Cabbages and Kings...

Travel, cell phones, cartoon worlds and many other things

Some things take longer to tumble down than others

Traveling

I am home from traveling, at least the kind where you move your body around in space. Such a lot of effort/time/cost to move my body from one lovely place to another. I can feel/see so many of the physical places I have been. They are still there, and I am here. This feels strange, and sad.

All these places where grass grows, trees move in the breeze, people and their dogs walk on paths, peacocks fly over fences and spread their tails, wild garlic and bluebells mingle, where ancient buildings rub shoulders with the new, where people I love come and go, are inside me now.

A magnificent creation by the universal artist…

These visceral memories are like remembering the past—they are the past, and yet what I am experiencing is the awareness that they exist in this moment, and I could still be in these places, but I am not.

Our bodies can only be in one place at a time. Perhaps this is also true for consciousness, and yet the mind’s relative freedom from physicality means that time functions differently. It feels as though we can travel in a blink from one place to another, or be in many places at once.

Perhaps a day will come when, “Beam me up, Scotty” will be a common experience; when we can move our bodies through the present as easily as we now move our voice and image.

Speaking of the present…

I had a big revelation about the comic strip/graphic novel I am working on. I’ve always seen it as taking place in the ‘sort of’ present. I recently realized that it has to be set a little bit in the past—not so much as to seem like a period piece, just long enough ago that every single person does not have a cell phone that they stare at half the day.

I’ve noticed in some TV shows that are set in the very present present how much cell phones are practically part of the cast and/or the plot. How can they not be when they are appendages to peoples’ bodies?

So my story has to be set somewhere back in the early 2000s. I don’t think I have to make a big deal out of it or try to place it too specifically, I just want to leave cell phones out of it. There are many movies and TV shows made in the 2000s which we perceive as set in the present, even though they are pre-ubiquitous cell phones.

I watched a movie last night that was made in 2015 and was set in that present, in rural Maine, where presumably people were a little less attached to their tech than in the big city. Cell phones were used a few times to make calls but were no more invasive than the use of landlines would be. That works for me. It’s the cell phone as body part that I want to avoid.

A little more complaining about cell phones…

On my travels I went on airplanes, trains, subways and buses. The people who weren’t looking at their cells phones were few. I thought about getting a bunch of cards made that said something like “Congratulations, you are the only person in this subway car who isn’t looking at a cell phone!” and handing them out.

Please don’t think I’m pointing the finger at anyone other than myself. I spend far too much time anesthetizing myself by staring at weird random mental and emotional detritus emanating from a little lit-up box. It’s so relaxing. I’m not thinking about anything significant that matters to me; I’m floating contentedly down a stream of content.

Two lads enjoying a museum…

How to travel without leaving home…

When I was a teenager, travel was my therapy. All that external stimulus forced me out of my depression. And travel still works as a way to get jogged out of the entropy of habit, of the familiar. But when I want to stay in one place and work on a challenging project, I need to find my jogging, my inspiration, my think different, some other way. Certain drugs can be helpful, but the real impetus is a mysterious blend of desire and confidence. Not confidence in an end product or result; confidence in the desire itself, confidence that the desire is worthy, and worth following. It is a confidence in self, the big self, that can function as a very particular conduit.

They don’t teach this in schools. I wish they did. Whatever else schools teach, they can’t help but teach children to do what is asked of them by others, not what is asked of them by themselves.

Doing what is asked of me by others and what is asked of me by myself is always a fluid back and forth. The ‘myself’ part can feel like being asked by something beyond myself, and yet I can’t let that sense get contaminated by ego. Most of the worst people in the world think that God or similar wants them to do whatever awful things they are doing.

The cure, or at least the vaccine against this, is the present, where I’d rather be. The present has no use for deluded fools who don’t see their own ephemeral vulnerability and incompleteness. The present IS, and when we are in the present, we are too, feeling, experiencing, wondering, loving. Joy in the loins, the root chakra. That is the place I want to travel to as much as possible, even if I can’t stay for long.