I made rasher decisions, spray-painting the slogan CORPORATIONS ARE SHARKS AND PEOPLE ARE ONLY REMORAS on the side of a huge shiny bank. I called Dr. Lu to ask if my symptoms were cause for concern, but she said I was going through the normal emotional transitions common to someone who no longer had WOES. I asked her out on a date, but she told me she was married.

I cancelled my health insurance and bought a motorcycle.  My meridians had never felt less congested. But when I rode my motorcycle to Ciudad Juarez to see if I could pick up some more dragons, the clinic had been blown up.

Some cartel had interpreted these dragons as competition.

I learned Dr. Lu's father had died in the explosion, and called her to express my condolences, but was told she'd taken a leave of absence. I rode on through the night, screaming all the Spanish swearwords I knew. When my motorcycle broke down, I stole another one and kept going.

On a whim, I spent half a week in Belmopan, Belize, studying font design, renting a room above a mosque. Maybe this would be a good experience to talk about on NPR or something. But I still didn't feel like my life was in balance.

Maybe competing dragon species were the answer. Seeking out men with an air of nautical abstraction about them, I asked around Belize about ways to get to Cuba, where I might obtain a rock dragon. At last I tracked down a crew of lone wolf shrimp fishermen and persuaded them to take me to the Isla de la Juventud on their funky steel catamaran.

 

At sea, my footloose friends argued about how big Cuban rock dragons get exactly. Like most of their discussions, it seemed to be always on the verge of turning into a fight. There was a tooth mark on my hand, where someone had bitten me in a bar argument the night before. In between pulling the heads off shrimp, I kept pouring whiskey over my wound.