Bloody Mary Morning (mp3)

My friend Leland, a will-be-well-known author who has written three novels and counting, travels around the world for work, and treats his time in the air as time to write, time to think. I envy that amount of dedicated writing time, but fundamentally hate flying: I find it terrifying—yes, I know all of the typical arguments about the safety of flying vs driving, biking, etc, but those things are on the ground, somewhere human beings are meant to be, not thousands of feet in the air, where birds and the spacemen are meant to be. For instance, here is something meant to be in the air:

Here is something meant to stay on the ground:

Rationalists ask me, what is so awful about flying? Some death-defying lunatics actually enjoy it, with no reservations. First off, there’s the sheer impossibility of it (your book-physics be damned,) but there’s more at play than that. For me there’s a certain amount of claustrophobia (thanks for that particular neurosis, mom!) involved. But more specifically, at least in my case, it is the lack of agency. Sure, I’m more likely to die behind the wheel of a car, but it’s me behind that wheel.

Bullshit, some have said in response to these arguments—being behind that wheel provides only an illusion of agency.

Which is an absurd response: it’s a rational response to an irrational fear. Rational responses have no place here—if they did, I’d have already been convinced by the fact that the human race has flown in planes for a century now, to generally positive results. Gung-ho rationalists who make such arguments treat irrational fears as if they’re noble savages to be defeated by good olde European steel. So by sheer dint of extrapolation, we can see that these rationalists are as terribly small-minded as European Colonialists, and their unimaginative arguments in favor of measured reason should be censured as such.

Despite all this, I have come to appreciate flying to a limited degree, fortunately in time for this trip to Australia and back. Living on the opposite side of the country than your family and friends, you’ve got to find something to like in it.

My old boss and misanthropic spirit animal Rob Miller wrote in an old issue of Punk Planet about his flight regimen: Xanax, Ambien, and approximately 3-5 alcoholic beverages. For me, it’s similar, though my doctor is not as forthcoming with the good drugs as his, apparently. In lieu of good drugs, I have to provide myself with a ridiculous number of diversions, not unlike a parent with a child. I’ve got my netbook with a backup battery, a couple of books (currently reading: White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Black Swan Green by the unimpeachable David Mitchell), a literal stack of magazines—Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, National Geographic, Seed, the Atlantic, and BBC Knowledge, and an iPod Touch loaded up with about a hundred hours of TV documentaries and podcasts.

Carrying all of this content around can be a pain in the ass (first Facebook commenter to suggest a Kindle gets a virtual kick in the nads!), but giving myself this many options helps allay the sensation of physical claustrophobia. I rarely use these diversions—or tire of them quickly, within the first hour of the flight—but having access to a limited set of them at least offers some relief. To quell the remaining anxiety, a few Bloody Marys help, as they did for Willie.

Once bored by the static buffet of diversions, flying becomes a great opportunity to be confined to one place and write. As I flew back from Sydney—14 hours across the ocean, four hours in SFO, another 4 hours to Chicago—I hit up Qantas’ complementary drink service liberally and went to work, locked in a hermetically sealed writing chamber with few outside distractions, save for the half hour of turbulence that was so horrifying that half the people in the cabin were screaming for at least 15 minutes of it (not I, what with the British stiff upper lip genes that I inherited and all that, you know.)

No endless tabs of distraction in Google Chrome, and a limited field of movement—time to be productive. I made it through three blog posts—I often write these a while before posting, so I can sit on them and think about what inflammatory statements I really want to stand behind—a couple of show previews, and, most productively, six scenes in a play that I’m working on. Since I know absolutely nothing about writing plays, even less than than I know about any other form of writing,  I would distract myself at some point for a couple of endless jaunts through playwriting blogs in most circumstances. Isolated a few thousand feet above the ground, without that apparent luxury, I just downed a few drinks, put the headphones on, and began writing.

The only place that I can enjoy this sort of focused work time is on a plane, unfortunately. While I imagine I could replicate the conditions, it would take a level of self-discipline that I rarely have.

The takeaway, in red text a la the new Newsweek, for readers who dislike reading more than 30 words of anything: flying is a terrible, terrifying act of tempting the fates, an act of man’s hubris as he mocks the gods with his makeshift flying machine fashioned from blood, toil and steel. Still, if you get suitably drunk while in the air, it can be a great opportunity to get some writing done without Internet and other distractions of the landlocked world.

I’ve yet to hear a homegrown country track, however; there seems to be a contemporary-Nashville-country-only policy dictating the playlists. Funny, since the alternative rock-skewing station seems to play a fair share of domestic hip-hop, albeit domestic hip-hop tracks featuring guest spots from Americans such as Pharaoh Monch.

One thing that the Australians appear to have a market on are surrealistically banal talk show topics. A few topics of discussion on today’s talk shows:

“What do you smell like?”

“What were your favorite candies and lollies growing up?”

“How do you feel about shopping? Do you love it or would you rather run burning spears through your eyes?”

Not that American talk radio topics are any less banal, but certainly less bizarre.

Bonus local colloquialism watch: for heavy drinking, “grogging on”, as in, “you should have thought about that before you grogged on all night.”

We’re attempting to relax out here, which is something that neither of us have much experience in; fortunately we have Scrabble and plenty of books as diversion. My wife’s uncle owns a phenomenal, well-appointed house on countless acres of land, with many amenities, stocked with fancy bottles of Scottish whiskey that I don’t dare to touch. It’s a welcome contrast to our dingy apartment in the heart of urban Chicago, with few amenities and a empty bottle of whiskey I’ve touched far too often.

Yesterday, we took a walk of the grounds, and saw a ton of wild animals novel to us urban Americans roaming in the wilds, including a family of kangaroos, a wombat in its hole, and countless vibrantly-colored birds swooping into a watering hole for grubs and worms. There were also, to my chagrin, human foot-sized piles of cow dung everywhere. My wife, far more athletic and rugged than myself, says that I’m getting even more prissy in my old age, which is absolutely true.

My patience threshold for nature is about two hours; fortunately, there are many electronic diversions on site, including (thank the gods) Internet and television. Australian television is a gift. Much of the fare is the same as in the States, but the advertisements are a wonder. The low-budget ones are charming: Australian cowboys uncomfortably offering product testimonials into a single digital camera, but the big-budget ones are the best. One highlight is an ad for Cadbury’s Chocolate that portrays the Mayans as cartoonish, warring savages and ends with playing the destruction of their civilization at the hand of the Europeans for laughs. If nothing else, it’s a lot more entertaining that American TV’s litany of richly-intoned “hey! you! your cock is tiny!” ads for pickup trucks and SUV’s.

One more day in Kangaroo Valley. We may go kayaking today, if so I will attempt to calm my mind for an hour or two and endeavor to “take in” the “beauty of nature”, as people have scolded me to do since childhood. It really is a calming thing, though, spending a handful of days in the center of rural Southern Australia, on the other end of the world from home. A couple more weeks here and I might actually learn how to relax.

It’s winter in Australia, and in comparison to Chicago, winter here is characterized by a light breeze, an average of 68 degrees (F), and inevitable complaints that the weather is too cold. Downtown Sydney is reminiscent of an Architect’s fever-dream mash-up of Seattle and Battlestar Galactica’s Caprica. Businessmen and tourists alike travel by ferry to visit pop-futuristic buildings and skyscrapers that look like they’re about to take off into space. This shiny newness is buffered by Victorian-era buildings that reveal the country’s stiff-upper-lip Brit roots. The juxtaposition works nicely.

One of the pleasures of the trip so far has been spending more time with my wife’s grandmother, who has a charmingly crotchety worldview that is similar to my own. I spent most of the day at her side, bemoaning the sorry state of the English language (“like” used instead of “as if”, the bankruptcy of contemporary English as a result of pandering newspaper writing and blogs, etc.) She also taught me a whimsical British poem about hating most of the human race (which I asked for a transcript of; hopefully I will be able to share it with you all, dear readers,) and we reveled in our shared misanthropy while eating proper British meals and ice cream.

A late-afternoon stroll up “the rocks” section of Sydney, the oldest part of the town, which is a bit reminiscent of New Orleans, revealed a fantastic facade of retro-futuristic apartment buildings that looked as if they’d just been transported from Logan’s Run. Also, wild cockateels.

Some quick observations:

1) Coffee shops are everywhere, but almost no one is carrying a drink to-go. Instead, they are drinking coffee on the decks of the coffee shop. There is a grand essentializing comparison between the U.S. and Australia here that I am not going to spell out.

2) Sydney has honest-to-god public spaces, such as a building that operates as an extension of the library and offers free Internet, magazines, and newspapers from around the world, along with ample seating and a large outdoor seating area. It would be wonderful to have such places in the United States, but of course that would be communist unless it was grandfathered in (libraries and parks) or owned by Starbucks or McDonalds.

Enough for today. Photos to come soon, once we buy some batteries. Today, off to see the wallabes and wombats and panda bears at the zoo.

Some differences: lots of usage of charming British slang, such as “what’s on” (what’s happening) and “on offer” (options).  Microwaveable pancakes. There is a preference for charmingly Lego-esque, boxy vehicles, be they subcompacts, compacts, vans or SUV’s. Dogs are not allowed on beaches as they attract sharks. Books are generally published using the British design scheme, which means they are more attractive to look at. Lots of gum trees, which are satisfying to the touch.

Highlight of the past 24 hours? A park with a petting zoo including ducks, chickens, two goats and a gigantic rabbit.

These are just cursory, jet-lagged impressions from less than 24 hours in Sydney. More in-depth responses to come.