Woo Hoo, Party Train to Novosibirsk!

From my handwritten journal:

I always figured that going mad would be accompanied by some cool noise, like a massive mental steamwhistle or a snapping twig. Then, just like when the final bell rang on the last day of school, the ensuing berserking chaos that followed would be expected, permitted, and perhaps even enjoyable. But as I lay on plastic upholstery in a smelly lagoon of my own perspiration on this misery train, transported prisoner-of-war-like to the next camp, I am starting to ponder if said snappage has already occurred. When exactly the flashes of crazy were replaced by flashes of sanity I don't know, but I'm laying here, suddenly cognizant that, with all the fun bikini-filled, tan-skinned, sunny blue-skied vistas I could visit on my summer vacation -- I'm in the middle of motherfucking Siberia!
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The glossy pamphlets they produce for the Trans-Siberian Railroad are wonderfully appealing. Young, impossibly good-looking and short-skirted nouveau riche Russians, sipping white wine, with toasts and laughter, watching as the vast Russian landscape melts into the sunset through the ultraclean window. What you really get: Two dirty-faced little moppets, one barely this side of comatose, staring blankly at her mangy one-eyed stuffed horse; the other, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of pea green vomit. The evercaring father, he of the beer cologne, passed out lifelessly, face down and shirtless, before the train even leaves the station. To add to the merriment is the toothless, miserable ready-to-die babushka who, when not wiping up the unholy discharge from Linda Blair below, glares unblinkingly and androidlike at me (as I write these very words). For visuals, think of the dinner scene in Annie Hall, when the jew-hating grandmother stares holes through Woody Allen.

So unwilling have I been to climb down from this bunk, imagining that I would drop ankle-deep into one of the puke buckets below, that I, in the blackness of night, with over 95% success rate, vacated my bladder into the contents of an empty two-liter bottle (with a painfully small opening). The unflattering and desperate contortions needed for such a maneuver will assuredly land me on a future episode of KGB's Funniest Thermographic Videos.

Epilogue: My lifelong habit of kicking my shorts off in the middle of the night endeared me to none of the passengers in Compartment 8.