For the next two months, I, Nick Allbrook, will attempt to keep a tour diary. This time I expect to surpass my modest record of two posts, which shouldn’t be too hard given the length of our journey.
The more we tour, the direr the need to write has become. Even the most vague, high-school-Gonzo tripe is a great personal help. These small communiqués are essential for maintaining some semblance of my mental agility, which can be almost impossible to recognize when left to wallow willy-nilly around the soup of my mind. Tangible thoughts become as evasive as rare birds, the only proof of their existence being blurred snapshots as they dart between the sporadic ideas and anti-ideas of a touring musician. Rendering my thoughts in the written word provides concrete evidence that my brain is still functioning. The Tasmanian tiger lives, the yeti walks etc. etc. etc. Making up a diary gives my little test the structure it needs to be truly authoritative. Putting it on the internet will show my father that his plea that I “…keep on writing [and not let my mind turn into a stagnant swamp, a tar pit to forever entomb ill conceived and unrealized ideas]” didn’t go unheeded, only embellished.
So, I’ll start with the airplane and the tragically relevant above sentence about tar pits and stagnant swamps. The mingled effluvium which has been caressing my nasal cavities with its acrid wand for nigh on ten hours has kept its origins a mystery, until now. I have been assured that the old woman across the isle is the perp. This is the kind of earthy grit a modern traveler never hears of, especially not from QANTAS. They portray impossibly urbane salt and pepper haired business men with strong jaws gliding suitcases past smooth crystalline frequent flyer card scanners, relaxing with glasses of champagne in futuristic comfort pods, automatic, sliding, glass, ethereal glowing white. Efficiency. Streamlined. State of the art. George Clooney. Terrifyingly sanitized. I wouldn’t blame Phillip K. Dick for saying a loud, jittery “I told you so!” if could see these humanoid machines and the apocalyptically sterile ideal they represent.
But an ideal it remains, as the woman next to us constantly reminds me. Here we are, a pathetic collection of dehydrated yet greasy apes, heaped together inside a flying steel phallus, individually wired to flickering blue screens. Gaseous, leaking, open mouthed and drooling. Henry Miller condemned the airplane as a mode of travel too clean, too removed from the blood and piss of humanity through which it is our God given lot to wade. If only he could smell what I smell. It might not have the homely fug of his beloved boats, buses or trains, but it could never be accused of being sterile.
The grotesque reality of earthly excrement, otherwise known as ‘passion’, is, according to Miller, wiped away in an airplane. And I guess this is true, to a degree. What do I know of the Macedonian peasant 40000 feet below? I sure can’t feel the icy winter air through my personal window, let alone the goat’s teat or the shitty mud beneath my gumboots? What would the imaginary farmhand say if he knew that somewhere in between the magical, twinkling stars above a dribbling 22 year old musician flew at 500 miles an hour, even while lying prostrate after ingesting a quantity of Mersyndol and red wine?
Unfortunately modern air travel falls awkwardly between the ideals of Miller and the QANTAS advertising committee, possessing neither honest human filth or uber-modern purity. The grime I am currently experiencing could never be rendered in romantic terms, even by the florid pen of Henry Miller. And I am probably at an altitude to challenge him personally, if his self-righteousness didn’t prevent his heavenly ascent. QF 31, eleven hours in, is pullulating with such a wretched stink that the toothless humpbacked Greek wench Henry described as so noble and resilient, would surely have pulled the ‘OPEN’ lever and sucked every useless, fat ankled, square eyed one of us into the starry night for emergency divine cleansing.
Although Miller was wrong in condemning air travel for its stark cleanliness, as the large woman of seat 40 D would attest, he was right in saying that the airplane will never be so noble a mode of transport as its terrestrial counterparts. I know I called him self righteous, but I must admit, I would give the niggling sting in my ass for the aching muscles of a cross country walker any day. Even though airplanes are not sterile in the true sense of the word, they are still anything but organic.
Human filth was meant to run among the stones and grass, to mingle into mud and soil and bring forth new life. Here in this Boeing 747, however, we see it candid as a turd on a dinner plate. Foul, stark and utterly useless, just like the husks of humans who birthed it.
