take off

12/31/09 11:18pm

There are few things that I can unequivocally admit to loving. Harper's Magazine is one of them. The “Readings”, the “Index”, the “Reporting in the Radical First Person”, the European Beret adds, the “Findings” on the penultimate page that I deny myself until I've read the rag cover to cover, like a child promised ice cream if they clean their dinner plate. I do not mean to imply that I cannot find fault with the publication, but that I wholeheartedly embrace it despite of, or even because of it's faults. Like any true love, I love Harper's unconditionally. The excessively dense smugness of a Lewis H. Laphan Notebook permits me to excuse my own pretensions. I feel a kinship between the flaws of the magazine and my failures as a man. I was recently kicked out the converted school bus where I was living with my ex-girlfriend. I lasted two and a half months before getting the boot. It was the second time I had attempted to live with a romantic partner, and the second time a romantic partner had informed me this wasn't a good idea.

Another questionably good idea is that of running away to Mexico. But when two bands contacted me in need of a fill-in bass player for a short 8 show Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas/Arkansas tour followed by a month-long drive through our southern neighbor all the way to Guatemala—where Spanish language schools are $150/wk including room and board—I couldn't really say no. At least I couldn't say no to the experiment when I compared it to the control group of drinking away my sorrows this winter in gray, gray Portland, OR, where seasonal affective disorder (brilliantly abbreviated SAD) has enervated me the past four winters like a wet wool blanket issued to a Siberian exile. So I am starting this travel blog, No Keys, writing to you many miles in the air, approximately above Tennessee on a Jet Blue flight from New York to Austin on New Year's Eve, with my one true love, Harper's Magazine, laying on the empty seat next to me.

I hope to update this blog every few days, though I must admit I have never been much of a writer. Embarrassingly enough it has been my sadistic enjoyment in writing my recent graduate application essays that has given me the confidence to attempt this. I apologize preemptively for this blog's infrequency and poor quality. I sincerely hope that my many brilliant literary friends will offer me advice on how to make reading this less excruciating as I blog along.

I have two days with a good friend in Austin before I meet up with the bands in Dallas and the adventure starts in full. Tonight, at the New Year's Party to which I will be arriving rather late, I plan to get drunk. I haven't felt the desire since the last attempt ended in following-day regrets of not having installed a breath-a-lizer on my cell phone, or at least deleted my ex's number. But like many questionably good ideas, its going to be a new year, why not give things another try.