music at rock-concert-volume that may or may not get close enough to each other to overlap different songs so you can't tell what you dancing to, or if you on either of the 2 beats, with lyrics like:
"listen mr. sankar, you say i am a drunkard and you doh want me marry your daughter, but you doing me a favour 'cause i doh want your daughter, she too damn ugly anyway. more rum for me, more rum for me, more rum for me..." for so long that your feet feel ready to fall off, but you keep going until they're numb, then go home, hose yourself off in the yard and go back out to do it all again, maybe with a different colour paint, but for more like 8hours this time, all after feteing so hard for the past few days that you can't tell the difference between drunk and tired anymore since neither is considered a valid excuse for missing a second of the bacchanal anyway.
but all i can say is, if you've never done it, you should get your ass to sweet trini for carnival in the very near future. it's not too early to book for next year.
if it tells you anything, not only was that the fabulous tale of what i did today, but i can't wait to do it for a 3rd time tomorrow...nothing else like it...

on another beautiful note (they're all beautiful here), while i sat on the bench outside our house tonight, scraping blue, yellow, white and black paint off every inch of bare skin (of which there was naturally an excess, which somehow still didn't stop the paint from creeeping into those few protected areas!) while waiting for my turn in the shower so i could scrub the rest of it out of my dreadlocks, i looked up and could see so many more stars than in d.c.! i always forget you can actually see the sky down here.
and i also realised that this week has been the first time that i could write in the trinbago time zone from trini, instead of just faking it through my computer settings...

walk good. may there be more rum for you all...