Tonight's Zelda's Inferno exercise: write about an experience of feeling foreign; include a cultural tradition, a food, place, or holiday, or phrase in another language
I just wanted a beer but I found a foreign land
Now I've drunk sake in a yakusa bar in Manhattan, where Japanese gangsters with missing fingers would walk in and out of the back room
and I've been the only white man in a bar full of Latino workers, not understanding the flood of Spanish around me except "cervesa por favor" and "gringo"
and I've been the closest thing to a working-class hero in the room at a party at the yacht club, certainly the only one there whose grandfather was a union organizer
and I've wandered the streets of Tokyo during the weeks before Christmas, seen incomprehensible displays mixed in with familiar seasonal decorations
and I've always felt at home
but in the bar of an Econo-Lodge in Marrieta, Kansas
I stumbled into a foreign world
the least-common-denominator tavern
it exists spread out in space and time
it's a state of mind
a place of lower-level business travelers in bad suits
of weary men and women looking to anesthetize
to numb the empty spaces with
bad domestic beer
and the most generic rock-and-roll possible
I've never felt so out of place