DAY INFINITY+INFINITY: DISINDIA

The Sati’s Revenge commits suicide in this, its last entry, by nobly leaping into the death of travel.

Sad readers … do not fear … Pariah Pipher has begun his own blog—The Secular Sadoo—describing in salacious detail his experience of exile in Canada. Become a follower of The Secular Sadoo and you’ll be eligible to win 381 free tickets to Disindia.

http://thesecularsadoo.blogspot.com/


After surviving a wild jeep ride up the Himalayan foothills, 30 of us packed in a space designed for 8, I said to Claire, “You know, that was a way better ride than anything at Canada’s Wonderland.”

“And it only cost us 25 cents.”

“And it lasted almost an hour.”

We knew we were on to something.

Since we travel to acquire new sights, smells, tastes, sounds, feelings, thoughts, and experiences—and yet since this travelling spews endless jet fuel into the atmosphere, ensuring we take far more from the earth than we give to it—The Sati’s Revenge recommends that a vast Indian Theme Park—Disindia—be opened north of Toronto, giving Canadians and northeastern Americans the opportunity to experience India without the typical extensive ecological damage.

Specifically, we recommend the following.

1. Disney Corporation should, without delay, team up with the Government of India and build Disindia on the present Algonquin Provincial Park site. The Ontario and Canadian governments can donate Algonquin as an international goodwill gesture; everyone knows Algonquin’s getting overcrowded and polluted anyway.

2. People with brown skin (nationals) get in for 500 rupees and forever; others (foreigners) enter for an unspecified fee (but not less than 5000 rupees), require a Visa prior to entry, and may stay for a minimum of a week, a maximum of 5 years.

3. Prices within the park will shift based on random and mysterious criteria.

4. The same menu will be at every restaurant; alcohol will never be listed but be occasionally available through unmarked portals.

5. The risk of death to nationals and foreigners will be real and constant. Death will most frequently occur from elephant, camel, car, auto-rickshaw, dog, motorcycle, or poop-slippage and trampling. Dead bodies will be burned at the site of death.

6. Specially themed areas will include Scamville, Noiseville, Godsville, HitYourChildrenville, BurningBodyville, Garbageville, and Poopville. Notwithstanding, there will be garbage, noise, and poop everywhere.

7. Poopville will include a special children’s Pooppark, where children can shoot poop at each other, ride down poopslides, make poopcakes, and generally have a good time.

8. All rides will be long (sometimes days), inexpensive (compared to DisneyWorld), dangerous, and smelly.

9. Since Disindia will be over 7,500 square kilometers in size, transport between various areas can be negotiated with various elephant and camel drivers, all of whom will try to rip everyone off.


The benefits of proceeding with Disindia as soon as possible are tremendous, and include—

1. Eliminates many trans-Atlantic flights and their associated evil emissions.

2. Provides an authentic Indian experience for millions, many of whom wouldn’t be able to experience it otherwise, expanding consciousness, tolerance, and photos.

3. As the Indian government will maintain majority control of Disindia, it can begin moving unemployed Indians from the original India to the authentic Disindia copy of India. Soon, people won’t be able to tell the difference between the original and the copy (indeed, global warming will make the copy the only inhabitable India), the Indian government will move to the copy, and the old India will simply disappear into history (which, with globalization, it's beginning to do anyway).

4. Metaphysically and spiritually, the migration of India to its copy is perfectly aligned with our present phase of evolution: the whole world’s crawling into a screen, one geek at a time; why not a country, to speed things up? Ecological responsibility has a price tag … and if no one really notices, it’s a pretty minor cost.

5. The Disindia model can be used for all other countries--beginning with the Third and Second worlds of course--gradually expanding to even include such monoliths as France and the United States. Eventually, everyone will not only live in but be born into a theme park and heaven will have (finally!) arrived on earth.

DAY INFINITY+3: CANADA EXISTS

Despite the reductionism in a recent blog about movement being the sole reason for travel, we know—as numerous bloggy commentators advised us—there are plausible other motivations. One is perspective: to see—and re-see—one’s homeland as somehow foreign. To see Canada—with all its familiarities—as a strange player on the world's crooked and shifting stage. Certainly if one wishes to be exiled in a context where exile is impossible, this re-seeing is necessary, enabling one to be deported to one’s birthplace … a virtual, purgatorial, and dubious existence that seems appropriately and really unreal.

Naturally, by Canada I mean Toronto; the rest simply doesn’t or shouldn’t exist. (Montreal exists, of course, but Quebec has always wanted to get out of the marriage yet fears the financial implications. Vancouver is basically a recreational ski, boating, and drug resort for disillusioned Torontonians to waste away in; Newfoundland’s a real-life Black Creek Pioneer Village; and the Prairies—along with that alien embarrassment, Stephen Crapper—should join Texas, where they belong. 40% of English Canada lives within an hour’s drive of Toronto and feeds off its inner hip. Toronto is the only livable city in English Canada for the true cosmopolitan; the world knows this—so does every Canadian in their gut.)

So, after visiting Planet India and successfully returning to Planet Canada, exiled here by the gods I tell myself I have constructed (the modern dogma of freedom runs deep) yet cannot escape because of my indelible attachment to them, I make the following observations about my land.

1. Canada is the opposite of India. Whereas India is a great place to visit and a ridiculous place to live, Canada is a great place to live but a tedious place to visit.

2. Unlike almost every other place on earth, the world already lives here, giving one no legitimate reason to travel.

3. Despite its sophistication and wealth, Canada remains a largely provincial and insecure nation. This is true not simply in its politics—irrelevant to everybody but politicians and their sticky hordes of wannabes—but in its culture, which is so desperate to be taken seriously on the world stage it never finds its way out of the washroom cubicle.

4. Unable to commit itself to greatness, it—in true democratic fashion—puts mediocrity in greatness’ clothes, calls mediocrity great due to the fashion, and sometimes gets away with it. This deception is a little bit great.

5. Canadians are the nicest people on the planet. This is wonderful, boring, and horrifying.

6. Perhaps as a result of the combination of the above characteristics, Canada is the world’s first post-modern nation. The fact that nobody knows what post-modernity is is simply a proof of this, as an educated not-knowing is a key attribute of any respectable post-modernity. Unsure that it exists—that it deserves to exist; unmoored from anything that has historically anchored any nation; sentimentally united only by a business that sells donuts and bad coffee, it wobbles along, easily self-satisfied and equally and unconsciously anxious that its self-satisfaction is unjustified.

How do I feel about Canada? I feel about it the way I feel about money or love. It exists.

DAY INFINITY: EVERY TRIP'S A TRIP TO ALICE

A trip never really ends. Not only do you never truly finish unpacking, but people keep demanding stories (a mandatory acquisition of travel these days) until you get so bored telling the slightly embellished ones that only falsehood spouts from your lips; if it's a trip of note, you end up thinking about it until the grave forces you to stop; and a trip's bacteria sufficiently infiltrates your physiology that even your smile changes. Your synapses fire differently. Cats lecture you in calculus.

One does walk in the door, I suppose. But home has become psychically tilted, like a fun house. One might sleep in one's own bed again, with its dubious stains and accustomed smells, but bed has become anywhere and the same one for longer than a few nights seems wrong.

Yeah--it's Toronto, with its familiar sleepy sophistication and competent makeup covering a provincial insecurity. And--migod--it's still Canada and the West. No goats to maneuver around on Yonge Street, no horny horde of beggars, poop, and gods chasing you to the store.

Of course the trip's over.

But come on ... when does anything end (or begin) exactly?

Does love end when she doesn't moan with the same seeming authenticity, when the volume of bile is more than half the cosine of the volume of tenderness, when he walks out the door? When was the light bulb really invented and by whom? By Edison in 1879, as a textbook might say? Ah--check again.

So here I am at the Bain Co-op, where there are cats. In Toronto, where the crap is hidden. In the New World, where polished metal, loud amusements, and quietly desperate therapy suppress the primitive tsunami of life.

I must have returned. I think I've returned. I may have returned. But did Alice ever really wake up?

DAY THIRTY-SIX: THE ANIMAL IS THE MASSAGE

Due to synaptic misfirings--unconscious or otherwise--Claire and I find ourselves stranded in Istanbul and do what one naturally does in Istanbul ... find a Turkish bath and get pummelled. There are the big tourist baths--which charge a 100 liras and are full of the polished and shoed. But there's one we found for 40 where there are no white people and an extended Turkish family just lurks, waitıng for bodies.

The men who massage me are oxen--17 of me could fit in one of their earlobes. They cover me with foam and toss me like a fluffy pancake, holding my ribcage between their thumb and forefinger, slamming me down on the hard marble and laughing theır deep Ottoman laughs. I slink back to my safe hot corner to recover.

Meanwhile Claire is being serviced by closet lesbians who prance heavily around in lace panties, shooting foam at each other, and going places no respectable masseuse would go.

For different reasons, neither of us are quite the same afterwards ... but that's what an Istanbulite bath's all about.

DAY THE IDES OF JOPLIN: IT'S ALL THE SAME FUCKING DAY, MAN

We--glorious comrades of the homo homo sapiens tribe--now live in one city ... the one city we have and are construcitng on this wilting planet. I'm unsure what the city's name is--call it Hope, call it Dream, call it Money, call it Garbage ... it's all okay.

Our city has many neighborhoods: slums; fashion-chic; techno-business-politics; factory-industrial; fortressed wealth; the great family sprawl; SRECS (sex, religion, entertainment, culture, sports--the bread and circuses); and things like infrastructure or lack of it.

We say we go to Manhattan or Bombay, Jakarta or Rio ... but all we really do is walk around in the same neighborhood--our neighborhood. Our familiar neighborhood. If we live in a 4-star suburb, then we travel in 4-star class, stay in 4-star hotels, and gab with 4-star people. If fortressed wealth, then fortressed wealth. If chicy-chic, then chicy-chic.

That's why there's no correlation between the quantity of travel and the quality of consciousness. Bruce Smith-Doofball may have visited every country in the world 40 times but be entirely commonplace, tedious, and narrow-minded. George Eliot can have largely stayed in England her whole life but seen the world. Seen it. (Despite what Nietzsche says about her.)

Why then do we travel, considering the expense, hassles, scatological surprises, and fear of falling into the Atlantic and becoming dental floss for sharks?

Well, there's the envy of course. But this only begs the question--what are people envious of? I mean--don't wash your hands after crapping and you can have diarrhea too.

It can't be the bad photos. Or the jetlag, weird mattresses, weirder toilets, or cancerous tans. And as two great globe-hopping friends told me before I left: people are the same everywhere and (maybe worse) you never escape yourself.

We travel--the origin of envy--for one reason: to feel movement. To participate in the great circulation of molecules we call life. This is what the slum people miss--it's not the new sights (after all, one pile of garbage is much like another)--it's the lack of movement, the sad blank pages in their passports, the very absence of passports ... all lonely reminders of their incarceration in stillness: the modern spiritual horror of horrors.

Ah ... but for the rest of us ... the rush, the rush of energy, the unfurling singing twirling scenes as if you're constantly at the movies--oh yes! in them!--the warp and woof of time in global air travel, the shuffling and being shuffled between queues and throngs like prosthetized bovine. The feeling that you're on a new street in the same neighborhood in the same city. The one city we're madly building together. The city in our minds.

DAY THIRTY-TWO: YOU CAN'T LIVE WITH THEM, PASS THE POTATOES

Despite my best and worst efforts, I've never successfully found my tribe. I've tried the business tribe, the Christian tribe, the techno tribe, the political tribe, the art tribe, the academic tribe, the we-were-naughty-when-we-were-young-but-now-we're-mature-with-jobs-and-relationships tribe, the love tribe, the eco tribe, the social justice tribe, the family tribe ... blaablaa ... finally realizing in my 40s (I'm a slow learner) that I'm atribal--not settling anywhere, exiled without the stigma, status, or physicality of traditional exile. The rootless cosmopolitan who's denied the certainties and self-righteousness of exile by cheap tolerance and air travel, restlessly at home everywhere.

Travelling like this, one bumps into the travelling tribe--a largely under-30 group (Generation A, perhaps), its members merging and separating like plankton, tenously bound on Facebook, trading Lonely Planet secrets, its males sensitive and modest, its females gabbily inoffensive. They have conversations like--

Blue's my favorite color.
No way - blue's my favorite color too.
{high-five's exchanged}
I love blue.
Blue's great.
Blue's the best.
I love blue.

... and ...

I regret having spent so much time in Goa.
I took the 50 hour train to Goa.
I--how do you say it--flewed, but--how do you say it--it was not good decision.
You can bargain the Goa autorickshaws down to 70 rupees from the train station.
Or--how do you say it--69.
{general giggles}

Claire and I have conversations like--

Listen to that Froggie--he's so pompous.
His accent is an instant panty remover.
Panty-schmanty.
There's a blog for you.
The Panty-Schmanty Blog?
Forget that--let's adopt a puppy.
You mean, exploring the relationship between nationality, sexuality, and movement.
You know, amphibians. Froggies are so cute.
What?

(There's also the over-30 crowd, of course: mainly couples more interested in safety than eros, glancing at their watches, with cameras bigger than their fortressed egos.)

Still vastly ignorant and curious about this copulating sub-continent, I look at the Indian tribe looking at me, pawing my whiteness--a symbol of remnant otherness which may very well crumble as India claws its way to globalization and the iPod replaces Ganesh and the crucifix. (I politely exclude the international middle classes--education and money provide us with at least a superficial bond.)

No tribe for me here ... other than what's available at home; the main attraction being voyeurism: peering at a tribe I haven't peered at before, knowing we have almost nothing to say to each other, preparing to return to a pampered land of cold and cloud in a mood of uneasy homelessness ... an attribute, I suppose, of the atribal tribe.

DAY THIRTY: MOMOMOMENTS

Momotastic. Momolicious. Momorrific. Momomazing. Momopendous. Momovely. Momoxcellent. Momovine. Momotific. Transmomo. Momoabulous. Momoubbly. Momolegant. Momoabulous. Momoesque. Momoperlative. Momoanicle. Momoetic. Momoepsi. Momoest. Urmomo. Momooroscope. Momoiphany. Momoepburn. Momoighteous. Momoakespeare. Momoorpse. Momoicked. Momoexy. E-momo. Momoilly. Momoolkien. Momoetty. Momolique. Momotiful. Momoicular. Metamomo. Momomomo momomo momo mo momo moma mama mamo nano momo mo mmmmmmmmm