Wax Banks

traveling is for idiots: lifehacking the western american hemisphere

[This is an excerpt from a larger, admittedly kind of weird piece. If you must know, it's from the Fixing You manuscript, a couple hundred pages of stylish/aggressive nonsense-or-possibly-genius in this vein. Please enjoy. --wa.]

* * *

the main difficulty with traveling, other than being eaten by carnivorous fish or having an "everyone here is very tan and speaks in gibberish"-related panic attack in the middle of the world's largest shopping mall or something, is adjusting to the little things, the tiny cultural differences that make life living: don't touch the food, don't look directly at sweet bitches or someone will cut off your hand, the mosquitoes have AIDS, there is no internet access unless you go to the city, nearly three hundred miles downriver, past the golden temple. THERE IS NO GODDAMN INTERNET. not 2.0, 1.0, little-known intermediate web technologies like web 1.5. nothing! plus there are sensitivity issues to worry about: how do you approach tiny japanese without being crippled by guilt, knowing that they've already lived through the 21st and 22nd centuries once, are aggressively fixing up the 23rd century with nanobots and thermonuclear magic spells at the moment (contemporary japan is what the 23rd century will look like if we make cloning not only legal but *mandatory*), and now here you come with your stupid questions about "how do they make tempura" and "why did the police outfit me with this GPS-enabled dog collar when i got off the plane in tokyo," things like that. plus, cultural solidarity is one thing, open-mindedness is one thing, but why are all the muslims dressed like assholes? you see? you dropped out of georgetown's medieval studies program before getting the degree, which was the right move, everyone thinks so, but you never did take that acting class you'd been so excited about - so how are you going to convincingly act like you don't know how much better your country is than, uh, theirs? all of them really.

worthies, the world is just too difficult to understand. did you see the part about no internet web? it's not available in alaska, indeed most of the u.s. west of the mississippi river (minus san francisco, obviously), so what are the chances they've discovered the internet in bangalore, paris, the picturesque mountains of switzerland? answer: the chances are very very small, and you can't take that kind of risk. you're not a gambler, you're an exceptionally talented and stylishly-appointed urban elite. you can't bring mohammed to the mountain because he's been put in a secret government prison on the floating magical island of west frandisco. but someone has to be brought to the mountain; the gods demand it. it just doesn't have to be you. nor do you want the mountain brought here; it's trivia night at Foster's and you can't duck out of it, not when you have to defend your "80's sitcoms"-themed record-setting title last week. someone else can babysit the mountain.

well so the alternative is to make like a grownup and stay home. but how? no american is truly cultured unless he or she has traveled the world, and yet we've shown through careful logic that travel is impermissible if not simply impossible, never mind pricy - god even if you can lifehack your tickets into a first-class upgrade from coach you're still looking at ten, maybe thirty thousand american dollars to get a seat on a giant spacegoing quantum shark-jet, and who has that kind of money lying around? other than famous personal american productivity guru/authors who spend their nights covered in locally-grown honey and rolling around in four-foot-deep piles of authors'-advance cash, "lucre" really, who has that kind of money in today's enlightened western world?

so if you can't go abroad - and you can't - you have to find a way to make HERE more like THERE, without all the "charming" local "flavor" that the emaciated non-digitally-savvy citizens of THERE think is so special precious dear to their ancestors in the dreamtime or whatever but is, when you get down to it, basically las vegas with cheaper whores and lower production values. which, sure, *awesome* in a way, but remember: no internet.

ok, to recap:

* be brave

* stay home

* america

it's a little unusual for a lifehacking project to intentionally downgrade performance and style, but when it comes to worldliness and open-minded cultural exchange, the western hemisphere is willing to take one for the team.

as is traditional, we have a set of easy-to-follow lifehacking tips'n'tricks in clear, jargon-free language - ready to be implemented by the post-digital post-national hardcore american digital freshmaker/coolhacker/raconteur now reading this volume, i.e. probably you. possibly not you - have you come down from the lsd yet, hasn't it been twelve hours? how much goddamn lsd did you take? - but *probably* you.

* food: american food isn't terribly fashionable unless consumed ironically, post-nationally - e.g. designer mac and cheese with a bottle of very delicate absinthe you got on your celebratory trip to bhutan when your post-college startup shipped version 0.02beta4 of the social-network app you guys had worked up and you just had to, like *unwind* - so we have some major changes to make here. luckily, most foreign cuisines are easily duplicated using american ingredients. for instance: to make delicate taiwanese curried poultry, buy some general gao's chicken at the local chinese take-out place, head down to your local organic/macro food mart, get a little green curry paste, and mix it in using a limited-edition quantum-plastic japanese designer stirring spoon. for authentic taiwanese texture don't mix it in, just pour it right on top, then call one of your chinese friends to wave nuclear weapons at you menacingly while you eat your food huddled in the corner of your small but efficiently furnished and stylishly laid-out loft, furtively looking around all the while to make sure no local warlords have beheaded any of your neighbors tonight. taiwan has warlords, right? or to make indian rice, buy chinese rice and give it smallpox.

* dress: ever since the second world war foreigners have been required by law to dress like americans, only funny in some small way - e.g. french clothes are always a little too tight-fitting at the crotch; all swiss wear baggy fleece workout pants cinched below the knees, known as "lederhosen"; amazon men and women wear dish towels; all germans have lots of piercings but in a refreshingly non-aggressive way; there's nearly a million chinese, two million, and they only have about 300,000 outfits between them - all grey tracksuits with "china!" written in big letters on the back, we saw it at the olympics - so in china you only get to wear any clothes at all one day out of three, which is actually ok because four days out of five it's illegal and unwise to breathe chinese air. (confirmed! on the internet.) you have nothing to worry about clothing-wise; most of your designer shit is made in sweatshops anyhow, right? so just pretend YOU'RE the sweatshop worker - easy, go around acting all grateful you have a job at all, even if that's a weird feeling for a progressive urbanite - and make believe you STOLE your featureless grey china-blouse from the factory, you're so worried about getting caught, and friendly subversive Commandant Chang can't cover for you forever, they'll catch you, FOOLISH xiao ming, they're sure to catch you...

* money: no problem. american dollars are good everywhere. however, to maintain fictional coherence on a fake stay-at-home world-travel vacation, you can't find or use an ATM, and will eventually have to barter to eat. this is standard in most countries of the dark, exotic east ("exotique" in french). you'll do fine; your body still has that undergraduate firmness, you'll fetch upwards of ten dollars a day. (sidenote: really? if you're offering, contact our publisher. IF you're offering.)

* internet: WHAT DID WE TELL YOU. NO.

* local customs: you went to graduate school, right? "culture is a conversation." you can more or less make shit up as you go along; for instance, refuse to believe that streetlights are real, or always turn left. if anyone asks what you're doing, call it "subaltern chic" or "just like mama xiao pan used to make" and then steal their wallet, but in an adorable, culturally authentic ("authentique") way.

* attitude toward americans: as with most things, you already know what to do here, you just need to maintain a constant high level of very cromulent mindfulness about it. assume that everyone on the street is an actual cowboy (ladies too) who bathes in liquid gold, nanobubble baths made from forcibly-aborted fetuses, and middle/near eastern crude oil; do not hide your disdain at people's inability to follow your language; marry a tiny cow-eyed babychild to preserve its honor post-defilement; occasionally mourn the death of a beloved uncle or grand-niece, wailing and ululating as their little coffin is lifted out of the pickup truck and lowered slowly, so slowly, into the blood-soaked earth that is your ancestral home - where you someday will rest as well. then vow bloody vengeance against whomever the hell; according to our fashion/historical sources, jews will do nicely.

obviously this will yield nothing even remotely like travel, will expose you to none of what makes other countries worth seeing (if you believe that marketing hype). but ask yourself: do you *really* feel like leaving home right now, right in the middle of things, when your favorite web-cartoon is probably updating tonight, and all your friends are talking about really important things on electronic digital mail? you really want to give that up?

well we don't either. never, ever, ever.

I have been...

...working, relaxing, not-blogging. I drove ten hours today, ten on Wednesday, and, I dunno, four or so on Thursday. The cause? A Phish show near Pittsburgh (Star Lake - a favourite venue for the band). Many thanks to the ladies of King's Family Restaurant in Denton, for whipping up a totally satisfying Country Fried Steak. I am dying inside now.

Great show too, though to escape the parking lot with quickness I left before the encore, which is a shame - it was a doozy. 'Get the tapes,' as they say. Who says? Well, I do, for one.

Vay kay.

Some woman is reading a magazine called 'Gluten-Free Living.' I want a magazine! They could call it 'Dripping Hot Wax' or 'Run on the Banks.' Obviously I have mature themes in mind, for Christmas.

When I was a boy.

I read Lord of the Rings over the first month or so of my sophomore year of high school; I'd gotten it at a bookshop in Brighton, England, on a trip with my family (our first overseas). This painting was the cover image:

But the image was quite smartly cropped for the cover, with gold foil runes at the top and bottom borders, and it's been tinted - green tint and a grey feeling. The splash of white around the title is all the more visually effective as a result:

The book is one of my most prized possessions, as is the memory of reading it for the first time. I was bad about doing homework then - a problem I never quite overcame - and I'd spend evenings in my bed reading, eyes straining under the dim desk lamp (I needed reading glasses not long after). I remember reading the Helm's Deep sequence over and over; I could hear the thunder of hoofbeats on stone and earth, and could imagine Aragorn and Theoden riding splendidly out of the fortress cutting a swathe through the mass of orcs. I loved the pace of it, the idleness of the story in its first chapters; I read the preface, concerning Hobbits, on the train back to London the day I received the book (a gift from the parents), and that train ride constitutes perhaps my happiest memory of the trip. I don't think I looked up from the book even once in that time, yet Tolkien's book, of all books, seems in retrospect like a reasonable substitute for the real England - at least as seen through the window of a train car.

I miss the feel of Middle-Earth as I imagined it then; I'm sure I'll have trouble recapturing the faces I saw on that first reading, having now seen Peter Jackson's films several times. But I'd like to try sometime. It was fourteen years ago this autumn that I came back from Middle-Earth and I've always meant to return. I guess there's time. Seeing Gandalf approach through the rain and mist took me away from a moment. Love of any sort can do that, and there's room for all sorts of love.

I'm so excited.

I'm in the MIT Reading Room, in W20.

The girl across from me is a member of the class of 2010, indeed is running for class president (and good luck to her); we can speculate that she was born in 1990 or 1989.

Her cell phone ringtone is the theme from Saved by the Bell. That show is a key cultural touchstone for certain kids my age; it aired from 1989-1993, a year after its short-lived forerunner Good Morning, Miss Bliss. In other words, my neighbour in the study room was four years old when Zack, Screech, Slater, and the rest went off the air (though they'd return in 1993-94 with the lamentable The College Years, and on one 'memorable' occasion visited the set of the surprisingly long-running The New Class).

I confess to being irritated by this treatment of the show - which was always kitsch, was intended as kitsch, was as much a descendant of Dynasty as anything else - as meta-kitsch, a merely remembered cultural object that happened to be kitschy on its own terms, too. I am bothered and irritated and this Yo La Tengo record isn't helping matters.

Holiday flight 23 Dec 2007.

'My current status is "hip-deep in bullshit"'

Guilt

I opened this document to rant about holiday travel and the insufferability of the airport bureaucracy – as well as to complain pointlessly about the dice-roll that is late-December travel in New England – and as I typed the words 'My current status' a friendly, only slightly frazzled female voice came over the loudspeaker to announce that flights to Washington-Reagan had been cleared for landing and could resume boarding. So I have only a few minutes before hopping a plane from Boston's unremittingly dull Logan airport to the nation's capital (an illogical three-hour stopover 'en route' to Buffalo).

I find airports bracing; like any good American I feel a fury rising as I pass through the largely pointless, more-than-a-bit inconvenient TSA checkpoint, with its casual elision of the expectation of privacy or even solitude, but I'm usually able to pull back from pique and remember that air travel is in fact a miracle, and even remotely organized or efficient or air travel doubly so. Several hundred passengers-to-be are seated around me, occupying themselves (or trying, or failing), and a staff of hundreds is making this enormously complex task not only possible, not only affordable, not only accessible, but routine. The miracle, frankly, is that the planes ever run on time in the first place.

Affirmation

Of course, in Washington itself the planes aren't running on time at all; the fellow at gate 35A yells into the microphone about 'brotherly love' in an attempt to keep passengers' spirits up, which the people around me appreciate. 35A is swamped with people, travelers in various postures of (im)patience and (di)stress, sitting cross-legged or fetal against every available vertical surface, and the delay has pushed the mass of travelers past its usual aversion to proximity, so every proper seat is taken as well. It's heartening in a way. The miracle of flight seems distant in time and space; outside the terminal window the only visible plane makes no gesture at movement, and the rain makes a mess of any would-be holiday festivity.

I'm seated up against the far wall here in 35A; the miracle of this building is that every wall is somehow the far wall. There's a pricey laptop bag next to me and I covet it.

I'm almost jealous of the young children who are experiencing this as an adventure: anything new, anything away from home, anything that brings you closer to other human specimens. Like a living museum of all fifty states. Well, 49 maybe: I can't conceive of anyone having the opportunity to be in Hawaii and still choosing to be here, in Washington D.C. or I suppose Virginia in the grey holiday drizzle two days before the 2,007th Christmas give or take. 'Two of those planes are going to Norfolk, two are going to Rochester. One is going to Philadelphia. Huntsville is one of the twelve. 3851 not here yet, Providence not here yet, Greenville not here. Norfolk 3911 delayed to 5:00 boarding...' The fellow at the desk has a charming African accent, as does his female counterpart, and the air of cosmopolitanism their lilting voices lend to the place is undercut by the enormous American flag across the hall. It's got the words 'D.C. Market Place' written on it in glowing white letters. 'Big bitch is finally moving,' says a smiling fellow in a thin moustache. His accent is maybe southern; it reminds me of home though home is in New York. And he's right: out in the dismal rain beneath the midafternoon blank slate sky, the big bitch really is rolling out from one or another gate, or at least thinking about it. The 'affectionate' habit of referring to vehicles as 'old girls' or 'great big bitches' or somesuch strikes me momentarily as grotesque.

Flight 3851 to Thereabouts and Environs is called and the mustachioed fella says ''scuse me gennlemen' and grabs the laptop bag next to me, his trucker cap nearly hitting me in the nose, and I'm reminded again of how few questions I think to ask. Ever.

Amendment

The state of things at Washington-Reagan Airport is such that U.S. Airways is apparently no longer bothering to update its Arrival/Departure boards; in consequence of which the only indication that my flight to Buffalo is delayed at least an hour is that a half-hour after its original departure time it hasn't left, hasn't arrived, or maybe even left whatever city comes just before this one in its itinerary, hasn't taken whatever several steps precede the crucial step of actually leaving the earth with me and my suitcase on it. There's something obscene about all these airplanes stuck on the ground; the squat profiles of jumbo jets make them look less like injured athletes than fat people pining for fitness. As if they could just shed thirty pounds and kick off the ground. Looking out the window depresses me, would depress me even if the weather weren't like an art-directed parody of Jack the Ripper's perpetually overcast Whitechapel.

Celebrating the Mutantor.

The broheem's birthday is drawing to a close; as is my trip-home tradition, I've kicked into what my boy Saurabh calls a 'full-on immune response,' i.e. my nose is running like Ross Perot c.1992 (fitfully, with a vengeance one minute and a certain devil-may-care vibe the next - quite dashing when you think about it [Perot the Crazed Presidential Midget, not my running nose]). My brother's phone keeps ringing but he's devoted himself to a rigorous no-answering-the-phone regimen. I admire that. I've been keeping a lightweight version of same, but not because I'd planned on such a thing - it's just that I left my charger at home.

Just keeping the vibe frosty and light for you, Reader(s), as is our shared habit.

Anyhow stay serious and salty, people, and I'm returning to Boston tomorrow. Let's hope the rental car holds up. (I'm less confident of that this time than last. Enterprise has a low-rent ambience that would appeal to me if, y'know, my whaddayacall life didn't depend on it.)

He's 25, by the way. The big QC. Hearing him pimp himself to various waitstaff hoping for free desserts (which he's received, of course, everywhere) has inspired me. Time to submit some articles when I get home! It's thriller, thriller night.

Farvel, eit_wax the Valkyrie...

                       ----------
                      /          \
                     /    REST    \
                    /      IN      \
                   /     PEACE      \
                  /                  \
                  |     eit_wax      |
                  |     3491 Au      |
                  |   killed by a    |
                  |    death ray     |
                  |                  |
                  |                  |
                  |       2004       |
                 *|     *  *  *      | *
        _________)/\\_//(\/(/\)/\//\/|_)_______


Farvel eit_wax the Valkyrie...

You died in The Dungeons of Doom on dungeon level 3 with 291938 points,
and 3491 pieces of gold, after 33598 moves.
You were level 16 with a maximum of 158 hit points when you died.

You made the top ten list!

 No  Points     Name                                                   Hp [max]
  1    3870608  jillyanthr-Wiz-Hum-Fem-Neu (Form-Art) ascended to
                demigoddess-hood.                                     184 [194]
  2    3313057  eit_fatdic-Wiz-Hum-Fem-Neu (Form) ascended to
                demigoddess-hood.                                     313 [313]
  3    3165638  eit_mobius-Val-Hum-Fem-Neu (Art) ascended to
                demigoddess-hood.                                     276 [276]

  6     422676  oedalpha-Mon-Hum-Fem-Cha died in The Dungeons of Doom
                on level 25.  Killed by an invisible ki-rin {33334}.    - [136]
  7     380703  raven-Bar-Orc-Fem-Cha died in Gehennom on level 37. 
                Killed by invisible Orcus {11040}.                      - [130]
  8     291938  eit_wax-Val-Dwa-Fem-Law died in The Dungeons of Doom           
                on level 3 [max 21].  Killed by a death ray {33598}.  158 [158]
  9     267139  bvowk-Wiz-Elf-Mal-Cha died in Sokoban on level 8
                [max 19].  Killed by Yeenoghu, while helpless
                {42598}.                                                -  [99]
 10     241497  valere-Val-Dwa-Fem-Law died in The Dungeons of Doom
                on level 22 [max 25].  Killed by an electric eel
                {22831}.                                                - [128]

CLAN EIT OWNZ J00!!

Dude all I'm saying is Clan Eit ownz j00.

That's all I'm saying.

Refreshing.

You thought it was awesome watching the Sox crush the Yanks at Fenway this weekend, didn't you? You were sitting there in some low-down bar in Boston screaming your little heart out. And more power to you.

But my brother and I were getting congratulatory high-fives from drunk blonde ladies at a bar in Times Square, my droogies. It's known in the Business as going 'behind enemy lines'. It's pretty much the most satisfying feeling you can possibly imagine.

(On the other hand, the broheem and I were forced to endure Friday night's loss to the Yanks in a bar full of - and I'm desperately trying to be charitable here - pretty much the mangiest collection of human beings ever to crawl across the face of the good earth. Yankee fans. In the wild. You get a couple of them together and you can feel the intellectual temperature of the room dropping.)

A Yankee fan picking on a Sox fan is like an American G.I. teasing some Japanese for having the bad taste to have a goddamn atomic bomb dropped on them. It's unseemly.

A Sox fan picking on a Yankee fan is an irreducible good. There is no metaphorical equivalent - it's its own sole parallel, if that makes even the tiniest hint of sense, you anti-intellectual mongrel, you.

Oh and by the way: Hidden super bonus!