Wasn't it a Good Year?

In keeping with the popular tradition of annual list-making, I thought I’d compile a little directory of my own. I’d not heard too many records last year; it’s not a point of pride so much as it is an admission of ignorance. So here’s a short inventory of my more memorable excursions of 2007, easily among the more memorable years of my life. Enjoy.

10) Peoria, IL: fortunately, there’s no place like home. The only allure this place retains for me is that it remains home to so many of my best friends, and so merits the occasional homecoming. In 2007, my ordinarily bittersweet biannual return degenerated to the purely bitter. With each subsequent visit, there are fewer persons and things present that I once loved, and a great deal more Applebee’s, Chili’s, and all the rest of that shit that sucks the character from a town.

I ain’t mad ‘atcha, Peoria. It’s just that I so intimately and irreparably associate you with misery and despair, with broken homes and bad dreams, with cold nights and poverty, slow change and false starts, withered trees and sad old crumbling tree houses, a bulldozed childhood and prick stepfathers and dead mothers. Nothing personal.

9) Las Vegas, NV: my sense of humor is such that I may endure a few days in nearly any place without ever entirely falling to pieces; worst case scenario: we get as piss drunk as possible and laugh it off. Granted this is harder to do in places like Amarillo or Dallas (most of my family now reside in Texas for some inexplicable reason) than it is in most others. Despite being a fairly protean creature, two and-a-half days in Vegas was about as much as I could stand. I am just not a Vegas kind of guy. I detest phoniness, and Las Vegas is nothing if it is not substitution, approximation; the basest sort of king-size abstraction. As such, the phoniest among us are probably the most invigorated in its company. I find the same to be true of present-day Manhattan; the family-oriented (whatever the fuck that is) corporate retail stores that now occupy the former residences of dildo shops and porn theaters in Times Square to my mind represent a transgression considerably more vulgar than the alleged profanities they’ve since displaced.

Las Vegas represents a great deal of what is wrong with our world; a parasitic little canker in the middle of the desert, a fake-ass little oasis of idiocy that robs suckers of their dough and Americans of their precious water supply. If any place in America can be said to actively endorse a policy of non-thinking while simultaneously promoting ruin, it’s this one. But it is romantic, in the obvious sense of the term: being in Vegas feels approximately like how one feels when watching popular films set in Vegas. You feel that immediate, ersatz kinship with the celebrities you’ve so often seen engaged in hosts of glamorous activities about the strip, and that connectivity and correspondence makes you feel like you’re somewhere, or maybe somebody. But you’re not, and nobody’s paying much attention. The reality is considerably less-romantic: septuagenarians who've never enjoyed the profit of a basic statistics course, chain-smoking and losing their social-security check at the slots, objectively poor-ass black dudes* up from L.A., embarrassing themselves by pretending to be rich for a day, parroting sad rap-video platitudes like “yay-uh, Vegas baby. This how we do it in Vegas”. But as I mentioned, even a place this repellent could not stop me from having a ball.

8) Puerto Nuevo, Mexico: beautiful coastline, a mere three hours from L.A., and one can gorge oneself on lobster tail for next to nothing. Then, if you’re feeling like a complete douchebag, you can drive up to Rosarito and dance to shitty MTV-style trance music in foam-filled nightclubs and be physically assaulted by barmen who carry around bottles of Cuervo in leather gun holsters. Suit yourself.

7) Solvang, CA: Solvang is a little village twenty minutes inland from Santa Barbara, whose architecture is intended to invoke the look and feel of Copenhagen, or perhaps a smaller Danish town. It tends to attract older, moneyed California families, maybe some Danish tourists, and sometimes myself. This was my third visit, despite swearing to never again return after my first. There is absolutely nothing to do here but wander about and drink good California wine, which rather suits me. The entire place shuts down at 8:00 P.M.; grossly premature by most standards. But after a full range of tastings at seven or eight decent wineries and a severely intoxicated girlfriend who will not cease cursing loudly en español in a crowded 4-star restaurant, calling it a day around eight begins to make some sense. Go for the buzz, stay for the Aebleskivers.

6) Big Bear, CA: my good friend Monica has a timeshare (see: glorified hotel) in Big Bear, so she, myself, Jasmin and Fernando spent a few days there; I believe we were the only Latinos in town. Oh wait: I am not Latino. I am Italian. And I happily abdicated the German portion of my lineage upon learning that I am part Jew. I mean, have you seen The Pianist? Have you properly assimilated the lessons of Black Book or Downfall? It is quite enough that I’m closely related to Giovanni Gentile, positivist philosopher who authored Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism, and was raised (to the extent that I could be said to have been “raised”) a Catholic. Retail stores make me paranoid because I’m certain that the staff necessarily suspects me of shoplifting, and I’d certainly flunk the simplest of polygraphs administered to me. Old Guilt is like a phobia; it translates broadly and is entirely unresponsive to reason.

Anyway, Big Bear is largely forgettable; its landscapes pale in comparison to hosts of other lake-riddled mountains throughout California. Though the company was sublime.

5) Valley of Fire State Park, NV: about an hour outside of Las Vegas, you’ll find a little side road that leads to a series of striking Mars-red sandstone formations jutting out of the desert floor. It’s an inclement area, largely without shade and water, but perfect if you’re seeking a bit of solitude. Though strange and dizzying, I wouldn’t qualify it as properly lunar; it pisses me off when travel writers so frequently refer to terrestrial landscapes as being lunar, as if they have some personal familiarity with the topography of the fucking moon. I suppose it pisses me off because they are paid so handsomely to write so poorly and I am paid absolutely nothing to write rather well. But it even fails as a metaphor; the most extraordinary and wildly varied scenes are to be found exclusively here on earth. If I were offered the opportunity to attend an expedition of any length to any known planet, or any of its satellites, I’d immediately reject the proposal; all known celestial bodies are a fucking bore when contrasted with the diversity of earth. The Gobi desert of Mongolia, the Atacama of Chile, the Uyuni salt flats of Bolivia; all are commonly referred to as lunar but are considerably more dynamic and startling than the moon. I know all this because I have actually been to the moon, and I can verify the very real presence of horses galloping and throwing up hard white clouds of regolith.

Anyway, the campsites are deeply recessed into the cliff sides and are remarkably soundproof. I spent some evenings building unfairly huge fires on the desert floor, thinking about the Indians who once dwelt here and the wealth of petroglyphs I’d photographed throughout the day. And drinking heavily.

4) Idylwild, CA: a charming little half-town two hours from L.A. There are a couple of pubs here, should you care to imbibe the hard-luck stories of local rural-folk. Spent the first night in a forest cabin, and the next two in a tent. I was a bit startled by the considerable presence of meth-rattled panhandlers here; who’d expect to repeatedly confront such a soiled constituency in the middle of the woods? And while we’re on the subject: why are all the worst drugs, the physically most-pernicious, also the most addictive? You never hear of any kids addicted to acid or Salvia divinorum (please do not bring up my activities in the summer of 1994). When DMT or an analogous tryptamine-based substance becomes a habit-forming convention within a given population, Philip K. Dick will be formally recognized as the prophet that he was.

3) Zion National Park, UT: most National Parks are such that a sign is not required to alert you that you’ve breached its perimeter; the stark contrast of Zion’s colorful plateaus emerging outside the already-gorgeous Virgin River Valley are evidence enough, as it’s clear you’ve landed in a rather special place. But thanks for the signage all the same. There was a little grocer in the park that sold cleverly-antagonistic microbrews like “Polygamy Porter: Why Have Just One?” and “Evolution Ale (add your own subtitle)”. I love that in a state as socially-stifling as Utah, there exist institutions within the National Park system willing to openly participate in a beer-based taunting of Mormonism. And what the fuck kind of name is “Mitt” anyway?

2) Five Dried Grams of Psilocybe cubensis in my living room, Los Angeles, CA: ask and ye shall, with a bit of patience, receive. For my birthday, I never ask for iPods or books or hookers or sweaters; I never ask for anything but drugs; any of the entheogenic variety. I did this for several years, and finally received the motherload. As I’d not taken any appreciable quantities of psilocybin in roughly two years, I thought that I might compensate this deficit by testing my boundaries, which meant consuming something in the way of five or six grams. I selected the terraced, staggered-dose method, piling them on over a period of two or three hours. It proved to be among the roughest of all psychedelic episodes within the index, considerably more difficult than my weird engagement with a little Yoda-esque Mazatec shaman in the cold mountains of northern Oaxaca.

I can report to you with some confidence that our ordinary experience of this world accounts for only a slight margin of what it really is; I have been witness to events that were not the product of some memorial amalgam, some abstract mosaic of previous experience. I could be wrong about its objectivity, but impressions of this rather gripping magnitude are a bit difficult to shrug off as simple neurological aberration. My favorite analogy is that of the television: imagine that you’ve been blessed with only the few shitty UHF channels; your model of television is necessarily restricted to these scant few impressions. To my mind, high-dose psychedelic experience interrogates a margin of objective reality not ordinarily available to our common-day apprehension; it represents a shocking introduction of Direct HDTV into a field of grainy, uni-dimensional, antennae-based wandering. Not to sound too Charles Dexter Ward**, but, I saw unmentionable things.

1) Vietnam: though I’ve already imparted much of this tale at length, I suppose the inclusion of a proper epilogue hadn’t occurred to me, and might be in order. What else can I say: the people were people, like any other place. Sometimes they were genuinely kind, and in other instances they were the same difficult pricks you’d confront anywhere. The food was incomparable. And there is always an inherent excitement in leaving your country of origin. I think it says a great deal about the malleable and forgiving constitution of the Vietnamese people that they so readily accept us as Americans, in lieu of the fact that we so profoundly fissured and decimated their culture.

But really, it was the being there that made it so special; that quality of participation and immersion that is not reducible to any of the surrounding constituents. In the moment of your joy or your discomfort, these sensations are not predicated on any single quality, or any difficult synthesis of them. In fact, my most treasured memories of Vietnam proceed from situations of the most classically-unfavorable variety: flood, instability, uncertainty, injury, shitty accommodations, and chance of death. Massage and museums and sailing are things you sign up for, but I most enjoyed the chance occurrences that could not have been anticipated. The best experiences are claimed not through money, but through a sometimes difficult commitment to gregariousness, or a sometimes undignified letting go.

Social Traveling is exciting not because it allows one to reinvent oneself in the company of others, but for precisely the inverse reason: you may proceed as yourself and on your own terms in a manner that it is often difficult to accomplish at home, in the near-constant presence of friends and associates who will scrutinize and weigh your behaviors. Strangers allow you the rare opportunity to reveal your authentic self before them; you will likely never again cross paths, and so you have nothing whatsoever to lose. In doing so, this authentic self is consequently disclosed to the superficial self, and you’re all the richer for it.

Eureka

01/06/08

* I love black people.

**either you get it or you don’t. Expect an H.P. Lovecraft-based flow chart to follow shortly.