So Mommy says don't put beans up your nose, but did she ever try it? Don't think so.
My mom came from a time and place where beans went into the ground (spring) or into the soup (any old time). And that was it. No nose beans, because everybody knew that beans and noses were not meant to be. No need to try it yourself. End of story.
A lot of things were like that where I came from. Common knowledge. Absolute limits. Duh.
- Look both ways before crossing the street, even an empty street.
- Wear your mittens.
- Brush your teeth once a day, right after getting out of bed, before eating.
- Always have on clean underwear, in case you're hit by a truck, so the people at the hospital won't be disgusted as you die.
- Never miss before-bedtime prayers, lest the god-thing rise to anger and reach for the whacking stick.
- Eat everything on your plate to make up for starvation somewhere.
- Respect authority. All authority. Everywhere. All the time.
- Rejoice in progress, for it will make us all happier, richer, and ever more content. Even if it hurts and is confusing.
- It's for your own good, so conform. Comply. Shut up.
If it now comes in a pouch, and costs less, and is never touched by human hands, and is harder to understand, and can't be repaired by ordinary mortals, and goes faster, and sluices you into the drain of complete faceless anonymity, then it's progress. So give up — you can't fight it.
I just finished a long airline trip. It was a miracle, a miracle of our age.
Imagine traveling thousands of miles in a single day, spending a day or two in a strange place, and then rewinding it all and magically returning home with all your original parts in place, albeit a tad tired. That's me, after an incident of progress.
And you know what? Poop on it.
Just poop on it all.
The best way to travel is the slowest. Not the fastest but the slowest. The most primitive, the most rudimentary, ordinary, most old-fashioned analog way you can. The way most open to fumbling, misdirection, error, and serendipity, with plenty of slow-motion time flowing all around so if something kinda goes wrong? You know? Wrong? Well, you still have plenty of time to fix it.
The way that gives you time to think, and time to feel. And time to sleep a little if you want to, and not be left stranded thousands of miles from home because your life, your self, didn't quite fit into an arbitrary schedule.
Multi-day, cross-country bus trips used to be an ordeal, but now that we have cross-continent and cross-ocean air travel, I long for a simple, agonizing multi-day bus trip, the sort of ongoing event that would let you get out and stretch your legs every now and then, and sniff the air, and hear a thing or two, and actually see, in person, whatever small town the bus happened to be stopped in, if only for a few minutes.
Air travel is fast, and that's all. Everything else about it is horrific.
I'm not big as people go these days, but sitting in my airline seat, I didn't even have room to cross my legs. That's bad enough. Two eleven-and-a-half-hour layovers, one going, one returning, were worse. It's now five days later and I'm still running into walls, and I have a head cold or something, and a headache and a sore throat, and I didn't even cross a single time zone.
I would much rather get on a boat and kill two weeks each way than to fly any more. I would much rather mount the stairs and board a gigantic fantasy airship that held a thousand people and cruised at 50 miles an hour and took a whole week or two, and be able to sit and look out the window and marvel at leisure, and walk around and be totally at ease than to sit, stuck in a tiny seat just barely big enough for my smaller-than-average self, for four-and-a-half-hour flights. Yes.
I cannot at all imagine a really long flight like the ones that cross the Pacific. I'm not even sure that humans can actually endure that sort of experience, despite knowing that they do. Some do — good grief how?
I'd even be willing to try walking or bicycling from one continent to another, if that could be managed. Perhaps not in the world as we know it, but it's a thought — in a better world, yes, maybe I could do that. Maybe I'd be willing to try. It would not be fast, but it would be real, a journey to remember.
But flying any more? Not really, no, unless I absolutely have to. Not any more. It's too much progress for me to comply with any more. I'm done complying.
Have anything worth adding? Then try
sosayseff+eff@gmail.com
Me? Jetlagged, yet somehow not full of hope.
Etc...
so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals