The Reader Travels

Streams and rivers through my mind, serendipitous meanderings… I have to tell about my journey to sea last year and how I got there.

It started with a discussion about Faulkner’s spooky cool short story, “A Rose for Emily.” Somebody mentioned the depravity of the US South and how it was reflected in the writings of people like Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and of course, the fabulous Mr. Tennessee Williams.

I love Tennessee Williams, so it made me think about his character from “The Glass Menagerie who smoked on the fire escape and tried to escape from his miserable life, always dreaming about joining the merchant marine. So, you know since he wants to go work on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of other sweaty men that the guy is gay, right? It’s like code.

And I remembered William S. Burroughs’s Cities of the Red Night, freaky little book with lots of sailing ships and blood and gore and hot man on man action.

So, I started thinking, I need to go find out more about homosexuality on sailing ships. I need to read Moby Dick ! It was just the beginning of the adventure…

Every morning I flow east on Northwest Highway, visor down, heading toward two golden towers. In the evening I flow west, the sun still in my eyes.

I can’t help but think of it as a river. It’s all Larry McMurtry’s fault. In his book Roads, a travelogue of US Interstate highways and places of literary interest, he planted this image in my mind of freeways as rivers. Everything flows together, connecting people and products. Rivers used to be one of the best means of transporting goods from state to state, but now we have the Interstates.

So, I have this image as I’m driving in my car with all these other drivers, that we’re all riding the same river together every day. Sometimes I feel like I’m riding the water, but other times I feel like I am, we are, the water, the same droplets flowing in the same river every day.

Okay, so maybe that’s just stoner talk. I guess I’m forever tripping.

The editors of The Blog Times Herald have informed me that Ann’s World is supposed to be the travel section of the newspaper. The trouble is that I never go anywhere, and when I do go places, I usually check into the hotel room, have a lot of sex, go someplace to eat and drink that’s in walking distance of the hotel, check out what’s on the TV in the hotel room, have some more sex, yada, yada, yada.

What I’m saying is, I’m not the one to tell you where the best shopping is, what sights to see, how to get more for your money, where not to go while you’re in town, nothing. I’ve never been to Europe or Asia or Africa or pretty much any other continent besides North America.

And yet, I constantly feel like I’m traveling, every time I pick up a book. Last year I spent six months at sea, from whaling ships around the globe to merchant vessels in the Mediterranean to pirate ships in the Carribbean. I’m hanging out in the Ukraine right now, but I’ll be heading for India soon. Join me.