Living With The F-Word

One of our on-going themes around here is traveling vs. touring.  The former is changing yourself to meet the world, and the latter is changing the world to meet your expectations.  In other words, a traveler will eat live monkey brains in Nagapattinam, India, while a tourist won't even make it to that city because there's no McDonald's or Best Western.

Most of what keeps people from being travelers is fear: fear of the unknown, fear or getting lost, fear of being outside of one's comfort zone.  Other people hate the bother of going somewhere, what with all the packing and planning.

Frankly, I hate packing and planning myself.  I prefer to throw a few items in a carry-on, buy a ticket to somewhere and go.  As for the planning, well...I'll get around to that when I get back.

I remember when I set off on my first big voyage.  I left Texas heading East and returned from the West.  I was freshly 18, and hopelessly naive.  I began in Dublin, Ireland, and when I had finished, I had lived in three countries and visited more than 30 across four continents.  Took about two years and my luggage consisted of a backpack.

While living in Dublin, I saved up and bought the pack, a tent, sleeping bag, a stove, and a few necessities.  In the evenings and on weekends, I would practice packing and unpacking, setting up camp and tearing down, and hiking all over the local area with my pack to get in shape.  That pack became a part of me.  I could set up and tear down in the dark, which came in handy many times.  By the time I got back home, the pack weighed better than 50 pounds (23 kilos) and I was in the best shape I've ever been in from lugging it.

I had no idea where I was going.  I had a Eurail card that got me 3 months of unlimited train travel around Western Europe.  I knew I wanted to see Paris and Rome, but other than that I had no plan.  I had heard about youth hostels and international camping sites, but had no experience with them.  And I had a couple hundred dollars in my pocket.

First stop after Dublin was Liverpool at 3am, with no where to go and no contacts.  I ended up napping behind a pint of beer in the corner of a seaman's pub that reminded me of something out of a Hemingway novel or John Huston film.  I was utterly on my own, never having set foot this far outside my comfort zone.

Keep in mind this was before cell phones and instant messages and portable tablets with WiFi.  A trans-Atlantic phone call involved reservations at the local telegraph office and cramped phone booths with a meter over the phone ticking off the milliseconds of homesick conversations with the folks back home who sounded like they were talking into a 5,000-mile-long pipe.

There is a Zen koan that says, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."  It is so true.

From that first night in Liverpool, shivering from the cold, terrified of the grizzled creatures all around me, and sucking down as much liquid courage as I could afford, a great adventure was born.

A day of travel teaches one more than a month of school.  You are not likely to slurp live monkey brains, snack on Madagaskar singing roaches or raise a toast with cobra blood sitting in the Des Moines Holiday Inn and shopping for refrigerator magnets at Mall of the Americas.  Maybe you think, "Good!  Who wants to do all that anyway?"  But that's just your fear talking.

You haven't lived until you've dug parasites out of your skin, or nearly died (or wanted to) from dysentery, or awakened in an opium den two days after your last memory.  But it's not all hard-bit.  There's dinner at Maxim's in Paris or snuff and beer with the boys in Fuessen, or tropical coral reefs in Indonesia, or Mayan temples in the jungles of Guatemala.  Or how about driving down the highway between two warring armies, or getting shot at on the Afghan border, or slogging through a blizzard at the Kremlin wall?

I imagine the afterlife as being something like Valhalla.  Souls sit around reclining on deer skin sedans, quaffing chalices of mead and ripping roasted lamb flesh off the bone.  Those souls with the best stories are given seats at the table.  The rest must stand like wallflowers and ponder the life they wasted amassing possessions that they no longer have while picking at the leftovers of more adventurous souls.

Tourists jostle and panic with mobs of humans through the peculiar form of torture called airlines.  Travelers know about the jump seats on air freighters and the best toilet stalls to sleep in and how to trade stories for free room and board.

Tourists worry about reservations and late arrivals and skycaps to shuffle their copious bags.  Travelers can carry their belongings with one hand and know where they are going when they get there.  Tourists are afraid of travelers because when they look into a traveler's eyes, they realize just how far they are from home and how they are just one cancellation away from having an adventure.  And that's what tourists fear the most: adventure.

We have developed a tourist culture.  We want it all to slide by unnoticed and unexperienced, with guides and skycaps to handle our dirty work.  We want to recline our seats and shut our eyes and wake up when we get to the next comfortable part.  We want reality to be convenient and clean.  We want experiences to be enjoyable and repeatable.  Most of all, we don't want to be afraid of anything.  Just swallow the pill and all the gritty parts go away.

And this is why aging tourists start to lament and panic.  They reach a point in their lives and realize they have no stories to tell.  Everything about their life has been mass produced and everyone they know has had the same trip and they have a 'mid-life' crisis coming to terms with the fact that they have never lived a life that is almost finished.

Tourists reach a point where they look around and realize that all they have for a lifetime of effort is a McMansion, 1.6 kids, 2.4 cars, 1.1 dogs and debt up to their eyeballs.  Their only recollections of adventure come from the NatGeo channel and the deepest emotion they've ever experienced was when the home team won the pennant back in 19 and something.  Their education consisted of an alcohol and drug-induced fog, and most of their friends (if not all) are just superficial acquaintances stamped from the same mold.

They panic.  They take cruises and go to resorts and try desperately to feel something other than fear.  They buy sports cars and motorbikes and figure that's hanging their ass over the edge, only to realize that they are in traffic jams of people doing the same thing.

Finally, they slump into a Prozac dream wishing that they had done something more with their lives than chase up careers ladders and shuffle paper and worry whether the A/C unit is sufficiently rated for the size McMansion they rent from the bank.  They vaguely remember the imaginariums they built as kids, full of monsters and adventures that they were going to meet, all of which evaporated at some point they can no longer recall.

What the tourists never realize is that it's never too late to become a traveler.

If you're reading this and thinking that you'd really like to become a traveler, then the first thing you need to know is that it's very simple and doesn't cost a thing.  You need no equipment or special clothing.  There's no training or guidebooks.

If you find yourself in a crowd of people all heading in a certain direction, go the opposite way.  If you are doing something that has a lot of rules, like getting on an airplane, pick one of the rules and deliberately ignore it.  If faced with the choice between two roads, pick the smaller of the two.  And don't worry about the consequences.  That's the adventure part.

Once you get the hang of it, then comes the Big Challenge.  Whenever you are faced with a choice, pick the one that causes you the most fear.  When you start doing that, then you know you are a seasoned traveler and tourism is far behind you.

Our culture has locked us into a tourist mindset, and I daresay that one thing is most responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves.  The dreams we follow have been manufactured for us by those who profit from our compliance.

The more we desire repeatable experiences, the more will be manufactured for us.  The more we follow rules, the more will be made for us.  The more we demand to know the outcome, the more the outcome will be predictable.  And most importantly, the more fear we feel, the more fear will used against us.

The difference between traveling and touring is nothing more than a simple choice.  There's a reason we call certain experiences "tourist traps".  That's exactly what they are.  And once trapped, we are nothing more than amusements for those who set them.

Tomorrow, get an early start and take an entirely different route to work.  It may change your life.

Reader Rites

Getting widespread distribution and having a provocative topic is both a blessing and a curse.  As a writer, it's always exciting when your work is read and even more exciting when it evokes immediate reaction from readers.  I know from many years in network television and marketing that when people take pen to hand, something has moved then deeply enough to put forth an effort.

The curse is a full inbox and I'm not the fastest responder in the East, at that.  But many of the email I received deserves to be heard, as much for what they say, as for what they don't say.

With that, I'd like to share some of them with readers.  Be forewarned that some of the language is adult in nature, so more sensitive readers are cautioned up front.

The first one I want to share speaks volumes in so few words:

The problem with you is you have more brains and balls than the rest of us.

In my case I screwed around chasing money and pussy till I got too old to be worth a shit to anyone. Now, all I can do is distribute the work of better men than I ever was or will be, and it takes me 80+ hours a week to do even that. Then again at 71 what the fuck else is there left within my abilities to do in this totally unexpected clusterfuck?

I have determined to create enough noise so they come looking for me, and find an old man with a shit load of ammo. That beats the hell out of rotting in some cell.

 This letter is so indicative of our culture.  That anyone can believe they are lesser or useless means that we have failed as a society to find the value in every member of it.

There was an time when the older folks were revered for their experience alone.  This writer learned some valuable lessons from his life that would be excellent teachings for younger generations.  Yet he feels left out and rejected, unable to do more than 'forward' other peoples' work.

First off, getting the message out in any form to anyone is a valuable service in itself.  Those who have the time and inclination to educate and awaken others is a positive and worthwhile effort by any standard.

Second, in these few short words are clear examples of what we are doing wrong.  We have allowed a small group of evil elite to dangle sparklies in front of our eyes and tell us that the pursuit of these things is the meaning of life.  We;ve been snowed into thinking that having vast selections of sparklies is freedom, but it's nothing more than a gilded cage.  Teaching others about this is a fundamental necessity.  If we can't see the bars, we will never know we are in a cage.

My heart bleeds for the world today especially your homeland of the USA. I know if Scotland ever needed me I would be there in a second. But that too is awash with deceipt and corruption. I must make a stand from where I am.

I get so confused a lot of the time listening to people who profess to have the answer and nothing happens.

I believe in TRUTH and JUSTICE. Deep down in the heart of every human being lies the truth. It cannot be coerced by media, newspapers, governments, friends, schools and colleges etc. It is self evident.

I am just starting on my journey in trying to awaken people around me for make no mistake its coming to the UK too, albeit at a slower time frame. I see it happening with each passing day, and

i,m not having it without the fight of my life!!

Its time I feel for heroes to arise both in the USA and here in Europe. Heroes stand for TRUTH, JUSTICE and LIBERTY, not just for themselves but for every innocent human being that suffers anywhere.

This letter brings up some excellent points.  One, the battle isn't anywhere in particular, it's everywhere and nowhere.  Next, a lot of people feel the need to fight something, but they are confused.  This isn't two armies meeting on a field to duke it out.  It's shadow boxing.

I've mentioned before, and it bears repeating, there's nowhere to run and hide.  But it works both ways.  Both sides are stuck on a single globe and there are few frontiers left.  Some folks have suggested that I ran away by leaving the States.  Au contraire.  I simply changed position because the one I was in was drawing a lot of fire.  There is no place to run away.  No matter where you are, it will come if it isn't already there.

Many of the letters ask where's the target.  They want to fight back, which is a natural impulse when you first wake up to this mess, but they don't know from which direction the sorties are coming.

That's because the war is in our minds and spirits.  The enemy is trying to break us, trying to turn prize stallions into draft horses.  The battle is taking back your mind and your culture.  This makes it the worst kind of war, because so many of us are ill-prepared for it.  We can shoot, or throw a rock, but how do you fight a shadow?

The answer is begin with good information.  Educating yourself makes you less vulnerable to the siren songs of the media and consumerism that have replaced our true culture with the veneer of sophistication.  As our first writer found, it's all empty once you get it in your hands, like cotton candy.  It just melts away leaving hardly a residue behind.

This one from someone with parallel experiences to my own, it seems.  The poem mentioned is quite good and if I get permission, I would like to share it at a later time.  Also need to meet up with this guy!

Liked the article on Henry's site, I am an Australian who has come to the same conclusions, had huge life changes after 9/11. Now live in East Java with my newly married wife. I am currently in Australia but return in late Jan. I have found new direction and meaning in Indonesia and feel more productive with my time and energy.I am a cottage industry film maker and much of my work deals with personal freedom. I have experienced similar observations in Australia with the TV watching population. After years of bewilderment I sat up one night and wrote a poem about this terrible weapon . It's brutal and angry but i hope u like it. 

I can't stress enough the need to turn off the TeeVee.  Most folks are ill-prepared to grapple with the issues surrounding this one device.  With 40 years of experience in mass media, I can speak with authority when I say that TeeVee is the most dangerous, insidious and ubiquitous weapons in the War on Mind.

People have withdrawl symptoms when they cut it out of their lives.  They feel empty and restless, and will actually stare at a blank screen for hours.  Folks are faced with nearly a third or more of their lives that they didn't know existed, once they turn the evil thing off, and it's scary to a lot of people.

There's a proven hypnotic effect from TeeVee that leaves viewers susceptible to suggestion and sub-conscious manipulation.  Even with my considerable experience in producing mass media, and a degree in the subject, I still find myself occasionally being taken in by it.  That's why the TeeVee in my house is rarely on more than two hours a month.

The reader's letter shows that there are many experts who are aware of this problem, and it should give pause to anyone before clicking the ON button.  Trust me when I say that this one act of turning off the TeeVee is revolutionary in itself.

There are many more fine letters waiting for me in the in-box.  It will take a considerable amount of my weekend to answer them all adequately.  I must say, though, that I am humbled and edified by the responses, and deeply grateful to the many websites that have picked up this and other articles.

We are faced with a War of Ideas, and getting good ones out there is half the battle.  It's the classic ripple effect.  When something you do or say sparks action in others, then we are on the road to victory.  We must be very cautious, though, to avoid violence and destructive acts.  They only serve to feed the Beast, which thrives on such things.  Self-education and teaching are our most effective weapons, and they require nothing more than genuine human contact.

The key concept I was trying to get across in previous articles is something we all learned in grade school.  Whenever the teacher turned her back is when the mayhem broke out.  In many ways, that is how we fight this enemy.  Wear them out.  Overtax their tools of control.  Keep them running in so many directions trying to stop us that they give up.

In Texas, we call it herding cats.  The Chinese call it the death of a thousand cuts.  Whatever you call it, the important part is to do anything in your power to confound the enemy.  The best part is that groups of one are impossible to infiltrate.

Be creative.  THEY hate that!

Herding Cats

Damn this traffic jam
How I hate to be late
It hurts my motor to go so slow
Damn this traffic jam
Time I get home my supper'll be cold
Damn this traffic jam

Now if I die, I don't want a coffin,
I've thought about it all too often,
Just strap me in behind the wheel
and bury me in my automobile.

- chorus -

Now I almost had a heart attack
Looking in my rear view mirror
I saw myself the next car back
Looking in the rear view mirror
'bout to have a heart attack
- Traffic Jam, James Taylor

Rome? Nope.
Paris? Child's play.
London? Piffle.
Beijing? Trifle.
New York? Child's play.
Los Angeles? Don't make me laugh!
Mexico City? Not even close!

The traffic in Jakarta can bring all of you to your knees! And I don't say that in theory, I have sat in and dodged through the worst that each of those cities has to offer, and trust me, you ain't seen nothing!

Eve my dear home city of Houston, during a massive flood when freeways are closed and arteries are hopelessly clogged doesn't compare to rush hour in Jakara. Lest you think I exaggerate, then consider this:

Jakarta has called in the army (TNI) to help fix the problem.

Now that's almost a late-nite stand-up joke. You know it's bad when you call the army to direct traffic.

There are so many reasons for the problem, it is hard to know where to begin: corruption, lack of mass transit, road conditions, weather.

One of the major reasons is just a complete, profound and utter disregard for traffic laws. Not that I'm complaining really, because it is a source of entertainment for me. Motorcycles drive anywhere and everywhere: sidewalks, pedestrian bridges, alleyways, and all over the roadways. Red lights are a mild suggestion. People stop in the middle of the road to take phone calls and send text messages. Motor vehicles share the road with a dizzying array of pedalled and pushed carts. Pedestrians march out into traffic with little regard for cross-walks. Motorists pay little attention to cross-walks. Buses drop off and pick up pretty much anywhere they please, including the inside, middle and outside lanes. Special lanes designated for the sole use of TransJakarta are clogged with every form of private conveyance imaginable.

In other words, the streets of Jakarta are thinly veiled, complete, anarchical chaos!

I personally only use ojek, which are motorcycles taxis. Supposedly they are illegal, which only means that there are thousands of them, waiting in groups at key locations, with large signs that read, "OJEK," in big, hand-pained block letters. Every day, I am treated to a game of bumper-cars, sometimes to the point of severe bruising on my legs, as we bounce around in traffic. I have sailed down the wrong way of a very budy 3-lane road, at night, doing 40 kph with push-carts, bicycles, pedetrians, cars, and buses flying at me. I have ridden up and down sidewalks, through drainage ditches, over pedestran bridges...it's very exciting.

Motorcycles are like flies on shit here. They are cheap and manuverable, so thousands of people buy them as alternatives to sitting for hours in a car to go a handful of kilometers. The irony is, that many people use motorcycles are a way to get around congestion, but there are so many now that they become one of the major problems with congestion. Of the very entertaining sights in Jakarta traffic, one of the best are those 'pink' lights. The cars generally come to a rolling stop for them, but the motorcycles wend and weave through the cars and pile up at the head end like a shotgun start to a rural moto-cross event. When the light turns to the right shade of 'pink', they all fly out into the intersection and begin honking horns madly at the cross-traffic who didn't bother to stop for the other 'pink' light. If any of my fridnds are family come to visit, the first order of business will be to put them on an ojek and send them across the city on what will likely be one of the seminal events of their lives.

Another problem with Jakarta traffic is just the sheer numbers of transportation options. There are private cars and motorcycles, of course, but there are also private and public buses, mikrolets and ankot (like Chevy Suburbans with bench seats in the back), bajaj (auto-rickshaws), baijek (pedalled rick-shaws), delman (horse carts), and pedestrians. The sidewalks are crammed full of street vendors, so people have to walk in the streets. The various forms of public transportation don't have regular stops, so they come to complete halts pretty much anywhere they please. The smaller rick-shaws are like berserkers, liable to turn, stop or reverse direction without warning.

The TransJakarta is half of a good idea. They are very nice and clean and cheap, BUT they have no posted schedule and there are precious few route maps in any of the stops or on the buses, so you can where you are going and what stop is next. They are supposed to have an announcement system on-board, but it is manually operated by the driver and only works about half the time. During peak times (sun up to sun down) the buses are so jammed packed that you couldn't fall down if you got a running start at it. Furthermore, the bus lanes that are supposed to be exclusive to make the busway more attractive simply serve as express lanes for every form of vehicle known to man. On the best days, they are turn lanes, thus bringing the busway to a dead standstill.

Back in 2000, the city launched the Millennium Monorail project, which got as far as building a bunch of pylons in certain parts of the city before the contractors absconded with all the money. They tried a second time and that was even more abortive. Now people are stealing the exposed re-bar for melt, even as the city is talking of reviving the project.

There is commuter rail, of a sort. Trains run between the city center and large suburban centers, such as Bogor. They even have a posted schedule, which primarily serves to give travelers false hope. One of the major problems with the rail service is that people steal the rails and sell them for melt, or to contractors who in turn get money to re-install the rails. On good days, the trains run fairly close to a regular schedule, but on many days its just a crap0-shoot.

One of the key problems here is Ipardon me while I laugh hysterically) law enforcement. To set this scene, I have litterally been in the car when people just roll up the window and drive away from cops because the cops are just nit-picking to get bribe money. In three years, I have seen one person actually get a traffic ticket. Most of the time, the driver simply pops Rp.20,000 into their registration book and hands it to the cop, who thanks them with a warning and waves them back into traffic (by the way, the standard bribe for white people is Rp.50,000 - don't pay more). If there's an accident, you must pay the cops to show up and take a report. If someone is injured, or God forbid killed, you must not stop, but run immediately to the nearest police station for your own safety. Trust me.

In addition to the lack of real enforcement, the law itself is quite flawed. In an accident, the smaller vehicle is always the injured party. The natural result of this is that motorcycles have little or no regard for cars, and cars will cut off trucks and buses without a thought, since the larger vehicle will be held at fault, no matter what the circumstance. That goes for pedestrians, as well. If someone crosses a busy freeway and gets hit (inevitably) by the fast-moving and non-stop traffic, then the driver is at fault. Always. Even at night when the pedestrian is wearing black clothes and there is no street lighting because someone stole the copper wiring so they could sell it back to the city.

That brings us to the two big wild cards in all this mess (if that can be said of the extant situation): weather and location.

The weather, of course, can not be changed. It is subject to the typical tropical situation in that there are two primary seasons, Wet and Dry. That's not to say it doesn't rain in Dry season, only that by comparison, the Dry rains are weak cousins to the torrential, ark-building events in the Wet season. We are currently in the middle of Wet, which means you can set your watch by the afternoon and evening deluges that are perfectly timed with rush hour (not that rush hour is much different from 3 a.m., mind you). Wild lightning and thunder are accompanied by blinding rainfall that quickly overwhelms the legacy Dutch canals and city storm sewers, which are crammed full of garbage, which piles up and dams off grates and the intricate system of locks that control the canals. Almost immediately, the streets and rivers fill and overflow, so that within minutes everyone is ankle deep or worse in water. Naturally, traffic grinds to a complete halt, further exacerbated by the thousands of motorcycles that jam up under overpasses for shelter.

On top of this issue is Jakarta's location. You see, Jakarta is built on the deltas of a couple of rivers that drain out of the mountains sourth of the city. Most of Jakarta is at or below sea level, the sea being the entire northern border of the city. If there is heavy rains in the mountains (almost daily year 'round), there is a frighening wall of water that rushes down out of the mountains and inundates Jakarta. If those rains are accompanied by heavy rains in the city (almost weekly), well, you can imagine the situation. For those reasons, everything in my house sits on tables one foot off the floor.

Trust me when I say that this only scratches the surface of the problem here. I haven't even mentioned the world-famous 'force field,' whereby pedestrians simply march into speeding traffic while sticking their hand out in the general direction of hurdling masses of steel and expect it to stop or go around them. Nor have I mentioned that streets with two painted lanes have four actual lanes of traffic in the posted direction, two couter-flow lanes on the outside edge, and a melange of pedestrians outside of that.

So, now when I tell you that the city has called in the army to assist with the traffic situation, instead of laughing at the obsurdity of that statement, you may be nodding your head in agreement. It truly is one of the modern wonders of the world. I highly recommend everyone come and experience it, because you will return home knowing that the worst your local area can throw at you is nothing compared to the daily commute of a Jakartan. Not only is the the chaos a thing to behold, but the fact that people face it daily with such dispassion and resignation!

So now I point you back to the title of this column, "Herding Cats." Make a mental picture of that, if you will. Now you know what daily life in Jakarta is like, and it is much the same through-out the country, though magnitudes smaller in scale. Oh, how I miss those six lanes of insanity around the Coliseum in Rome!

Next time you are cursing the traffic at home, think about this: if you can open the door and step out, then it can always get worse. If you haven't bumped into two other vehicles in the last ten minutes, then it can always get worse. If the two feet between the front of your car and the back of the next is not crammed full of motorcycles and pedestrians, it can always get worse. And if your city has a public transportation system, with a posted schedule and way-finder maps, and it keeps fairly close to that, then it most certainly can get worse. And IF, in your city, people general follow the rules, and the rules are enforced by a professional police staff, then you are NOT in Jakarta, my friend!

Mexico City, eat your heart out!