Non Travel Writer

There is a deep seated and somewhat amusing contradiction to this ambition to be a travel writer. Or to write about my travels. It began to occur to me as I watched an episode of Star Trek NG where an alien race reprogrammed Barclay’s brain so he could invent a new propulsion system that would take the starship across 30,000 light years. This was the aliens version of space exploration. They send out probes that bring what they want to explore to them. This had everything in common with the aspect of the Buddha I am most taken with. He sits by the tree and everything, all manner of everything comes to him, to tell stories, to rant, to engage in battle, to perform worthy deeds that all amount to the same thing. He is the center or is at the center of a well of experience, all of which seems to indicate that the strife and ambition of the journey, the struggling, can obscure the point.

Can you begin to see what I am talking about? The irony of wanting to write about travels that in many ways I do not want to take place. The effrontery of the mass transportation system that has evolved for airtravel works completely against the experience I wish to achieve in the places I want to go to. And The thing I most want to do in those places is serve an appetite that runs counter to my ultimate well being. Those grossen portions in Morocco were not as off putting as we both pretended. Morocco is one of the few laces we have travelled where we both gained weight, both because we did not walk as much as we do in other places and because they were so obscenely generous in the amount of food they offered us.

Let me clarify the embarrassing point I am trying to make. I want to sit at home, surrounded by my myriad toys and appetites and have everything come to me. By whatever probes and devices I can concoct I want things to rearrange themselves and invent new ways to reach me, to show me what they are, to come into my house and just chat awhile. Maybe they could bring an interesting dish or two, some local cheese and an amusing local wine. And this has at it’s heart by congenital laziness but it is not wholly a lazy desire. There has to be some reward, so reason for the visitors to want to come at all. I would have to launch some very convincing probes. The writing, perhaps….