Killing Batteries

You are never gonna guess where I am right now. Bonus smartass creativity points for anyone who thought “The Home for Disturbed Travel Writers with Bad Breath? Finally?”

In truth, at this moment, I am technically in Arlington, Virginia, but for the past three days I have been crisscrossing my nation’s capital on almost no sleep, suffering the worst jetlag of my entire life and trying not to stare at the abundance of very attractive college coeds, that seem to spend their entire days jogging around town in those teeny, skin tight track-and-field brief-shorts.

Travel writing is a funny business. Things sometimes happen at an agonizingly slow pace (like paycheck delivery), other times they happen so fast as to breach the stoutest of urethras. Flash back to last Thursday.

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So, I was in Malta almost two weeks ago. For the record, it was not a vacation. It was all business, as far as my long-suffering LP editors are concerned. The Maltese Strongbow cider distributor admiring an odd four-day spike in sales may testify differently, but that’s purely circumstantial evidence. As is the Strongbow logo tattoo I woke up with at some stage on my bikini-line.

A few years back I stayed at a great hostel in Nice, France that verily invited drunken debauchery. While I was in residence, during an unusually lucid moment, the phrase “if I don’t remember it, it never happened” was coined. Abiding by that school of thought, apart from getting my passport stamped and the fuzzy, profoundly sucky 15 minutes between waking up and trudging to the nearest pub each morning, Malta never happened. So help me Buddha.

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I’m shameless about a lot of stuff, but there are only three things that I’m so shameless about that if it weren’t me doing whatever it was, I’d pants me just to teach me a lesson. Those three things are:

- Self-promotion

- Abusing any opportunity for free booze

- Alerting the world when it’s my birthday

Funny I should mention that, because today is my birthday. And if I weren’t already wretchedly hungover from the free booze from last night, I’d be out tracking down some free booze right now. As it is, I’m working and admiring how effing good I look for a 37 year old guy who gets negligible exercise and hasn’t seen the inside of a dentist’s office for over four years.

Speaking of free booze… If an open bar and saving orphans are things that you can get excited about, then here’s your chance to indulge in both simultaneously. Next Generation Nepal a charity aimed at rescuing displaced Nepalese children run by my hilarious travel blogging accomplice Conor Grennan, is having a fundraising drunken melee in New York City on June 21st. Admission is $50 per drunkard, after that it’s on brother. Open bar, conga lines, naked break dancing, you name it.

Actually, open bar notwithstanding, there’s some serious fundraising to be done. Remember, the drunker you get the more you’re likely to rashly bid when they auction off the rights to pick me up at JFK and drive me across Brooklyn when I swing through town later this summer. Yes, it’s true, I won’t be at the party, but I’ll be doing my part to help. I got me a whole bottle of vodka here, so at least I can be embarrassingly drunk at the party in spirit.

If time, space and the elements is keeping you from attending the party as well, there’s always the donation button at the bottom of the NGN main page. If you’re as bummed about missing the party as I am, donate $42 on the web site and then buy yourself a bottle of wine with the other $8. Everyone wins.

And if you aren’t reading it already, Conor’s blog is pretty funny, even when he’s reuniting displaced children with their parents and fall-down tired because an insomniac neighborhood monkey is having a love affair with his doorbell.

I’ve been back from Malta for like three days, but its really only been about 12 minutes when you take out the waking hours that I’ve been entrenched in frenzied catch-up work. Apart from one indulgent shower and a run to the market in the next village because all I had to eat was raw garlic, bread crusts and a giant Toblerone I bought in duty-free, I have been working virtually non-stop since the moment I got off the train Sunday afternoon, two hours later than planned (keep reading).

If you’re just joining us, I’m kind of a dangerous fanatic when it comes to work. I have to be. I don’t say it often enough, but at the end of most days this job is effing awesome, however little details like having to work seven days a week most of the time just to stay financially afloat can make me a little cranky. Well, I just went a full week without doing a minute of work for the first time in like two years and even though I’m not under any deadline pressure just yet, as soon as my plane from Malta landed in Italy I zapped into full freak out mode.

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