Act One:
I Am Lashed to the Hull
The only way to barrel down the New Jersey Turnpike is at 2am on a
Friday morning. The white lines in the asphalt race to greet you at 80
mph, like friendly little white bullets racing past. But they never
hit you. There's no impact of lead on flesh, no hydrostatic shock, no
shattering bone, no blood spray. Just you and the backseat and the
streetlights and the white noise drone of rubber on pavement. And you
think for a moment what it would be like to just go ahead and jump the
median and plow into oncoming traffic, but some smart monkey thought
ahead and put a cement wall between you and the northbound lane. But
then you think, it would be so easy to just pull open the door and
slip out into the night air. No more spa vacations with the in-laws.
No more delayed then delayed then cancelled connecting flights in
Newark. No more screaming little bastard in the backseat making
demands without the balls to back them up in a fight. Hell, his balls
won't even drop for another 10 years. Most importantly, no more
barreling down the New Jersey Turnpike at 2am in a rented minivan that
stinks of Subway tuna fish with another couple from your cancelled
flight and their aforementioned grandkid in the backseat.
This is your vacation, and it's ending one second at a time. The
difference between this vacation and a nightmare though is that a
nightmare isn't real and you know it will end at some point. That's
not an option when your flight is cancelled and they're holding your
luggage and you're a 4-hour drive from home. At this point, the
journey isn't the reward. It's punishment for a crime that no one will
explain to you.
A single bright point in this blank grey ocean of a waking nightmare.
When my calcinating bones are rotting in hell, and they give me a day
off for bad behavior, I'm going to get a fifth of whatever liquor they
make in hell and give Heather a call, because I know she will fucking
get in her car and pick my ass up at the airport and drink it with me.
That's just the way she is and we're very lucky to have her. Next time
she gets picked up on a DUI or disturbing the peace or manslaughter,
she knows I will pay her bail.
Act Two:
Among the Living Dead
Fred Allen said that Los Angeles is a great place if you're an orange.
How much truer is that about the orange's other favorite State? If
you're an inanimate object or a piece of fruit or a mortician, the
Geritol Belt is the place to be. Everyone in Florida is rapidly
approaching a vegetative state anyway. Everybody drives like they're
lost on their way to a funeral, and they probably are. The obit
section of the paper is bigger than the classifieds and almost as
entertaining.
DC and Florida share an aspect in that they're both brimming with
death. If DC is an empty sarcophagus, Florida is a stinking shallow
grave covered in driftwood artfully painted teal and salmon. You have
only to look at the museums on the Mall and the cemeteries and the
marble statues and monuments. They may honor a life well-lived, but
they're all about the death. The reason Japanese tourists all wear
suits in DC is to show respect for our ancestors. And Florida is where
Americans go to die, and not well. No Viking funerals here, just acres
of waterfront real estate and bungalows and trailer parks gone to
seed, scattered beneath the shadows of the elms and Spanish moss and
palms. The stench of Ben Gay and Old Spice and suntan lotion struggle
with stale sweat and b.o. and that old people smell that you can't
quite put a finger on and wouldn't want to if you could.
Everyone's either sick or getting sick or just getting better. And
everybody else looks like they're made out of leather, cut from the
same cowhide of suffering with a crookbacked geezer-shaped
cookiecutter.
Is there nothing at all to recommend about Florida? Well, there's
plenty of lonely, scantily-clad members of the opposite sex walking
the beaches, their nubile flesh aching to be touched. But of course,
once you touch it, you have to talk to it, and then they crack a smile
or stroke their mullets or pull out their cellphones and unzip their
mouths like firebuckets, and the spell is broken.
They sell a lot of seafood, so if you like that, you might have a good
time. Then again, it all comes from South America anyway, so you're
better off going there instead and cutting out the middle man. And
that dead fish smell beats the Ben Gay/b.o. smell by a mile.
Surely you could relax and get a good spa treatment? Not when you have
two kids and there's no childcare available and their grandparents
spend all day at tennis camp or in ultra-low-impact water aerobics
where you just sort of bob up and down in a tub like a sad little
buoy, convinced that this is somehow healthy for you.
How about just hanging out at the poolside bar? How can they fuck that
up? Five words: five dollar Bud Lite Ice. Mixed drinks? There's a
reason we drink scotch on the rocks out of a glass; plastic that's
been left in the sun just doesn't taste right. After drinking the
stale of horses, Hannibal would have spat this rotgut out and cleaved
the barkeep's head in twain.
The highlight of the stay was a nice Cuban sandwich purchased at a
stripmall convenience store squashed between a 25-hour laudromat and a
gas station. And if that's not the saddest thing you've heard in a
weak, you are a lucky little person, yes that's what you are.
Basically, its a flattened sub made of roast pork loin, baked ham,
genoa salami, provolone, spicy mustard, and pickles, between Cuban
bread (kind of a thin baguette, with an ultrasoft crust) and pressed
on a pannini grill just enough to melt everything into a soft gooey
mass. Twelve inches of heaven wrapped in wax paper; enough to dull the
pain of existence for a few fleeting moments. The problem with your
most toasted or grilled sandwiches (I'm looking at you Quiznos and
Panera) is that they cut it across and do it open-faced, exposing to
bread to high heat and basically creating a mouth-shredding asswich,
burning the roof of your mouth and searing your flesh. If I wanted a
mouthful of blood I'd go down on my wife during her monthly visit from
Aunt Flo.
Ever waited in line for tickets to an aquarium, only to have the
ticket guy disappear with no explanation, leaving a long line waiting
for nothing? Then you ask the other ticket guy what happened, and she
says he went on lunch. So you yell at this stone face what the hell
kind of operation is that and she just sort of shrugs and ask blankly
how many tickets you want. So you go to your "customer service
representative" (i.e., oily portly teenager straight from central
casting) who just says that he's SUPPOSED to say he's going to lunch
but that he has to go to lunch, because, it's like, lunchtime. At
which point you're hitting the counter with your fist and the
"manager" shows up and offers FREE TICKETS which to you is about as
useful as nipples on men because you're flying out the next day (or,
at least, you think you are, [see Chapter 1]). So you write a tirade
on their How Are We Doing? form letter including expletives about
humiliating pets with whisky bottles and toilet plungers and that
makes you feel a little better.
So, no, there's absolutely nothing to recommend about Florida, except
to stay away, if you value your emotional health and want avoid
banging harangues out on your keyboard.
Act Three:
The Man Who Killed Vacation
The essential part of "vacation" is the root "vacant." Vacations
aren't about going someplace new and doing different things. It's
about escaping the loneliness and emptiness and despair of our
workaday lives. The problem is that it's still there when we get back,
waiting for us at the door tapping its feet, its hair in curlers,
glaring at its wristwatch, holding a rolling pin.
Raymond Chandler said that there's nothing as empty as an empty
swimming pool. Tom Waits said that there's nothing as lonely as a
parking lot after the last car pulls away. In my more lucid moments,
I've been known to say there's nothing as lonely as a monkey on a
pier. But I top them all when I say there's nothing as lonely as a
baggage claim conveyer belt when the last bag is pulled off and you're
standing there staring at it as it comes grinding to a halt and your
luggage is nowhere to be found. It's just you and a dozen other people
looking at the machine blankly as if it were an indifferent chrome
god. If there were a little altar that you could burn incense and
claim tickets and rattle chicken bone rattles, you could at least feel
like you're accomplishing something. Instead, it's just you and these
strangers and the circular chrome god, and the "customer service
representative" with an indecipherable accent thick enough to spread
on toast. We beg her to intercede on our behalf, but her only reply is
that they baggage unloaders can't unload during bad weather, to which
we reply that it's stopped raining an hour ago. She decodes an even
more indecipherable muttered squawk from her walkie talkie. The
priestess has conferred with the luggage gods.
It's like you're those Papua New Guinea aborigines who build straw
airplanes on mountainsides to lure the flying white gods back to
return with their precious cargo. You both have tattoos and you both
have stupid haircuts, but you have a steel piercing instead of a bone
through your nose and even though your technology is marginally better
(can't turn off the annoying new message chime on your Blackberry,
though), you are in the end worse off. The aborigine at least knows
how to hunt with a stick, gut a fish, and start a fire. Without a can
opener and a supermarket, you will starve.
The vacancy extends to your home. You go in order to return, and in
your absence, your house drains itself of what the French call
"presence;" the psychic footprint you leave behind where you live,
breathe, sleep, and eat. So that when we get home, we can go back to
filling it up with our own particular brown aura, that flavor of wet
ashes that poisons everything we touch. But it's your aura. It doesn't
have to be great, or even very good. It just has to be your own. And
that's what it comes down to: vacation isn't about you getting out of
the house; it's about your home getting away from you.
It's been said that the American dream is a labyrinth with no center.
I have no idea what that means, but I think it's a great way to end
this pointless little jeremiad. It also reminds me of a story about
the Zen master Dokuon. Yamaoka, a young student of Zen desiring to
show his enlightenment, said, "The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings,
after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness.
There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is
no giving and nothing to be received."
Dokuon, who was smoking quiety, said nothing. Suddenly, he whacked
Yamaoka with his long bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.
"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?"
Long story short, in the best of all possible worlds, you wouldn't
have to choose between between emptiness, pain, and anger. But if
you're looking for a hot deal on all three, a spa trip to Florida is
the best value for your vacation dollar!
I Am Lashed to the Hull
The only way to barrel down the New Jersey Turnpike is at 2am on a
Friday morning. The white lines in the asphalt race to greet you at 80
mph, like friendly little white bullets racing past. But they never
hit you. There's no impact of lead on flesh, no hydrostatic shock, no
shattering bone, no blood spray. Just you and the backseat and the
streetlights and the white noise drone of rubber on pavement. And you
think for a moment what it would be like to just go ahead and jump the
median and plow into oncoming traffic, but some smart monkey thought
ahead and put a cement wall between you and the northbound lane. But
then you think, it would be so easy to just pull open the door and
slip out into the night air. No more spa vacations with the in-laws.
No more delayed then delayed then cancelled connecting flights in
Newark. No more screaming little bastard in the backseat making
demands without the balls to back them up in a fight. Hell, his balls
won't even drop for another 10 years. Most importantly, no more
barreling down the New Jersey Turnpike at 2am in a rented minivan that
stinks of Subway tuna fish with another couple from your cancelled
flight and their aforementioned grandkid in the backseat.
This is your vacation, and it's ending one second at a time. The
difference between this vacation and a nightmare though is that a
nightmare isn't real and you know it will end at some point. That's
not an option when your flight is cancelled and they're holding your
luggage and you're a 4-hour drive from home. At this point, the
journey isn't the reward. It's punishment for a crime that no one will
explain to you.
A single bright point in this blank grey ocean of a waking nightmare.
When my calcinating bones are rotting in hell, and they give me a day
off for bad behavior, I'm going to get a fifth of whatever liquor they
make in hell and give Heather a call, because I know she will fucking
get in her car and pick my ass up at the airport and drink it with me.
That's just the way she is and we're very lucky to have her. Next time
she gets picked up on a DUI or disturbing the peace or manslaughter,
she knows I will pay her bail.
Act Two:
Among the Living Dead
Fred Allen said that Los Angeles is a great place if you're an orange.
How much truer is that about the orange's other favorite State? If
you're an inanimate object or a piece of fruit or a mortician, the
Geritol Belt is the place to be. Everyone in Florida is rapidly
approaching a vegetative state anyway. Everybody drives like they're
lost on their way to a funeral, and they probably are. The obit
section of the paper is bigger than the classifieds and almost as
entertaining.
DC and Florida share an aspect in that they're both brimming with
death. If DC is an empty sarcophagus, Florida is a stinking shallow
grave covered in driftwood artfully painted teal and salmon. You have
only to look at the museums on the Mall and the cemeteries and the
marble statues and monuments. They may honor a life well-lived, but
they're all about the death. The reason Japanese tourists all wear
suits in DC is to show respect for our ancestors. And Florida is where
Americans go to die, and not well. No Viking funerals here, just acres
of waterfront real estate and bungalows and trailer parks gone to
seed, scattered beneath the shadows of the elms and Spanish moss and
palms. The stench of Ben Gay and Old Spice and suntan lotion struggle
with stale sweat and b.o. and that old people smell that you can't
quite put a finger on and wouldn't want to if you could.
Everyone's either sick or getting sick or just getting better. And
everybody else looks like they're made out of leather, cut from the
same cowhide of suffering with a crookbacked geezer-shaped
cookiecutter.
Is there nothing at all to recommend about Florida? Well, there's
plenty of lonely, scantily-clad members of the opposite sex walking
the beaches, their nubile flesh aching to be touched. But of course,
once you touch it, you have to talk to it, and then they crack a smile
or stroke their mullets or pull out their cellphones and unzip their
mouths like firebuckets, and the spell is broken.
They sell a lot of seafood, so if you like that, you might have a good
time. Then again, it all comes from South America anyway, so you're
better off going there instead and cutting out the middle man. And
that dead fish smell beats the Ben Gay/b.o. smell by a mile.
Surely you could relax and get a good spa treatment? Not when you have
two kids and there's no childcare available and their grandparents
spend all day at tennis camp or in ultra-low-impact water aerobics
where you just sort of bob up and down in a tub like a sad little
buoy, convinced that this is somehow healthy for you.
How about just hanging out at the poolside bar? How can they fuck that
up? Five words: five dollar Bud Lite Ice. Mixed drinks? There's a
reason we drink scotch on the rocks out of a glass; plastic that's
been left in the sun just doesn't taste right. After drinking the
stale of horses, Hannibal would have spat this rotgut out and cleaved
the barkeep's head in twain.
The highlight of the stay was a nice Cuban sandwich purchased at a
stripmall convenience store squashed between a 25-hour laudromat and a
gas station. And if that's not the saddest thing you've heard in a
weak, you are a lucky little person, yes that's what you are.
Basically, its a flattened sub made of roast pork loin, baked ham,
genoa salami, provolone, spicy mustard, and pickles, between Cuban
bread (kind of a thin baguette, with an ultrasoft crust) and pressed
on a pannini grill just enough to melt everything into a soft gooey
mass. Twelve inches of heaven wrapped in wax paper; enough to dull the
pain of existence for a few fleeting moments. The problem with your
most toasted or grilled sandwiches (I'm looking at you Quiznos and
Panera) is that they cut it across and do it open-faced, exposing to
bread to high heat and basically creating a mouth-shredding asswich,
burning the roof of your mouth and searing your flesh. If I wanted a
mouthful of blood I'd go down on my wife during her monthly visit from
Aunt Flo.
Ever waited in line for tickets to an aquarium, only to have the
ticket guy disappear with no explanation, leaving a long line waiting
for nothing? Then you ask the other ticket guy what happened, and she
says he went on lunch. So you yell at this stone face what the hell
kind of operation is that and she just sort of shrugs and ask blankly
how many tickets you want. So you go to your "customer service
representative" (i.e., oily portly teenager straight from central
casting) who just says that he's SUPPOSED to say he's going to lunch
but that he has to go to lunch, because, it's like, lunchtime. At
which point you're hitting the counter with your fist and the
"manager" shows up and offers FREE TICKETS which to you is about as
useful as nipples on men because you're flying out the next day (or,
at least, you think you are, [see Chapter 1]). So you write a tirade
on their How Are We Doing? form letter including expletives about
humiliating pets with whisky bottles and toilet plungers and that
makes you feel a little better.
So, no, there's absolutely nothing to recommend about Florida, except
to stay away, if you value your emotional health and want avoid
banging harangues out on your keyboard.
Act Three:
The Man Who Killed Vacation
The essential part of "vacation" is the root "vacant." Vacations
aren't about going someplace new and doing different things. It's
about escaping the loneliness and emptiness and despair of our
workaday lives. The problem is that it's still there when we get back,
waiting for us at the door tapping its feet, its hair in curlers,
glaring at its wristwatch, holding a rolling pin.
Raymond Chandler said that there's nothing as empty as an empty
swimming pool. Tom Waits said that there's nothing as lonely as a
parking lot after the last car pulls away. In my more lucid moments,
I've been known to say there's nothing as lonely as a monkey on a
pier. But I top them all when I say there's nothing as lonely as a
baggage claim conveyer belt when the last bag is pulled off and you're
standing there staring at it as it comes grinding to a halt and your
luggage is nowhere to be found. It's just you and a dozen other people
looking at the machine blankly as if it were an indifferent chrome
god. If there were a little altar that you could burn incense and
claim tickets and rattle chicken bone rattles, you could at least feel
like you're accomplishing something. Instead, it's just you and these
strangers and the circular chrome god, and the "customer service
representative" with an indecipherable accent thick enough to spread
on toast. We beg her to intercede on our behalf, but her only reply is
that they baggage unloaders can't unload during bad weather, to which
we reply that it's stopped raining an hour ago. She decodes an even
more indecipherable muttered squawk from her walkie talkie. The
priestess has conferred with the luggage gods.
It's like you're those Papua New Guinea aborigines who build straw
airplanes on mountainsides to lure the flying white gods back to
return with their precious cargo. You both have tattoos and you both
have stupid haircuts, but you have a steel piercing instead of a bone
through your nose and even though your technology is marginally better
(can't turn off the annoying new message chime on your Blackberry,
though), you are in the end worse off. The aborigine at least knows
how to hunt with a stick, gut a fish, and start a fire. Without a can
opener and a supermarket, you will starve.
The vacancy extends to your home. You go in order to return, and in
your absence, your house drains itself of what the French call
"presence;" the psychic footprint you leave behind where you live,
breathe, sleep, and eat. So that when we get home, we can go back to
filling it up with our own particular brown aura, that flavor of wet
ashes that poisons everything we touch. But it's your aura. It doesn't
have to be great, or even very good. It just has to be your own. And
that's what it comes down to: vacation isn't about you getting out of
the house; it's about your home getting away from you.
It's been said that the American dream is a labyrinth with no center.
I have no idea what that means, but I think it's a great way to end
this pointless little jeremiad. It also reminds me of a story about
the Zen master Dokuon. Yamaoka, a young student of Zen desiring to
show his enlightenment, said, "The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings,
after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness.
There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is
no giving and nothing to be received."
Dokuon, who was smoking quiety, said nothing. Suddenly, he whacked
Yamaoka with his long bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.
"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?"
Long story short, in the best of all possible worlds, you wouldn't
have to choose between between emptiness, pain, and anger. But if
you're looking for a hot deal on all three, a spa trip to Florida is
the best value for your vacation dollar!
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