Deathbed Of The Demon Buffalo

There's a big announcement at the end of this post. I always put these things at the end so you have to wade through my musings on bus fares and goat tranquilizing first, because I do not respect you. Actually, now that you've been warned, I'm writing about something besides buses and goats, and the announcement is somewhere in the middle. Ha!

You know, I realized just how jaded I've become when I was trying to come up with something to put on this blog about the city of Mysore and gave up, only to remember hours later that a bus I was riding knocked a motorcyclist off his bike in front of a full detachment of police officers. I also almost forgot that on the way down the stairs from a sacred hill I had spent some time flirting with about 80 members of an all-female military training batallion until their big, bearded Sikh commander finally arrived and gave everybody a glare that said "I carry this large wooden stick for a reason." How could I almost forget these things? When nothing in my life makes any sense, everything begins to lose its meaning. Like the word "cutlery". What does that mean? Gee, I don't know.

I wasn't sure whether I was going to like Mysore. It's mostly known for incense, yoga, and a fairytale palace, which together draw in millions of tourists a year. Specifically, it draws the sort of people that come thousands of miles for incense, yoga, and a fairytale palace. The foreigners here are weird. There are large numbers of fatties walking around in between trips to magical centers of study where they presumably are taught that if they are going to order a large pizza they should give at least one slice to the dog. There's also lots of people here for the yoga which will de-stress there lives. The problem is the main cause of stress in a lot of people's lives is themselves. Last night I was sitting right here working when I witnessed the spontaneous combustion of the friendship of two middle-aged Minnesotan women, one of whom was absolutely outraged the other was making her wait a full twenty minutes at the net cafe before dinner, prompting the other to exasperatedly snap back "Soo just gooo then, eh! You dooont have to stay, I t'old you!" After also witnessing a German-sounding couple squabble about how far they had walked from their hotel ("No! It vas only von hundred and tventy fife meters to ze bas stop and zen fifty meters more to ze bakery!"), I concluded that yoga isn't always the answer.

In between wandering various corners of Mysore I took a trip to Srirangapatnam, which is a fascinating fortified island where....OK whatever, short version, this dude named Tipu Sultan was a huge pain in the ass to the British and was obsessed with the fact that he got the nickname "The Tiger of Mysore" and put tiger-related shit everywhere. Srirangapatnam is this guy's town. You can go see what's left of the town if you want. It's pretty nice.

Two things turned my opinion of Mysore around. The first was the fairytale palace, which really was some Disney-worthy material. You go in and there are these epic ballrooms surmounted by stained glass, plenty of gold leaf, and plush red upholstery. Probably my favorite part was when you go to the grand balcony and look at the massive ceiling tiles painted in a European neo-baroque style, except everywhere there would be a troupe of plump little cherubs blowing bible verse pennants out of horns there are instead levitating cows, goddesses riding swans, and Vishnu transforming into a fish. It was awesome. Also, if you come by on Sunday nights they light the entire place up with approximately 100,000 little light bulbs and it is pretty amazing to look at. One person I was chatting to asked how I, being a writer, would try and put the sight into words. "Some magical-ass shit" I said.

The other thing that changed my opinion about Mysore was when I learned that the name "Mysore" is a corruption of the place-name denoting the spot where the goddess Chaumundi slew a demonic buffalo. This is a celestial agenda I can get behind. In a few hundred years India is going to be dotted with towns called things like "Kowslap", marking the site of events from the Ghostfacebuddhana, an epic describing the liberation of Hindustan from bovine tyranny.

And now we come to the end, where I was going to reveal my momentous decision all along.

Ghostface Buddha is going to quit his job...but not for another month or so of high-profit writing in the far south.

After that...THE DOG IS OFF THE LEASH.