Introductions—At Length

There are those commitments in life that occur in real time; a kiss, a pulled trigger, a punchline delivered. These in turn stand in juxtaposition with their counterparts which unfold gradually, yet irreversibly; the end of the first trimester, a signature, or, in my case, take-off.

I'm flying over the wrinkled coast of Nova Scotia, over land so spattered with lakes and ponds it looks as though the province is, with geological patience, submerging. If the plane is my chauffeur, the sky is my warden; as the former ferries me to my destination, the latter ensures that I cannot escape. So, committed, my stomach is lurching about. Like a child playing in a puddle, caffeine and a Tim Horton's breakfast (my blue-collar bon voyage) are frolicking in my anxiety. And whence for the allegorical galoshes? Ten-thirty in the morning is a tad too early for a drink. I'm running out of finger-nails fast.

A disclaimer to those who've never read my writing: make no mistake about it, melodrama is my first language—English is merely the vehicle.

This intercontinental adventuring business is all so very new, to me. One of the greatest pleasures in life is the profundity that accompanies the novel, and as soon as I realized this—in my teens, I believe—I began to practice a sort of meta-awareness to appreciate such experiences as vividly as I could. Saturation of experience is the path along which decreasing marginal utility ultimately sends novelty, blunted, to its grave. Thus, rather than lament the fact of novelties inevitable transience, I do my very best to savour it while it lasts. Whether its the heady tonic of infatuation (wherein waning novelty, if unanticipated and misunderstood, can so easily be mistaken for a failing romance) or the thrill of a new toy [read: e-paraphenalia], the accompanying sense of adventure—of something new—is a gift that derives from our being such obliviously finite creatures, and it is too often squandered by mourning its passing. You can't ever keep it; nothing is new forever. All we can do is watch intently as the thrill of the novel passes, honing our attention in order to best glean each transient detail, else, when it inevitably has vanished, the imprint of its memory will be shallow and discredited with an undue sense of loss. You cannot lose what was never yours to keep in the first place, you see, but you have everything to gain from delighting in the gift of your history.

So here I sit, watching the carpet of my home descend over the horizon, knowing intellectually that it will be many months, if not years, before I see it again, yet helpless to reify the fact. India is an inevitability, merely forty-two hour distant, and still it is only a pastiche of abstracta, a psychological scrapbook of factoids and images, stereotypes and romanticizations—fantasy and spectacle, in short. I have been trying for weeks to properly realize that reflection as more than an intellectual truth (as usual, it's being impossible hasn't dissuaded me at all). Logically speaking, I can't possibly know the first thing about what I'm getting into. And for all the world it still feels as though I'm someone Rudyard Kipling penned but failed to publish; I feel like I already know how this story unfolds. I am simultaneously terrified and hungry for the magnitude of my conceptual discrepancy. As an aside, then, let the record show: it isn't fair that one should be able to recognize in themselves the arrogance associated with youth and still be helpless to divest oneself of it.

An alcoholic drinks away his problems, and finds more at the bottom of each bottle; I run from one dichotomy to the next, propelled by the exultation of finding synthesis in the former into the anxiety of negotiating another. If circumstance were a pinball machine, how a shiny and smooth a marble I would make.

I will shortly arrive in Washington, where I shall have thirteen hours to relieve myself of before I'm flung across the Atlantic. Airports have always played the muse to my imagination, so I'll pick up again when either inspiration or boredom prompt me to.

~hours elapse~

In just over two hours, I will board Quatar Airways #52, and thereby commence my first trans-Atlantic crossing. I've spent the day in Washington D.C., and found my self having a number of strange reflections about my experiences here. The first, and in some ways (depending on the lens through which one chooses to examine these sorts of things) the most salient, occurred as I entered the downtown core via a city bus, and saw in person for the first time a slough of images I am, actually, quite familiar with. The Pentagon, Arlington Cemetary, the White House, the Library of Congress—to name a few—rolled into my field of view with an eerie recognition. And I do mean eerie, which quickly explained itself under some fast reflection, a clarification I will presently share . Since the largest part of anyone who's likely to read this won't have played the game Fallout 3, allow me to catch you up on the details: set in a post-apocalyptic future, the player roams Washingto D.C. and it's surrounds, collecting those resources that can be salvaged from the debris of a spent civilization and all the while indealing with the consequences of tinense radioactivity on the local biology. Suffice it to say, then, that it was simply a bizarre experience when, whilst travelling beneath an overpass on my way into the city (and the reader should appreciate the Washington in Fallout is street-for-street a copy of the real thing) I had a reflexive expectation to see a pair of super mutants armed with chain guns bearing down on me. I'm not even slightly kidding; it was a knee-jerk reaction, and it left me very seriously rethinking all the arguments I've ever heard about the ethical implications of video game violence. Moreover, it left me reflecting on the surreality of knowing a place I've never been too well enough to recongize huge swathes of it on sight simply because I've watched enough movies centered around America's capital to warrant it.

I could (and did) pontificate on that topic for some time, but I'll spare the reader the ensuing essay. Besides, I did not, in the end, actualy visit any of the afore-mentioned American heritage locations, minus one. I made my way almost immediately to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. In the most reductive description I can manage of the experience, let me simply say that one never gets too old to get very, very excited in the presence dinosaurs. Additionally, I visited the zoo, and the same came be said for gorillas, elephants, tigers, anacondas and komodo dragons. Why I am so deliciously fascinated with things that are so effortlessly able to achieve my death I don't fully understand, but on numerous occasions today I found myself bursting with the urge to tackle someone.

So now I am sitting in a pub—Harry's Tap Room—marginally enjoying a plate of fish and chips that have been served with chile sauce, and sipping on a Bud Light (a beer which, at least on this side of the border, sports the slogan "superior drinkability", the implications of which for the English language I won't currently explore). This, coupled with the fact that voices on buses, intercoms, airports and digital billboards have been all day reminding me to "report suspicious behaviors and happenings to the appropriate authorities" because, afterall, "safetly is everyone's responsibility" have left me with an urge to escape the Orwellian prophecy that is the United States with all haste. To that end, India here I come, now slightly less anxious, in large part thanks to mounting exhaustion and the moral support proffered by Budweiser.

Be well Nova Scotia, I shall miss you.