Killing Batteries

It’s finally happening.  I’m forgetting how to speak English.  Will the eccentricities never end?

Has this ever happened to you?  You just wanna say something simple to the girl behind the gelato counter like “I want to put your lips on one of those cones and suck on them all afternoon” (never mind that she won’t understand me, I just wanna say it, is that a crime?) and your mental teleprompter starts scrolling, but it seems like someone went through and deleted every third word and/or all words over one syllable, and the words that you can discern get corrupted during the journey from your mind’s eye to your mouth and it comes out in halting gibberish?

Forget I asked.  No need to embarrass yourselves.  After all, I’m the only one here literally getting pennies per day in Adsense revenue for detailing my profundity of shortcomings and the exquisite contours of my tushie.

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I have a somewhat addictive personality.  This has manifested itself in a number of ways over the years:  juggling, girls, Jolt Cola, women, video games, babes, wine, Michelle Hunziker, travel and boobs.  Thankfully, somehow, I’ve avoided drugs or the only people reading my missives now would be abnormal psychology researchers, increasingly regretful social work trainees and the letters editor at the New York Times.  As if the above list of time consuming and expensive pursuits weren’t enough of a distraction, I’ve recently managed to accidentally acquire a new fixation: pizza.

But this isn’t just any pizza.  After all I’m an American, I’ve been eating enormous amounts of pizza ever since I’ve been able to get down solid food, as is decreed in the Pledge of Allegiance (“… indivisible, with liberty and deep dish for all”).  No, I’m talking about lovingly tended, precisely crafted, magically delicious traditional Italian pizza. 

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In our continuing coverage of dumbass blunders I’ve committed during my freelancing career, one of my budding gullibility lapses of all time is buying into the assumption that Italy has something approaching First-World internet service.  Now, I haven’t been to every corner of Italy, but judging from the parts I’ve seen, they rank on the Internet Usability Scale somewhere between the mountains of Northern Laos and the inside of a donkey’s colon.

Imagine the internet connection you had at home in 1996, now imagine that it’s about 70% slower, three times as expensive and/or it only works every third day.  That’s internet in Italy.  Now imagine an environment where about one in 20 people are internet users, with the resultant priority placed on firming up service and reliability and that’s the state of internet on Sardinia, my throw-back island home.

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In a few hours I set off on a series of budget planes, trains and automobiles, for nearly 24 hours of sleepless, undignified, butt-pounding travel (keep your tsk-tsking comments to yourself Tim Leffel) to get myself from Iasi, Romania back to my travel writing Apartment of Solitude in an abandoned vacation village in western Sardinia.  I’ll be in no mood to write something funny (or sit normal) for several days afterward, so instead I’m offering up this week’s humor-starved post early, in order to pass along an embarrassing, but topical cautionary tale about a major ‘don’t’ in freelance writing.

If you haven’t dabbled in freelance writing, or if you have and have been far too clever to fall for the “can you really quick write something for our next issue without a contract?” scam, then the following rant may be of no use to you.  The rest of you might like to like to absorb the following advisory and potentially save yourself some precious time and energy on your next “vacation” that might otherwise be spent drinking cider and playing Halo II on your friend’s Xbox.  Let’s begin.

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