Listen, I don’t want no guff from you—because life is already so staggeringly capricious and unfair as it is, that on the ultra-rare occasions when it is so in your favor, you learn to take the money and run. Hence, when a chance arises to go on what is in effect an all-expense-paid round-trip to Venice—especially when you are a broke, dissertating, newlywed adjunct grad student—then you sure better believe you’ll take it. Because you are not the sort of person who’s supposed to be able to visit Venice; you are supposed to be at the whims of the market, not vice-versa. Flying to Venice can thus become a form of resistance: politically, economically, even cosmically.
But hark, there is danger! For the world has forced you to be so suspicious and so critical for so long, that you may be tempted to be a total crank about the place, and roll your eyes at the fabled gondolas as yet another overpriced, overrated tourist trap, a pale performance of a facsimile. You may even consider blowing off the gondolas as a form of resistance in and of itself, a willful refusal to be told what to do, what to desire.
Protip: Ride the gondola anyways. So very few things live up to the hype, but these do. And elect to ride through the small canals over the more heavily trafficked Grand Canal—for in the quieter waterways the motorboats are hidden, and the sunshine shimmers on the water like a secret. It is magical on purpose.
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A week later we were in Denmark, and for some reason it wasn’t until I was physically walking the streets of Copenhagen that I remembered I was at long last visiting one of my Mother’s oldest haunts. She’d skipped her own High School graduation in the early ‘70s to fly across the Atlantic with my Grandparents, to pick up my Uncle Tom returning home from LDS missionary service. It is also worth noting that all those same people I just mentioned are now dead—ovarian cancer, old age, and suicide, respectively.
On my mother: I couldn’t help but remember how hands had been placed upon her head (shortly before I left on my own mission to Puerto Rico) wherein the Stake President solemnly pronounced, by inspiration and revelation of the Holy Spirit and the power and authority of the Melchizedek Priesthood, that she would overcome this “and all other afflictions” in this life—and how, when her cancer was in full remission as I reported to the MTC, we all praised it as a miracle and justly ascribed the glory to heaven. I also recalled how she passed away two days after I came home, two years later.
I had a very long, very passionate prayer the night before her death—I’d had many such prayers, on behalf of investigators and multitudes, all throughout my mission, so spiritually I considered myself to be in the best shape of my life, and wondered if I had not been saved for just such a moment as this. Like my namesake Jacob of old, I wrestled with the Almighty for the life of my mother.
Not until years later did I read that other product of Denmark, Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and realized that I may have been just a couple patriarchs off—it was Abraham who ascended Mount Moriah with Isaac, in fulfillment of that terrible requirement God Almighty had made of him. The gist of Kierkegaard’s argument, is that Abraham ever after went from feeling that he was the center of his own story, to instead feeling his much smaller place in the expansive cosmos. For all its Christian apologetics, Fear and Trembling marked the dawn of existentialism.
Similarly, when the desired blessing did not come on the eve of my Mother’s death, I suppose that is when I should’ve suffered a crisis of faith, a grand disillusionment; but as I stood on the front porch of the home that evening, staring up at the stars through my own breath which I hadn’t seen in two years, possessed of the disquietingly calm assurance of the Holy Ghost that my mother would not survive the night, I felt a strange sort of simultaneous alienation from and connection with the cosmos that would only be articulated years later—and that feebly—by Kierkegaard.
These thoughts did not so much pass through as merely settle upon my head as I paced down the streets of Copenhagen in a jet-lagged dream-state. And as I wandered past the statue of the Little Mermaid, the colorful homes of Nyhavn, the Danish Royal Palace, the Christus itself (suddenly divorced in my mind from Temple Square), I couldn’t help but feel how I was now stepping where my mother, my uncle, my grandparents once stepped, seeing what dead family once saw—the ghosts fluttered and fled around me.
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Days later we were in Iceland, where everything feels primordial: the visible tectonic plates, the geothermal hot springs, the volcanic landscape, even the language with letters unused by English itself since the days of Beowulf, all make the island feel like a relic from the dawn of time, a vision of a young Earth. The tour-guide may tell you that at a “mere” 18 million years, the landmass of Iceland is, geologically speaking, an infant—but that is just another way of saying that we humans are really just guests here, strangers and pilgrims. We are as ephemeral yet destructive as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (of which there are no fossils in Iceland).
On the Golden Loop, that same tour-guide points out the home of Haldor Laxness, the sole Nobel laureate of Iceland. (“Per capita, that means Iceland has more Nobel laureates than any other nation,” quips the tour-guide, “We Icelanders love per capita!”) One of his more prominent novels is Paradise Reclaimed, which narrates the tale of an 1800s Icelandic farmer who emigrates to Springville, Utah, of all places, at the height of the Brigham Young era. When I finally got around to reading it, I was shocked to discover it was the good-humored take on 19th-century Mormon polygamy I never knew I needed so badly. Why did it take a non-Mormon to see what was best in the parts of our history we (understandably) shun the most? It feels like my shelf should’ve broken by now, so to speak—that the weight of history and all modern scholarship should’ve finally collapsed my faith. But I’m still here, and I increasingly suspect it is because I have been flying on Standby.
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Before proceeding further, let me just say that I can hear you now: Profligate Millennial! Could you be anymore irresponsible! But then, to quote Ralph Ellison, to whom can I be responsible when you won’t let me? Where are we to settle down and build a home, when you’ve collapsed the housing market, stagnated wages, outsourced the jobs, broken up the unions, vastly inflated tuition while deflating the worth of a college degree? If you are going to cast an entire generation adrift in a sea of contingent labor and 1099s and call it “disruption,” then don’t you dare feign outrage when we embrace the nomad lifestyle you have forced upon us—and that as far away from you as possible.
Now, one might here argue that if the world is not how we like it, then we should work all the harder to change it. I quite agree. However, one can only attend so many marches and wave so many signs and sign so many petitions and share so many links before one begins to feel a bit like a head banging against a wall. Permit me to paraphrase Ralph Ellison once more: perhaps all I can do right now is hibernate, with the understanding that hibernation does not mean to quit, or hide, or cut and run—it only means to wait, to prepare. And so I hibernate, at 38,000 feet. I fly on Standby, in more ways than one.
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“Standby” is an industry term, also known informally as “non-reving” (as in non-revenue-generating). Some context: Most major U.S. airlines, as a perk designed to minimize turn-over, allow employees and their spouses to fly for free on the unsold seats. My wife works as a flight attendant for one such airline. She stows carry-ons in overhead bins and serves drinks and almonds and crackers all across the stratosphere; and then on layovers the company puts her up in the finest downtown hotels, free of charge. When my teaching schedule permits, I join her—and sometimes even when it doesn’t (the university’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge or pay attention to its adjuncts can have its perks).
It can sound like a sweet deal, but there are some serious caveats. For starters, though she occasionally flies to spectacular cities abroad, more often than not her layovers are in such ruins of the American dream as Detroit, Baltimore, or Columbus. When she does fly abroad, her layovers are rarely for more than 24 hours, with such a massive Time Zone differential that we typically go out touristing in a profound state of sleep deprivation—never quite sure if we are awake, if we aren’t just dreaming, if life itself isn’t a dream. You do not see the world so much as sample it.
Non-reving can also be a relentless game of roulette: sometimes you get Business Class with every luxury and comfort, and that wonderful feeling of getting away with something, as you intrude upon the hidden places of the privileged and the plunderers—while other times you are cramped in a middle-seat in the shadows of coach and happy to have it. Sometimes you crash in the world’s finest resorts on the company’s dime; other times you lie down on the hard carpet of the airport floor, amidst the midnight vacuums and ever-burning fluorescent lights, for the worst night’s sleep of your life.
And still other times you get nothing at all: for every time you enter the airport, you face the very real possibility that you will not board this plane—for if there are no unsold seats, you will not fly. It is an adventure, in its oldest sense, from the Latin adventurus, “about to happen,” as in anything can. It is a literal venture, a submission of one’s self to sheer chance, to cast off the anesthetizing safety of routine and schedules, and to embrace the very serious possibility that everything can go wrong at once—and that with only the vaguest idea of what it would mean for everything to go right. An airline employee can of course check the on-line manifest ahead of time to see how many unsold seats remain, but it is not unheard of for a flight that looked perfectly open the night before to suddenly be oversold the morning of: cancelled flights get rebooked, delayed passengers get rerouted, or someone rich enough or desperate enough simply buys up the last tickets last second. But sometimes the inverse happens, too—a flight appeared oversold, but someone oversleeps, or someone’s flight didn’t connect, or someone gets trapped in traffic, or someone simply gets cold feet, and so their seat is yours.
Hence, it is not the on-line manifest you learn to trust, but your own gut—and when I say your gut, I mean your gut, on a very primal, instinctual, nigh spiritual level. It is ironically in airports—those buzzing, sprawling monuments to modernity—that I have learned to recover a long-lost sense of spiritual oneness with the universe. I declare to heaven, I have learned more about following the promptings of the Holy Ghost non-reving than I have in all my years of church. The skies themselves have been my Sunday School.
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One Sunday after church, around the 4th of July and shortly after our marriage in the Provo City Center Temple, I laid down for a nap when my wife called. She had picked up a last-minute trip to Lahui, and excitedly told me to fly down to L.A. to join her. I felt a strange pit at the bottom of my stomach—a subtle yet unmistakable feeling that I would not make it to Lahui that day, as surely as I once knew that my mother would not survive the night. I ignored it however, because one never knows how long this whole non-rev thing will last, how many more chances one has left to be young and wild and free, and if there was even an outside chance of holidaying in Hawaii that weekend, it was my solemn duty to try, so down to L.A. I flew.
At LAX, there were only two people on the standby list, and neither of us got on. I promptly booked a flight back to Salt Lake, only to find the flight delayed 2 hours. My entire Sunday had been wasted. I was so angry at myself—not about not flying to Hawaii mind you, but about not listening to myself. All my life you see, I have quietly longed to be the sort of person who could trust his gut, obey his instincts, feel something outside of himself, to cut through the cacophonous noise of modern life and follow the peace which surpasses all understanding, the groanings beyond utterance. But what was the use of having those sorts of gut feelings if you never follow them?
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Another time, I was absolutely certain that I would board a connecting flight to Minneapolis. You must understand, I was sure of it the same way I was sure on my mission that God lives, that Christ atoned for our sins, that Joseph Smith saw them both. Never mind that it was the middle of holiday traffic in New York and every other direct home was utterly, hilariously oversold—this would be the one that would save me from another night’s sleep on the airport floor.
Hence why I was so crushed to arrive at my gate, only to find the flight oversold by 12; there was not a chance in hell I would be boarding today. I collapsed into the nearest chair—exhausted, sleep-deprived, broken and broke, facing the very real possibility of blowing my meager savings on a severely-overpriced hotel room in Queens.
But what was worse was the overpowering feeling all I had felt before was but confirmation bias, wishful-thinking, pride, vanity, and foolishness. I had never really known which flights to board and which to not, there were no impressions of the spirit, there was no God, I had spent my strength for naught, I had been a fool and my faith was vain.
So deep down did I go in this silent depressive spiral that I initially didn’t notice when the gate-agent began calling names. With slow-dawning awareness, I became aware that these were people late for final boarding call. I was still a dozen names down the list, so I didn’t dare hope; yet nevertheless, with mere minutes to go, the gate-agent began clearing standbys.
Mine was last to be cleared.
I stumbled down the galley in a sort of holy terror.
✈
Once, another time, we were in New York, and the connecting flight home appeared oversold. My wife checked on-line, and found a Portland flight leaving about the same time; she figured we could spend the night with my family in Washington, then try again for home the next day. Although such a circumlocutious route appealed to my round-about sensibilities, nevertheless I still felt the nagging impression that we should try the Salt Lake flight home first. She then pointed out that the Portland flight left 40 minutes before the Salt Lake one, and if we missed both we’d be stuck sleeping on the airport floor again. This she was in no mood for. I fell silent, I took a deep breath, I closed my eyes…and then insisted once more that we would get home to Salt Lake tonight. She glared at me, but still gave me a chance. A lot was riding on this.
Mere minutes before the doors closed, our names were called by the gate-agents; they handed us our boarding passes and rushed us on board. Again, we stumbled down the galley in a sort of reverent terror, as though we walked on Holy Ground (Holy Ground at 38,000 feet). She fell asleep on my shoulder. It was good to get home and it was good to be right—but I swear on my Mother’s grave, that I would have been perfectly happy to sleep on the airport floor yet again, for another one of the worst night’s sleep of my life, if only to know that I could still trust that feeling.
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Rome is the James Dean of world cities—it left a beautiful corpse. You can’t swing a shovel without striking ruins of some priceless historical significance. One excavation we came across was discovered when ground was broken for a new luxury hotel. It contained the remains of an ancient temple to a dead religion. Needless to say, they did not build the hotel.
Other major cities feature monuments to their current glory and power, their potency and virility—the Statue of Liberty; the Eiffel Tower; the Great Wall; Big Ben—but in Rome, all the major landmarks are already fallen: the two-thirds remnants of the Colosseum; the wrecks of the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill; the half-broken Corinthian Columns scattered like weeds across the Jewish Ghetto. Unlike, say, Paris, you cannot contemplate Rome’s glory without also contemplating Rome’s fall. There’s something perhaps more honest about that—Rome reminds you that your current happiness is strictly provisional, that it cannot last, that (as Mormon said) all things must fail.
I cancelled the last day of class to make it to Rome. The students didn’t complain (they never do), but still I felt a need to explain myself, how I wanted to see Italy while I was still young. “That is good,” declared one middle-aged student abruptly, one who had only rarely spoken up over the course of the semester. All eyes turned on her as hers turned on me: “My husband and I had made many wonderful plans to see the world when we retired, when the children were grown and the money was saved,” she continued, “That was before he passed away, suddenly, last Christmas.”
“Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry—”
“You never know how much time you have left,” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “You do not know when you are already middle-aged. Do what you must while you still think you are young…”
And the class fell silent.
✈
You don’t go to England to feel young again. Quite the inverse, in fact. Everywhere you turn reminds you not only of England’s antiquity, but the world’s: Westminster Abbey with the musty-tombs of men who once commanded kingdoms but now can’t command the attention of indifferent tourists on their way to see Chaucer; the British Museum littered with the remains of ancient empires once-awful-long-forgotten, all plundered by another Empire upon whom the sun was never supposed to set but then did; all while Big Ben keeps time as unhurriedly and morosely as the Thames. Among these countless artifacts, one begins to feel part of the whole endless, weary drama of human folly, tragedy, and vanity.
One is confronted with this antiquity head-on at Stonehenge, outside Salisbury. Here is a Neolithic structure that predates the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts, the Romans, the Druids, even the wheel. The nearest quarry is over two hundred miles away. Whoever built it put themselves to profound and impractical expense, effort, and sacrifice to complete it.
Of course it was a Temple, is all I’m saying.
And as utterly (and inevitably) touristy and roped-off and ticket-boothed as that World Heritage Site is now, and as bitingly cold was the wind and poorly-prepared my clothes on the day I visited, still I insisted that we walk around it twice, and I wish I’d walked around it a third.
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One of the first places we flew to as newly-weds was Juneau. It is shockingly small, shockingly isolated, like you never imagine any U.S. city to be, let alone a state capital. Moreover, as the plane lands at the municipal airport, one can still just sense how much bigger the rest of Alaska is beyond Juneau’s immediate borders. It really is the last frontier, as their license plates declare. I’d never been to Alaska before, but then, arguably, most people never have, not really.
Though Juneau at first blush feels too tiny to be a capital, each day in summer it is swarmed by at least 5 cruise ships. It is a fascinating study in contrasts: extreme isolation and extreme consumerism, tiny population and massive crowds, an escape at the edge of Western civilization daily overrun by its worst excesses.
Mendenhall Glacier is the main goal of the cruise-liners, which likewise is an exercise in contrasts: first there is a feeling of awe and wonder, at its sheer size and expanse, the ice tinged with bright blues that I didn’t even know existed outside of cinema. But then also comes a feeling of profound melancholy, at the realization that this glacier may well soon be remembered only in cinema. For the Park Service makes no bones about the fact that as recently as 1950, the Glacier covered clear up to the current Visitor’s Center; that in 1960 it had already shrunk to the site of the first look-out; that in 1980, it still covered Nugget Falls, which is now open to hikers. By any and every calculation you could devise, this glacier is in full retreat.
Now, I knew full well before I flew to Alaska that Global Warming was real: I’d read all about the drought in California, the bleachings of the Australian Coral Reefs, the mega-storms smiting the Gulf Coast, the decimation of the Ice Caps. But somehow the clear and rapid retreat of Mendenhall Glacier forced my attention like never before. And of course I’m complicit; I flew there on a carbon monoxide spewing airliner, did I not? Even if I was, in effect, just hitching a ride on a plane that would have flown there anyways—a glorified tramp in the grand old American tradition of hopping railroad cars—does that make it any better? And all those tourists from the Cruise Ships, they, too, trampled the trails to see the Glacier before it disappeared, even as it withdrew before their very footsteps.
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I knew a guy in High School who ran off to Alaska, not to tour, but to live. His father had taken his own life when he was young, and it was difficult not to read his teenage enthusiasm for extreme-sports (and frequent ensuing trips to the ER) as a sort of therapy, a catharsis, perhaps even a closeted death-wish.
He said in 11th grade that he wanted to go to college to become an anesthesiologist (he’d had so much experience with them, you see). Yet after college, he did not apply for med school, but instead moved to the Last Frontier. He worked the seasonal jobs—canaries and fishing boats and so forth—so that he could spend the rest of the year exploring the wilderness, seeking those places where no white man—perhaps no human ever—has ever left a footprint. I learned of his exodus only years later in grad school, when he reconnected with me on social media. His profile pic was of him shirtless, tearing the spine from some six-foot trout while a pristine Alaskan lake shimmered in the sun behind him. I am normally impatient of shirtless profile pics, but this one I allowed: for his were not the cosmetic muscles of the gym, but of the bona fide frontiersman who actually uses them. I confess I was jealous—not for his physique, but because he was no longer at the whims of the market. He knew to escape it before the rest of us.
But folks who are expert outdoorsmen in the lower-48 are often caught off guard by how much larger and wilder Alaska is; if you don’t respect Alaska it doesn’t respect you back; and sometimes even when you do respect Alaska it doesn’t respect you back; and one day he went out canoeing, and they later found his canoe but never his body. He was 26. Too late I realized that reconnecting with him over social media was not the same as actually reconnecting, and I was filled with remorse. Among certain of his closer High School friends, a sort of legend arose, that he had not perished at all, but had faked his death, that out in the northern wilderness he had finally found the peace that had so long eluded him, that he was now living off the land, wild and free like no one lives anymore. The legend even took on a sort of Messianic tinge, an apocalyptic expectation that he would one day reveal himself and return to us. Who knows, maybe they’re right: maybe he, too, is only hibernating, preparing, waiting—for the day of return, for the day of resurrection perhaps. Maybe he, too, is on standby.
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In some ways, finally visiting Paris is like finding out that Narnia, or Middle-earth, actually exists; that they really do speak Elvin on the subways; that Dwarves and Centaurs read their newspapers in the park while Orcs are out for a jog; that there is a statue to Arwen and Aragorn on a round-about near the expressway; that Minas Tirith is a real building, open to tourists, right in the heart of Metropolitan Rohan. You snap endless pictures in Paris less to prove you were there than to prove it exists.
In the Louvre, where one wall-sized masterpiece after another stretches before your overwhelmed and crumbling consciousness, you are tempted to skip the Mona Lisa altogether, to deride it as overrated, overhyped, the original Paris Hilton, famous-for-being-famous—at least compared to this embarrassment of riches. How delicious would it be, you ponder, to go home and tell everyone you visited Paris but skipped the Mona Lisa on purpose? (That was almost our logic in Venice, recall). But you go anyways, cause how do you know if you’ll ever be back (there’s always less time than you think there is); and so you elbow your way through the crowding tourists and flash-photography, just so you can catch your glance, roll your eyes, and check it off the list.
But then you stare at it. For twenty minutes. Even amidst all the jostling crowds, you stand transfixed. Her face: you swear it shifts. Is she smiling? Or mourning? Or flirting? Is she about to cry with you? Or for you? Or just laugh at you? She’ll never tell.
So, as with all else in Paris, you walk away, defeated, chastised, constrained to confess—it’s a masterpiece.
✈
For all the times my wife had worked a flight to Amsterdam, she had never actually been there for when the Tulips bloom. The season was about to end yet again, so we determined to do something about it. She was not able to pick up a work-trip the one weekend we both had free, which meant we had no guaranteed lodging. We debated about how willing we were to shell out for an expensive hotel or hostel in Holland, when at last it occurred to us: we were flying standby—did the not the seats in Business Class transform into beds? Could not the airplane itself be our accommodations? The sheer decadence and outrageousness of the idea, the cheapskate extravagance of it all, struck our fancy. We determined to exceed the wildest road-trips of our college years, to live like we had hoped we would live when we got to be our age, and left for Amsterdam on a moment’s notice with only a backpack and a change of clothes.
We flew 9 hours non-stop to the Netherlands to spend 4 hours at the Keukenhof, the world’s largest Tulip garden. A bus took us straight from the airport to the front gate, where we spent the morning overcome by the sheer quantity and quality of flowers, the sheer overwhelming beauty of the scene, wonderfully wondering if we weren’t just dreaming in our exhausted reverie—and then we took the bus straight back to the airport, to catch the last flight home. Dutch security interrogated us rather extensively over our suspiciously brief visit, but we got through. I’m pretty sure the radical Time Zone whiplash is why we both came down with colds the next week. We rejoiced in the audacity of our triumph, but also swore to never do that again.
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I could not help but note to my wife that thus far our travels had been largely Eurocentric. “You sure bet they have!” she exclaimed, making clear that it was a function of my male privilege that I could, say, sleep under a park-bench on a Mexican beach under a full moon (as I once did in college), whereas she was an independent young woman navigating a world increasingly hostile to the same.
Nevertheless, for all her Western bias, she still subjected herself to the three-month process of getting a Chinese visa—she went near stir crazy as her work-life became a never-ending parade of dull domestic flights while her passport wended its way through the bureaucracies of two nations. When she finally got it back, the first thing she did was nab a trip to Shanghai. Her trip put me in a deeply reflective mood, because it was exactly a decade and a month earlier that I had first flown to China myself, posing as an English teacher for an immersion school in AnHui province, in a quest to get as far away from Rexburg, Idaho as possible (and boy did I succeed).
Towards the end of my time in China, I hiked up famed Huang Shan, or Yellow Mountain, hoping to gain the view that had inspired countless Chinese poets. But a thick rain cloud and perpetual mist sat on the summit, such that everywhere I looked, I could see only a cold, gray, white-out. I stood at the summit to see the world but only seemed to see nothingness itself. “See through walls and see through stone,” the mist seemed to whisper, like death personified, “But thou shalt never see through me.”
My American roommate and I spent the night at a mountain-top hostel, where I prayed like I hadn’t since a child. I acknowledged in my orisons that I had already seen so much of this beautiful country, more than I ever deserved, that I could not reasonably expect clear skies everywhere I visited, that something had to be a bust sooner or later; but nevertheless I was here now and might never be again; and though this be far, far from the most pressing issue facing this awful world or even my own personal life right now, nevertheless if the Almighty could see fit in His Infinite Mercy to lift the cloud while I was there at Huang Shan, I would be eternally grateful. But I woke up the next morning to find the cloud still there.
I was about ready to declare the trip a wash and get as far away from the place as possible. (It all reminded me too much of my mother’s passing). But my roommate, bless his soul, insisted that since we paid good money to get up there, we might as well get our money’s worth, and explore the mountain for its own sake. To this day I wonder if that is what made the difference, that we saw the mountain for its own sake, and not our own.
For as we wondered down the trails, peeked through the trees and climbed the boulders, a cold wind began to move, seeping under our clothes, shivering our bones, tingling our spines. Then, like a theater curtain, the cloud quietly, achingly, unhurriedly, began to lift. Slowly, we began to discern shapes, depths, distances, even colors, teasing and tantalizing us as they gently emerged from the whiteness.
Finally our patience was rewarded; the cloud lifted whole-sale, and we beheld vibrant green bamboo forests rolling into the morning sky as far as the eye could see, surrounded by mountains, cliffs, crevices, and of generally such surpassing beauty that I fell to my knees in awe—the first time in my life I was ever physically overcome by beauty.
✈
I finish, for now, where I began: in Venice.
There was a second flight attendant in the gondola with us: Alex, a young gay man from the South. (Some folks later expressed surprise that we would allow a third-wheel onto our gondola romance, but how else were we to get a picture together? Why else were we even there?) Alex initially only joined us out of some half-formed sense of guilt, sighing, “Eh, there’s poor people in Alabama or whatever.” But not even he could repress a smile, a real sense of wonder, as the gondola weaved its way through the canals. It was worth having him along just to watch his defensive sarcasm fall silent before the beauty thereof. (Of course, he also had a bit of a crush on the gondolier).
After the gondola ride, we did what he wanted to do this time: find the Hard Rock Café Venice. He did not desire to eat there, nor did he want a t-shirt: he just wanted an ironic picture in front of it—perhaps, I suppose, to prove that he could breeze past the wonders of the world as though they didn’t impress him (even if they did) straight for their most crassly-commercial copy of the same, and then blow that off, as well. I suppose it was his quiet form of resistance—or at least a placeholder for the same, until a better form presents itself. Maybe he, too, is only hibernating, abiding, awaiting the signal moment; maybe he, too, is only waiting on standby.