Howdy readers.
In a recent post I mentioned that people who have a problem maintaining a good work/life balance tend to conflate vacation with travel. It recently occurred to me that it's been a while since I took some time off from this blog. To that end, I'm going to take a couple weeks off from publishing stories. Because I need to keep the conveyor belt moving, I'll still be doing a few 'behind the scenes' tasks---but other than that, I'll be taking a 'stay-cation'.
See yah later---.
“You’ve been working pretty hard the past two weeks on what we learned during our field trip to see the mentalist. Today I want to test one of the lessons in ‘real world conditions’. To that end, I’m going to see how well you can use ‘confidence speak’ to ‘buffalo’ someone.”
Sally paused to change lanes.
“I’ve got an expensive laptop in the trunk that was purchased at Costco and a fake membership card plus more fake ID in my pocket. I want you to go into the store with both and convince the person at the returns kiosk to give you a refund. The membership card won’t work, but it will look like a problem with your membership on the mainframe computer, not like it is a counterfeit.”
Nate sat bolt upright in his seat. “You want me to try to get a refund on an item that might be stolen using a fradulent card?”
Sally smiled, “Well, it’s not stolen---I have the receipts on me in case they call the cops. And the card is such a good fake that no one is going to give you a hard time over it once I produce the receipts. Moreover, the laptop is in perfect condition---which means nothing is going to happen if you get into the worst case situation.”
“But having said that, I’m asking you to go through the motions of being a thief who is selling stolen goods. I’ll explain why after the fact.”
By this point she had taken the turn off and was heading towards the parking lot. She shortly parked the car and popped the trunk. She pulled out one of those plastic card holders from a pocket in her vest and handed it to Nate. “There’s the Membership card plus a driver’s license and one of those prepaid credit cards. You can use them as back-up ID. The box in the trunk has the computer. (You’d best take a look at it before you go into the store.) I’ll be waiting here for you when you get back.”
Nate was a bit nervous at this point. “But what if things go sideways?”
“You have my cell phone number.”
She pulled a paperback out of her purse. “Now get cracking. We have other things to do today.”
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I've always been a bit "out of step" with both my friends and most of my generation when it comes to travel. It's almost an article of faith among them that travel broadens. I don't think I've ever believed this. Instead I tend to believe in another credo: some people travel farther walking around the block than others do when going to the other side of the world. The difference between the two is what I think people should think about when they brag about how much jet fuel they've burnt in the modern race to create runaway climate change.
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I'm going to anchor this op ed around a review of Stuart A Ross's Lost in Latin America. It's a short little book that has the virtue of being a somewhat unvarnished account of what it was like to be one of those "travel to X on a shoestring" people in the 1970s. It's exactly the sort of book that future historians and sociologists will use as a primary resource for trying to understand what it was like to be a privileged North American traveling in the Global South---something of a Samuel Pepys of the 1970s hippy travel culture.
Ross is a therapist by profession (his short biography states that he was "chief psychologist at the Homewood Health Centre for 28 years") and among the basic, factual description of his travels, he is careful to share concise descriptions of his mental states as he remembers them.
Traveling alone can be lonely, but boredom can be worse. One has a lot of free time with slow travel. Waiting for boats, buses, train schedules, visa offices, etc. And here in Puntarenas, sitting in my dumpy little flat, I was a prime example. Traveling had slowed to a standstill. The 'distraction' of motion had turned into too much time to reflect. As for traveling, what happens when visiting museums, art galleries, historic sights and incredible scenery becomes the norm? The bigger question is what is my life's purpose? With so many things for a young man to do, how does he ever choose?
The early evening was approaching with me expecting to have found something by now. Lost, helpless, terrified. Jungle noises building to a peak with my anxiety. Claustrophobia, thick as the tangled vines I was pushing through, stumbling ahead without clarity. A metaphor for my current life, as well as my only option. Nowhere to hang a hammock. Too wet for a fire. Too dangerous to lay down for a sleepless night. The remaining daylight dimmed to darkness. I felt lost. Rather than stopping, I chose to keep going, praying I was still on the path and that I would survive.
Lost in Latin America, p-53
At that point, Ross hears the call of a rooster----which means that there is at least a subsistence farm nearby and heads towards the sound. Eventually he stumbles into a clearing while in total darkness. Exhausted, he pitches his hammock and mosquito net between two conveniently-placed poles that he finds by touch, and goes into a deep sleep. When he wakes up, he finds that he's been sleeping in the Porta Planta farmer's market and one of the local vendors wants Ross to take down his hammock so he can set up his stall.
Everyone who's done any traveling has had this sort of experience. In one way or another you will find yourself having to make a very quick decision to deal with a situation that you didn't expect to happen. And when you are in the grips of it, you will think that the stakes are extremely important. I think that paradoxically this is also one of the appeals of traveling.
There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
Winston Churchill
There is something in human beings that likes being thrilled by danger. That's why people ride roller coasters.
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Moreover, there's a social element to this too. Not only is there an adrenaline rush in trying to make your connection or find a work-around, there's also a secondary mellow that comes from talking about it with your friends afterwards. This is such a common phenomenon that it has an English phrase to describe it: dining out. The idea is that someone who has had an extraordinary adventure is in high demand at dinner parties because the host and other guests want to hear the story.
This is such a common experience that Phillip K. Dick wrote a short story titled We Can Remember It For You Wholesale on the premise (it has also been made into two different movies titled Total Recall). The idea is that if the only reason people go on trips is to remember experiences that you can later relate to your family and friends, why actually go on a trip when you can just download the memories of someone else? That way you can dine out on the experience---but not have to worry about actually being stuck in the middle of a jungle to feed the mosquitoes and worry about ever getting back to civilization.
But this isn't just about having a story to relate over coffee at a dinner party. Modern society is so complex that it requires an enormous amount of regimentation to even work at all. (That's why whenever something unexpected happens---like a plague year or the war in Ukraine---the economy goes through spasms of things like inflation or labour shortages.) The problem for people is that we just aren't constructed to live the same old life day after day. Being a hunter/gatherer is about doing a lot of very different things according to the time of the year and the specific circumstances of any given moment. We are hard-wired to deal with the odd 'out of the blue' event---large predators, wild weather, etc. If life is too predictable, the part of our psyches that evolved to deal with such things seems to get itchy and needs to be exercised. For a lot of people, I suspect that this is what travel is all about---whether they know it or not.
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If you've been following me up to this point, I'll recapitulate. To my mind there are four key parts to the 'travel experience':
This brings me back to the saying some people travel farther walking around the block than others do when going to the other side of the world. What I understand this to mean is the items I've listed above can be achieved without actually physical travel. Moreover, the corollary is also true---it is possible to travel without experiencing each of them---and many people actually do so.
The second point is relatively easy to illustrate. If you are able and willing to pay a lot of money, you can minimize points 2 and 3. If money's no object, you can travel by the fastest way possible which goes from express flights all the way up to private jet. In addition, you can avoid boredom/introspection by spending the extra money for things like privileged boarding arrangements and first class/VIP seating. This includes things like lots more room to spread out and work, plus entertainment like being able to watch movies while burning lots of jet fuel. In effect, with enough money you can change your travel time into working at a desk, sitting on a sofa watching tv, or, even sleeping in a bed.
As for getting adrenaline jolts because of unexpected events, if you have enough money you can hire 'minders' to make sure that your experience is flawless. You can stay in first rate hotels that are booked in advance. And you can stay in gated resorts where the 'riff raff' are never allowed in---and the only random locals you will meet are servants.
As for 'dining out' on your experience, once you get rich enough that ceases to be an issue. No matter how boring you might be, the fact that you are rich will bring more than enough fawning attention from people who want some of your money.
Even among the more well-off, however, there are folks who really do want the 'full' travel experience. But I would argue that even these people's needs can be serviced without burning a gram of petroleum distillate.
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Let's look at the first item on my list: "getting away". This really is another way of saying that people need to balance what they do for a living and everything else in their life. This can be better achieved by deciding to set limits about how much work is going to intrude into your life---and sticking to them. To be fair, there are a lot of careers where it is expected that you will not have a life/work balance. But people should be more ready to fight to diminish these expectations on the part of employers. (One friend of mine in the computer industry told me about being so angry about this that he threatened his boss by telling him that he knew where he lived and if things didn't change at the office, he'd be sorry---not my preferred option, but it seemed to work for him.) And if it simply isn't possible to get the management to be reasonable, then I'd suggest that you shouldn't be working in that environment. We only have one life to live and wasting most of it for prestige or money is a fool's bargain.
(Anyone who is forced by poverty to work at whatever they can get isn't going to be spending a lot of time traveling, so this issue just isn't going to arise in the first place.)
Even if you have a high stress job that eats your consciousness without intruding too much in the hours of the day, it is possible to find something that will 'take you away' from it. Many people devote themselves to hobbies, passions, nature, politics, charities, etc, as a 'respite' from the idiocy they have to endure as a means of making money. But in these cases too, there needs to be some sort of willingness on the part of employers to leave workers the time and energy after work to be able to do something productive. (I've had jobs that were so tiring that on the way home I'd get some take out, eat, fall asleep listening to the radio, and, wake up in time to make the next day's lunch and then go to bed. I'm lucky---this was just a summer 'vacation' gig while a student.)
As for the need for introspection, I'd suggest that this can be dealt with through a regular meditation practice. This needn't be a heavy-duty practice of Zen meditation. It can be exercise---something like yoga, taijiquan, running, pilates, etc. It could also be not much more than undertaking some sort of repetitive work that most folks would call "boring". (I did a lot of thinking as a child while hoeing in the garden and ploughing fields.) A little 'boring work' can be a good thing to center yourself. The problems arise when our workplaces are organized to separate jobs into slots of 'knowledge workers' and 'drones'---with the former getting all the stress and latter all the boredom. (When I'm writing and hit a bit of writer's block, I often do some housework or go out and pick a bucket of weeds in the garden.)
As for trying to get the thrill of the unplanned in your life, I've had so many "thrilling/terrifying/horrifying" experiences in my life that I tend to lack much interest in adding to the list. But it is possible to dramatically increase the 'spice' in life without burning tons of jet fuel.
I once came across a strange little book once that described an experiment that a retired factory manager in India pursued. When retired, he decided to live like a street Sadhu or holy beggar in India. He decided that he would take a vow to view everything that happened to him as 'a command by God'. For example, if no one gave him any food on a particular day, it meant that God wanted him to fast. One of his things was to get onto trains without a ticket and when the conductor came by, he'd either stay on the train or get off as the conductor demanded. As a result he traveled all over India---but without any idea of where he'd end up. He did this for a year and then decided to going back to living the life of an ordinary well-to-do retiree. But he said he found the experience quite interesting, although he wouldn't recommend it for just anyone.
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| This is a Sadhu from India. |
I tried much the same thing in Guelph once. Oddly enough, all I had to do was simply tell myself to say "yes" to whatever came my way and within a few days I found myself going through a series of minor adventures. The one that sticks in my memory was a woman who drove up to me when I was walking down the sidewalk and who asked me if I wanted to shovel her driveway. I said "sure" and jumped in her car. She drove we way out in the boonies, only to see that someone else had already cleared her parking space. At that point she said that she didn't need me after all. She didn't want to leave me with nothing, so she gave me a ticket for a free bowling game (?), and, drove off to do something else. (I had a fun-filled hour or so walking to the nearest bus stop in the cold and snow.)
I think the point of all of this is that modern people have developed a lot of defense mechanisms that keep other people out of our space. We've internalized them to the point where we aren't even aware of what we are doing. If you doubt me, I'd ask readers to do two things. First, get out of your car and walk around the downtown. I had a friend who gave up her car late in life and moved downtown. She said she was flabbergasted about how many beggars she saw. She never noticed them as a driver. (You won't see them at shopping malls because the security shoos them away.) Second, instead of just walking by and averting your gaze, make a habit of looking each and every beggar in the face. If you really want to follow Alice down the rabbit hole, why not actually give a significant amount of money to the person (ie: between $5 and $20) and ask them how they ended up on the street?
People have to make their own decisions about what their comfort level is with regard to their own personal space, but it really isn't that hard to have local 'adventures' without having to travel to Kookamunga first. It's a question of your headspace---not your physical location.
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I'm not really opposed to travel per se. Perhaps in a future world there will be electric airplanes or Star Trek transporters, but in the face of the Climate Emergency it just seems ridiculous to me for people to help make things worse for such a frivolous reason. This seems especially so nowadays when things like universal literacy and the Web have given us all access to the literature and culture of the entire human race.
Having said that, I would like to add one more point. By the end of Ross's book he also seems to have been rethinking the entire travel thing.
What had I learned so far in my travels? On the one hand, wherever I stayed for a few days, I appreciated how cool it was to wake up, go out and sit at a sidewalk cafe, sipping coffee, watching the world pass by, immersed in a foreign culture. After studying the city map and several days exploring, I could stride confidently down the street, knowing a few shortcuts back to the hotel, my momentary home. These first few months had their frustrations---finding myself disoriented looking for a bus station, hotel or restaurant, pretending to understand what people saying while comprehending about 10 per cent of what they said. I had learned to be more compassionate. When I get back to Canada I thought, I'm going to help any lost-looking traveler I meet and be patient if their command of the English language is as limited as my Spanish.
Lost in Latin America, pp 98-99
When I read Ross's line
I had to mentally ask him "but were you really 'immersed in a foreign culture'", or did you just fool yourself into thinking you were? Tourism suffers from something like the uncertainty principle. The more people go to a place to immerse themselves in a foreign culture, the less foreign it will become as it adapts itself to cater to tourists. I'm reminded of the common anti-Vietnam war poster I saw as a kid.---I appreciated how cool it was to wake up, go out and sit at a sidewalk cafe, sipping coffee, watching the world pass by, immersed in a foreign culture.
I'm not suggesting Ross was trying to kill anyone, but when more and more tourists show up anywhere, the economy, culture, etc, inevitably change---which often means that whatever people like about the place is often destroyed forever.
And if you read the book, it becomes pretty clear that most of the the people that he spent time talking to weren't the locals---it was the other tourists he met in the hostels. As he freely admits in the above quote, he didn't know enough Spanish to understand more than 10% of what locals said to him. And the bits where he really seems to have long conversations were with other tourists. And these (often stoned) rap sessions don't really appear to have been anything that couldn't have happened in Canada.
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To sum things up, the book is a useful window into what it was like to travel in Latin America during the height of the "counter culture" of the late sixties and early seventies. It's well written and seems to be a fairly honest account of one man's experience. If you are someone who would like to know what it was like to 'travel X on a shoe-string', I'd recommend it. Reading the book will certainly be a lot easier on the planet than trying to recreate the experience.
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Stella Dyck wasn’t someone who usually spent a lot of time on line. But she’d recently developed a medical condition that kept her at home more than she was used to. It was really boring. Luckily she had a computer and access to the web. She already had a Facebook account, but hadn’t done much with it except keep an eye on family and friends. But with time on her hands she’d started looking at the stories that got forwarded to her.
She was amazed. At first she’d noticed the odd story about how immigration was damaging Western nations. For example, she’d read several in-depth articles about how badly Europe was suffering from the huge waves of immigration from the Middle East. Indeed, there were places in England where women couldn’t even walk down the sidewalk without wearing a veil and foreign men were raping German women with total impunity. At first she couldn’t believe what she was reading. But after a while there were so many stories coming to her through social media that she knew there couldn’t be all that smoke without at least some fire. Moreover, they all had links in support of what they were saying, and when she followed those to the sources she found out that it was all true.
Indeed, as she did more and more of this type of research, she found that things were worse and stranger than she’d ever thought possible. A Jewish billionaire was funding anti-democratic movements all over the world. The leadership of the major “liberal” parties seemed to all be involved in charitable organizations that were little more than scams. And things were so sordid! The Prime minister of Canada was actually the son of Fidel Castro! Hillary Clinton had one of her staffers murdered to stop him from blowing the whistle on her activities! A sinister Cabal of liberals was selling children through a popular on-line furniture website! The Centre for Disease control in Atlanta was working with the Chinese government to develop biological weapons! Possibly worst of all, the elites wanted to replace people like her with masses of immigrants from “shit-hole countries”, low-life that are only used to being controlled by an elite and would swamp the real citizens with their votes.
And only President Norbert Blunt was willing to stand up the “Deep State” types doing all these horrible things. That’s why the mainstream media were so opposed to him. She was so glad to have him on her side that she gladly sent her some of her pension cheque every month. But even he had been torpedoed by the cabal of evil-doers. He’d won the last election handily, but voting machines had been manipulated to steal it from him. That’s why he was working so hard to get people elected who would enforce the real election laws and only allow real Americans to vote in the next election.
Unfortunately, after January 6th she found some of her most interesting sources of information were being censored. Luckily, an on-line friend walked her through how to use some of the social media systems that hadn’t been taken over by people like George Soros and Bill Gates. And what she found on these new sites was really an eye-opener. People were a lot more friendly, for example. That Blabber app was great! It was like being in a huge group phone call with other people interested in the same things as her.
And the really, really, wonderful thing was the people were so non-judgemental! When she’d started doing the on-line reasearch and began teaching herself about how the world really worked, she’d tried to talk to her friends and family about it. They’d been so cruel to her. They’d all be so quick to judge. They all asked the same questions “where did you hear that?” and so quickly pooh-poohed what she had to say. They talked to her like a child. Of course she couldn’t counter their criticism---she was new to all this stuff and they had all the goverment propaganda to throw at her. Besides, she was an old woman and only had a high-school education.
She got so mad at these people for being so arrogant. She was just as good a person as them. Why couldn’t they see how horribly things were going around us all? She’d been warned about “cancel culture” and the way the “socialists” and “libruls” had manipulated people into adopting “group think”. These people had been corrupted by their fancy university degrees and could no longer understand common sense.
Probably the worst had been her friend Jake. He’d originally been polite---she knew he really did care about her. He’d just asked for her to email her the links to where she’d heard about the new info. But he was so brainwashed by the system. He always had an answer---that person she quoted had been outed as a member of Russian Military Intelligence, ---she didn’t understand the statistical implications of some figures she quoted, ---that news site had been caught spreading disinformation so she shouldn’t ever pay any attention to it ever, ---he had that idea that ‘freedom’ should always be balanced by responsibility, etc. Eventually he’d told her that it took him a long time to hunt down the “facts” about the stories she was sending him and he just didn’t have the time to be trying to prove to her that what was obvious nonsense wasn’t true---why wouldn’t she just stop wasting her time with this stuff?
The real break with Jake happened when she complained about censorship on line. He said that what she was complaining about wasn’t censorship but rather editorial responsibility. After he’d made some song and dance about how people who publish newspapers and magazines have to be responsible for what they print---which is why there are libel laws---he asked why should anything on line be any different? At that point she knew that he really didn’t believe in free speech and was therefore one of the people who actively supported the cabal. At that point she knew that he really wasn’t her friend and that she shouldn’t talk to him about what she really believed. It was hard to admit, but she needed to face up to the truth---no matter where it led her.
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“Remember when we signed in and I volunteered our fake names and email addresses? Katy was asked for her’s too. She gave the real ones. That allowed a helper to look up her up on line. That would have included a search for her picture---to ensure they had the right person. Then they could search for all sorts of things---including finding out where she lived. This would be cross-referenced with a Real Estate site that would have told Randi’s people it was up for sale. He used the cold reading techniques he started out with to paint a picture and get the audience thinking he was just going to use things like Barnum statements.”
Sally paused while she shifted lanes. Once she was back in a safe place for a few miles, she continued the conversation. “But because his minions had both figured she would be a good subject and that there was a specific factual statement that Randi could aim towards, she was selected to come up on stage. At that point, the people with the spot lights were given pictures of her and they picked her out of the crowd. Randi ‘warmed her up’ to the point where it wouldn’t seem too strange that he knew she was selling her home. That’s important, if a piece of information comes like a bolt out of the blue without any window-dressing aimed at diverting people’s attention from the obvious, it would be too easy to figure out what happened. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t a totally cold reading. The info that was found and fed to Randi would be called a ‘hot’ reading. And she was such an easy subject that he started out with her and then moved onto the others---some of whom were much more skeptical. She warmed up both the other people that had been selected and the audience too.”
Sally again changed lanes, and then took a turnoff that would bring them directly back to the Elder’s retreat centre. “Randi is just a ‘B’ class stage magician. But the influencers that we will be dealing with are pretty much cut from the same cloth. Since he was in town, I thought it would make things more ‘live’ for you if you could see the technique in action---without the distractions that come from it being more than just harmless entertainment.”
She paused while negotiating a stop light. “The key take-aways I want you to remember are the specific techniques of both a cold and hot reading, plus the strategic sense of how to manage individuals in order to control the entire audience.”
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