Wanderlust Heaven!

“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
-Tim Cahill, author & intrepid traveler

Spent a lot of the past week with old friends. Had dinner with an ex-colleague last week, right before the dreaded ‘mancation.’ We had a lot of catching up to do…he filled me in on various PG-13 gossip about our mutual employer, I told him about my recent round-the-world trip. Which he already knew about in some depth…he’s been a steady reader of this Slog and has sent me encouraging emails from time to time. And during our dinner he continued to praise my writing. It’s obvious to us both that I’m a hell of a lot better as a writer than as a consultant – and I’m certainly more switched on by this new life than by the old one. But I did find it difficult to react to my friend’s praise – I just didn’t know quite what to say. Perhaps it’s because we used to work together and the criticism : praise ratio was a number vastly greater than 1…ergo, I’m not used to hearing positive feedback from him. In any event, there was no doubt back in the day that I didn’t react well to criticism…it’s somewhat surprising that I also can’t handle acclaim either. Yet another thing for me to work on…

The coming of the Florida ‘mancation’ got me thinking about the wider topic of traveling. My next round-the-world adventure looms, and I’m excited to get going again. Not that my time in the States has been sedentary – I’ve been gone nearly every weekend since late December. A weekend in New Hampshire, two in the Caribbean, one in Washington, and now one in Florida. All justified, of course – even with the relatively mild Northeastern winter this year, I’m still having trouble dealing with the cold. I think my body changed during my years in Asia. I need to strap on the Tevas and feel some warm wind in my face…I want to spend an hour or two every day in the ocean…I need to gaze upon some long-limbed beauties wearing sun dresses and high heels (not sweatpants and work boots). This is who I am, people. Pathetic, perhaps, but simple.

Back to the mancation. The term came from a fraternity brother of mine whose wife, incredibly, set up a trip to commemorate his 40th birthday, and defined it as an all-boys weekend in Florida. I was a late entrant, signing up all the way from Goa, and he and I were joined by 4 other fraternity brothers. We flew down last Friday afternoon to West Palm Beach, rented a car, picked up a pile of alcohol, and drove up to the town of Fort Pierce, where we’d be staying and fishing for the weekend. Getting on the plane, I had a notion that sometimes comes to me – I think back to the time my parents put me on a plane to Florida to see my grandmother. I still have a faint memory of the trip, specifically getting random goodies from the flight staff and later, getting off the plane and seeing my grandmother. And even now, 35 years later, I sometimes can’t believe I’m allowed to get on a plane by myself and that grandma isn’t waiting for me on the other end. If I got off a flight in Hong Kong and my grandmother was waiting there, I wouldn’t be all that surprised – although I would probably lower the dose of my current meds and see a shrink.

On this flight to Florida, I sat next to a kid clutching a stuffed animal. His family was with him, in nearby seats, but it was obvious that he hadn’t flown much and that this was a very big deal for him. Perhaps grandma was waiting for them…whatever. I could identify with his excitement, even though I fly all the time, and while I might appear stony-faced and relaxed about flying, I still get worked up – not nervous as much as energized. When I was working I found flying to be a respite from the craziness of the office. Now I just find it relaxing and an interlude between places and times; a good long flight is something I look forward to from time to time.

So there were 6 of us on the mancation – a collection of cretins, perverts, and attorneys (2). I have been asked (begged/threatened) by some of this cohort – guess who – to keep my account of the mancation PG-13 and as anonymous as possible. That will obviously lead to some system losses, so I need to have fun with this in other ways. The following is an anonymous and highly dumbed-down overview of the weekend – you might call it a PG version, or whatever rating is a notch down from that. Dumbed-down – that’s something I can do very well…

Start: This was a really cool trip. Maybe the coolest part was when Friend1 got seasick on the fishing boat and turned gray (grey?). He was grey (gray?) for a really long time…then he booted. Then he lay down and fell asleep. His stomach was probably pretty tired from booting. Wouldn’t yours be? Then Friend2 got a funny look on his face and his eyes got all narrow and stuff – then he leaned over the side of the boat and booted too. Me, Friend3, Friend4, and Friend5 all laughed – that was really cool. I wish I took a picture of them booting – I wonder if my camera could get the chunks flying out of their mouths? Gotta try that sometime.

We all caught some fish on that big boat. The crew was really nice – one guy did all the baiting and set up all the fishing rods, all we had to do was hold the (fishing) rod and reel in the fishes. The guy was pretty quiet – I think he was either dumb or stoned (maybe both). And there were really big fishes too – sailfish, dolphin fish (not dolphins, dummy), and some other ones. Friend2 (done booting by now) caught a huge sailfish but we had to throw it back – ‘catch and release’ is what the crewman said. Isn’t that some stupid movie with Ben Affleck’s hottie wife? Whatever. My fishing skills were pretty bad – good thing all I had to do was turn the handle. It was still pretty hard. I got tired, and the end of the rod banged up my groin. What do you call those special doctors who look at mens’ johnsons all day – urineologists? Maybe I should go see one soon.

Friend2 and I joked that fishing could be much easier if certain steps were taken: using a button instead of manual reeling, giving the bait fish a Valium so the prey got tired faster, and having a slip-proof ship deck. We called this ‘Jewish Fishing.’ Don’t try to steal the idea – we already patented it!!

Friend1 was back on his feet. He called his experience ‘boot and rally’ and that was really neat. He still had bad breath, though. Friend3 took a 45-minute nap, he was fully asleep and yet he didn’t spill one drop of the Tecate beer that he was holding in his hand. When I fall asleep all my muscles (except one) go limp and I drop everything. Friend3 must be some kind of sleep athlete…

Then we got off the boat and gave the fish to some guy on the dock and then he cut off the meat and gave it back to us and then we brought it to Chuck’s Restaurant where they told us the night before that if we caught fish and brought it to them they would cook it for us. And they did that. Dinette the cool waitress brought out all this fresh fish and we drank a lot of beer (don’t tell Dad) and ate a lot of fish and had really smelly burps (especially Friend4). Friend3 challenged me to a running race to the bar…one time in college I ran (with a belly full of rum) all the way from school to a White Hen Pantry just so Friend3 would buy me a large sub sandwich. Now I have more money and am not as desperate – anyway we both wimped out and just drank and ate more.

Then we argued about where to go see hot chicks and Dinette told us that fat old ladies in thongs could be found just across the bridge but the meanie policemen always sat at the bridge and arrested cool dudes like us so we didn’t go over the bridge we just went over to the Jetty Bar again, just like the night before. We were pretty cool.

There were a lot of big kids in the bar with bad teeth. Good thing crystal meth isn’t that big in Boston (at least I never found any). There were some ugly yet aggressive women in there – I was kind of shy and afraid they would sit on me so I hid behind Friend5. Some of the girls had really big bazongas. I looked at them for a while. Friend3 tried to set up Friend2 with a blonde girl – he said a few stupid things and then nothing happened. Then he blamed Friend2 for being a lame-ass. Then we peed in the bushes outside after the cop closed the bar down and told us to go home. We sure showed him. That was really cool.

Friend3 ate lots of Spicy Cheese Doritos in bed that night. His teeth were gross orange color and you could hear the chewing all the way across the hall. Also I heard that he walked right through a screen door (they are hard to see, sometimes, when you’re really drunk) and I wished I was there because I would have teased him a lot about that.

The next day we had brunch/lunch/whatever. We all had headaches. Then the cute little waitress told us that they couldn’t serve booze till 1 p.m. We had asked for Bloody Marys (don’t tell Dad). We were bummed out. Then we asked her about bending the rules and then she said that actually only hard booze was restricted, beer and wine were OK. So we ordered lots of beer and the next thing we knew, it was 1 p.m. and then we could all get Bloody Marys and that’s what we did so na na na!

I ordered some nachos and they were hard to eat. I wondered aloud why I even had any clothes that didn’t color-coordinate with spilled nachos. Then I dumped some on my white t-shirt and boy was I ever right! We were all laughing a lot and you probably couldn’t blame it all on the Bloody Marys and beer. Friend5 was sitting across from me and I made a dumb joke about some short storys involving him. You had to be there to get this joke (like all of the other ones too).

Then we went to the beach and swam and slept on the beach for a while. We brought some beers but the mean police didn’t see us. Friend5 told us he locked up our rented minivan (with all of our stuff in there). He did lock it – but left a side door completely open, anyone could have reached in and grabbed our (heinous dirty laundry) valuable stuff. I guess he was right, though – the other doors were locked. He’s really literal about things, that’s what I like about him.

What else? Friend4 ran all the way from the hotel one morning to get the car, we had to leave it at the bar the night before because old meanie cop was sitting outside when the bar closed. What a loser (the cop, I mean). Also, Friend2 brought a whole bunch of newsletters from our fraternity meetings and we laughed over those. One of our fraternity brothers was quoted in one of them as saying ‘Ice is one-tenth water.’ But that was a long time ago. I think he now understands that it’s really five-tenths water. End.

That’s all for this week. I’m off on my next journey starting next Monday, I’ll be flying through Vancouver and Hong Kong to Manila, where I’ll spend a few weeks on a mission I’ll spell out in more detail next week. Also – my next entry will be #40. Thanks for sticking with me – one of these days I’ll actually write an entertaining and semi-truthful column. Just remember: life can be incredibly rich, just give it a chance. Over and out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.