9 September 2004

Ahem.

*tap tap tap*

Is this thing on?

Hello?

Ah, we’re transmitting? Right. Let’s do this.

nat.org is coming to you this evening from the lofty perch of seat 18A, wedged uncomfortably between armrests on Air Canada flight 759, hurtling westward from Toronto to San Francisco.

Seat 18A has little to distinguish it (besides the ordinary distinction of hosting me), except that it is directly behind seat 17A: one of those special exit row seats with extra leg room owing to the non-existence of a seat 16A. And 17A’s smug occupant is reading that awful book, The Alchemist, which I haven’t read but which I have seen recommended by Italian waitresses in Harvard Square dive bars as “life-changing,” and which is therefore only read by men whose lives are rich with manipulative, shallow women, and which is left unfinished by those to whom reading a book is something other than merely proving a point.

(Waitresses who, incidentally, tattoo a Chinese glyph for purity on their chests with no apparent trace of ironic deflection, and who claim birthright entitlement to your miniature statuette imitation of the Winged Victory of Samathrace: a prized memory of visiting museums in Paris with your heiress girlfriend of the time, now a Nun who won’t answer your emails, ferretted off by a spoiled bambina with a mother in Reno and wispy dreams of opening an art gallery in New York.)

Life is too short for bad books, or bad books are too long for short lives; either way, what I’m trying to say is that Seat 18A is the seat of muttering jealousy. That bastard. Taking the good seat and stinking up the place with crap like The Alchemist. Where does he get off?

Same place as me, most likely: San Francisco International Airport.

The last several days saw me in Provo, Utah (Thursday, Friday), Boston MA (Saturday, Sunday), Covington KY (Monday, Tuesday), Boston again (Wednesday), and today in Toronto with my dear friend JP Rosevear (chief monkey on Evolution). The plan was to post photos from each new city during September’s insane travel, to give you a sense of the pace & momentum, but obviously I’m off to a bumpy start, having left my Utah and Kentucky photos in Boston.

Well, better late than never!

JP recommends Coffee Crisp, the elusive Canadian snack treat.

It was awesome to see JP. I was headed west anyway, to California, and he and I hadn’t spent undistracted time working together in a very long time, so I stopped over and saw his kitchen-under-renovation and his wife Tara. JP and I worked most of the afternoon in a cool little restaurant down the street from his house, on the outskirts of Toronto.

But after 21 hours in Canada, enough was enough, right? Time to get back to an airport. Gotta keep moving.

All cities look exactly like this when you land.

A few months ago I was in New York, and in a bar they were playing Dave Mathew’s Band (which, by the way, started up in my home town of Charlottesville, $5 for a ticket to see DMB play at Trax, but I was always doing something with my computer: no time for sweaty music-halls), and it was a particular song — I don’t know the name — which I’d heard before in Cancun with Miguel in 1998, and in Brazil with Alex in January, and probably countless other places, and it seemed boring that the same music played in all the world’s cities. There was a time when you went to a new city and everything sounded different: the language, the music, the birds.

And I’ve been thinking this about airports too. I think the best way to approach a city is probably from the water. I wonder what it would be like to approach a vast, bustling city for the first time from its ocean-facing port? Yeah, that one’s going on the list.

But, probably not on a trip like this one, which will continue to expose the emblems of the Great Global Homogenization, not just a matter of music or airports, but also homogenization of ideas, of roles, of fears, of hopes. In computer networks, too much homogeneity can amplify the impact of a particular flaw in the system: a single virus in a uniform network can bring down every computer. This is true in biological systems too, which is one of the reasons the occasional mutation — and a consequent decrement in homogeneity — seems to work out pretty well in the long run.

And of course this applies to thought too. A monoculture of music, of news and of opinions makes us vulnerable to a bad idea. An entire country consumed by a monoculture can all make the same mistake, all at once, because it lacks the variety of points of view and ideas that might otherwise counteract the antigen. Bad ideas like hatred of other races, or, oh, maybe voting for Bush.

The twenty-lane highway 401 around Toronto.

This year has been pretty heavy on books, and I keep meaning to write up a bunch of reviews, but for now let me just recommend You Shall Know Our Velocity with vigor. I’m looking for suggestions for gripping histories of China and Africa, if anyone has them.