I just saw Live Free or Die Hard, so I do understand that there is a limit on how often one can suspend disbelief in life. That said, I am pretty much the eternal optimist. (I mean, it is true that I entered Live Free . . . expecting to like it!) So, I guess that just goes to show that I’m the original “there’s-always-something-good-around-the-next-corner” kind of guy. And if not “good”, then “wild” or “unexpected” or “worth keeping awake for” or simply “can’t wait to see what happens next”. Well . . .  that’s me.

I don’t know about you, but I have to say that I am rarely disappointed. ‘Cause invariably, after turning that corner, something unanticipated, unusual, something worth encountering, generally is standing right there. To my utter surprise (and general a/mu/ma/zement).

Like Bunny Country.

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—tjmHolden

The hard part about life is extracting enough novelty from it to keep it interesting, but not so much as to make it intolerably, unbearably, unmanageably, unliveable.

Which is why we have heuristics. Or other simplifying devices like codifications and formulas, recipes and examples, parables and analogies, metaphors and portents.

(Oh, and travel blogs and people like me!)

You know: intellectual tools that help present life as it is: unique, yet, at the same time, compact and fathomable; and not so overwhelming as to tap us over like so many ten pins standing helpless, in muted anticipation, in some inert line we have been fitting into.

Which (believe it or not) is one reason that I’m about to talk about Iraq, but only as a prelude to talking about my guitar-playing son. And it is also why, along the way, I’ll probably take a detour through Oedipus Rex. Maybe as a means of verifying that this is a travelblog – which is another way of observing that just about everything we think or do has detours and rivulets and tributaries and ultimately feeds into and contributes to the execution of the great journey of life.

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—tjmHolden

New trip; same old routine. International flight. Packed like sardines. Ten and a-half hours to get from there to here – wherever that may be. No matter where it is, it always seems to take ten – minimum – to get delivered to any international destination. Is it just me? A function of that little archapelago in the Pacific that I make a habit of inhabiting. Or is it true for you, too? No matter where you reside.

Okay. So, how about you? Does this ever happen to you, as well? . . .

Mid-flight, an unscheduled nod-off, only to wake unexpectedly nine minutes later; face flush against the spiny shoulder of the Indian teen to your left. A trace of spittle rolling from your lips, dribbling now along his bicep.

Yuk.

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—tjmHolden

My boy is on the verge of feeling his rock oats. After years of my entreating him to bring his drum, piano and vocal skills over to my band, he up and formed his own! Which is what 16 year-olds do, I suppose.

“Later, Dad.”

Sigh.

His band just had their second session over at our house. Fresh off nearly cracking the windowpanes with their fuzzed out bass and guitars (and I’ll be damned if I’ll ever let that happen again!); but how can you say “no” when you see those hyper-stoked kids with grins that won’t quit on their faces, flush from those first few empowering moments of “we-can-do-anything-because-we’ve-done-nothing-and-it’s-all-in-front-of-us”.

God, how I miss those times!

Practically, what that means is that my stealing him back into the fold to work his chops with his sis and me and our band-on-hold, won’t be happening for the next few months, probably years—by which time I will be so doddering that the point will be moot: who‘d want to play with me anyway? I mean, Mick and Sir Paul and B.B. King are still tolerated cause they built up a following the previous 40 years. (And, besides, Mick and B.B. can still make magic tracks).

All of which goes to prove that rockers are allowed to live forever, if they can manage to get born first!

But I guess I’m just letting the scent of my sour grapes out.

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—tjmHolden

I know that this is a column about travel, but you know from being such faithful readers that voyages of the body, the soul, the mind . . . they all qualify. Still, even by that liberal definitional standard, this entry will be a stretch, since this entry is about journeys of a moral kind. It is a topic that came up recently over here in Japan (where my peripatetic feet generally roost) and I hope you agree it’s worth consideration, at least for a paragraph or three.

If you haven’t heard, a “baby drop box” was put into operation May 10 by a Roman Catholic hospital in Kumamoto. It was designed for unwanted infants however it made the front page of newspapers when a father dropped off a preschool-aged child on the service’s first day.

This abandonment aside, Kumamoto’s so-called ”konotori no yurikago” (stork cradle) plan has generated both praise and criticism. Is this an example of social engineering noble and visionary, or of a society dissipated and retrograde? Is this a human community committed to the principle of “no child left behind” or, rather, of any child potentially tossed by the wayside?

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—tjmHolden

“I once had a girl, or should I say . . .”

No, that’s John’s line. Me, being different, mine better start cleaner. Clearer. Something more kosher, like thus:

I once had an acquaintance who wrote songs for a living. Apparently she had a knack for it since she managed to cut 5 records (remember those vinyl things?) and 3 CDs over the past couple decades. Because I had a past life in music (well, after a fashion) sometimes we sat around and kicked song titles or themes about. Just for the jest of it.

”Hey, how about a song about a couple meeting for a date, only they screw up their coordinates and board trains going in opposite directions, and end up in different cities? Call it something like ‘wrong-headed rendezvous’.”

“That’s horrible.”

“You can do better, then go ahead.”

“Well sure. How about the ballad of a guy and girl who fall for each other after he almost drowns and she has to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Call it ‘breath-taking love’.”

“You really think that’ll sell? Well, no wonder you’re holding chalk in a classroom.”

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—tjmHolden