Well, you may ask, how did he manage to get through a thousand years of travel before all of this bitching and moaning about how he needs to stay at home to curry his craft? How did anybody put up with him?

Answer: Kathleen did put up with me, so anybody else’s willingness never came up. 

Answer: It was a James Bond-type vanity of abomidable-conceit proportions. When I traveled, I saw myself in some sort of 1960s ad for Scotch, in which I had only three lines: “Put it there,” “Thank you,” and “A Tanquery martini, up with an olive and not too dry.” Everything else was off the menu. I happened to be very good at this. Given these three handy phrases, I could go anywhere on earth and be worshiped by the locals, and I was. Generous tipping didn’t hurt. Even in places where martinis aren’t made from Scotch.

In any case, that’s what travel means to me. It means standing in a foreign hotel room that’s contrived to look like a room in your own home, smiling at somebody who has just carried something heavy across the threshold, and either signing a chit or handing over bills. Insofar as that is what travel is about, I’m very good at it. It doesn’t matter that I care for it even less than the people who are toting barges and lifting bales.

My dream of dreams is to spend a week in New York City. Not the New York City where I live, but the other NYC, where we’d stay in a hotel, dine out every night and see a show (a different show every night) — and that would be that. Then we’d retire to Yorkville, venturing forth only to the odd concert at the Museum. That’s my dream. As the old lady says to Stifler, “Focus!”

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 at 11:54 pm.