Travel

People hear I'm going on yet another trip and they get all,

ooouu, aaahhhhh, it must really be great to travel all over the world the way you do.

Just for the record, for the umpteenth time, No! It's not! Not for me anyway. I keep wanting to say,

If you like to travel so much why don't you go?

That wouldn't be any use because fantasy doesn't have any bad travel stuff in it. There are no TSA officers who've had way too many bad days in a row. There are no delayed or canceled flights, no twelve hour layovers in the lovely Dusseldorf airport in the middle of the night when everything is closed but it doesn't matter because you only have two Euros and no place to exchange your nearly worthless Yankee dollars for some gone-too-soon-is-that-all-I-get Euros. Oh, did I fail to mention there was a guy with a jack hammer tearing up the floor all night while I tried to sleep on a line of six chairs with my arms entangled in my luggage so it would still be there when I awakened from my sorely needed beauty rest? Yeah, travel, by all means. See the world. I live in a very beautiful part of Southern California. I've been to a lot of places and trust me when I say with Dorothy, There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

So, where is it this time? Seoul, South Korea. I kid you not, I got a phone call the other day from a guy, and when he heard where I was going this time he said,

Wow! That's really great. I've always wanted to go to Seoul. It's one of my top ten gotta go to destinations.

What's wrong with me? I've never had even the slightest desire to travel to Seoul. Is that because of watching M.A.S.H. all those years? Is it because when I was a child the Korean War was raging? Is it because I don't want to eat kimchi, that three thousand year old traditional Korean fermented taste sensation? No, it hasn't been lying around for three thousand years. People have been eating it that long. In a perfect fantasy I'd be like this James Bond character traveling around, staying in the finest luxury hotels, winning millions in fancy casinos, driving really expensive sports cars with world class beauties vying for my attention and eating in the most upscale restaurants that would make your average person blush to see the prices they charge for two shrimp, three carrots, a sprig of parsley and some colored sauce they squirt artistically on the plate. The only part of the James Bond fantasy I get is the bit where people want to kill me. Oh! you say, how exciting. Again, fantasy is great because there's nothing to oppose you in a fantasy, and even if there is, it's there because you can overcome it and come out all the more fantastic. Nothing at all like real life. Is it any wonder we spend so much time in fantasy and day dreams?

Twenty days may not seem like a long time to be away from home, but when you're my age you don't know how many twenty days you may have left. The truth is, at any age, you don't know how many twenty minutes you may have left. The fantasy is that you can pretend you're going to live forever. Death is something that happens to other people. No, I'm not afraid of dying in a plane crash or any other way for that matter. Life is a lot more unpredictable than death and a whole lot less certain. When four a.m. rolls around Tuesday morning and you're snuggled in your warm bed, dream about how wonderful it is to drag your bags to the airport, go through the always long and tedious security check because you have an artificial leg that always sets off all the alarms and brings a rush of TSA officers to have you assume the position while they wand you, pat you, question you, swipe your clothes and bags with little white patches they then stick in a special machine that tells them if you've got anything on you or your bags that could be found in b*mb fixings. Right. I can't even type the word let alone say it. Travel. I'm not even going to tell you what happens when I get there. Why? I don't even know until it happens