Travels with Pops

A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the High School Cafeteria...

Well, I guess since I haven't gone anywhere in the last day or two, I can't really write about anywhere I've traveled, thereby giving myself a reason to shamelessly post pictures of places I've already been to (this theoretically is not the reason why a person would want to read a "travel blog" -  afterall, they could simply look thru my old facebook pictures and get bored and want to shoot themselves like Hemingway or David Foster Wallace, but not David Rains Wallace who wrote some really cool books about the outdoors and is still out there cooking along for all I know)
So instead, it occurred to me on my daily journey to the school cafeteria that I could simply extend the definition of the title of my travel blog to include a) mental journeys I enjoy/endure, and b) travels that other people have gone on that I read about. In other words, I gave myself permission to write about pretty much anything. Myself is good to me like that sometimes)

(BTW: Feel free to discontinue reading my blog at this point in time)

For instance: I accidentally surfed into David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again,"on the web again today. I'd heard of Wallace and actually picked up one of his books a while ago and read a few pages, got bored.  Not so with "A Supposedly Fun Thing." He hooked me the way I allegedly hooked the side of my uncle's head when we were fishing in Canada when I was a child (since this is a travel blog, I'm going to limit myself to travel-related metaphors) Wallace's famous essay is a description of his experience on a week-long Caribbean cruise. Now for those of you who have actually heard of David Foster Wallace, you'll probably, at this point, accuse me of trying to copy his technique. And I admit that, yes, that's probably what I'm doing (or at least he's given me a good old dose of inspiration, no matter how much he reminds of NYCBikeSnob or Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Robbins or Holden Caulfield or an essay written by one of my sophomores). Fortunately for you,  I will resist stealing Wallace's habit of including footnotes at the end of nearly every sentence, however funny I would personally find that to be. Instead, you'll just have to put up with my irritating overuse of dashes and parenthesis (which is really irritating - isn't it?)
Anyway, I'm only a few pages into the essay and I already feel about cruise ships the same way I feel about David Foster Wallace. I'll be depressingly blunt: the guy killed himself a few years ago. So why would anybody in their right mind want to read anything he has to say about life? And yet, because the guy is so funny and the essay is so well-written, I'm gonna read the whole thing today, ignoring other more important things I ought to be doing, such as grading sophomore essays. It's the same for cruise ships: he makes the whole exercise seem so completely, mind-numbingly no fun, that I can never imagine myself blowing a couple thousand dollars (that I don't currently have) to spend a week aboard one. And yet, what could possibly be no fun about spending a week floating on the ocean, stopping at exotic ports of call and eating something other than frozen pizzas for dinner?? I want to confirm for myself that it was Wallace himself who was to blame for the dreadful experience, not the cruise: he was no fun, and I don't want to be no fun, so someday I just might find myself on a cruise, to find out what I've been missing. Hell, I went to the Grand Canyon and had a good time, took a lot of pictures, and talk about it as much as I talk about Tulum.
(the astute reader will detect the shameless opportunity I've taken in that last sentence to link up some of my old facebook photos.
Anyway, I'm plunging into the "uterine warmth" of Wallace's essay now. I'll let you know how it feels.