why are you honking at me?

    I should take a moment to talk about Christmas vacation at Setse Beach. A wide, flat, peopleless expanse like its own little desert when the tide goes out, leaving broad puddles of algae in the dips, and plateaus covered in tiny spheres of sand arranged in starburst patterns around the burrows of crabs. Strange creatures darted in the rivulets, hidden by clouds of sand; only once revealed to be thin, white, featureless, electric tilapia fillets pumped with amphetamines and too fast to see clearly. To the North, near where the locals spun donuts in their pickup trucks and ATVs while blasting dance music and burning things, one man rode a pony past the restaurant where I ate every day. The waitress with sunscreen smeared on her cheeks and pigtails like twin fountains of oil spurting from her skull had eyes that became dark crescents when she smiled and served a squid curry that made me never want to leave.
    On the other hand, the chief occupants of the motel (described as 'rustic' in the guidebook) were spiders, coating the high ceilings, getting fat in the light fixtures, lying in wait under the bed's canopy when I unrolled the mosquito net. Taken together with the LMFAO that pounded against the walls at night, the everpresent mosquitos, and the unceasing heat, they were more than enough reason to want to promptly make my exit.
    A feat, given the remote location. I spoke to the man who seemed to be the motel's caretaker, an emaciated fellow of about my height, focusing on his good eye and not the one that appeared to be filled with milk when I spoke. I wanted a taxi to the bus station at 6 pm the next day. I could eat at my favorite restaurant and visit the hermit crabs reclining in the mud around the pagoda to the North, without having to stay an extra night in my own personal purgatory. He seemed to understand, and at 6 am, woke me to tell me the taxi was ready. We quickly worked out the misunderstanding and laughed about it. I went to sleep again, and then at 6 pm, walked to the office with my luggage to find it empty except for a local woman nursing. By full dark, I tracked down my contact, reminded him about the taxi, then followed him around the neighborhood as he recruited another local and tracked down a motorcycle. What he had meant by taxi, of course, was just that he would drive me there himself. The three of us packed onto his motorcycle and sped off away from the spiders and into the dark.
    Now we come to the point of it all, I guess, which is a deeper understanding of what honking means in this part of the world, compared to back home. At home, when you honk at someone, you probably mean something like this:
   
    "Hey, you're breaking the law!"
    - or -
    "Hey, you're in my way!"
    - or maybe just -
    "Hey, you're a jerk!"

    It didn't take me too long to notice that, here, honking means this:
   
    "Hey, I'm driving!"

    This was an important step for me to cease being constantly offended as a pedestrian. The occasion doesn't matter, honking is just a thing people do to indicate they're in a car, or perhaps riding a bike. Is the honk directed at an object? Sometimes, maybe? It can be difficult to tell. Given the lack of enforced traffic laws, stop signs, lights, etc, it's only prudent, I suppose, to honk at every single person, animal, or plant that you see. And it was our little motorcycle trip that really drove this home for me.

    The three of us zipped down the road at what must've been top speed, around blind curves through the darkness. Insects cut at my cheeks like hundreds of invisible razors. It occurred to me that our driver was clearly blind in one eye, and I imagined the first mosquito to light in his good one would send the three of us sailing off into the trees, bones cracking and popping out this way and that. For that matter, a single pothole in the darkness would turn the scooter into a catapult, and our headlight was almost useless. Worst of all, the road was thin, curving, and overgrown. In our haphazard path, we took up every part of it at all times. The first car or truck on a curve couldn't fail to turn out the contents of my skull across its windshield.
    It was for this that our driver laid on his little horn for the entire trip into town, despite the empty road looking as if there might be no one to hear us for miles in any direction. It was simply his duty, or perhaps desire to avoid being mushed into a fine paste, that made him announce to the world, "I'm driving!" as he indeed drove, an act of intense presence and concentration, not to mention velocity.
    Being who I am, I was quite surprised when we arrived at the bus station alive. I was feeling stressed, windblown, and crusty (the ocean had been my only shower for days), but quite thankful to have my bones safely contained in my skin.