date machine : goodbye

Date Machine: Who Am I and Why Am I Here? or Let’s Keep in Touch

amboabe — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:08:00 GMT

I didn’t want my last post to be a formal goodbye so I’m going to do all that formal housekeeping here, in my second to last post. My name is Michael Thomsen.

“Amboabe” was a dumb nickname I gave myself in Madagascar. After an extended rant about something marginal and self-reflexive my friend S, who was a fellow volunteer, said “I hear you barking, big dog.” Madagascar is a country defined, in large part, by taboos and there are a lot centered on dogs. Dogs are considered filthy. It’s taboo in many areas to bring a dog into your house. It’s taboo to feed a dog the same food that humans would eat. It’s taboo to refer to another person as a dog in any way.

Dogs are mangy and opportunistic lurkers, crawling through the filthy back alleys on a never-ending search for food and shelter. They’re turned away and cursed at every turn. Children amuse themselves by beating dogs with sticks or throwing rocks at them, giggling when they evoke a pathetic yelp.

“Amboabe” is a literal translation of “big dog.” Once I got to know people in my village, I would make joking reference to myself as “amboabe” to see how far I could bend the taboos. When I told Bernadiny, the tank-like nurse at the clinic where I spent most of my days, she scowled and said I was dirty. “That’s not alright,” she told me. “People can’t be dogs. That’s bad.”

I made a point to laugh and make joking faces whenever I said it, but it was always received with headshakes and clucking disdain. After my first year, I noticed people had started calling me by the name. “Where is the big dog?” they would ask my neighbors when someone was looking for me. “Are you coming on the vaccine drive… big dog?”

The scorn was still present, but I could see the lips pointing upwards just a little bit every time they said it. Bernadiny started calling me Amboabe regularly, shaking her head at how ridiculous it was. There was no one else in town who could have been called a dog, much less request it. It was stupid. Absurd. Wrong. She would shake her head, as if she couldn’t believe what she was doing, and then laugh to herself when she saw what an joy it was for me to hear her say it.

Nothing happened when the taboo was broken. There wasn’t any ugly incident, the gendarmes didn’t storm the clinic, and god didn’t strike anyone down for blaspheming the human spirit. We laughed, and shook our heads. It was so stupid. “Beeg dug,” she would say in her broken high school English. “Eka, izay ty anarako,” I would tell her. That’s my name.

I write for a website called IGN.com. I freelance for them now, but when I was in San Francisco I was an associate editor. I wrote about video games and music. Before that I lived in LA and wrote for a smaller video game website called Nintendo World Report and had a day job at a big game company called Activision (the people that make Guitar Hero). I wrote a couple screenplays and came pretty close to raising $500,000 to direct one I wrote about kids in high school. It didn’t really come together and then I got offered the job in San Francisco.

If you want to read other stuff I’ve written, you can Google me. It’s not hard to find. Here are a few links just in case. Hopefully you’ll recognize the voice, even if the terms might seem a bit foreign. If you aren’t moved by my writing here I don’t know if any of this other stuff will change your mind. But it’s me, I wrote it.

Editorial: The Case for Six Days in Fallujah
*and here's a short video interview I did for ABC about the game.

Contrarian Corner: Mirror’s Edge

Animal Collective: Meriweather Post Pavilion Review

Writing for Date Machine has been one of the most consistently difficult things I’ve done over the last year, and this has been one of the toughest years I’ve had. It started with my grandfather dying, and ended with the possibility of my mother dying. In between, the love of my life moved across the country to live with another man, I got an STD, I feel into a depression and lost twenty pounds.

But I wanted to write. And so I would come home after work every night and sit at my desk for three or four hours trying to come up with something that would be worth reading; something honest, entertaining, and worth returning to. I tried to do it five days a week, after twelve hours in another office, and in between directing, producing, and editing a short film, and working on some other freelance writing jobs.

It’s been great to do it with Zeitgeisty and Airheadgenius. It probably doesn’t seem like much of a trick from your end, but on my end it’s been consistently frightening. It’s easy to be honest and unapologetic with your friends and people you care about, but it’s a separate thing to do it out loud and in public. It’s really hard to spend hours sharing something vulnerable and intimate and indemnifying, only to hit publish and face an anonymous swell of readers eager to evaluate, convict, and issue sentence.

We’ve fought amongst ourselves, and the end has been no different than the beginning in that respect; but I’m thankful to have written alongside them. It was always a little less daunting to climb out on the rhetorical limb when I’d see each of them taking their own risks everyday. Whatever I’ve written here, it would have been less without their camaraderie.

I’m also glad that you’ve been here, reading all of this. I’ve tried to give what I could of myself in every post. I’ve also asked for you to give me your time, and your energy in reading all these little stories and thoughts. It may not seem like it given how self-absorbed much of this must read, but I appreciate that time and energy more than you may expect. Whether you liked what I wrote or loathed it, you still gave me a hearing and that’s the most any writer could ever ask of any reader.

If you want to stay in contact, I’m on Facebook. Find me if you want to. If you’re in New York, buy me a drink. If you’re not send me a note.

Tomorrow afternoon will be my last post. I’ll try and finish in the same way I started, with some red meat. I’m kind of scared to write it, but I’ll be talking about everything that’s happened since I moved to New York.

See you then.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

Date Machine: Women at 30, or the Scent of the Medicine Cabinet

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Nurse at the HIV Clinic

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet

amboabe — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:37:00 GMT

On Wednesday the US Ambassador to Madagascar said the country was "on the verge of civil war." He encouraged his staff and any other westerners in the country to evacuate while commercial flights were still available. Over the last several months protest and violence have been ebbing and flowing, led by the Mayor of Antananarivo's claims of corruption and fascism against the sitting government of Marc Ravolmanana.

I lived in Madagascar from 2003 to 2005, working as a health educator for Peace Corps. It's hard to reconcile the country I lived in with the militant urgency that comes through in reports about the looming conflict. As contentious as things become in our country, as much economic turmoil lies ahead, the prospect of living in a country at war is incomprehensible. War is an abstraction in the west, something we've left behind. It's a wedge for arguments between red and blue, the socio-political equivalent of a giant foam index finger pointed at someone else with guilty insinuation. We still fight wars, but they don't happen in our homes. They exist out there, in pictures and on television.

It's sad to think about the migration that happens in advance; the flock of friendly foreigners finally reaching their limit. Bustling regional capitals gradually transform into muted cities of boarded-up storefronts, curfews, and eyes peering down onto the street from a window. Then one side opens fire, and the other side fires back.

I was evacuated from China in 2003 during the SARS epidemic. There was no impending war and no real danger, but it was still a terrible experience to go through. I got the call on a Friday afternoon, I had twenty-four hours to pack my belongings and travel 700km north to Chengdu where we would be flown to Beijing and then home to America. I had been in country for almost a year.

I spent the rest of the evening with the other teachers at the mining college where I taught. We had one last dinner together at the school restaurant, an impromptu banquet with lots of speeches and measured words of gratitude. I felt sick and weak. I guzzled glass after glass of beer with each toast and still felt sober and joyless. My blood pressure dipped and I could barely feel a pulse in my neck.

I looked around the gathered faces, people that had been innate parts of my life six hours earlier. They looked eerily separate, like severed fingers in the road. Our connection was so fragile that a sixty-second phone call in the middle of the afternoon was capable of breaking it irrevocably. I felt like a liar and a coward. I had told these people that I loved them. I had told myself that I loved them. And now I was leaving without a whimper of protest.

I packed my bags and took the 2AM train to Chengdu. I was there in the early afternoon. I holed up in a hotel with some other volunteers and went out with a big group for our last night in country. It was a morose evening. Everyone was trying to behave normally, joking and gallivanting, but it felt hollow. All my laughs tailed off quickly and eye contact was fleeting.

I stumbled back to the hotel after closing time with a woman I had dated on and off during my time in China. I liked her a lot. We hooked up after a few weeks in country and saw each other throughout most of training. I got freaked out at a certain point because I was falling for someone else and S kept an emotional distance that made me uncomfortable. We were sent to different ends of Sichuan province and I only saw her every two or three months after that. We tried to be friends, but we had a special knack of hooking up after a few drinks.

We stumbled back to the hotel. Peace Corps made us share hotel rooms and my roommate was already fast asleep when we returned. We had started kissing in the bar and continued to make out on the long walk back to the hotel. We decided to go into the bathroom. She hopped onto the counter and straddled me as we kept kissing. Soon enough my pants were down and my shirt was off.

We had just started having sex when, in a fit of drunken bravura, I picked her up and swung her around onto the upper portion of the toilet bowl. We started to have sex while she leaned back on tottering porcelain. After a few minutes there was a loud crack and the upper portion of the toilet came apart with a loud crash.

I held S up, precariously wedged between the wall and the jagged remains of the toilet. Everything felt ridiculous. We were having sex in a hotel bathroom while someone was sleeping on the other side of the wall. Broken porcelain and toilet water covered the floor. I looked at S and realized my heart wasn't into it.

I tried to reassemble the bigger pieces of the toilet into something that looked normal, then climbed into bed with S and fell asleep. A few hours later there was an urgent knock at the hotel door. She was on an earlier flight and had to leave for the airport. It was just after 8AM, and a weak gray light was coming in through the window, the perpetually overcast smog of Chengdu masking the sunlight.

It's hard to know where the borders are. What are the hard and fast lines that separate two people? Where is that final point on the map where you cross from one person's domain into another's? I got up and gave her a hug at the door. I kissed her on the cheek. She smiled her gentle little smile, lips closed softly over her teeth. I let her walk into the hallway without reaching out again. "Bye," I called after her, just before the door shut.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Living Like a Bachelor

Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Date Machine: Sex in the Office

Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra

Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation

Love Machine: Can You Be Friends With an Ex?

Sex Machine: How Soon, Sex Toy?

Date Night: Kissing in the Rain

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Sex Machine: The Funny Thing About Handjobs