^Meditations:
WHY / HOW TRAVEL ??

Wherein I ponder just what the fock I'm up to, and why and where, and how far and how long, and the implications thereof, as far as I can drag out the meditation, or whatever.

Part I

WHY? The question may arise: why travel? Why uproot oneself from a more-or-less comfortable, stable existence? Why bother going anywhere?

The answers are many and overlapping, but they seem generally to align themselves in a few categories. So far I've counted four: escape, employment, expansion, and esperanza (hope). There are probably many more categories and motivations. I'll work on this.

ESCAPE: There is always so much to escape from: police, courts, militaries and paramilitaries; famine, plague, poverty, fire, fear; dejection, rejection, injection, inspection; former friends and old lovers and new enemies. Or maybe just boredom, biliousness, bilateralism. Reality. Whatever.

EMPLOYMENT: Travel may be related to work, as a journalist, soldier, tinker, trader, entertainer, service provider, diplomat or other scoundral. Go to new places, meet new people, and kill them or rob them or feed them or document them or lie to or about them or train them to do likewise.

EXPANSION: The oldest excuse is to travel to better oneself, by education or pligrimage or absorption or adaptation or adventure, thus curiosity. Or visitation with family or friends or fiends or co-conspirators, thus commitment. Expand your outlook and your consciousness, with or without drugs or media or alien implants. If one's fortune can be made along the way, so much the better - expand your material sphere too.

ESPERANZA: All the above are ties in with hope. We HOPE that THERE is better than HERE, or at least different. We HOPE that what we'll find is worth what we left behind. The expectation becomes a rich fantasy life - how does it match with reality?

The motives in these catagories needn't all apply to what we usually call 'travel,' especially 'tourism' aka recreational travel. [RECREATION - a means of being re-created.] Some are only for migrants, for those who move about on serious business, for those on the run. But maybe everyone who leaves home is on the run. Maybe only those who end up in hermits' caves have finished travelling, at least physically. But recreational travel implies a return (eventually) to where we started the journey. If we don't go back, we're migrants.

Part II

HOW? The WHY of travel shades into the HOW and especially the HOW FAR. In my youth I did roam all over my vicinity, variously afoot, on skateboard, bicycle, moped, and much later by car. Thus was the travel on which I directed myself, not just being hauled around by insistent elders. The WHY covered many of the motivations discussed above; the HOW (physically) dictated the HOW FAR, as did mountains and hills and paved channels and areas of intense disinterest. But beyond the physical HOW lie mental, moral, spiritual, emotional HOWs.

On most such non-motorized perambulations, I wasn't that concertnd with my surroundings, having usually seen them many times before. My brain craved other forms of input. So when I had a transistor radio on hand, I listened. Otherwise I read. I could be found walking or rolling (on skates, skateboard, bike) far and wide with a book stuck into my face. The physical HOW was supplanted by a mental HOW that took me much further afield, to lands and times and worlds unbounded.

And now in my dreams I travel across the universe thru space and time, flitting between planets and galaxies and eras for far-flung adventures. The physical HOW is fantastic; the mental HOWs derive from the WHYs, but I'm just as lost to my surroundings as I was when skateboarding seven miles across town to Grandma's house while devouring Poul Andersen's EARTHMAN'S BURDEN.

Self-directed motorized HOWs of travel don't allow such freedom. (NOTE: It's hard to read while pogo-sticking.) Driving a motorbike or car or jetski or airplane or snowmobile or boat requires rather more concentration on immediate surroundings, lest one blend painfully with such. Being a passenger of these forms of transport allows one to either absorb the surroundings (where available) or possibly to withdraw into sleep, torpor, fantasy or intense paranoia. In either case, HOW do we travel, mentally? And HOW might hour journey be untimely terminated?

Part III

HOW? Other ranges of HOW we travel encompass emotion: expectation, joy, hate, ennui, giddiness, terror, I bicycle with a sense of excitement and energy until I'm nearly run down by a large truck - then my HOW shifts to fear and trepidation, and that's HOW I pedal my ass off. The HOW of airline travel is merely tedium and discomfort unless we think we may be hijacked or air-raged or blown out the sky. Your trip home might be accomplished in happiness, were you not going to attend a funeral - and even then, your HOW may be happy cynicism or relief. HOW you travel, in what mood, informs the whole trip.

Most of these possible bad moods result from anticipating an unfortunate end to the trip. Will your plane or train be crashed or hijacked or bombed? Will your cross-country drive be cut short by a falling meteorite or spacecraft or cow? Will you stroll thru the woods, only to be devoured by a bear or a puma or a pack of Great Danes? What's your chance of being abducted by aliens whilst you skateboard? When you bungee off a bridge, will the line snap? Do you worry about such fates?

Hopefully your journey will have a happier ending; visualize THAT! And consider whether your purpose for travel is to arrive somewhere, or the journey itself. Are the end points of your trip more or less important than what lies between? Does the end justify the means or vice-versa? Why go anywhere else?

Part IV

HOW MANY? Another HOW of travel is HOW MANY? Who all do you travel with? You may be alone, in a bonded pair or triple or whatever, your immediate or extended family, a small or large group, a whole cluster-fuck, an army, tribe, nation - any number of people can be in motion, in parallel, in time. And your numbers will color your experience.

HOW MANY may be tied to WHY. If your goal is to, as mentioned above, to do harm unto others and for them to do harm unto you, you might want to be part of a fairly large cohort - milling about, directed by the Judas goat fearless leader.

As a singleton you have the most flexibility, the most agility, the most options to hop when the griddle gets hot. And you won't necessarily succumb to loneliness, not if your WHY involves interacting with new people in non-destructive ways. Thus, hitchhiking alone is always a social experience; while flying, although you're intensely crowded, cheek-to-jowl with innumerable unwashed others, you may be quite solitary. All depends on who you talk to.

HOW MANY? Your tour group may deplane en masse, hop onto a noxious bus driven by an emaciated sallow fellow with a perpetual bad attitude and stained sunglasses. And you'll cruise the exotic land, stopping at village after village; everybody disembarks, swarms, re-embarks, and on to the next splendorous site with the same chattering mob. OFF the plane a Naples airport, ON the shuttle to the chain hotel, ONTO the bus to Vesuvius, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Sorrento, Capri.

At each stop your flock of ravening locusts attempts to strip bare the locals of their wares. Not a chance, of course; they're used to much larger and greedier and wealthier flocks than yours. They are prepared, well-stocked, handy with calculators and change.

Or your chartered Airbus jumbojet comes in from Frankfurt to Los Angeles. Your whole province jumps off at once, jumps into the fleet of rental motorhomes your tourmeister has pre-arranged, and starts driving all the scenic glories of Western and SouthWestern USA, establishing new nation-sized encampments at every state and national park deemed worthy of your attention, and especially of your marks and francs and euros.

HOW MANY? It's very entertaining, being part of a barbarian hoard that sweeps across the countryside, torching cities, waylaying smaller groups and stragglers, living off the fat of the land. There's something very satisfying about being part of a conquering army.

In a much smaller group, you and those close to you, you have less impact up on the landscape, yet you're also more vulnerable to predators and the vicissitudes and vagaries of fate and nature and human cussedness. And alone, you must depend upon your own wits, and upon the accuracy of timetables and route maps and currency conversion charts and language phrasebooks and impromptu interpreters. Two or three may be able to sleep and eat nearly as cheaply as one, but they can't jump as fast or as impulsively.

PERCEPTION? "Journeys are the midwives of thought." (Alain De Botton) What do you think when you travel alone, in a small group, a large group, a mass migration? And what do you see? WHO do you see? You can make some judgements about your own nature by studying the images you capture and accumulate on your travel, if any. Whose faces appear? Your own? Your immediate companion(s)? Distant companions, total strangers? Faceless blurs of massed humanity surrounding you? Animals? Posters, paintings, statues? Do you avoid picturing and thus thinking about real humans? Are flowers and dogs and lawn gnomes much more amenable as subjects?

I'll admit my own proclivity - I travel as part of a bonded pair, but I like to wander alone, a camera nonchalantly stealthily held in my unnoticed hand, snapping pictures of unawares passersby. Well, statues and bumper-stickers too. It's fun also to snap the relatives at family gatherings, I can mount a huge rogues' gallery of these captive subjects. But different faces in different places seem so compelling, not dwelling in the same sphere from which I've escaped. A sea of change, distant from the unchanging rocky shores of home.

Part IVa

HOW FAR? Another HOW of travel is HOW FAR? Distance may not be measured in kilometers or parsecs, nor duration measured in milliseconds or aeons. All travel is measure in experience.

Hop on your transcontinental red-eye, Los Angeles to New York City. What's the distance and duration of the transit? Let's tabulate that: There's the tedium and terror of getting from your front door to the airport; the apprehension of going thru security; more tedium in the departure lounge; more terror and apprehension and fatigue on the flight; possibly more of the same during any layover and the flight continuation; then surviving the touchdown; pushing thru the terminal crowd; reacquiring your luggage; fear and tedium while being transported from the airport to your destination.

In toto the trip encompasses some number of hours but hardly any real movement at all on your part. Most of your time is spent in vehicles and buildings that may be totally sealed from the external world, rendering you oblivious to the passing scene,

That same journey, driving, takes much more time; and if you stay off the Interstate highways you're much more exposed to the world around you. You may stop frequently, perform bodily functions, interact with other humans.

And that same trip hitchhiking would result in much of the same but many added doses of fear, tedium, apprehension, wondering where the next lodging or food may appear. But you'll have a great deal more interaction, and even adventure and exhiliration and surprise, a very rich experience.

And that same journey on bicycle: more time, more contact with passing reality, much more exertion; possibly much less interaction, depending on whether you're alone or in a group. But it's an experience you're DAMN unlikely to ever forget!

And that same trip WALKING ... well, I'll leave that to your imagination.

HOW FAR? A frequent flier, often moving between offices or conference centers or resorts, may put on a great deal of mileage but really goes nowhere, revisiting the same place over and over - different CITY LIMITS signs, same infrastructure.

At the opposite extreme, you can build a small labyrinth (NOT a maze, a labyrinth!) in your back yard and walk it endlessly. Put on a million miles while spanning a distance of no more than a few feet, and travelling even further within the 10^15 neurons inside your brain. 10^15, a ONE with FIFTEEN zeroes after it; that's ten times a billion times a billion times a billion times a billion times a billion. Even if your neurons are only a greater or lesser fraction of a meter long, it adds up. Do the math.

COUNTING? Another measure of HOW FAR sounds like HOW MANY but now instead of counting companions we're counting destinations. You're obsessed; you're BAGGING places; your goal is to reach as many roller coasters or observatories or botanic gardens or Planet Hollywoods or 20,000 foot peaks or gun shows as possible. Ride every train and merry-go-round, visit every brewery and motor raceway. Et cetera.

This animated version of collecting matchbook covers may be richly rewarding to some poor sods. Shoot something or somebody in every state, every nation, every continent! Piss directly into all the major rivers of the world! Visit every alien abduction site! Have sex in every casino! Acquire bumper stickers from every roadside attraction! Collect the entire set!

And another variant thereof is HOW MUCH - how high can you go, and how low? To how hot and how cold? To how windy, to how wet, to how dry? To how scenic, to how noxious? There's always another extreme to attain.

My own goals are more modest. I like to 'bag' observatories and ghost towns, mountain passes and missions, UFO set-downs, and towns named POMONA. But all within reason. I feel no compulsion to do ALL or THE MOST of anything. Not yet I don't, anyway. (Although I wouldn't mind photographing all the squirty-titted nymph fountains in Southern Italy and Latin America.)

Part V

HOW DEEP? Suppose we have what we think is a good reason to travel. That reason is neither harmful nor helpful, we're not traveling to cause or relieve pain among others. We aren't mercenary and we aren't even escaping from those who would harm us. Suppose instead that we seek SELF-ENRICHMENT (a Nietzchean term that encompasses all but material pursuits).

If we go to unknown places we are confronted with myriads and observations that we must ourselves evaluate, try to place in some order or context. If we go to KNOWN places however, those details have already been recorded, noted, measured, quantified, printed, and very likely evaluated.

How much shall we depend on those prior evaluations and judgements? If we travel someplace new, what are our options? Do we:

1. Depend on existing travel guidebooks?
2. Ask locals about what may be worthy of our attention?
3. Let all details wash over us, unevaluated, unjudged?
4. Take the explorer's approach, observe all that we can and try to sort out for ourselves what means what and what is of interest to us?

To do this last of course we should take copious notes, make long lists, write up our own judgements, our reactions and our reasons for those reactions.

We can focus our self-enrichment by giving ourselves goals. We want to see all the missions, we want to see all the observatories, we want to see all the oceans and jump into them and taste them. Yes, write The Connoiseur's Guide To Seawaters Of The World. And don't listen overmuch to what others have said about THEIR favorite seawaters - decide for yourself.

HOW DEEP? Total observant travel, exploration is tedious of course. If I wanted to make accurate judgements about the deserts I'm passing thru I'd be walking in direct lines, noting all the vegetation and animals and rocks and features that I encountered, counting and measuring them, noting time, temperature, elevation, humidity, proximity to roadways and utility lines. But all that would probably go a bit beyond mere self-enrichment unless I were really really anal about such data. So I may note:

Ah, the pines are no longer with us. And we've even dropped below the black sage zone, we're now among creasote bushes. The burro-bush has been constant for a ways. The color of the sand changes, consistent with the color of the mother rocks it weathered from and the layers of dust that have been blown over it. And the aesthetic impact of this is trivial. Trivial, that is, until the tallest mountains around have reappeared behind the foreground hills. Note that these are the famous Alabama Hills, settings of so many films.

The previous may be an entry in a catalog of experiences. To build a comprehensive catalog we might take that entry and thousands of similar entries; assign a ranking based on our criteria of evaluation; decide on some way to order the entire list of entries; print them out, cut'n'paste, order them, print them. HERE is the catalog of my life!

And for a small fee prospective purchasers may acquire any specific experiences. Some that I might like to sell may include, oh, a cold night camping, or camping in fly-infested areas, or our Guatemalan diahrrea, or food poisoning at a resort in Alaska (Chena Hot Springs), or long waits for delayed aircraft. But I'm not sure there'd be much of a market for those items. It might even be best to drop them from the catalog. But the catalog, the list, my life story becomes a lie, the product of a selective hack-job. But don't we usually try to prune our memories anyway?

Rather than compile an exhaustive database of original experiences, we may chose the easy way out: buy and follow the guidebooks and only go to the 3-star attractions. Or at least budget time so the 3-stars get more of your time and attention than the 2- and 1- and 0-star items. Your list of experiences then becomes a merged-joined-edited extract of other peoples' lists. Yes, travel and life itself become much easier if we don't have to actually chart any new paths, have any original thoughts, or deviate from orthodoxy.

And thus we enter the realm of theology.

Part VI

HOW LONG? Travel may be linked to some forms of attention deficit disorder. Travel is a perfect metaphor for the syndrome: We're doing something, we get bored or distracted or impatient, so we drop that and do something else. Replace the words 'doing' and 'do' with 'being' and 'go' and we've described the inveterate peripatetic wanderer.

Not all types of travel may be so diagnosed, just the malady of self-directed journeying. If work or fear or greed or submission obligates us to move our moldy hides from place to place, that's 'normal.' But if we go just because we want to be somewhere else, that's a symptom of ADDS.

Aimless shopping may also be linked here. And aimless gallery- or museum- or attraction-hopping, as well. Pick up stuff (physically or visually or metaphorically), consider it, get bored, put it down and go on to the next item. And the next. And the next. Et cetera, ad infinitum.

We can even extend this metaphor into the political realm. Grasp or state a policy or program or propaganda line, consider or exploit it awhile until you or your constituents are bored or distracted or impatient, then move on. Whenever we see short attention spans in pols or pundits or the press or the public, blame ADDS.

But back to travel. I have no itinerary, no schedules, other than the roughest leave-here-now and be-back-then sort of timetable. If I see any likely-looking path, I'm up it. If someplace is boring, I go somewhere else. A perfect picture of ADDS. Huh? What are we talking about?

Part VII

HOW DIFFERENT? Sometimes you must leave home to experience how other people live publically. You might not be able to attend cultural-religious ceremonies by Apaches, Basques, Mayas, Khmers, Quakers or Kurds in your neighborhood. Your township may not host festivals extolling garlic, tortoises, artichokes, chiles, pansexuality, poison ivy, mescal, rubber duckies, leeches, sand fleas or mud. You may never witness a public person being burnt in effigy or reality if you stay home. People elsewhere do things differently.

You may even have foregone a variety of rich multicultural experiences in your own locality. Aren't there a number of activities and events that you seen advertised, that you've thought about attending, but you just couldn't find the time? Some exotic minority's food and craft fair; some cult's initiation rites; rallies by political-social-economic groups you despise or fear; alien sporting events; ritual sacrifices. You are surrounded by different worlds you've never even tasted.

The disadvantage of sampling such homegrown exotica is that they DO happen where you live, and should you attend you may be recognized then or later. Travel somewhere else to savor the experience and you're anonymous, invulnerable. Nobody there knows you, they'll never see you again, so you can do what you want without fear of anything - except maybe violating some minor taboo. But they hardly ever throw offenders into a volcano for THAT anymore, right? So relax.. Have fun. Stomp that dwarf.

NOTE: Such travel is NOT on the same level as wandering from place to place just to repeatedly experience the same event (with minor variations). You may repetitively and compulsively attend NASCAR races, your fave band's concerts, mass circle-jerks, screenings of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, presidential inaugurations, anti-globalization rallies or Moonie mass-marriages. You may visit numerous golf courses (miniature or full-size), slotcar tracks, nudist camps, heretic stonings, war zones, waterslides, Starbucks cafes, or Scientology offices. You will NOT be enriched by such obsessive-compulsive behaviour.

So try mixing these up. For example, getting naked in a Scientology office while chanting anti-globalization slogans and swinging golf clubs can be very fulfilling. Trust me.