There are plenty of people who think AI is a bubble, that there’s no there there and people are just chasing it because it’s the current hotness. I think investment dollars are foolishly chasing AI, but I think there’s something behind the curtain. I think AI will be truly transformative. I’m just not currently engaged in any activities that are ripe for transformation. So I’ll continue to use it for travel planning, at which I think it truly excels.

In a spasm of random synapses firing, I asked Google Gemini this: Write a post about indigenous culture in Argentina in the style of Mark Nevelow’s Escape Velocity blog. Honestly, I expected a timed out blank screen. What could AI possibly know about my blog?

In under five seconds it produced this:

OK, first, my day job is safe. That’s identifiably AI slop. Second, that’s laughably brief if it purports to mimic my style. 583 words. I never. But third, there’s an unexpected echo of my voice in there, like AutoTune for words. That surprised me, so my followup question was: Have you been trained on Mark Nevelow’s Escape Velocity blog?

Can you tell me more about the stylistic synthesis you performed?

Well, that last claim is a little self-aggrandizing. But a mathematical analysis of my writing is pretty interesting. To me, at least. And, if you’ve made it this far, obviously to you, too.

I think the first section, Narrative Architecture, is reductive, the result, at best, of a minimal sample size. I feel like there are elements of that structure in the blog, but it’s not a formula I follow. Let me know in the comments below if you think that’s an accurate précis of the blog.

The second section, Character Anchors, isn’t even analysis. It’s just scraping the blog for keywords and repeating them.

The third section, Tone Sliders, is the most interesting. This is where the model did some actual text analysis, and it’s fascinating to see what it extracted about my style.

The thing about sentence length contrast is true. I do rely on both complex and simple sentences. However, the bot has assumed that I do that for rhythmic purposes, which is, again, reductive. The bot understood the what, but missed the why entirely. While there’s an element of rhythm, it has more to do with the idea being expressed, and which structure best suits that idea.

The dense, multi-clause sentences are the linguistic equivalent of a cattle chute, the twists and turns keeping you off guard until the hydraulic hammer comes down at the end. Like that sentence. They are a form of misdirection, allowing the payoff to land from a completely unexpected direction. They are a structural choice, not a rhythmic quirk.

Here are a few examples:

Whereas other ideas lend themselves to a punchier, more telegraphic style. Like that sentence. The words are in service of the ideas, not the other way around.

For example:

The Grit Factor is real. I like to ground my observations in very direct language. Guilty. In another exchange I didn’t copy, Gemini referred to my style as “swear-y.” Which is related to the Grit Factor, and also true. I’m just so fucking proud that I made a robot whose existence is based on predicting the next most likely word in a sentence have to make up a word to describe my writing.

Finally, Self-Deprecation. I think that’s probably fair. My sense of humor has always leaned that way, predicated on the notion that I’d rather take the piss myself rather than leave the opportunity for others. Although I would never stoop to “clumsy Golden Retriever.” I’m better than that.

My takeaway from all of this is that while the actual attempt falls well short of plausible, it’s still pretty fucking impressive. Gemini went outside its corpus to check Escape Velocity in real time, performed a plausible mathematical analysis of my writing style, and produced an example in about five seconds. Given that this was impossible two years ago, one year ago, six months ago, it’s clear where the arc is headed.

But it’s still 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters. It will get better and better at the thing it’s currently doing, but genuine creativity will be a breakthrough of a different order of magnitude.

For shits and giggles, I ran the same questions through Claude and ChatGPT. They both turned out slop similar to Gemini’s output, but neither of them was forthcoming about how they’d done so. ChatGPT made the absurd claim that it hadn’t read any Escape Velocity posts and had inferred the style entirely from the blog’s title. And then went on to enumerate the same things Gemini had noted in terms of sentence length rhythm and narrative structure. Not sure why it felt the need to lie about what it had done.

Claude didn’t claim to learn everything it needed from the blog’s title alone, but neither did it admit to actually reading any of the posts, which it clearly had done. Again, it noted the sentence length rhythm and narrative structure, which it could only have deduced by reading and analyzing some of the posts. Gemini was very upfront on this point.

I didn’t check Grok, which might have been entertaining but which was entirely too Elon-adjacent for my comfort. He literally doesn’t care if you live or die. It’s just another data point. Pass.

And here’s the coda on this screed. Dorothy made our daughter’s wedding dress. The dress is going into storage, and Ruby reached out to Dorothy for some narrative to frame the dress’s origin story.

Dorothy’s reply:

All well and good. Then, perhaps because we’d discussed my AI experiments, Dorothy fed Gemini some information, and this is what it spit out:

As they say, I have notes. But they’re copy editing, not substantive. The truth is that you can measure the value of something like this through the response it elicits. And all three of us cried.

Dorothy: “I was a romantic heroine in a carefully crafted piece of sentimental motherhood propaganda.” And she liked it.

I especially enjoyed “There is barely even language for it.” That’s a pretty spicy meta coming from a word-predicting robot.

I’m not particularly worried that AI is going to eviscerate the arts. I’m writing a novel, and very early in the process, when all I had was a premise, I fed it into ChatGPT to see if it could generate any story arcs that I could use as the seed. It shit out an impressive number of variations on the Hero’s Journey, all regurgitated plot lines mixmastered from extant stories. Not an original idea to its name. That wasn’t surprising. That outcome is practically AI’s mission statement.

I can see movie studios loving it, as it seems like all they want to do is regurgitate plot lines mixmastered from extant movies. AI was practically designed with Hollywood in mind. But it’s going to take a quantum leap in capabilities before AI threatens the creative arts. Thank goodness I’m so old.

It was less about running from and more about running towards. I was ready to launch my real life, and had a partner to help me. Why wait around? For what?

The unintended outcome of all that is that I have never been alone and fully responsible for myself. OK, almost never. While we were divorcing Dorothy worked at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival for a year while I set up shop in San Francisco. One of the reasons we remarried is because neither of us particularly enjoyed our Wanderjahr, although for very different reasons.

Part of that separation involved figuring out whether the problems we were having were worth overcoming or whether there was greener grass elsewhere. In Dorothy’s case, that manifested as dating one of the actors, who eventually proposed marriage. Faced with a specific A/B choice, rather than a generic ballot, Dorothy decided that fixing what was up with us was the best path.

My journey led to the same destination but took an entirely different path. I, too, was committed to exploring the alternatives and applied myself with gusto. I made a date with a different girl every one of the 52 weeks Dorothy and I were separated. You’ll notice a said “made a date,” not “went on a date.” That’s because I was stood up on every single one of those dates. Every. Single. One.

After a year of that, running back to Dorothy, tail tucked between legs and forelock tugged, was a pretty easy call. I’d have done pretty much anything to avoid the future that year portended. Including admitting that I was a dick and that all of our problems were my fault. An admission made at least slightly easier as a result of it being true.

I’ve thought about that year a lot, and the most plausible explanation I’ve come up with is that the first few cancellations were a coincidence, and then I got the yips. I think I gave off an air of flop sweat and desperation that women sensed. Easier to say yes to my face with no intention of following through than to deal with me directly. I suppose if any credit accrues to me at all in this debacle, and it doesn’t, it’s that I kept at it. Long past the point where it made sense to do so, a recurring theme for those following closely.

Over our several hundred years together, Dorothy and I have established pretty clear spheres of influence. I balance the checkbook, she feeds us. I take care of logistics, she makes sure our lives are beautiful. I ignore things, she obsesses about them. Overall, a pretty decent division of labor.

But the thing about being apart for five months is not only that we’ve lost each other’s companionship, but we’ve also lost each other’s labors. I’d have to feed myself. If Dorothy wanted to visit St. Louis, she’d have to figure out how to get there on her own. On the one hand, all part of the Neuroplasticity Tour. Good for us. Personal growth, y’all. On the other hand, oh, that just doesn’t sound fun.

And it wasn’t!

There’s been an element of the solo travel that’s been liberating. We’ve been an us so long that I sometimes think we’re a single organism with the same desires and needs, but that’s pretty clearly stupid. When we have people join us we’re always aware of the triangulation necessary to make sure everyone’s having fun. But we obviously triangulate with one another, even if we do it so gracefully that we’re not fully aware that we’re even doing it.

So the ability to stand up, put on pants, and walk out the door is pretty cool. It’s a lovely freedom, and very difficult not to enjoy. Is it worth giving up Dorothy’s companionship to get there? Not even close. It’s like the difference between finding a quarter on the street and a $100 bill. No comparison. Although it does calibrate Dorothy specifically as $99.75 of value added. Good to have that calculation in the bag.

And there’s the feeling of accomplishment that comes with being fully autonomous and taking care of myself like a grown-up. Finally, I’m a real boy! But it’s fucking exhausting. I feel like I have to be vigilant and mindful about everything, with no one there to back me up. Am I in the swimming pool when it starts raining and thundering? My call as to whether I should get out. Open wound? My job to figure out how to treat it. Has that meat gone bad? That decision is mine alone. It’s so much work staying alive. It really doesn’t seem like a one-person job.

So the real takeaway from all of this is that the solo travel makes sense and we can both manage fine, but not for five months. That’s way too long. But if we did it for a month or two, at most, I think it’s more than just survivable. I think it’s actually incredibly positive. I’d go so far as to say, smart.

When we’re in Chicago we are able to manage time together and apart. We each have interests there that don’t involve the other. It’s balanced. But when we travel, that balance evaporates. By going places where we don’t speak the language, we are the only people we can talk to, creating this tightly bound, hermetically sealed echo chamber. That’s not the only pressure associated with the travel, but I think it’s the big one.

A month or two apart is a tonic for that, making sure that we have enough solo space so that the completely shared space doesn’t feel so claustrophobic. I think by taking that regular short break we’ll be able to sustain the travel part of the year for a longer, healthier period.

The most salutary side effect of divorcing and remarrying was the context shift around foibles. “That thing you do is really annoying and I’m going to have to tolerate it for the rest of my life” is entirely different from “That thing you do is really annoying and it’s a very small price to pay for all of the amazing things about you.” We came back together not because we’d figured out how to eliminate the things we found annoying about one another, but because we’d decided they didn’t matter. We’d intentionally chosen to accept them as the price to get our tickets punched. And you don’t get to be salty about your own decisions.

This experience has been a lot like that, a welcome reminder after all these years that we’re still making choices. For example, most of you know how very, very observant Dorothy is. Nothing gets past her. But in our 24/7 travel bubble, I have been the subject of that scrutiny in a way I’ve found oppressive. Jesus, just… look away for a minute.

But now that I’ve been fully responsible for myself for five months, I’ve recontextualized that scrutiny as labor-saving. If she’s not staring at me and asking whether that new thing is a skin tag, I have to. I now can’t wait to be under her watchful eye again.

Also, I’ve gained about twelve pounds feeding myself. I’m eating out in restaurants way more than I do when we’re together, traveling or home. And if I’m being honest, I’m also eating for comfort. There’s a Dorothy-sized hole in my life which I’ve been convinced can be filled with cake. Now we know how many doughnut holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Enough so that when I was trying on a shirt recently the shopgirl told me that the shirt fit fine, I just needed to lose weight. Ouch.

We were discussing this recently, and Dorothy summed it up in her usual pithy fashion: “I loved you when you left, but I miss you now.” Back atcha.

• Image generated by Google Gemini

Lakes can count, under the right circumstances. But islands are the gold standard, surrounded, as they tend to be, by oceans. We try, at least once per country visited, to spend at least a week (or a month – looking at you, Bali) body-of-water adjacent. Bobbing in a pool is lovely, but it doesn’t hold a candle to bobbing in the ocean. We are committed, unapologetic bobbers.

Which is what makes my current location, George Town, such a disappointment. George Town is on an island, Penang, which doesn’t, between sewage and fatal jellyfish, have a single swimmable beach. Unacceptable! It’s the reason I find myself on Pulau (island) Perhentian Besar (big). Big Perhentian Island, not to be confused with Pulau Perhentian Kecil, Small Perhentian Island.

But here’s the thing about the island and beach trips. They are incredibly fun to do, but not, I think, of particular interest to read about. They feature pictures of beaches, pictures of sunsets, and pictures of fish. The only practical purpose they serve is to make you feel bad that you’re not bobbing in the bathtub-warm waters of a tropical island, like me. And while your envy keeps me warm at night (that, and the tropical weather), I don’t honestly think there’s much in it for you.

So I’ll follow the classical form here, and give you pictures of beaches, sunsets, tropical islands, and fish. It’s the template, and who am I to rail against the constraints of my cage? But most of this post is about AI.

I know, right? Way more excitement than you were expecting. Why? Because as a blogger I am an honorary pundit (the hazing ritual is harsh), and haven’t yet provided my hot take on AI. The Guild contacted me, and they’re not happy. But why here, in a post about tropical bobbing? Because, in a first on our travels, AI brought me to my current location. I am in Pulau Perhentian Besar at all thanks to Google Gemini.

But first, dessert.

After my toe injury, I wasn’t certain a beach junket was actually wise. With my Jiminy Cricket in Chicago, I’d have to navigate avoiding sepsis on my own. I went back to the clinic that had originally treated the wound, but I showed up just as they closed for a long lunch break. I had a scab on my toe still, but it wasn’t swollen or tender to the touch any longer, and I’d scheduled my trip for two full weeks post-incident. It would be fine. I’d be fine. Everything would be fine. So, unburdened by either common sense or knowledge, I took off.

Getting to Pulau Perhentian Besar was a multi-step process. First, fly from George Town to Kota Bharu, on the eastern side of Malaysia. From Khota Baru, a taxi trip of over an hour to the Kuala Besut Jetty. From there a speedboat, which made multiple stops before depositing me at a jetty that led directly to my hotel, The Barat Perhentian Beach Resort.

The Barat is a classically shabby/chic resort. I’m a budget traveler, so I didn’t spring for an ocean view room, which seemed unnecessary. I am 60 seconds from my door to the beach. What I didn’t realize is that those rooms also come with en suite bathrooms. I have my own dedicated bathroom, but it’s a separate room down a hallway.

And exactly what treats does the Barat offer? Bobbing, snorkeling, and hiking. Eating, at the overpriced restaurant. There’s a little strip of resorts all next to one another, so if I tire of the Barat’s overpriced meals, I have other places to get the same overpriced rice-noodles-pizza-sandwiches. To be fair, it’s an island. Everything here arrives by boat, so it shouldn’t be cheap. But it adds up. I’m spending about $35 daily on meals, since there are no non-restaurant options. I’m only here for five days, but I still cringe whenever I settle my bill.

I forgot gaze. I’m on a tropical island, so gazing is also a major activity.

Fun With Wildlife

At one point I swam (OK, walked in shallow water) too close to the rock this pair of black-naped terns called home.

They seemed offended by my presence, and were happy to make certain I understood their feelings. I loved that they didn’t scream until they were right at my head.

In addition to the two bad terns, Barat’s beach offered one very aggressive fish. Territorial like the terns, this pushy little bastard headbutted my calves whenever I ventured onto his lawn. At first I thought it was driftwood, but I never saw any driftwood, and the impact was way more forceful and intentional than something just floating into me. It only occurred in this one spot, and it was a surprisingly creepy sensation. I screamed like a little girl every time. Although it tended to strike from behind, the coward, I did see it once launch a frontal attack to the shin. The hissing gave it away.

Light My Fire

I wasn’t expecting any sort of entertainment, but they offered an evening fire dance performance on the beach. I think it’s required by custom, if not law. It had a very DIY, this-whole-thing-could-blow-at-any-moment vibe. Like maybe I shouldn’t feel deeply attached to my eyebrows. They didn’t seem deeply attached to their pants.

I especially admired the casual smoking while fuel was decanted from one vessel to another. I mean, they were eventually going to light them, but still. I felt… exposed. The whole thing bespoke an exceptionally low TLI (Tort Lawyer Index, calculated as TLs/hectare).

I wasn’t expecting crowd work, but there’s your low TLI at work again.

Truthfully, this was way more entertaining than it had any right to be. And I’m sure their safety protocols were impeccable. What could possibly go wrong?

Snorkeling!

I signed up for a morning trip, 10:00 – 1:00, that stopped at four locations. We’ve been snorkeling a fair amount, so I don’t want to be jaded about it, but it was… OK. I mean, I was snorkeling a Malaysian island in the South China Sea, so it’s hard to complain. It’s like sex. As a general rule, bad sex is still better than no sex, and so it is with snorkeling. This wasn’t even bad snorkeling. It just wasn’t particularly distinguished snorkeling.

It starts, as all good stories do, with beautiful views from the boat.

The first stop was Rawa Island, which produced no good underwater photos, but did provide a classic white sand beach and water so turquoise it made my teeth ache.

Next stop, Tokong Burung, the Temple of Birds.

This offered up some underwater goodness.

Tokong Burung also provided one of the day’s highlights, this beautiful stingray.

Stop #3 was Serenggeh Island which provided the day’s absolute peak, another close encounter with wildlife.

I’d found a broken plastic bottle sitting on the sea floor, so I dove down and retrieved it, like a good boy. What I failed to grasp is that I’d seemed to have taken a key piece, if not the only piece, of Moon Wrasse enrichment infrastructure. As I swam with the bottle in one hand, I was approached by a horde (that’s the collective noun, look it up) of Moon Wrasse, nosing around me much closer than fish are generally prone, to see what I was up to with their toy.

I was very tempted to let go and let it sink back to the bottom, but I just had to play White Savior to those poor, benighted fish, who couldn’t possibly have known what was in their own best interest. Thank goodness I was there to save them from themselves. They will speak of this day, and their encounter with the Great White, to their grandfry.

Although the Moon Wrasse were the standouts, and are kind of my favorite fish anyway, there were other fishes of note.

Parrotfish. Allies, amiright?

The final stop was Nemo Reef. No one calls them clownfish anymore, they’re all Nemo fish. Although truthfully, they may prefer that. Clownfish seems a little disrespectful.

One of my boatmates claimed to have seen a clownfish here, but his photo fell short of dispositive. Myself, not even a hint. I’m not sure our guides even know what one looks like. I think I only swam for about 15 minutes here. Last of four stops and feeling those years. But more pretty turquoise water.

The day left me with an imponderable to ponder: Why are there so many different brands of fish? Why isn’t there just one fish, or maybe a handful at most?

I get why there’s lots of land animals. Different habitats, different diets, different ecological needs. All that creates diversity. But fish all live in the same ocean. OK, maybe a little warmer here, a little cooler there. I know that’s reductionist. Some fish thrive at different depths and different temperatures, and their morphology expresses that. Freshwater fish are often in bounded environments, leading to differentiation in the aquatic equivalent of Madagascar.

But there’s a ridiculous profusion of fish on the shores of this one island, all different shapes, sizes, and colors. All sharing the identical biome and all eating pretty much the same stuff. Why not just one fish here? What drives species differentiation in a common ecological environment?

I know it sounds like I’ve taken a blow to the head, but I’m kind of serious. I don’t normally assign homework, but please fill the comments below with cogent explanations. I could ask Google, but you’re more fun.

Tuna Bay

A theoretical short walk north from the Barat is Tuna Bay, which purports to have coral and fish accessible from its beach without needing a boat. We’d had a walk-in reef experience in Bali, so I was very excited to walk to Tuna Bay and see what was on offer.

I headed north up the beach and found this:

There was another sign that identified this as a “Jungle Trek.” That felt more accurate than the sign that promised it was 15 minutes to Tuna Bay. Because those were the last signs on the hike (path is definitely the wrong word), and the only way you could do it in 15 minutes is if you already knew the route well. Even then, once you were out of the jungle and back on the beach, Tuna Bay was another 10-15 minutes further north.

Was I on the path? Off the path? I deduced at one point that I was off the path because I was pushing my way through nettles that left me bloody, and that just didn’t scream path to me. I finally burst through the jungle to the beach, and was rewarded.

This lovely, secluded cove was still short of Tuna Bay, but I didn’t know that when the jungle finally released me, and the pull of warm ocean water made me forget all about what salt in my wounds would feel like.

I did trek the final mile to Tuna Bay, and there was some coral and some fish. Nothing like Jemeluk Bay in Bali, and well short of the previous day’s underwater extravaganza. I didn’t even bother taking pictures.

The trek back was, if anything, worse than getting there. I followed the signs at the head of the trail and wound up at a dead-end. I circled back to the closest resort and found someone to help. He explained that a tree had fallen across the trail so there was now another, unmarked, entrance to the path. He brought me to the entrance and waved his arm in a compound curve to mimic the direction the path would take.

It’s a good thing he did, because the official path took me to the same dead-end I’d been able to reach from the blocked path. If I hadn’t known to look in the direction of his arm motion I would never have seen the little sub-path forking off to the right, which put me back properly on the trail. I noticed that path mere seconds before I intended to just sit down in the jungle and cry. Good timing!

I stuck with the beach at Barat after that. Right at my feet, and very little bleeding required. The wildlife was a little pushy, but nothing I couldn’t handle.

Revolution #9

What’s the Escape Velocity brand? “Overpromise and underdeliver.” Because I don’t truly have a hot take on AI. To the extent that I have a take at all, I think that there’s an AI investment bubble but not an AI technology bubble. That’s a warm take, at best. Lukewarm, even. Tepid.

One of the things I’ve read that the various AI bots excel at is travel planning. Which just happens to be the most onerous part of our journey. Discounting, of course, learning to butcher a different language at every stop.

The actual practical logistics aren’t that complicated. Once you know where you’re going from where you are, it’s not rocket science to determine the optimal method to get there. A quick stop at Rome2Rio usually answers that question, with a follow-up visit to Skyscanner if air travel is involved. What’s truly complicated is determining where to go in the first place, and secondarily where to stay once we’re there. That’s where I figured AI might provide a boost.

The inability to swim on Penang was the driver. I knew that Langkawi Island was a nearby resort island, and that the best snorkeling in the area was at Pulau Payar Marine Park, in between Penang and Langkawi. I couldn’t find any tours to the Marine Park leaving from Penang, so I figured I’d have to spend a few days on Langkawi in order to get my beach and snorkeling fix. How sad.

I told Google Gemini (a.k.a. Google AI Mode) that I was on Penang, that I wanted to spend a few days on Langkawi so that I could take a day trip to the Marine Park, and that when I wasn’t doing that I wanted to be able to walk from my lodgings directly into the water. How should I get there and where should I stay?

Gemini suggested two specific beach communities that met my criteria and from which I could get to the boat to Pulau Payar, and offered up links to several tour operators. I pointed out that the dock was a good 30 minute drive from the beach communities that had been suggested, and asked if there were any beaches that met my criteria closer to the dock.

That served up a detailed description of the coast around the boat dock, and a firm recommendation that the 30 minute Grab ride was a perfectly reasonable price to pay for the beach stay I craved. I checked one of the tour sites, which said that the Marine Park was closed right now. I went back to Gemini and specifically asked whether Palau Payar was open, and it confessed that it was closed for annual maintenance until the end of the month. First mistake.

It asked if I wanted recommendations on specific hotels at the beaches it had suggested, and I told it that I was still thinking about whether it was worth going to Langkawi if there was no snorkeling available. That produced a detailed list of the pros and cons of going, including a breakdown of all the other activities available besides snorkeling. It followed by asking if I wanted recommendations to other excellent snorkeling sites, like the Perhentian Islands. That was the kind of proactive suggestion I hadn’t been expecting.

I even asked it, since my dates were fungible, if there was any savings to be had by sliding the dates around. I got back a detailed analysis of the seasonal pricing policies for flights, boats, and lodging, and a net out that it didn’t make any difference at all.

It then offered me the ideal way to get to Perhentian, and detailed, to-the-minute logistics. It was a multi-stop process: Grab to airport, flight to Kota Bharu, Grab to Kuala Besut Jetty, speedboat to Pulau Perhentian Besar. It provided logistics in both directions, flight numbers, and precise timing for each of the steps. It even told me how long I’d have for lunch at the jetty before my boat left.

And it was correct to the minute. I stepped off the speedboat onto the jetty at my resort at precisely when it said I would.

I asked it, since my return boat left the dock at 4:00 and checkout at the Barat was at 10:00, how I should spend the time. It provided hour-by-hour suggestions, along with the info that after checkout I could store my luggage in the locked baggage room the Barat had behind the reception desk and use their public shower, so there was no reason I couldn’t swim as part of my post-checkout activities. That intel was incredibly specific and 100% correct.

The only mistakes it made were not flagging the Marine Park as closed until I specifically asked, and some of the pricing. Flights and rooms were slightly more than Gemini had suggested. Which is hardly a surprise, given the current volatility in energy prices. But everything else, down to the level of detail of the specific government access fees and which ones took cash vs. credit card, was completely accurate. While I came to Gemini more for directional guidance than detailed logistics, the quality of the logistics information was impressive.

Not only did it point me to a solution I might not have found on my own, or only found after many hours of keyboard pounding, it saved me countless hours of research. I got through in a couple of hours what would have taken me several days unaided, and it did so with a concierge-level of both service and knowledge.

I lightly fact-checked Gemini’s work, but mostly I just put myself in its metaphorical hands to see what would happen. I’d be on the beach no matter what, so the downside risk to the experiment seemed modest. I have to say that I’m more than pleasantly surprised. AI will be an integral part of our travel planning going forward.

Obviously, I hope, I don’t use AI in any way in the writing of the blog itself*. But the successful Gemini experiment made me curious. So I asked it to write a post about indigenous culture in Argentina in the style of Mark Nevelow’s Escape Velocity blog. Which, to my shock, it was able to do.

Not at all well, thank goodness. My day job is safe. But its attempt to recreate my voice, and the textual analysis of my writing that it performed to do so, was fascinating. I’m going to try the same prompt with the other bots and see what happens. That is a whole post of its own.

On the other hand, we may be new to Chicago, but it’s still fundamentally our culture. It’s less a foreign locale than a new neighborhood, so it’s not clear to me what I might have to say, other than, “Hey! Cool new neighborhood, amiright?” It just doesn’t feel like I have anything interesting to say about Chicago.

As it happened, I was having this very conversation with my sister, Nef, and my niece, Amber, as we walked to a downtown protest about Trump sending ICE and troops to Chicago. Spoiler: the demonstrators were opposed. I basically laid out the argument above, to have them push back that they thought the blog was about something else entirely. I don’t remember what, exactly, as I was confused as to whether I was supposed to be offended that someone else was defining my intentions as a writer or chagrined that I didn’t seem to be doing what I thought I was doing. Regardless, their contention was that their interpretation of the blog’s focus permitted plenty of Chicago reportage.

Then we got to the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ida B. Wells Drive, the gathering spot for the protest, and I realized that they were right. Maybe not regarding my objectives in blogging, but they were certainly correct that Chicago would offer ample blogging opportunities. Looking at the crowd gathered there, I felt as much confusion as to what the natives were doing as I did in any of the more credibly “foreign” places we’ve visited. I was pleasantly surprised to discover how comfortable I felt now that I was baffled. It’s the place I’ve been living the past couple of years, and it feels like home.

As with everywhere else we’ve been, I was struggling to understand the purpose, meaning, and intention of what I was seeing. It just wasn’t clear what we were there to do. Protest, sure, I got that part, but to what end? The desired outcome of this activity wasn’t at all obvious to me.

Which is not to shit all over protests and demonstrations. They’re all we have. But they’re inherently performative, which is why I’ve never attended one before. They’re about expressing anger and outrage, and while I’m certain that expression feels cathartic, it’s not going to directly lead to anything changing. Unless we deploy the Kathmandu method, which didn’t seem to be on the menu. Absent that, which I’m also certain was cathartic, the best a protest can do is let people know that other people are outraged. And if enough people know that enough other people are outraged, A Change Is Gonna Come, I guess. It all feels very abstract.

This particular protest also felt super chill. As this was Baby’s First Protest, Amber prepped me on the walk over, letting me know that I would be seeing more police than I had ever seen in my life.

Or not.

This was about it. There was no presence at all at the plaza, and maybe a couple of bike cops at each intersection on the march, clearly meant to manage traffic rather than keep the peace. No riot shields in phalanxes, no truncheons at the ready, no water cannons poised to gently nudge miscreants back to the path of righteousness. Just… traffic control.

It was, if I’m being honest, a little bit of a letdown.

I think maybe it was because, in an alignment unlikely to reoccur, the cops and protestors were on the same side. Nobody wanted a massive ICE presence or troop deployment. The citizens because, “How dare you?” and the cops because, “Hey! Brutalizing Chicago’s citizens is our thing! Stay in your lane.” Still, the absence of water cannons and beatings was probably a net positive. However it came about.

The result was a vibe more Lollapalooza than Watts Riots. There was marching and chanting of slogans and waving of signs. One of the chants sounded like “Trump loves donuts,” which, sadly, it was not. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t have a bullhorn, as that’s certainly the chant I’d have led. So many great reasons for me to not have a bullhorn.

The signs, however, were 100% the highlight of the experience. If you’ve been following along, you know that we always document entertaining examples of local graphic design, and this place was a hotbed, from hand scrawled to elaborately printed. Many of them were clever and funny, but quite a few seemed not fully on point. While the ostensible purpose of the gathering was to protest the Trump administration’s plans to send the military to Chicago to assist ICE deportation efforts, the signage reflected a less focused umbrage.

And there were a ton of signs that just seemed hilariously off the mark. Calls to release the Epstein files. An earnest young woman carrying a handmade sign with the reproductive rights slogan, “Keep Your Hands Off Our Bodies.” An obviously unassailable sentiment, just not particularly related to the stated purpose of the demonstration. And this:

OK.

But my favorite was this:

I apologize for truncating the sign. The full quote is, “First off, fuck your bitch and the clique you claim.” At the time I thought, well, you’re just angry, aren’t you? Not sure about what, but that’s not a happy sentiment. Then I looked it up, and it’s a lyric from a famous 2Pac dis track, Hit ‘Em Up, and that rabbit hole left me more confused than when I thought it was just random.

Hit ‘Em Up is about the West Coast/East Coast beef that eventually took 2Pac’s life, among others. He specifically called out East Coast rappers such as the Notorious B.I.G, Diddy, and Mobb Deep. For being, you know, bad people. And suggesting that the appropriate response to their badness was to fuck they bitches, to be followed by stabbing and shooting. Not of the bitches, of the bad people. Bitches are for fucking, not stabbing and shooting. Go down that path and soon enough you’ll run out of bitches to fuck. No one wants that.

Anyway. A measured, thoughtful, reasonable position. Hard to argue.

But harder to find the thread that connects the quote to the event. Is it a metaphor? Are we 2Pac, and is the Trump administration East Coast rappers? Are we supposed to fuck they bitches? Before stabbing and shooting? If that’s the intention, does the sign carrier understand that we die in the end?

This was more targeted to the rationale of the gathering, but so telegraphic I had to decode it for our group.

I can’t begin to tell you how I knew this, but the sign refers to Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which defines the requirement for soldiers to follow orders, but provides an affirmative defense for failing to do so if the order was illegal. That’s a subtle, perfectly targeted argument that, maybe, could have been made a tad more obvious.

And these are just funny.

I’m glad I went, because we brought the Trump administration to its knees, and about damn time he faced the consequences of collective action. Next up: climate change. Or vaccines. Or tariffs. Or extrajudicial killings.

No wonder those signs were stuffed.

We failed to account for two things. At least. The first was that if we were committed to “traveling until it was no longer fun,” what that really meant is that we were playing a game of chicken with our mental health. Neither of us would want to be the first to admit defeat, so one of us would wind up going way past not fun and straight into meltdown. Not good.

The second thing we’d failed to account for was that we’d be spending every waking moment together, sharing exactly the same experiences, and with no one to talk to except the occasional Zoom friend. That was an entirely more claustrophobic effect than we’d anticipated. Also not good.

That’s why we picked up an apartment in Chicago last year and spent six months in the US settling into it. We figured it would act as an escape valve, allowing us to go home when things got to be too much on the road. Our plan was for nine months of travel and three months in Chicago. What could possibly go wrong?

This lifestyle requires sacrifices but also, obviously, confers benefits. The problem Dorothy and I have had since Day One is that those sacrifices and benefits impact us asymmetrically. Dorothy values more highly what she’s had to give up than I value what I’ve lost, and I value what’s been gained more than she does. So, good for me, but that means that this whole endeavor has been built on the back of Dorothy’s goodwill. Which is almost infinite. But not quite.

The things Dorothy has had to give up, friendship, community, meaningful work, are things she’s no longer comfortable living without. I, on the other hand, deeply miss my weekly board game night. But I’m coping.

We’d said at the beginning that when the pressures of travel became too great that we’d still leave Chicago for three months over winter. We’d have to be physically unable to leave the apartment before fleeing Chicago’s winter was off the table. So that’s what we’re going to do.

Well, that’s what Dorothy’s going to do. We’ll go somewhere together each winter, but I will travel solo for another chunk of the year. I’m not sure how long or on what cadence, but that’s the plan. If I like traveling alone at all. Dorothy and I have been together 50 years, so I’ve never been alone. I may not like it, or it may be a refreshing smack in the face. It will certainly stretch my skills, as I’ve never had to feed myself before. And I probably won’t notice that something is wrong with me until a limb falls off.

I know for a fact that I’ll find solo traveling inferior to traveling with Dorothy. But I also know that I’ll find solo traveling superior to sitting in Chicago nine months of the year, so I’ll take what I can get. Honestly, I think at this point we’ll both benefit from not sharing every moment together. It’s… a lot.

One of the ways we’ve made fifty years as a couple is by being willing to throw everything in the air and start over. Circumstances change, but most people are way too slow to recognize that different circumstances require different responses. Different input, different output. That’s all that’s going on now, so it’s a thing we’re supremely comfortable doing. We’ll figure it out and get it right.

The current plan is to return to the US in September, after Indonesia. Then I’ll leave around the first of the year (two months in Thailand?), and join up with Dorothy and my sister, Nef, in Uzbekistan for a month. They’ll go back and I’ll keep going (Malaysia & Sri Lanka?) for another couple of months. That will reset the calendar for our snowbird cadence, and I’ll know by the following year what I can handle for solo travel.

Or not. Between now and whenever is then, something else may change that forces another pivot. It’s what we do.

Taken in total, Vietnam’s economic system feels like Western capitalism with some of the Darwinian struggle for survival shaved off. It’s tough to argue that that’s an inherently bad thing. You can debate the particulars, but it hardly seems like a system that threatens our way of life.

Where capital C Communism is felt most strongly here is in the political system, rather than the economic structure, and in a post-colonial nationalism that is the primary justification for that political system. Much like in Cuba, the single-party system is a bulwark against Western fuckery. That’s not a convenient justification, that’s a fact. Multiple political parties would permit dark money to flow in from Western actors who have an economic stake in a compliant government. We may not be blockading Vietnam, as we are Cuba, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t fuck it in a heartbeat if we could.

Economically, the difference between the US and Vietnam is a values-based fork in the capitalist road. We favor rugged individualism, and we’re happy to let you die to prove the point, while Vietnam favors the collective good. That’s on Vietnam’s side of the ledger, in my book. But what about the distinctions between our multi-party free-for-all and Vietnam’s authoritarian one-party rule? It’s not clear that we win that duel, either.

The purported virtues of our system are: transparency – the ability to see and understand how our government functions and makes decisions; accountability – a free press that exposes our government’s failings, allowing voters to hold politicians responsible for their actions; and competition – a marketplace of ideas that allows debate and an informed electorate.

That all seems positively quaint now, doesn’t it? Transparency and accountability have always been in conflict, with government trying to shield its inner workings from prying eyes. That’s been turned up to 11 lately, but it’s hardly new. And we seem out of the habit of holding politicians accountable for their sins. As for the marketplace of ideas, there hasn’t been any genuine conflict since FDR, with both Democrats and Republicans alike faithfully representing the donor class. An oligarchy that cosplays as a Free Market is still an oligarchy.

So how about the evils of Communism? Vietnam’s government criminalizes dissent and has no free press. It is notably corrupt, both at the petty greasing-palms level and at the senior abuse-of-power level. And it makes decisions that have broad impact without input or oversight.

We’ve had the luxury here, as we did in Cuba, of having more access to locals than in many of our destinations. We’ve been able to have pretty frank conversations with our host’s daughter, An Binh, and our guide in Lan Ha Bay, Ryan. An Binh and her mother have been by twice to cook us traditional meals, and on their second visit we asked An Binh if she was comfortable discussing her government. She was.

We asked her about the whole notion of dissent or disagreement, and she seemed genuinely puzzled. Her position was that her government was responsibly acting in its citizen’s interest, so there was no need to disagree or protest. The government passed the laws and it was every citizen’s duty to obey them. Failing to do so is, and she had to look the word up to make sure she got the right English word, reactionary.

There’s a number of ways to look at that belief. You could claim that “Vietnam is just an obedient culture,” but a) there’s no metric you could use to validate that statement, and b) it’s pretty fucking reductive. Like “China has been ruled by emperors for centuries, they’re used to being told what to do.” Kind of insulting, so I’m not inclined to go there. It would be like claiming that the current situation in the US is because “we’re just a lawless culture.” Maybe, kinda, but also, shut the fuck up.

You could claim that it’s the result of lifelong educational indoctrination, and the use of the specific term “reactionary” gets you at least part of the way to that explanation. But it’s not like we don’t use our educational system to indoctrinate the young with specific values. In fact, we fight over what those values should be all the time.

You could chalk it up to a genuine credulousness, but that doesn’t square with the rest of An Binh. She’s a bright, articulate young woman with a good head on her shoulders. I’m hesitant to lob “credulous” in her direction.

Which leaves one with, à la Occam’s Razor, that she was expressing a genuine, considered belief. I’m inclined towards this explanation, as we pushed back gently, explaining that US politicians often acted in self-interest, rather than for the good of their citizens, and that’s why we needed a free press and the right to protest.

We also asked about urban renewal and relocation. Some of the denser parts of the cities lack adequate public services and can only be brought up to safe, modern standards through demolition and rebuilding. Residents get relocated, and we asked An Binh about the tradeoff between the individual right to stay with their communities vs. the state’s right to rebuild according to plan. She explained that in those situations families were compensated, and if you thought your compensation was unfair you could petition for an increase, and even be represented by a lawyer.

But at no point did An Binh question the right of the state to take actions it deems fit for the greater good. And, again, we do the exact same thing. Eminent domain.

Our other data point was our Lan Ha Bay guide, Ryan. We had a discussion with him about the government’s mandated changes to the historic floating village way of life. He was less “everything they do is for our benefit” and more “they make the rules, what are you gonna do?” There’s a little daylight between his position and An Binh’s, but certainly not enough to drive a protest through. We suspect the difference is that Ryan, as a member of the floating village community, has felt the impact of the state’s decisions in ways decidedly less abstract than An Binh, who’s college educated and solidly middle class.

When you look at the scoreboard it’s hard to give a definitive W to the US of A. We have a theoretically vibrant information economy, whose openness makes it prone to propaganda and exploitation. Vietnam has state-owned media that serves as an organ for government propaganda. If that’s not a tie, it’s 51-49 for the US.

Vietnam jails protesters and dissenters, and we practice extraordinary rendition on the street. That’s just a straight-up tie. And, “Yeah, but we just started” is a pretty lame defense.

Economically, we have late-stage capitalism’s death grip on our institutions, while Vietnam has a centrally planned economy. I think that’s a point for the visitors. Also a point, I think, for their stronger commitment to their social safety net. Their system has holes, but so does ours.

Vietnam is noted for its corruption. Thank goodness that never happens in the US. Tie.

Vietnam has single-party rule and the US has multiple parties. But do we? Really? Sure, right now there’s a bigger gap between the Anarchist Party and the Institutionalist Party than we normally enjoy, but over the last almost 100 years they’ve oscillated mildly around an agreed upon middle. If it’s not an actual tie, it’s another 51-49 win for the US.

That scoreboard just isn’t the smackdown we’ve been promised in the Manichean struggle of Light over Dark. It’s just another system, another way of solving problems, the political manifestation of a difference in values.

At the end of the day, while I actually prefer Vietnam’s values over ours, I’m not sure I’d want to live under Vietnam’s system. But I also don’t want to live under ours, as currently configured. The benefits of free speech, a free press, and the right to assemble and protest may seem a little abstract these days, but they’re also the tools we’ll use to put out democracy’s dumpster fire. So I’m kind of attached to them.

I also wouldn’t care to live under a monarchy or a theocracy. But we’ve spent time in both, and they each have something to offer, to teach us about how different approaches can lead to solutions that seem out of our reach. It’s not like demonizing the other has gotten us anywhere useful. Perhaps it’s time to listen instead.

All Things Ho

The story of Communism in Vietnam is the story of Ho Chi Minh. Unlike Castro, who was pushed to Communism by American fuckery, Ho was dyed in the wool. The precursor to the current CPV (Communist Party of Vietnam) was Uncle Ho’s Indochinese Communist Party, which he founded in 1930. A unified Vietnam with a Communist structure was his lifelong dream. He died in 1969, just a few years short of that dream being realized when Sài Gòn fell and the Americans fled in 1975.

Ho is still a revered figure here, for his tenacity in ousting the Japanese, French, and Americans, but also for his humble lifestyle and his teachings. More Ataturk than Pol Pot. No one refers to Uncle Stalin. Unless Stalin was their actual uncle.

I’m not an apologist for brutality. In Vietnam’s case, both North and South engaged in repression, assassination, and ruthlessness. Ho’s struggle was both a revolution and a traditional war. Eggs were broken, and I’m not arguing that the tasty omelet made it all worthwhile. Today, Vietnam is notable for both repression and corruption, not exactly a Denver Omelet of governance.

But the founder of this state is beloved. Maybe nostalgically, as an avatar of a morally simpler time, when independence was an inarguably worthwhile goal that hadn’t yet metastasized into a self-perpetuating regime. Still, it’s pretty tough to walk through a revolution without atrocities clinging to your pants, so you have to give Uncle Ho credit where it’s due. He’s a legit father-of-our-country hero to the Vietnamese people.

Visiting With Uncle

All unbeknownst, we happen to be in Vietnam during the Reunification Day celebration. And not just any Reunification Day, but the 50th anniversary. Sài Gòn fell on 30 April, 1975. They celebrate, as would I, the anniversary of us running away. On top of that, the very next day, 1 May, is International Worker’s Day. We were expecting they’d pull out all the stops for a multi-day holiday. Posters all over the city strongly suggested a shindig.

Which happened. In Ho Chi Minh City. That’s where all the military parades and spectacles took place.

Hà Nội, not so much. A fifteen minute fireworks show on 27 April, and a list of all the cool cultural exhibitions in the city, none of which were staged especially for the holiday. We felt a little gypped, Hà Nội being the capital and all. Admittedly, it’s the celebration of Ho Chi Minh City/Sài Gòn falling, but that was kind of the North’s handiwork.

This was as close as we got to a parade. Which is nothing to sniff at. I just think it would have been enhanced with a phalanx of tanks and soldiers. So sue me.

It was especially disappointing after working so hard to get to Cuba for International Worker’s Day in 2023 only to have the parade cancelled due to gas shortages. Whatever. We were in Ho’s home town, and we’d make the most of it. His mausoleum, the Ho Chi Minh Museum, and the restored stilt house that he lived in are all located together in a lovely park. If there weren’t going to be parades, we’d pay our respects in person.

As it happens, the grounds are really beautiful, which is a good thing, as both the mausoleum and museum were closed. The museum because we went on a Monday and we’re stupid. The mausoleum is also closed on Mondays, but we asked, and it wasn’t going to be open Tuesday, either. We’d read that Uncle is shipped to Russia for a couple of months every year to have his oil changed and tires rotated before going back on display, and that’s what we think was going on.

At least Uncle’s residence, the stilt house, was open. We would not leave empty handed.

The residence is gorgeous. Beautiful hardwood construction, open and airy and light, with the pond right beside it. I’d live in that house in a heartbeat.

The grounds also included the Presidential Palace. I’m not sure if that was also closed on Monday or if it’s just not open to the public, but it was off limits while we were there. There are gardens, all ridiculously well manicured, food stalls, and souvenir shops dotted about. We saw this in one of the gift shops, which briefly inspired in us a desire to be grandparents. I think it’s gone now. But seriously. How could you not crave a small creature to wear one of these?

The other highlight was a series of cartoons explaining the concept of karma. This one was labeled #4, and we saw another labeled #1, so we’re guessing that there were two other pentaptychs (look it up) that we missed. Here’s a full set for you. We’ll start with positive karma.

Here’s the vastly more entertaining negative karma.

I hope you enjoyed that. Vote for your favorites in the comments.

And that’s everything you need to know about both Communism and Buddhism. You are entirely welcome.

I think that’s a great question, because it forces us to step back and think about the meta in a way that I don’t usually. I tend to be firmly grounded in the experience and what that experience means, but I haven’t really slowed down to reflect on the big picture.

So, thanks, Whip. It forced Dorothy and I to talk through this topic and have a lively conversation, which is always welcome. On a side note, the last time Whip and I spoke he shared his list of five things he’s learned from world travel, and there was zero overlap in our lists, which I thought was interesting. Beyond that I don’t recall the specifics, because they weren’t about me.

#1) It’s The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine

Empires rise and fall, and so will ours.

Our accidental Cradle of Civilization Tour has provided some unexpected perspective. We’ve been wading through the ruins of successive empires, each of which was certain it would last forever. Hittites gave way to Phoenicians, who were crushed by the Romans, who also outlasted the Greeks, but were superseded by the Byzantines, who were destroyed by the Ottomans. Who eventually became foot stools. Knee bone connected to thigh bone.

Some of those civilizations lasted over 1,000 years, although the Hittites only lasted a few hundred. But they’re all gone. Some died as wizened old codgers rattling out their last breaths and some died as teenagers. Teenagers are stupid. Many get over it, but a few get behind the wheel drunk and don’t make it home.

The US is Hittite young. Are we going to make it to adulthood or are we going to hit the ditch going 100? Right now the ditch is looking like a safe bet, but you know what? None of it matters. We rose, and if we don’t fall now we’ll fall eventually. That may sound like nihilism, but it’s not. As the Buddha said, “All things must pass.” That’s meant to anchor you in a humbling impermanence, a certain graceful sanguinity. Check.

#2) R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Everyone’s culture is beautiful and amazing.

Culture. It’s more than just a Petri dish. And it’s certainly more than lines on a map. It’s food and history and dance and race and geography and clothes and ethnicity and architecture and language and religion and traditions.

I don’t think we understood how fractal culture is. Does the US have a culture? Sure, if hamburgers are a cuisine and self-righteousness is a religion (I say yes to both). Does the South have a culture distinct from US culture? Duh. Does Louisiana have a culture distinct from Georgia? Obviously.

Dorothy and I are Californians, a place that sometimes seems devoid of culture. Rather than feeling steeped in any particular cultural identity I think we grew up thinking of ourselves as generic Americans. Then we moved to New York City, home to a substantial expat community from what seemed like every country on the planet, a concatenation of micro-cultures separated by cross streets rather than a culture of its own. Unless New York’s jacked up version of American Exceptionalism counts as culture (I say it does).

But I don’t know that we appreciated the granularity of culture until we took a road trip from St. Louis down the Mississippi to Louisiana one Christmas. It turns out that reading about the Civil War from the safe confines of California doesn’t prepare you for the place itself, where it’s still a raw, painful wound.

It wasn’t the omnipresence of memorials and museums, it was the way people spoke about their history. What felt like ancient history in high school in California was so present. I toured Edinburgh Castle some years back, and the docent was pretty clear that they’re still pissed about the Reformation, so yeah. The Civil War wasn’t that long ago.

It became hilariously obvious when we toured Vicksburg and then Natchez as we made our way south. In Vicksburg the docent waxed eloquent about the Siege of Vicksburg and how they had held out until the end, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi. He then tossed in a gratuitous observation about Natchez, their neighbors to the south who had just rolled over and surrendered at the first sign of a Union ironclad. I believe he used the expression round heeled.

Then when we toured Natchez the docent spoke admiringly of the wisdom of the city’s leaders who surrendered to the inevitable, leaving Natchez almost entirely intact, allowing us to enjoy the antebellum architecture years later. He then tossed in a gratuitous observation about Vicksburg, which had foolishly held on until the bitterest of ends, leaving the entire city in ruins. I believe he used the expression idiots.

When I mentioned what our Vicksburg guide had said, our Natchez guide laughed and said it was just a little friendly rivalry. Really? That’s not what it sounded like to me. It sounded like a long-running, unresolved argument about morality during wartime. But I’m sure it was just joshin’.

It’s not just that California has a different culture than the South, or that Mississippi has a different culture than Louisiana. It’s that Vicksburg has a different culture than Natchez. And if you zoomed in further, Natchez would most certainly look like a patchwork quilt, not a monoculture.

Maybe we weren’t Southerners, but the Civil War, however poorly taught in California high schools, was still part of our shared history, still part of American culture. When confronted with new information from the local perspective, we had a framework in place that allowed us to understand what we were hearing. Obviously, that’s been missing on our travels. Unwinding culture without any previous knowledge of our setting has been both one of our biggest challenges and our biggest joys.

The challenge is in trying to decode and unravel the various strands that make up a local culture, and the joy is in having any success in the attempt at all. Oaxaca represents one of the best examples of this. At first it seemed to be a monoculture. A distinct, specifically Oaxacan culture, but consistent in its expression. But digging a little deeper, we discovered that 16 different indigenous populations had contributed to the mélange that looked at first like a unitary “Oaxacan” culture. Some parts contributed by Zapotec, some by Mixtec, some by Mazateco…

There’s the cultural fractal again. We saw it at an even more zoomed in level in Tunisia, when I got my Berber tattoo. When we were talking about the meaning of the Berber symbols, my tattoo artist/ethnographer explained that there was no single, agreed upon codex. As she traveled the Sahara documenting tattoos, she found that the same symbol took different meanings in different tribal groups, sometimes only a few miles apart.

And that’s where the rest of the joy comes from, aside from cracking the code itself. There’s an enormous amount of joy in discovering the particulars of a given culture, the meaning and the beauty underlying specific cultural components. Why that pattern is used on ceramics. What that woven rug motif means. What that dance represents…

Here’s what matters: As important as dispassionate observation is to understanding what you’re seeing, you should never forget to let yourself get swept up in the moment. The purpose of beauty is transcendence. Which is everywhere, if you’re looking for it.

#3) Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough

How long you stay somewhere is fundamental to your experience of that place.

We’re clearly not on a tourist cadence on our travels, staying about three months on most of our stops. There are distinct benefits to that cadence, one of which is the perception that we have effectively infinite time. Every day doesn’t have to be packed with adventure. We can have an inside day, house cleaning and reading, and not feel like we’re cheating ourselves of experience. We can get a cold without it feeling like an existential threat to our FUN. It allows us to relax and just live wherever we happen to be.

“Just living” in that way also brings us closer to the normal daily rhythms of local life wherever we are. We’re never going to truly experience a place the way locals do, but we get dramatically closer in three months than we would on a ten day tourist junket. Marinating in local life, and not just slamming the tourist hot spots, is part of what makes this such a lovely, profound experience.

But I think the most salient benefit of the time we spend in each location is related to the previous point about decoding culture. That process requires moving slowly, listening, researching, processing… It takes time to figure out how the puzzle pieces fit together. We were in Mexico for over four months before I could plausibly explain the differences in shopping patterns between Mexico and the US.

Three months isn’t enough to make us hardcore experts on local culture, prepared to write a book on the subject. Unless a blog is just a very slow book. But it’s enough to tease out some interesting connections and get a deeper understanding of a place than is possible on a tourist cadence.

#4) War! What’s It Good For? Lining Colonialist’s Pockets. Uh!

Colonialism has a longer history than I thought.

I like to think that one of the privileges of being an American is the right to a blinkered, narrow view of history. We’re only 200 or so years old and we’re awesome, so nothing that happened before us could possibly matter. Right?

When I think of colonialism, which is often, I think of the ravages of the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. I knew that Western European colonialism stretched back earlier, but my familiarity was with its 18th century heyday. What I like to think of as the Golden Age of Colonialism.

Imagine my surprise, as we traveled the world and partook of different cultures, to learn that colonialism has its own rich history going back to the earliest city-states. A lack of respect for borders may be one of our innate capabilities as humans. Maybe prostitution is only the world’s second oldest profession. After fuckery.

Phoenicians colonized the North African coast in 900 BC. Greece colonized not only other city-states in modern day Greece, but also in Italy and North Africa as far back as 800 BC. By 200 BC Rome had colonized the rest of Italy, and over the next 200 years added Greece, Spain, France, Britain, a chunk of the Middle East, and whatever was left over in North Africa after they beat the shit out of the Phoenicians.

And it just keeps going. The Arabs were big time colonizers, peaking between the 8th to 12th centuries. By the 1400s the Ottomans had turned colonization into administrative performance art, allowing the Western Europeans to offer a philosophical rebuttal anchored in brutality.

And while it’s obvious, it’s worth stating that every colonist at every point throughout history engaged in slavery. I certainly thought of slavery primarily in the context of the 18th century slave trade, and not as an historical constant, but you can blame my California high school for that.

I’m not sure if it’s comforting to know that colonialism has been with us all along and isn’t just something the French made up because they’re French. But it’s certainly eye opening to confront the scars that exist, at one level or another, just about everywhere. It’s one thing to be in Morocco, where there are still people alive today who lived under French colonial rule, and another to be in Tunisia and hear Berbers refer to the predations of Arab colonizers, who conquered the region in 647.

It’s been with us forever, and it never really goes away.

#5) Land of 1000 Dances

There are different models for being successful, as both individuals and nations.

Every place we’ve been we’ve seen some component of culture or behavior or civic life that was a) different than how we do things in the US of A; b) admirable, and c) generally tied up with other things that weren’t so swell. A way of life can be something we wouldn’t want to live under (single party political rule, theocracy…) and still have positive elements.

We have seen countless examples. Here are just a few…

Same Sex Friendship

As we traveled through Muslim countries, we were shocked by the extent to which same sex friendship was expressed physically. Men hugged one another, walked hand in hand or arms around shoulders, came in close for conversation, and generally behaved in ways that would be interpreted as gay in the US. Same for women. Friends reveled in one another’s company without having to worry about policing their perimeters.

We thought hard about how states that were so hostile to homosexuality could have fostered an environment in which same sex friends felt they had license to express their feelings for one another physically. “Homosexual activity” is illegal in Morocco and Tunisia, and while there are no laws against it in Turkey, LGBTQ citizens enjoy no legal protections from discrimination.

Sadly, the only explanation we could come up with is that same-gender attraction is so taboo in those countries that no real gay couples would ever risk public displays of affection. Thus, any such displays must, by definition, be platonic.

It would be a pure delight if same sex friends in the US felt comfortable expressing their affection physically, instead of trimming their sails to avoid the appearance of homosexuality. I think it would dramatically relax our culture. But I’d hate to think that the only route to that outcome went through violent suppression of LQBTQ+ rights.

Embedding Faith In Daily Life

One of the things I hate most about the US is the centrality of religion in our culture, and how that manifests as a particularly curdled piousness and hypocrisy. We love to proudly proclaim our religious bona fides while giving the thinnest of lip service to the values upon which those religions are built. We’ll fight to the death to make sure the town square has Christmas decorations, but god help you if you expect us to exhibit actual charity, compassion, or humility.

Over 99% of the populations of Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia are Muslim. While Turkey is a secular state, Islam is the official state religion of both Morocco and Tunisia. None of these countries is run by priests, the technical definition of a theocracy, but civic life is absolutely driven by religious concerns and requirements.

And yet…

Where public expressions of faith in the US seem largely performative, the equivalent expressions in Muslim countries seem heartfelt and genuine. We found the same thing when we visited India, which also weaves deeply religious practices into daily life. These are people who are living their faith as an integral part of their lives, not sinning six days a week and begging for forgiveness on the seventh. There’s something truly beautiful and graceful about that.

I don’t want to live in a theocracy. Certainly not the one that wackjob American Christians would like to impose on me. But still, there’s something to be said for a culture that lives its values, even if those values are religious. Not a point of view I ever thought I’d understand.

There Are Valid Reasons For One-Party Rule

Cuba held many surprises, not least of which was the argument it made for the value of single-party rule. I go off at length on this subject here, but the gist is that I had thought that multiparty rule was a bedrock value, a principal of good governance. If Cuba ever converted to a multiparty system, as the US government demands that it do in order to lift the bloqueo, its grand socialist experiment would collapse. Which is, of course, exactly why we’re demanding it.

While that outcome might not seem obvious, the explanation is super simple: The moment there are multiple political parties the US would rush in to financially support the one most prone to do our bidding, turning Cuba into the US colony we have long desired. We would, through illegal means, buy the election and the government. If that sounds paranoid, you’ve never read any Cuban history, and you should. And if that sounds avoidable, I have nothing for you. That level of naiveté is unfixable.

But here’s the thing about Cuba’s single-party rule, which exists entirely to blunt the predations of the US government: it has delivered for its citizens, and, absent the bloqueo, would be thriving. Crime is low, the streets are safe, education is free through university, health care is a right, there’s low infant mortality, and there’s universal literacy. I’m not excusing the crushing of political dissent, just pointing out that Cuba isn’t the Communist hellhole we’re told it is. And to the extent that it’s an economic hellhole, that’s a thing we did to them, not a thing they did to themselves.

Would I like to live under single-party rule? Not at all, but I wouldn’t mind free education through university and universal health care. Besides, we kind of are living under single-party rule. That party is Late-Stage Capitalism, and it brooks very little dissent. But I’ve now seen a plausible argument for actual single-party rule, and I’d have thought that impossible.

Every problem we have in the US has been solved somewhere, although maybe not with methods we’d consider American. We should be able to acknowledge the benefits we see in other societies and at least make an attempt to figure out a way to import the upside while dulling the downside. Obviously, that’s hard to do while everyone’s knees are busy jerking.

At a minimum, though, we should be able to look at other places and admit that while their values might be different than ours, those values often lead to outcomes that seem out of our reach. And wonder, at least for a moment, why that is. Maybe demonizing the other doesn’t get us anywhere but a false sense of moral superiority.

Which beats all hollow actually solving any of our problems.

#6) More, More, More

Bigger Isn’t Always Better (with apologies to Dirk Diggler)

Bonus time! This is the sixth of the five things we’ve learned on our travels.

At one point I dug deep into the differences in shopping patterns between Mexico and the US. While Mexico has big box stores (Ikea, Walmart, Home Depot), they haven’t obliterated everything in their path, as they’ve done in the US. Mexico has somehow managed peaceful coexistence between large and small retail models, as opposed to the winner-take-all, late-stage capitalism death match we enjoy in the US. This has been largely true of our other destinations, as well. Carrefour’s hypermarkets haven’t obliterated local produce stores or neighborhood markets in North Africa and Turkey.

In the US, the Market insists that the opposite of Growth is Decline: if you’re not getting bigger you’re dying. But that’s kind of obviously bullshit. Success doesn’t have to be reduced down to a Manichaean binary. Success can mean Enough, instead of always manically demanding More.

Oaxaca had more eyeglass stores per square foot than I’ve seen anywhere else on the planet. How can they all be successful? By defining success differently than we do. If my store sells six pairs of eyeglasses/day and pays my rent and delivers enough profit to be comfortable, why would I have to purchase my competitors and super-size my business? Where is it written that I must get bigger?

Refusing to buy into the Market’s definition of success does more than just create a retail landscape that’s balanced between large and small businesses in a way that we can’t muster. I honestly believe it makes for a healthier citizenry. Sure, there’s a lot of hustling in those economies, but it’s not like our version of capitalism has granted us a hustle-free existence. But there’s a healthy acknowledgement, I think, that sometimes enough truly is enough. We’re certainly trying to live that way, and have been enjoying the hell out of our distinctly un-American downsizing.

Thanks, Whip!

Dorothy and I really enjoyed the conversation that led to this post, and I hope it’s been an entertaining read. If you liked it, the good parts are Dorothy’s. If not, please blame Whip. I am but a vessel.

That’s certainly how we felt about this adventure. And most of our lives. And it’s absolutely true in the broadest sense. But in the approach we’ve taken in executing this particular escapade, I think we’ve come up short.

Despite the obviously meticulous planning that made what we’re doing even possible, our entire process has been to play it by ear. Where are we going next? We’ll decide when we need to. How will we get along with limited native language skills? We’ll find out. How will we feel? TBD.

What we did know is that we’d each be giving up a lot to do this. What we didn’t know, and couldn’t, is what those losses would feel like and where the dial would land between gain and loss. We’ve both tended to be loosely tethered to place, happy to pack up and move if it seemed convenient or interesting, so we weren’t expecting the absence of home to carry so much weight. In hindsight, there’s a glaring difference between not being attached to a particular home, and not needing a home at all.

Something’s Lost But Something’s Gained…

There’s been an underlying asymmetry to this plan from the very beginning, in the sense that Dorothy and I valued very differently the things we’ve had to give up. We both gave up friends, which I think landed about evenly, probably a little harder on Dorothy, who’s less noticeably sociopathic than I am. Zoom mitigates that a little, but not entirely. Lockdown taught us that Zoom could suffice when there were no other options. And there are definitely no other options while we travel. Three months is a long time to stay somewhere as a tourist, but it’s hardly long enough to make friends.

The real downside here is less about access to our friends than that we are 100% our only companions. We’re experiencing everything together, and it’s a little claustrophobic. One of our ironclad relationship rules is that each of us should have a hobby that doesn’t involve the other. I had board game nights with my friends that Dorothy didn’t join. Dorothy had nights out with her friends that I didn’t attend. But we’re this hermetically sealed unit on our travels, and that’s not healthy. I’ve taken to going on walks by myself one day a week, but all that does for Dorothy is absent me; it doesn’t offer her anything positive in return. Not that the value of my absence should be underestimated.

We both gave up work, which hit with completely disparate impacts. Dorothy gave up satisfying other people’s demands for money, which she’d have to be a psycho to crave. But she misses work in the sense that her entire adult life has been devoted to making things with her hands, and that is largely absent. We travel with a sewing kit, and she has hemmed the curtains in our Airbnb and bought clothes for the fabric and completely recut them and reassembled them by hand. It’s what there is for her to do, and it scratches the itch at least a little. Personally, I find the faint whiff of desperation intoxicating.

I, on the other hand, haven’t enjoyed my work for the past twenty years or so, ever since I started being paid like an adult and stopped being creative. We wouldn’t have the flexibility and freedom to do what we’re doing without the financial base those twenty years built, but I can appreciate the benefits without having to gaslight myself about how much fun it was.

So I’ve happily given up a work life I’d only ever tolerated, while Dorothy is sporting a severe phantom limb where making things is concerned.

And we both gave up Home. More on that in a minute.

What have we each gained to offset our losses? Most obviously, adventure. We’re going places and doing things that are absolutely amazing. However, there’s even a little asymmetry here, as my risk calculations tend to be looser than Dorothy’s. I’m happy to just set off (my motto: What could possibly go wrong?), while Dorothy requires a little gritting of teeth (her motto: It will be fine…). I know not to push too hard and Dorothy knows to let things happen, so while this isn’t a major problem it’s definitely a source of underlying tension.

Dorothy has gained the challenge of settling us in a new place every three months. She has to figure out how to close any gaps in what the Airbnb offers, suss out the local produce and figure out how to feed us, and make sure that our home is as gracious as we can pull off under the circumstances.

The other thing we’ve probably gained is staving off dementia. One of the reasons we chose to gallivant off in the first place was because we knew it would be hard in ways that promote neuroplasticity. We can practically feel that on a daily basis. Our retirement fears were all about becoming smaller and having our lives close in on us. Disaster averted! For now.

The primary thing I’ve gained is this blog. I’ve always written a lot for work, but I’ve seldom been able to write as a pure expression of myself. I not only take pleasure in the act of writing, but the writing forces me to be thoughtful about the places we visit and the things we do, even the pictures I take. I am definitely a more engaged consumer of our experiences because of it. Of course, I could just write a pure travelogue: “We went here and saw this and then we went there and saw that.” But how profoundly uninteresting, for both me and you.

Instead, I want to write about what the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen mean. I want to understand their context, to write about things that aren’t just on the surface. That requires that I’m thinking both while we’re adventuring and while I’m writing. I’m not crafting learned dissertations, but I feel a responsibility to accurately represent what we’re seeing. That’s what made Cuba so painful. The truth underneath the surface was fucked up.

So, on balance. I gave up work I didn’t like in exchange for adventure and the blog. Dorothy gave up friends and making things and home for… adventure and housekeeping?

When we set out, the commitment we made to one another is that we’d stop when it was no longer fun. What we didn’t understand is that, at a practical level, that meant that we’d go until one of us broke. Neither of us want to pull the lever if the other is still having fun, so that means we’d each hold on until the last possible moment before cracking.

That’s an unhealthy dynamic.

We needed to figure out a safety valve, so we could reduce the pressure when necessary without having to completely throw the towel in.

Homeward Bound

As it happens, my sister, Nef, owns two apartments in her Hyde Park Chicago building. Don’t ask. There is no straightforward narrative that ends in “spare apartment.”

We’d already made arrangements to purchase the apartment from her. The idea was that we’d pick up our Final Resting Place for when we were done traveling, lock it in at today’s prices, and rent it out for a little extra income until we careened to a stop.

Since this adventure is all about being responsive and adaptive to whatever’s going on around us, we’re executing a pivot. We’re returning to the US after Tunisia, but we’re returning to truly move into the apartment. We’ll get our things out of storage, do a little renovation, and have a real home.

Our assumption had been that we couldn’t afford to maintain a home and travel, but that’s what spreadsheets are for. We’re paying for our travels out of our Social Security income, and we actually run a surplus every month, even with all of the rugs, pottery, and clothing. You can see our budget here.

We paid cash for the Chicago apartment from the proceeds of selling our St. Louis building, so it only has insurance, taxes, and HOA fees while unoccupied. That load isn’t 100% covered by our travel surplus, but it’s defrayed to the extent that the additional expense isn’t an existential threat. And once set up and furnished, we could rent it out on one of the sabbatical services and bank some profit if we wanted.

What this means is that when we’re having the conversation about where to go next, “home” is now an option. We could travel for six months of the year, nine months, or a full year at a time, as we see fit, knowing that we can tap out and recharge at any time. That will substantially extend how long we can do this. Left as we currently operate, I think we’d have an increasingly shrill year of this left, maximum. With a safety valve installed, we can do this until we’re physically unable, which had been the original plan. It never occurred to me that we’d crack mentally before we broke down physically.

Our son, Sam, is graduating with his MBA in December of this year, so we’re going to stick around for the ceremony before hitting the road again. That gives us more than six months in Chicago to settle in, learn the city, and make a home. A home we’ll be happy to come back to whenever we feel the need.

I’ll write about the move-in and renovation, and I’ll write about Chicago. But then we’ll be back in the saddle and on to more exotic destinations and more interesting blog posts.

Let your home be your mast and not your anchor. — Kahlil Gibran

Our apartment was… an apartment, and our neighborhood was kind of industrial and unattractive. We were blessed with a fonda a few blocks away that made the best tortas we’ve ever had, but that represented the neighborhood’s highlight. Honestly, we never even thought to take pictures.

We arrived a month prior, so that Dorothy had time to complete Ruby’s wedding dress and finish the alterations to Layla’s suit. The best Airbnb we found in San Diego was a 14′ Airstream parked in someone’s driveway for $2,000 for the month. Thus, Rosarito.

How much is Rosarito not a destination? When we walked through customs, the Mexican agent, looking down at our passports, asked how long we were staying. “Un mes.” And where are you staying? “Rosarito.” He looked up, startled, and said, “Rosarito?” Apparently no one has ever voluntarily chosen to go to Rosarito for that long.

It’s just south of Tijuana, but the trip to San Diego was rough. Uber to the border. A bus that goes about 100 yards in 30 minutes, but drops you off right at the US Customs entrance, avoiding the 3-4 hour pedestrian queue. The San Diego trolley, which picks up right at the border and deposits in town. Uber to Ruby’s apartment. Total elapsed time: about three hours.

That was more time and effort than we expected, but we also thought we’d be going back and forth just a few times. As it turns out, we underestimated by a wide margin. In fact, we wound up making the full round trip six times, and sleeping just eight nights in our 30 day Airbnb.

What did we wind up doing in Estados Unidos that kept us out of Mexico for all but eight nights? The Medical-Industrial complex attached itself to me and wouldn’t let go. Truthfully, sometimes it’s hard to tell shark from remora.

Soylent Green Is People!

The actual story about my condition isn’t very interesting. Old person has organ fail, harvesting ensues. Whatever. But before the speculation starts (“I didn’t even know he had a heart”), the organ in question was my gall bladder. A glorified appendix. Although I did learn, while I was in the hospital, that no one seems to have a gall bladder. I would say 80% of the folks in my ward, both patients and visitors, were walking about gall bladder-less. Who knew that every day we walk through a world of ghost gall bladders?

What is arguably of interest, though, is how the Medical-Industrial complex dealt with me, with a little cross-cultural observation thrown in, since this escapade started in Mexico. Let’s dig in, shall we?

We were visiting Dorothy’s parents in Temecula, and as I went to sleep one night, I rolled over and got a sudden sharp pain in my chest. It felt like a muscle pull, so I figured I could ride it out. By the time I figured out it wasn’t a muscle pull I was in so much pain I wasn’t rational, or I’d have awakened Dorothy and had her take me to the ER. Instead, the episode lasted about 35 minutes, and I went to sleep when it passed.

When we woke up in the morning I told Dorothy what had happened (“This is why women live longer than men”), and we set out for urgent care. My blood pressure was fine, blood labs were fine, EKG was fine, but they noticed some inflammation in my lungs. I got a diagnosis of bronchitis, a fistful of meds, and a pat on the back.

I’m pretty sure the bronchitis diagnosis was correct. I’d had a lingering cold in Guanajuato that lasted so long we were taking side bets on when the secondary infection would show up, so bronchitis tracked. But I’ve had bronchitis before, and the chest pain I’d had the night before was nothing like bronchitis. I’ve never had a heart attack, but I imagine one would feel much like what I’d enjoyed the previous evening. However, no lingering effects. No numbness or tingling. No more aphasia than previously. When the pain passed, it was over.

If you’re keeping score, this first episode was September 12th, and the urgent care visit was on the 13th. We’d only planned on visiting in Temecula for a few days, so we headed back to Rosarito after we picked up my new meds. That night I had another episode, again in bed, and thought to check my blood pressure (we’re old, so a blood pressure cuff is part of our travel self-sufficiency kit). I didn’t get it right at the onset, but it was 225/83 about ten minutes in. Pretty alarming. So, off to the ER in Rosarito.

I basically went straight from triage into the ER, where a doctor saw me right away. My blood pressure was still super high, so they gave me a medication, a prescription for high blood pressure medication to fill in the morning, and had me there for observation until my blood pressure dropped and I was stable. I think I was in and out of there in under an hour, and the entire suite of services was under $50. This was retail pricing; we’re not traveling with US-style international medical coverage (I explain how we’re managing health care while we travel here).

So back to our Airbnb, with a quick shoutout to our host. Not only did she tell us which hospital to go to, she called a cab, went with us to the hospital, and waited until we were done, just to make sure her translation services weren’t required. We haven’t had any bad hosts in the last year, and we’ve had some very good ones. But that, that was above and beyond. I’m sorry the rating system tops out at five stars.

Sitting in the apartment, waiting to calm down enough to sleep, and another episode comes on. This time I threw on the blood pressure cuff right away: 265/100-something. When I search to find out how bad that is, Google asks me how I can still type, since most of my organs are about to fail.

Back to the ER, less than an hour after I left. They take me right back in, check my blood pressure, and give me one of the meds I was supposed to start the next morning (different than what they gave me on the first visit). I hang out about 45 minutes until my blood pressure is reliably stable and they send me home again. Without, I feel compelled to note, charging me for the second visit.

The next day I had another minor episode, despite being on the blood pressure meds. It lasted under five minutes, and blood pressure was 156/83. Still bad, but better. I guess. Although it felt like if I was being properly treated I wouldn’t be having any episodes. We thought it best to be on the US side of the medical system, so we returned to Temecula. I swear, I think this is where it went off the rails. I’ll never know for sure, but I honestly believe I’d have been better off under the Mexican health care system.

This takes us to the 15th, with no more episodes and blood pressure mostly in the 110s to 130s, with a few peaks at 147 and 151. On the 16th, although still no episodes of chest pain, my blood pressure was stubbornly high, consistently in the 140s and 150s. So, off to try our luck at a US ER.

Not as smooth an experience as the Rosarito ER, but a similar outcome: a diagnosis of high blood pressure and a different medication. Thank you very kindly, you’re free to go now.

The next day, the 17th, I had two minor episodes, both of which had blood pressure readings in the 160s. Another minor episode on the 18th sent me back to the ER. They ran the same set of blood tests and EKGs they’d run before, and discovered that my liver enzymes had spiked dramatically since my visit two days earlier. And thus we had our culprit: the unassuming gall bladder.

Turns out I, and all of the medical professionals, had assumed that the high blood pressure was causing the chest pain. Rather, gallstones blocking my bile duct were causing the chest pain, and the pain was shooting my blood pressure up. Easy, by-the-books solution: they’d clear out the gallstones and remove the gall bladder to keep them from recurring. It seems that once your gall bladder starts spitting out stones it just can’t stop.

So far, so good. The reason I’m drowning y’all in so much detail, though, is because it’s the foundation on which the next part rests. Because this is where it goes south.

After explaining all this, I’m told they’ll be admitting me to the hospital for the procedures. Which seems sensible only because I don’t know how long this is going to take. I spend my first 24 hours on a gurney in a hallway, because they don’t have room for me anywhere else. Even better, food and water are withheld for that entire 24 hours, because no one can definitively answer the question as to whether it’s OK for me to eat or not. Not even fluids are provided. I can just desiccate in the hallway, if you please.

Extra fun in that first 24 hours: I had blood taken eight times. Despite the fact that I had an IV port hanging off one arm. I finally get an explanation from a nurse: some of the blood needs to be drawn directly (whatever, sure), but mostly it’s because they’re sending phlebotomists to draw blood, who aren’t licensed to access the IV port. Has to be an RN. Every time someone approached me with a needle, I demanded a nurse, so they could use the port. And I still got spiked eight times in that first 24 hours. I had the bruises for weeks.

On Day Two, they finally move me to a group ward. Kind of like a cross between sleepover camp and prison. People just keep showing up or disappearing randomly. But an actual doctor does finally pay a visit. So I ask why, if both upcoming procedures are outpatient (removing the gallstones is endoscopy and removing the gall bladder is laparoscopy), I’m in the hospital at all. I’ve been asymptomatic since checking in, so why don’t I just check out and come back for the outpatient procedures?

Up until this point, the barbarity of the care I’d been provided had seemed site specific. Sure, many hospitals are under the same staffing and space constraints, but my treatment had been specific to those circumstances. If I’d happened to have gone to a hospital without those constraints, in an imaginary world where such a place existed (like Mexico), I wouldn’t have been warehoused in a hallway without food and water.

But the doctor’s response to my seemingly reasonable question cast the whole system in a more sinister light, where my treatment represented something endemic rather than situational. His answer was, sure, I could check out. But it would be Against Medical Advice, meaning that my insurance wouldn’t cover my hospital stay (it turns out that’s not true, but it’s not clear whether that was an intentional falsehood or just the thoughtless repetition of a discredited urban myth). And good luck getting on the schedule for outpatient services. That would be weeks, at best (and don’t forget, I have a wedding to attend on October 6th). So if I actually wanted this thing done and paid for, I should sit tight in the hospital until it happened.

Which I did, because, really, what was my choice? Even so, “until it happened” took five days. I was in the hospital for five days to get two outpatient procedures. And if that wasn’t enough, my gift with purchase was a case of Covid (our first, after all this time), which I gave to both Dorothy and her elderly parents before knowing I had it. We cleared protocol with only a couple of days to spare before Ruby’s wedding.

About That Wedding…

There hasn’t been a lot of pleasure in this story so far (unless you count schadenfreude), so I’m going to take a detour before returning to my previously scheduled screed. We were in San Diego in the first place for my daughter Ruby’s wedding to her partner, Layla. It was very hard to keep our eyes on that ball during all the Sturm und Drang, but that was the actual point of our presence.

And, with apologies to my son and everyone else whose weddings I’ve attended, it was the best wedding I’ve ever attended. Bar none. Ruby and Layla are such a delightful couple, they take so much pleasure in one another’s company, it is impossible to be around them without getting a contact high. Everything about the wedding, which Ruby planned out meticulously over the previous two years (wonder where she gets that from), was perfect.

I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I teared up during the reading of the vows. They were beautiful, heartfelt, genuine, and full of their true playful, loving spirits. We feel… I was going to say “lucky,” or “grateful.” But I think I’ll stick with “we feel.” I’m never unsurprised when it happens.

Here’s a sizzle reel of the wedding, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Don’t Worry, Be Angry…

OK. We were on fire about the medical industry. Let’s not forget why we’re here.

What stood out to me about all this was the difference between the treatment I received in Mexico vs. the US. It’s not a direct comparison, as I only got as far as the high blood pressure diagnosis in Mexico, although I’m certain if I’d stayed in that system they’d have found the gallstones. After all, my first trip to a US ER also ended with a high blood pressure diagnosis.

The Mexican system seems to be driven to maximize efficiency. My first experience with the Mexican healthcare system was for kidney stones in Oaxaca, but there was a part of that story I didn’t share at the time. The doctor had prescribed me 15 pills of one of the medications, but when I got to the pharmacy they were only available in pre-packs of ten each. So they gave me two packs, a total of 20 pills. Five more than I’d been prescribed.

The horror! No one in the healthcare system in the US would tolerate such sloppiness. To say nothing of our broader social expectations that no one should get one more thing than they’re entitled to. We spend more on the mechanisms to make sure that no one who hasn’t earned it gets safety net coverage than we would if we just approved everyone who applied. We’re just dicks.

The US system, unlike Mexico’s, is absolutely, completely, heroically indifferent to efficiency. Frankly, it seems bipolar. On the one hand, the system’s underlying values seem to be accuracy and certainty, which feels like a response to tort risk. We over prescribe, over order, and over treat, to make sure there’s no potential liability. Unnecessary tests and procedures are a major component of our overall healthcare spending (over $200 billion/year by some accounts).

On the other hand, we also under prescribe, under order, and under treat. How often have you had a health complaint effectively ignored by a provider or, at best, under explored? The answer to that depends quite a bit on who you are. White and male? Probably doesn’t happen much. Not white and male? Share your stories in the Comments.

Maybe it’s the difference between being in the hospital (over treating) and seeing your personal doctor (under treating). Maybe the incentives built into our system are in conflict with one another, and sometimes lurch one way, sometimes another. Maybe the US system is just broken in random ways.

So what happens when you value efficiency over certainty? You get pre-packs of meds and over-delivery. There’s no one in a Mexican pharmacy counting pills, filling bottles, checking insurance, printing invoices… They’re just grabbing boxes off the shelves and ringing them up. Could be turkey franks. Getting a prescription filled is near instantaneous, and involves fewer steps and highly paid professionals, so costs stay low. What’s the price of all this efficiency? Occasionally someone gets a few more pills than they’re entitled to. It’s a pretty good trade. One we’d never make in the US.

So why, with that excellent experience under my belt, did we decide to return to the US for medical care? FUD, I suppose. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Fear of the unknown: walk-in care was inexpensive in Mexico, but how much would hardcore surgical services cost out of pocket? I knew hospitalization was a $90 copay in the US and outpatient services were $320, so our financial risk was capped. Maybe a surgery that would be $20,000 retail in the US would only be $3,000 in Mexico, but that’s still way more than our plan’s copays.

Uncertainty about communication: One of the ER nurses in Rosarito was blessed with excellent English, and translated between the doctor and I. It made the visit manageable. But would that level of translation services be available at every step of the process? Even my visit with the urologist in Oaxaca was largely mediated by Google Translate. That’s a tough way to have to make important decisions.

And finally, doubt about the quality of care. This one stings, because it’s just prejudice. Tijuana is a well-known destination for US medical tourism, specifically because the quality of care and cost advantages are so compelling. Ultimately, this is the concern that brought us back to the US (the fear and uncertainty were manageable). It just feels weak. And having enjoyed five days of the best the US system has to offer, it also feels stupid.

Don’t get me wrong. The quality of the execution of the services provided to me in the US was stellar. My gall bladder is completely gone (I’m told), removed as delicately as current technology permits. But the entire infrastructure surrounding the provision of those services seems intentionally designed to inflict maximum pain and suffering. I know it wasn’t intentional in the sense that every provider I interacted with would have been delighted to have worked within a kinder context. But intentional in the sense that every decision made about the US healthcare system (funding, staffing, payments, business structures, incentives) drives inevitably to the brutality of the system we have. It’s not necessary. It’s the result of choices. We could make different choices and have a different system.

Or we could continue to insist that ours is the best of all possible healthcare systems (despite being first in cost and 75th in outcomes worldwide – looking up the ladder at you, Turkmenistan) and never explore alternative models. Some of which are as close as our southern border.

What distinguishes the Guanajuato mummies from your standard issue Egyptian mummies is that they weren’t intentionally mummified. Also, that they’re just out there hanging around, not wrapped up and hidden in sarcophagi. Like the good mummies.

There are two origin stories about the mummies, and they may both be correct. They share in common that the cemetary (panteón) started charging families annual fees, and when families couldn’t pay, or there was no family, the bodies were disinterred. To everyone’s surprise, what they found wasn’t a pile of bones, but fully mummified corpses.

In one version, the bodies were buried in above ground crypts. When they were disinterred, the dry, warm mountain air turned out to have created the perfect conditions for natural mummification. In the other version they were buried in the ground, as god intended, and the dry soil led to their mummification. A variant on this version is that many of the corpses were buried as a result of a cholera epidemic, and were buried in such haste that no one bothered with the salts that are usually used to speed decomposition and absorption.

Whatever the specifics, the result was over 100 mummies, and it’s axiomatic that any number of mummies over, say, none, is a tourist attraction. The Guanajuato mummies have been on display since 1894.

And How Does That Make You Feel?

What’s disturbing about the mummies isn’t that they’re corpses. It’s that they’re displayed as objects, not people. Of course, when they were first disinterred the panteón knew who they were. Each deadbeat had a name. Over the years, with the lax handling and the absence of give-a-fuck, their names have been lost. They’re just archetypes now: El Ahogado (The Drowned Man), La China (The Chinese Lady), La Bruja (The Witch).

Thankfully, not everyone is OK with the current state of affairs. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History has undertaken an effort to identify the remains and, when it’s possible to locate living descendants, return them to their families. Just the effort is already more dignity than they’ve been afforded since death.

It also warrants pointing out that El Museo is hardly alone in this sort of reassessment. Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, which features medical curiosities, is undertaking a critical reassessment of how it displays and contextualizes exhibits featuring human remains. Cue howls about the Woke Police.

In the meantime, the display at El Museo De Las Momias has more in common with pornography than anthropology. It’s a form of objectification that makes the viewer complicit in the act.

Trigger Warning

There’s a reason I used a photo of a mural outside the Museo for the featured image on this post, rather than an objectively more arresting photo of one of the actual mummies. Because, people, these are corpses. With hair and teeth and clothes. And eyes. *shudder* And truly horrifying expressions. They are disturbing. There is no shame in bailing. No one will know. So do not scroll any further if this is a thing you don’t want to see.

For the rest of you, fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Nothing

To

See

Here

I’d

Scroll

Back

Up

If

I

Were

You…

Still Here? Good.

The few, the brave, the foolish. Welcome, my band of brothers. To something you can never unsee. This is on you.

And… Nothing more needs to be said.

That’s never really true, is it.

I had originally written clever captions for each of the photos. There was some pretty good stuff there. Knee slappers, if you will. But I’ve deleted them. They made me feel… dirty. And not in the good way.

It felt like I was just heaping one more indignity on folks who didn’t deserve it. It felt like… a feeling. And you all know how ambivalent I am about having feelings. So if funny captions make feelings, no funny captions. Sorry. You’ll have to write your own.