I Can’t Not Talk About Brexit

June 28, 2016June 28, 2016 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Imagine, for a moment, that you are on an airplane for a long flight. You occupy the middle seat in the last row, and it’s one of those funny regional jets where the last row doesn’t have a window at all. You are adjacent to the lavatory, and between a morbidly obese couple who is eagerly trading cell phones across your lap so that they can fawn over their cats, whom they miss dearly. The cats are hairless.

You mutter under your breath that you might prefer it if the plane just crashed. It is an objectively unpleasant experience, this flight, and under normal circumstances you’d readily be forgiven for you exasperated hyperbole.

Except that in this allegory a flight attendant overhears your discontent. He rushes to the cabin and alerts the pilot and co-pilot to what you just said. They discuss the topic briefly before they throw up their hands and concede that The Customer Is Always Right. Then they take hold of the stick, turn off autopilot, and crash the plane into the nearest mountainside.

That shit just happened in the UK.

The world is abuzz with the news of the British exit (Brexit) from the European Union. You’d have to live in a pretty deep hole to have missed this, and so I’ll spare you the details and point you toward a real journalist’s summation of what’s going on if you’re still a little hazy.

Instead, I’d like to point out a few observations that I’ve made over the last few days.

The Wrong Side of the Bed – My favorite thing about world politics is how large and far reaching the ramifications of every conversation, dispute, and sleight tend to be. It can be a bit overwhelming, but it’s also a beautiful context for how small the rest of our problems are.

Only have $40 to your name? Just caught your spouse having sex with the neighbor? Just caught your spouse having sex with the neighbor’s dog? Doesn’t matter! Right now Jeremy Corbyn is having a shittier day than you are. I guarantee it. Any time I’m feeling stressed out, or flustered, I like to think to myself, “This sure is shitty, but at least negotiating a Syrian ceasefire isn’t on my plate today.” Try it some time; it helps!

jeremy-corbyn — This is the face of a man whose day is going worse than yours. Take solace in that.

Call It Like You See It – The Brexit vote was sold to The People (happy to be fact checked by someone who lives there . . .) on two main principles: first, that Britain has been hemorrhaging cash to the EU that should instead be spent on healthcare, and second, that the EU’s stance on trade and labor has opened the floodgates of needy immigrants who are just coming over the channel to steal jobs and welfare. Now that the referendum actually passed (more on that later), there seems to be some backpedaling going on.

Independent of truth, the campaign certainly worked. And I can’t help but notice that the Brexit campaign, a resurgence of ultra-nationalist parties in France, the Netherlands, and Norway, and the Cruz/Trump Twat Caucus have all risen in the polls as the Arab Spring has fizzled and Middle Eastern political stability has fallen into shambles. Just as many millions of displaced Muslim refugees are flowing out of Iraq and Syria, far right political parties are exacerbating latent Islamophobia throughout the slums of disenfranchised whitefolk and riding that momentum to the highest offices of government.

While the TEA Party, the Leave camp, and Marine Le Pen’s cronies all have different official platforms, a common denominator is palpable: Islam is scary. Not to paint with too broad a brush, but the whole Far Right Renaissance just kind of reeks of Busch League racism to me.

But shit. How much trouble can you really get into with banal racism and ultra-nationalist ideology? It’s probably not that big a deal.

Can We Get a Mulligan? – The Brexit vote presented a perfect storm that combined the most honest, brute force method of democracy, the referendum (where there are no pesky parliamentary middlemen to read the fine print – the will of the people is effected directly), with a largely uneducated populace who was so disillusioned with the democratic process that they truly believed their votes didn’t count.

Seventy percent of British voters, including a majority of the people who asked to leave the EU, didn’t think that the referendum would pass. Let that sink in for a moment. Many people (3 million at last tally) want a do-over now that the ballots have closed and they’ve made time to Google what the heck the EU is, anyway.

I don’t bring this up to poke fun at our unhappy ideologues across the pond. It’s easy to forget that we’re on the cusp of a similarly outrageous decision right here in the Best Goddam’ Country On Earth. Please do try to remember this November that every single thing about Donald Trump is a joke except for the fact that he really is the Republican Presidential Nominee. (That’s actually a joke about the Republican Party.) Hillary Clinton may not be a perfect candidate, but there are no mulligans on Presidential Elections.

Spring Traditions

April 26, 2016April 26, 2016 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

It has taken me about 20 years to conclude that ham is bullshit. Regardless of whether you’re peeling slippery pink sheets of the stuff from an Oscar Meyer package for lunch, or piling steaming slabs of it on your plate at some fancy brunch buffet, it’s always kind of the same.

Ham is an exercise in paradox, somehow simultaneously too dry and too rubbery. Too fatty and too sweet. Unsettling and somehow ubiquitous on tables across the Christian world two or three times a year. Ham is without question the worst kind of pork.

Yet each spring, millions of families clamber to the fluorescent humming of the grocer’s meat isle to return home with a dense, sickly, uninspiring lump of flesh, vacuum packed in some kind of industrialized brine. Delicious. Happy Easter.

“Traditions,” I finally concluded a few years ago after finally eschewing ham, and while working on our family’s first Easter dinner of tacos al pastor, “are for those who lack imagination.”

I’ve held on to that declaration for a number of years: Thanksgiving lamb. Mediterranean Christmas. Breakfast for lunch.

But then a few days ago something funny happened. I woke up to the sound of rain on the windows and the sky was still grey much after dawn. It was a wet, cold, drab morning and I had this odd impulse to race my bike.

In April things are turned upside down for the Classics. These one day bike races fall in the spring, and are somewhat removed from the popular American sporting landscape, especially compared to the Tour de France and Giro di Italia (probably because Lance was always too afraid to race them).

The Classics are different from the grand tours. They only last a day. They cover extraordinary distances. The weather is usually awful. For better or worse, they’re steeped in tradition. The Tour de France gets coverage now on NBC and the New York Times, but it’s names like Ghent-Wevelgem, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, and Paris-Roubaix that make the hearts of cycling fans race.

The grand tours are competitions of organization and efficiency; the team that can ride for a month without making a mistake wins. But the spring classics are one day events that frequently feature long stretches of cobblestones or dirt roads and terrible weather. Course conditions routinely affect the race outcome, and these early season races carry an excitement not unlike the NCAA basketball tournament, where the prospect of a Cindarella story is always hanging in the air.

The Paris-Roubaix is the crown jewel of these races, and as a kind of celebration, each April hundreds of classics style events pop up across the world.

In western Montana we have the Rocky Mountain Roubaix. The race bounces along farm and forest roads west of Missoula for a couple of hours before racers return to a rainslick school parking lot to change at their cars and shiver until results are posted. There is no glory. There is no prize money. Their bikes are probably broken.

But at the Rocky Mountain Roubaix there’s something a bit more than a finishing order scrawled on a soggy notepad. The Monuments of European cycling are more than 100 years old. They’ve survived world wars and transcend national boundaries. They are older than we are and will exist long after we’re gone.

Even, or rather, especially when the weather is lousy and there’s no real reason to be out there, toeing the line at a spring classic is being a part of something much bigger. It’s an embrace of cycling history and a toast to the heroes of the sport.

And so while ham still has no business on the dining table, some traditions might be worth keeping around.

Lifestyle Inertia

March 22, 2016 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Precisely one week ago I was sitting in a canvas yurt filled with strangers. By the time the sun went down the woodstove was hot, the beers were very cold, and we were starting to make friends with people we’d never met before.

Each of us knew a person or two before we met for dinner in Ketchum, but no one knew everyone. Avalanche conditions in this little corner of Idaho were spooky, and feeling out risk tolerance as a newly formed group forged a kind of bond early on. In the first twenty four hours we became friends over card games, stories, and private jokes.

We also shot a lot of photographs; at least half the group identified as a photographer in some way or another. I’ve spent the last few afternoons sorting through pictures of a ski trip that fit even the most rigorous definition of fantastic. The weather was perfect, the skiing was tremendous, and living in a yurt is about the best way you can spend a week. But while I was sorting through photos my mind wandered to what might be next. I’ve been back in the groove of life in Missoula for fewer than 72 hours, but can’t help but scheme on the next thing.

I may have a predisposition to restlessness. I’ve at least got a bad habit of quitting good jobs to leave the country. But I plan hundreds more trips than I take. Since we shussed out of the Pioneer mountains a couple of days ago I’ve laid plans for a ski trip in the Sawtooths and another in Kootenais. I’ve penciled out ski tours across Switzerland and Poland. I’ve researched and begun writing proposals for a month in Japan, and, because of course it stands to reason that a month in Japan will segue smoothly into a bicycle tour of Thailand and Laos, that itinerary ballooned to approach three months.

Twenty minutes after sliding out of my ski boots at the end of this last trip I was racking my brain on the best way to reorganize my assets into a sailboat worthy enough for a year long cruise in the Pacific. Never mind that I get seasick.

Looking back through pictures and journal entries from trips of the last year or two scratches a certain itch. Memories of loneliness, mosquitoes, and diarrhea fade and are replaced by the sunsets and powder turns that we photograph to remember. There’s a nostalgia for time we’ve spent on the road and friends we’ll never see again. But in planning the next thing there’s excitement and hope.

I don’t pretend that even a fraction of the adventures I scheme on or plan will happen. That’s part of the fun. If you reject the real constraints of budgets (money, time, and responsibility in equal parts) and imagine a trip unfettered by an anemic checking account or a 2,080 hour work-year or a dog you adopted from the pound in the midst of an existential crisis (bless her heart), you get comfortable with thinking beyond the back yard. If you allow your mind to wander enough you might find, eventually, that an idea or two resonates and begins to ache.

If that idea aches for long enough, you might allow yourself to think about the next step. You might find that you can eek out a living while working from the road. That the 40 hour work week is something that’s best left behind. And even that you really can just drive across the border while your mangy pound dog glares at you from the back seat. You might even swallow the hard pill that inertia is not confined to objects with mass, and that the only way to make tomorrow different from yesterday is through deliberate effort.

And who knows, maybe I’ll see you in the south Pacific.

At the Heart of Angst

January 12, 2016January 26, 2016 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

“I think I’m ready to get a dog,” I told my mother. “And plant a garden. I think I’m ready for tomatoes.”

The time I spent in Latin America was formative in the way that only travelling alone can be. It was an opportunity to party with Belgians, sip mezcal with smugglers in a candlelit bar, and smoke Cuban cigars on the roof while volcanoes spewed lava under a full moon. I read Hemingway and Dosdoyevsky and watched pirated DVDs of shit TV when I was too sick to hold a book. It was a chance to be in a kind of social vacuum, away from friends and family, to look at what I like and who I want to be. After six months I found that I wanted to be at home.

When I got off a plane in Seattle, my hair was greasy and long. I had dirt underneath my fingernails, and what clothes I still had with me were stained or torn. I smelled very bad and had dozens of dollars to my name. Half a year as a trekking guide in Guatemala left me weary from the road and ready to put down roots.

For a while I was happy to build a life in a little mountain oasis with a dog and a row of tomatoes, but a few years later I quit a good job to drive to Mexico for a while. The garden had mostly failed, and the dog seemed happy to come along.

In the car I had good company and a folding chair and a long book, but the expectations of the trip were different from my time in Guatemala. I wasn’t so much looking for anything in particular so much as the experience of being on the road. Of moving every day and not thinking beyond what kind of ceviche we might have after a nap.

A nomadic inclination is natural, I think, for humans. Ten thousand years ago we wandered across the Bering Straight after game. Pre-Christian civilizations spanned Eurasia, Colonial Europeans mapped the globe, and two centuries ago new settlers trickled westward across a continent already claimed by a different sect of wanderers. Restlessness is as fundamental a part of the human experience as oral history and sharing fire.

But it’s not quite as simple as that, because we’re also driven to stay put and build. We discovered the wheel, and the written word flourished in the relative calm of agrarian society. Whether we’re piling sticks for a shelter or cultivating a field for grain or engineering a high rise apartment, what sets humankind apart is our industry and our drive to improve our place.

That disparity is at the heart of angst.

Not that long ago I drove through Idaho with the dog. The radio didn’t work and cell coverage was a distant memory. I was simply alone with a panting companion. At a gas station in Ketchum a man well into his 40s came to the passenger window, and the dog woke from a nap to greet him.

“Just you and your buddy, huh?” he asked. A Volkswagon van has a way of inviting conversation. The man drove a fifty thousand dollar Chevrolet, and in the back seat his young son was spreading chocolate ice cream across the upholstery. He looked through the van and saw the bits of camping gear spread out. He saw ski boots and a propane stove and a broken paperback, and his eyes glazed over with a kind of longing or instantaneous regret for every decision he’d made in his life. He wanted to talk about the van.

What he didn’t see was that I was sick. My eyes watered and my throat bled, and the van didn’t start when I turned the key. There was no bed in the back. I’d been sleeping alone in the desert, but never more than a few hours a night. There was sand in my toothbrush. I didn’t know if the engine was blown, or if the problem was electrical. If I needed a jump or a new battery or if the starter had finally gone. I did know that I didn’t have the money to fix it and that even under the best conditions the only place I wanted to be was still a day’s drive away. That I longed for a comfortable pickup truck with air conditioning and a good radio and that cruised at 80 miles an hour on the highway.

A man’s eyes turn desperate when he’s been on the road for too long, but if he sits still they soften and let the spark die out. I’m not exactly sure how we’re supposed to spend our time, but maybe that’s the point.

New Year’s Resolutions are (still) Stupid.

December 29, 2015December 29, 2015 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

Before we get started, I should mention that New Year’s Resolutions are still a stupid tradition. I don’t feel this way out of an objection to self improvement, of course, as much as from the belief that if you’re unwilling to effect a change in your life on December 31, you’re probably going to be every bit as unwilling to make that same change on January 1.

More often that not a New Year’s Resolution is an excuse to put off trying something new until some time in the future (how about January?), and the rate at which we fail on our resolutions is, at this point, a cliché.

Publically stating your goals for the year seems like a good way to increase your accountability. In reality, the act of making the statement usually suffices to let your friends and loved ones know what you’d like to improve in yourself, and that’s about where it ends. With a New Year’s Resolution, a dramatic act of proclamation replaces the slow and deliberate effort required to modify behavior.

I’ve been fairly outspoken about this, which is why it will probably come as a surprise that I’m about to encourage all of you to make a resolution this year.

Most of these so called resolutions are silly, nebulous things. “I’m going to give up carbohydrates.” “I’m going to exercise more.” “I’m going to eat more cheese.” They’re difficult to quantify, continuous challenges that take significant commitment in order to yield any palpable benefit. On the other hand there are a number of discrete actions, things we only need to do once or twice, that fit more squarely with the nature of The Resolution and still improve our quality of life.

And so, in 2016, you should go someplace alone.

I don’t mean the entire year. Or a month. Or even necessarily a week. For most people even a few days will probably be a huge shock. What I do mean is alone. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to hike into a Wildnerness and stay there for a while (although that does sound nice). It means that you should take some time to travel and disengage from your status quo.

Alone does mean don’t bring anyone with you. Don’t go visit friends or family. Leave town, and don’t take the computer. Turn off the phone. Let an auto-reply tell your world here that you’ll be right back.

Take a few days away from work and from family. Away from the cell phone and emails, and remember what it is you like to do. Bring a book or a journal. Bring a camera or a sketchbook. Or don’t bring anything.

If you disconnect entirely, if you can be completely selfish for even a few days, you can fill your days with exclusively what you want to do. You’ll remember a lot about what really makes you happy. You might even learn something new. Don’t feel pressure to come back and tell stories, or put pictures on Instagram. Just go and be with yourself for a little bit.

You might remember that you like to paint. Or write. Or that you want to exercise because it makes you feel better, not because you looked frumpy in the hot tub at Christmas. You might even find that eating more kale is something that you’re really passionate about.

The only changes that will stick are the ones that you really want to make. The first step is remembering what they are.

The Gentleman at Large

Keeping an eye on the forest.

European Travel

I Can’t Not Talk About Brexit

Spring Traditions

Lifestyle Inertia

At the Heart of Angst

New Year’s Resolutions are (still) Stupid.