2003-08-16 - 3:34 a.m.

I want a little adventure out of life.

But it's rapidly becoming a depleted resource in this jaded world.

Most adventures to be had are of the sort for which one pays a fee, handed over to an expert in adventure dispensary as if one was filling a prescription. Take a riverboat cruise. See the pyramids. Bag a few gazelle and get your photograph taken with a drugged lion. Walk the streets of London as printed on any number of greasy maps from the hands of Cockney hawkers. Watch the roaming buffalo. Get a white-knuckled grip on an aluminum frame underhanging a garish triangle of nylon as you glide over Oahu. Tour scenic Everest, a Kodak moment guaranteed every 1,000 feet. Visit Canada and leave as quickly as possible.

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of this. These are all valid thrills and genuine enrichment. In my current state of mind, however, it all strikes me as somehow tawdry. Cheap. Why can't you do any of that on your own? Why can't you put together your own ragged glider from wood bound with fronds and pounded reedcloth? It worked for the Ewoks, didn't it?

Well, because then you'd get killed. Is that what's irritating me? The fear of death? To be sure, I have an AVERSION to death, but how afraid of it am I? I don't actually know. The closest I usually come to death is standing on precipices that would kill me if I suddenly hurtled myself off into space with a jaunty "Woo-hoo-hoo!" and the occasional vehicular brush with destiny.

Is driving an adventure? Thinking about it outside the context of hundreds of millions of people driving all over God's green earth every waking moment from here to Eternity, it's a risky and nearly insane proposition. Here's this little metal box with a few gallons of explosives inside that's going to hurtle along smooth stretches of pulped stone and tar at speeds fast enough to atomize anything it comes into contact with. You're going to climb inside and attempt to steer this flaming coffin as it roars along a dense column of other boxes, all of you weaving around, stopping every arbitrary distance or so and then flaming back into life, and if your pod ever so much as brushes another at the right angle your fragile little corpus will become like as to the jelly center of a doughnut which has been fired from a mass driver into a brick wall.

Sure, in that context, it sounds kind of insane. But how ELSE are you supposed to get to the ice cream store that's five miles away before it closes in twenty minutes?

For all its inherent insanity and risk to life and limb, vehicular travel of all sorts has really become too prevalent to count as an adventure. We motor around in coffins powered by flaming dinosaurs and we rocket into the sky in tubes of brushed aluminum that are just a blown gasket away from crushing us into fragments too small for even a dentist to identify. But if society had developed to the point where, for instance, we all got around by diving headfirst down greased chutes thousands of feet long after climbing towering rickety ladders, that wouldn't seem adventuresome by the fifth generation or so, either.

Repetition. Repetition. Repetition is another problem with the quest for adventure. If you're a history major or anyone else who is vaguely aware of the sheer overwhelming ungodly volume of people there are currently residing on this world, and moreover, how long that this has been the case, then you begin to realize that there is very little you can do that no one else has done before, or in fact that no one else is doing right at that moment.

Our friend Platypus has taken us to Fort Worden several times since our arrival in Port Townsend, and it has never failed to be entertaining. From the sprawling fortifications lining the beachfront, run through with tunnels and internal bomb-proofed bunkers to the massive gun-mounts and spotlight tracks up on the cliffside, the Fort is positively rife with dangerous things to climb, graffiti of all stripes, chutes to drop into, and little enclosures to poke about in. It is also rife with rubberneckers, children, and drunkards who seem to be having a good time doing essentially the same things I am doing. I cannot, however, help but harbor the thought that they are not enjoying the Fort as deeply as I am, and are in fact merely hindrances to my adventure. Bah. No matter where I go and how much fun I have, my questing spirit must always be plagued with the feeling that this has been done before.

I know precisely how Millie felt when she was determined to be doing something that no one else in the world was doing right at that moment. It's much harder than it looks. You're not the only person reading Diaryland pages with a pickle up your nose and two rabid weasels tied to your feet. Trust me. I should've used a smaller pickle.

Okay, wait a minute. The perils of finding adventure aside, does anyone know, even remotely, what "Pop Goes the Weasel" actually means? The best attempt at an explanation I've ever seen was a bizarre bit of madness about "weasel" being rhyming slang for "coat", since "coat" rhymes with "stoat", and "monkey" meaning "uncle" somehow, which was an affectionate term for pawnbrokers, and "pop" was slang for pawning something. And mulberries are what silkworms feed on. So a pawnbroker chases a coat around something silkworms feed on, thinking it is fun, until the coat is pawned. A penny for a spool of thread, a penny for a needle, that's the way the money goes, and then your coat gets pawned. I'm just not buying it.

Anyway, yes. Either adventure has become commercialized, generalized, or tainted by the sheer weight of the world and that hoary old fear that there is nothing to do that hasn't been done before. All the maps have been explored to the extent that there are no longer any areas marked "Here There be Dragons". There are no more frontiersmen, no more gentlemen explorers, no more privateers in lonely seas, no Dark Continent. Except for perhaps the center of Papua-New Guinea and a few other bits of the 'nesias, and some of the more barren parts of Antarctica, the world is an open book. Hell, you can download satellite views of any GPS coordinates you care to name for a modest fee. The world is FULL of GPS coordinates.

And here I am, wanting adventure.

So I'm left with no choice but to make my own. If I can't be a gentleman adventurer, I'll have to be a gentleman bandit. If I can't be a great cartographer, I'll have to be a rogue scholar. If I can't find the Northwest Passage, I'll have to be a pirate.

Or, daresay, a freebooter.

There's an adventure that will never fail. A little touch of the illicit, a whiff of gaol and bobbies at your heels as you dodge over the garden wall. Ahhh, a little dance among the twilight shadows of the other side of the law. The perfect drug.

And I suppose that just because there's nowhere someone hasn't been before doesn't mean that I can't go there and do things that haven't been DONE there yet. I can play a game of Chez Geek in the Hall of Nefertiti. I can crack open a bottle of Cold Duck in St. Peter's Basilica. I can stage an impromptu acapella performance of old Marx Brothers tunes at the Floating Market. I can practice my firebreathing on the slopes of Mount Minto. I can start a pie fight with the Swiss Guard.

Or, I suppose, if I wanted to take the easy way out, I can just take pleasure in experiencing the adventures the world has to offer in a way that no one in history has been able to match, and that no one in the future can hope to duplicate ... through my own two eyes.

Ahhh, but that's not nearly as much fun as a pie fight with the Swiss Guard. Or plotting to steal the Mayan Codex.

All right. I feel a little better. Perhaps there are adventures to be had. Illicit, absurd, or simply philosophical.

Hmmm. That might be the first time that I've actually successfully purged myself of doubt within the course of a single spate of writing. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Okay, so it didn't appear to take that long. Mabye my writing is simply that powerful. Or maybe I was just bored.

Maybe later I can tell you about my crippling fear of medical care and afterwards feel confident enough to go get voluntary hernia surgery.

Now if only I could figure out what to do about the damned weasels.

- Pop goes the \/\/heel

"A penny for a spool of thread, a nickel for a weasel ..." - Flaming Carrot

*****

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