Great Experiences Talk

Greyhound

Great and Terrible

Taking a long trip on a Greyhound can be a great experience, but that depends very much on your definition of “great.” If it's the Oz definition (“great and terrible!”) then it really fits, but even so the exact proportion of great to terrible depends on the trip.

I, like many people, have a busy and stressful life without a lot of time to just sit and relax and read a book. So the mere fact that a long bus ride forces me to sit in one spot for five or twelve or even thirty-five hours at a stretch can be great in a way. If I spend most of that time either reading or just watching the world go by through the windows of the bus, it can be quite relaxing. That's the “great” part, but even here it's not unmixed with the “terrible” because your legs can start to really hurt after sitting in one place for such a long, long time.

The factors that can push it into the “terrible” category are many and varied: late buses, long lines, canceled buses, missed connections, angry drivers,unhelpful customer service staff, psychotic or rage-filled or unhygienic seat companions, excessive heat, excessive cold, people singing at the top of their lungs at two in the morning, armed guards, dangerous bus stations despite the presence of armed guards, and ill-informed people sharing their catastrophically ignorant opinions whether you want them to or not. But hey, you get to read, so at least there's that.

Yurts And Gers

Learning How To Build Them

Do you know how to build a yurt? Well, neither do I. But I'm a little bit closer to knowing how to build a yurt after this last weekend in Minneapolis. Technically, what I was shown how to build was a ger, which is a Mongolian structure similar to a yurt. Either way, it's a simple concept, and the only reason I still don't know how to build one is that I'm not that bright. A ger is basically just a number of wooden slats hanging down from a central ring, with tarps or canvas for walls. The interesting thing about them, though, is that they won't blow away in a heavy wind, because the structure of the ger is extraordinarily stable. If you think about it, it would kind of have to be, because the Central Asian steppes where this type of home was invented are almost completely flat, and flat places tend to be pretty windy.

The other good thing about a yurt or ger is that it can be made in about three hours with about four hundred dollars worth of lumber. How's that for affordable housing? You could literally just buy an acre somewhere in the middle of nowhere, throw together a yurt, and you'd have a place to live for next to nothing. The smaller yurts can even be assembled, disassembled, and carried around in pieces by a single person, making a true nomadic lifestyle an intriguing possibility within the reach of a working man's budget. Steppes of Mongolia, here I come!

Belgian French Apple Fried Chip Potatoes

In The French Manner

French people don't actually call French fries “French fries,” because they would only confuse themselves if they did. But they only confuse the rest of us with their own name for the salty treat, which translates literally as “fried apples.” There's a perfectly good reason for this, or at least a reasonably good one, but I'm not going to give it to you. If you didn't take French in high school- look it up.

You might have heard that Americans call them French fries because of World War I, when our GIs were given some “fried apples” in France. But that's not true. Thomas Jefferson had some once and referred to them as “potatoes fried in the French manner” or something like that. Admittedly this is not exactly the same phrase as “French fries,” but it's pretty close.

So why is all this a “great experience”? Because “fried apples” are actually a traditional Belgian food, and I had some in Belgium (the French-speaking part of Belgium, of course!). Belgian French fries are wonderfully delicious, just like Belgian chocolate and Belgian beer. If I lived in Belgium, I would never eat anything but chips and chocolate, or drink anything but Belgian beer.

What's that about “chips”? Well, that's what the English call them- sort of. They actually call skinny American-style French fries “fries,” and fat British-style French fries “chips.” Nobody calls them “fried apples” except the French. Sometimes they even have a moment of clarity and call them “patates frites.”

Romanticist Poetry

A Lifelong Inspiration

One of the most powerful experience of my entire life was when I happened to open up a book about the poetry of the early Romanticists at my local library when I was thirteen or fourteen. I can't really say why. Maybe it was the heroic (or pseudo-heroic) image of Lord Byron and his friend Shelley, maybe it was the emphasis on intuition, mystical insight and the supernatural, maybe it was the fact that the book put a lot of emphasis on the literary rivalry between Romanticism and Classicism and that just naturally appealed to my Us vs Them mentality, maybe it was the fact that the Romanticists were rebels.

Whatever the reason, I immediately and strongly identified with the poets and the poetry of that era, and dove right into all their classic works: Shelley's heretical blank verse epics, Lord Byron's “Don Juan,” Coleridge's “Christabel” and “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” Wordsworth's “Intimations of Immortality,” Blake's “Prophetic Books” and “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” the Scots poetry of Robert Burns.

I also started writing poetry of my own, and have done so ever since. I no longer appreciate Byron and Shelley as much as I did when I was a teenager, but Blake and Coleridge have remained lifelong favorites. My taste in poetry has expanded a lot, but I owe my love of poetry to that one little book, and my own work still owes a massive debt to the Romanticist worldview and aesthetic.

Lucid Dreaming

A Wonderful Experience

One of the greatest experiences you can have is a lucid dream, where you suddenly realize you're actually dreaming and yet remain in the dreaming state. For some reason I don't understand, this seems to result in a dream of such startling clarity and vividness that it almost feels more real than your ordinary daily life, yet even so you are fully conscious that it is in fact a dream.

This also tends to have a side effect of making you feel tremendously joyful and refreshed, a feeling which sometimes lingers for hours even after you wake up. Some people can train themselves to have lucid dreams at will, or even to control elements of their own dreamscapes by changing colors or shapes or even the events of the dream.

Tibetan dream yoga practices are taught within both Tibetan Buddhism and the indigenous Tibetan Bon religion. They are also practiced in some forms of Taoism, and just in the past few decades they have been scientifically studied and practiced in a secular context in the West. Even though secular lucid dreamers try to understand the practice in scientific terms, the religious traditions of lucid dreaming have centuries and centuries of experience behind them rather than just a few decades. Statements made by some secular lucid dreamers discounting the spiritual significance of the practice should be understood in the light of this relative lack of experience and practice. At the same time, the scientific study of lucid dreaming should be expanded and continued.

The Storr

"An Englishman, A Scotsman and An American Walk Into A Bar..."

The Storr is a huge outcropping of rock on the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Hebrides. I was lucky enough to get to climb it with a Scottish friend and an English friend about fifteen years ago, as part of a driving and hiking trip around the Highlands.

The thing that's really neat about the Storr is that it almost looks like an alien planet when you're up on top, with all the giant boulders and the rock pinnacles of different shapes and sizes. I've seen it described as a “lunar landscape,” which seems about right.

While we were up there on the Storr, my Scottish friend decided it would be fun to go off the path and climb right down the face of the rock through a narrow corridor in which plenty of handholds were visible. He got all the way down, and waved up to us from the bottom to encourage us to join him. I got about halfway down before getting stuck, unable to find another handhold I trusted enough to commit my weight to. My English friend didn't try at all- maybe he felt the Scottish Highlands had claimed the lives of enough of his countrymen.

I ended up tearing my pants on the way back up, which turned out to be an even worse problem because Scottish people don't call those pants. They call them “troosers,” reserving the word “pants” for sexy underwear. So when we went to the pub after we got back down, and the barman asked me why I was wearing a sweater around my waist, I inadvertently told him it was because I had torn my lingerie while crawling around on some rocks with an Englishman. It was a long, long evening.

Citronella Campbell's Coffee

Worst Coffee Imaginable!

If you want a really great coffee experience, you have a lot of options, from local specialty micro-roasts to international gourmet coffees from obscure places with exotic names. But a genuine coffee addict is not so picky. To a coffee addict, the caffeine is the thing, and it has to be kept at a certain level in the bloodstream by hook or by crook. If you can get your hands on some organic fair trade estate-grown Kenya AA, then you'll be happy. If you have to use a Citronella candle to heat up instant coffee in a Campbell's soup can, then so be it.

I have tasted such coffee, and let me tell you- if you have ever had a more repulsive cup of coffee, I will concede my title, but I am personally convinced that I have fully earned the status of Most Dedicated Coffee Drinker In The World.

Here's how it happened. I was going on a camping trip, so I brought some Sanka. I also brought some Campbell's Soup for my dinner. When I got to the campsite, the ground was soaked, and all the potential firewood was dripping wet. There was no possible way to get a fire going, so I ended up spending a miserable night hunched over on a wet log in front of a Citronella candle to repel mosquitoes and keep my hands warm until the dawn.

First I got hungry, but there was no campfire to warm my soup with. So I opened it up and drank it cold. Then I started to get tired, but there was no ground dry enough to lie down on, so I was forced to stay awake. I put some of my water in the empty soup can, rigged it up over the Citronella candle until it started to steam a little, then used my Sanka to make some coffee. So what did it taste like?

It tasted like caffeinated Citronella mixed with Campbell's soup. It kept me awake and I got home safe. I'm not proud of what I did, but... actually, I am. I am the Most Dedicated Coffee Drinker In The World, and that is a legitimate cause for pride.

Martial Arts

A Lifetime Of Great Experiences

Most people who don't do martial arts find it to be an odd if not a screwball activity. The typical image of a martial artist is not too different from the demented Rex Kwan Do instructor in “Napoleon Dynamite.” There are definitely a lot of martial artists who do fit that stereotype, or one of several other stereotypes. There's the morbidly-obsessed violence junkie who trains constantly for the urban warzone (generally while living in the suburbs!). There's the wannabe samurai droning on about “the way of the warrior.” There's the ethereal tai chi hippie who couldn't win a fight with a stiff breeze.

But there are also a lot of highly interesting, intelligent people, who practice martial arts for personal and often idiosyncratic reasons. Many of these people are in the world of the historical European martial arts or “HEMA”.

HEMA practitioners study a wide variety of European combative disciplines, from medieval sword and buckler fencing to Edwardian stick-fighting. A lot of these arts have no direct application to self-defense, nor are there significant sporting venues. People basically practice them because they find them interesting, and because the practice of the art is a compelling and rewarding personal experience. That's the same reason many martial artists practice Japanese fencing or Shaolin kung fu or Filipino stickfighting.

Very few martial artists have any direct experience with violence. Very few of them want to. The real reason to make a lifetime study of martial arts is not to prepare for a fight. Although most martial artists believe their training would help them defend themselves if they had to, that has little to do with why most of us train. Most of us train in these arts because it's a great experience, which is also why some of the most fascinating human beings I have ever met have been martial artists.

Meeting the Black Bloc

Not My Greatest Experience Ever...

I was at just one of the big anti-globalization protests back in the day, before the 9/11 attacks ushered in a new era of hyper-security and patriotic paranoia. I was curious to see the protesters known as the Black Bloc, militant anarchists who challenged the riot police- or so I had been told.

The Black Bloc was there when I got there, and so were the riot cops. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of riot cops, all heavily armored. Cops on horses and cops in an armored car. The Black Bloc, by contrast, were skinny little young men, malnourished as only a militant vegan can be, dressed in an assortment of black rags.

Unfortunately, they turned out to be humorless and highly unpleasant fanatics, who decided that I must be an undercover cop merely because I was above the age of twenty-five. For the entire rest of that long, long day, I stood in the front lines of the protest at equal risk from police violence, but without the support or solidarity of the people next to me. In fact, they referred to me as “cop guy” whenever they spoke to me at all.

Standing up against the globalization of corporate power was a great experience. Dealing with the Black Bloc, not so much. Now that the Black Bloc has begun to make its presence felt at Occupy events, all indications so far are that they are exactly as I remember them: arrogant young men without a sense of perspective, flaunting their false machismo to cover up for their lack of ideas.

First Day Of Occupy Minnesota

A Day Of Hope And Optimism

My life has been kind of colorful. I've had a lot of adventures, from exploring the hallways of an abandoned factory as an urban explorer to wandering around the country by Greyhound for six weeks as a traveling martial artist, fighting bouts with other instructors in multiple states.

Out of all of those life experiences, one of the most emotionally powerful was the first day of Occupy Minnesota, when the Occupy Wall Street movement first came out west. The atmosphere on that first day was intoxicating and joyful. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there, of all ages and races and backgrounds. The feeling in the air was one of incredible optimism, and for anyone alive in the United States since 9/11, that's an unusual feeling to say the least.

It felt like a new awakening, like people had shaken the cobwebs out of their eyes after a long, long sleep. It felt like I had a thousand or so new sisters and brothers, standing together with me in solidarity against the forces working to destroy our democracy. The feeling was so expansive, so incredible, that I wanted to be back there every single day, working to help make a better world with my fellow Occupiers.

Things are different now. The mood has changed, and Occupy is now marked by a sense of grim determination to hold on in the face of tremendous repression rather than by an expansive feeling of joy and happiness. I think that initial experience is what keeps us all fighting, despite everything they do to put barriers in our way. We know that another world is possible, because we all experienced it- even if only for a little while.

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