How I plan not to die

One of the major themes in my life these days, and I think most of my friends of the same general age will agree is the idea of coming to grips with the fact that you are no longer what someone would call "young." Obviously, people who left thirty in the rearview decades ago will still refer to the amount of time I am assumed to have left, and by that reckoning surely I have more to go than I have done and therefore I still qualify. Qualify as young.

But I think not.

I don't need to tell you that this is a youth driven culture, you seen Madonna lately? She looks like she is going as herself for Halloween, you just want to grab her paper thin shoulders (feeling her bulging veins) and shake her and scream "Give it up Gramma!" But in fairness, this is a woman in a business where she is competing with Rhianna, and Britney Spears before her, and whoever qualified as a poptart back in the mid 90s... none come to mind just now. I think most people naturally feel the same sort of pressure, and therefore we have this cultural oddity where we make a choice between growing old, or sort of plasticizing ourselves. Either way, I am not going to be the guy who is 35 wearing an Ed Hardy tee shirt and flattering dumb beautiful kids to trick them into giving me things I want.

Ew. That sounds so dark. The sinister unlit side of youth culture are all the sad bastards who got kicked out just from the shear passage of time, and then look in the window and don't realize they are missing and have missed the point. That supremely taut skin and a kickass metabolic rate are wonderful things, but that youth means nothing if you do not advance. You have to move onto the place where you prove to yourself and whoever you decide that matters, what you learned.

I suppose that I am just trying to make a point about things having a point. I am probably trying to assign meaning and reason to things that don't really have them. Anyway, I'm not old enough to wave my hands and say "Damn kids." But I am old enough to say that the stuff every person I know under 20 has on their ipod is bullshit and awful. You damn kids and your music! Back in the 90's we had Nirvana and Husker Du and the list really starts to thin... but fuck you, we did NOT have the All American Rejects. Those guys suck. I will not argue about this.

Okay. Back on point. Here is why I am thinking along these lines. I am going on this trip and it is going to be for months. I am trying to get from Paris to Tokyo, and I am energetic guy, but I think this is also going to be a grind and when you start to accept you are growing older; well one of the steps, and this is tricky for me, is accepting physical limitations. Despite the instinct and tendency to want to party it up ALL THE TIME while I am there, I think that I need to make myself realize that this isn't really a vacation. A vacation is where you have maybe ten days if you're lucky and you are going to stuff yourself with as much into those days as possible. A vacation is a sprint, a frantic limited period where you are trying to have as much fun as possible away from all the things that make your ass hurt back home. I am not going to be sprinting for three whole months, I hope you are not disappointed.

On vacation you do not allow yourself to be too tired to go out, is what I mean.

Three months, trains, walking, getting lost, well... it's going to be tiring and I think that by accepting and embracing the fact I can get more out of the experience. Drinking. Chasing skirts. Getting stupid. Well that is part of it, obviously, and will probably make for the best stories I come back to you with, but what is going to make it special is that other part. Hurting feet and a silent cell phone to give me time to think about everything, process what it means. When I am someplace that is old and important I always feel like I am getting answers to questions I am not smart enough to be asking. I always try to listen really hard, but I can never hold it, I end up talking about what things looked like or something else you have heard a bunch of times before. I think that has always been why I have had the urge to act out, so that I will have something to bring back that I can express properly and in context.

I don't know that this makes sense to you, if you even care, I don't know.

As I am now officially and inescapably an adult male in the world, I don't think it works to make every night like the nights I am going to be having during Oktoberfest. I am going to try and hydrate. I am going to floss. Holy fucking hell, I am all growed up. It happened. It happened in tiny devastating increments because of the wind, and currents, erosion, and whatever else you want to add to an already elaborate metaphor. Now facing down this trip and pondering how it is all going to work I think that due to my insufferable nature it will forever mark the line where I crossed and said I was grown. Of course, I have been for some time. But like Madonna and her plastic face, I maybe held on a little too tightly, it does not mean the end of zany misadventures to embrace the next phase in your life. It doesn't mark the end of being stupid and kind of charming for it (If that ever stops being the case with me, I am sure someone will kill me before I have to do it myself). I guess, ultimately, the only thing I have really learned so far is that you should be prepared to get humbled. And if you are prepared to get smacked around a little bit in the course of your life you don't have to spend so much time fearing it, and avoiding it, in fact it allows for you to do exactly what you wish. Afterall, why be scared if its going to happen anyway?

I am working on some goals for this trip (How grown up! Yeah? Yeah?). For instance I plan on not buying any maps and asking for directions instead, especially when there is a language barrier involved. I am open to suggestions. Pretty soon we're also going to have to discuss what I am bringing and not bringing. This trip is only about 6 weeks or so away. I do not have visa to Russian, China, or Turkey yet. I need to get my ass in gear.