Killing Batteries

Over the past few years, I’ve become a household name in something like a dozen houses. With this kind of staggering fame comes ancillary perks and burdens. Some are great, like meeting readers on the road and enjoying their hospitality and local expertise. Others, not-so-great, like being spammed with tourism industry press releases sent by PR firms sweetly suggesting that I deviate from trash talking members of the media and mocking whole countries with hilariously bad internet service and instead write about their new business class seats to South America.

Further to the not-so-great parts of being rabidly popular, I’ve got some unimaginable news that’s going to shake the very cores of your respective worlds. Indeed, you may be overcome with faint upon hearing this information, so I strongly advise you to put down your coffee, assume a wide stance and position a friend/co-worker/medical burro so they can break your fall should the worst occur. Ready? OK…

Not everyone thinks I’m a literary genius.

[Pause for administering smelling salts]

The pitiable character flaws of my non-fans notwithstanding, some people take it even further and hate me. And some of those people take it even further than that and waste perfectly good time writing poorly worded missives about how much they hate me and then sending them to me and sitting back waiting for the sweet, sweet validation that will occur when I answer, admitting that yes, they are completely right, I am wrong and a terrible person and the quality of my upbringing and education is clearly to blame. Plus, I’m ugly.

There are really people like this.

It’s been a rocky road that I still drunkenly trip over once in a while, but I’ve managed to compile a simple, idiot-proof methodology for coping with hate mail that I will now share for the betterment of my travel writing colleagues should they ever attain the heights of fame that go with being ridiculed on the radio for two hours by The Hackensack Sister’s Breakfast Time Hack Show.

My fool-proof approach to hate mail has been proven time and again to be the quickest solution to dealing with angry readers and can be encapsulated in three simple words: laugh, delete, repeat.

No matter how much you want to be loved, never answer hate mail. I don’t care how openly wrong, narrow-minded, brain damaged and f*cked up they are, your reply will do no good. This is largely because anyone who has taken the time to send you hate mail has two, if not all three, of the following qualities:

1. Self-righteous
2. Pissed off
3. Batshit crazy

You could write the most diplomatic, rational, understanding and reality-fueled email in the history of the written word, but the fact is that one email isn’t going to cure their psychoses. It’s just not going to happen. Ever. So, don’t bother. If you try, not only will you be wasting your time, but nine times out of 10, you will only succeed in enraging your anti-fan even further, eliciting one or more follow-up hate mails to the tune of 2,000 words and maybe weeks of them spamming your blog’s comments section and sending you viruses in Word document attachments.

One time in a hundred you’ll get the sense that your hate mailer is actually reasonable and recognizes that people’s opinions differ and that they understand your views and that you’ll have to agree to disagree. Those people are batshit crazy too. Just because they’re high functioning batshit crazy doesn’t mean you should waste 20 minutes composing a reply, because it’ll probably get you nowhere and that person will never read your stuff again anyway, so screw ‘em.

Now on occasion you’ll get that juicy, jaw-dropping, frame-worthy piece of hate mail that’s just so irresistible that you can’t help but act on it. I’m talking about the one where the sender is so batshit crazy and attention starved that you feel compelled to f*ck with them a little. Again, this isn’t worth 20 minutes of your time, but with only a little one-time preparation, you can be ready to quickly strike back at these people in a way that’ll make them descend into jabbering, irreversible madness. I’m talking about instant primal de-evolution here, bounding around their basement apartments, slapping their chests, grunting and throwing their own feces at their mothers.

There’s no greater torture in life for a hate mailer than the knowledge that their precious hate mail will never be read. If you simply ignore them, they can still cling to the hope that you read and absorbed their ravings, but if you can indirectly convince them that you never saw it… instantaneous, frenzied, veritable tornado of feces – followed by a localized brainstem explosion.

Here’s what you do… Doctor up one of those infuriating MAILER-DAEMON email rejection notices that you get whenever you try to email anyone in Barcelona tourism. Carefully change the words to something along the lines of the following:

“Hi. This is the qmail-send program at [insert appropriate domain name].
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following address.
It could be that the recipient doesn’t accept mail from your domain. Please try again from a different email account. Thank you.”

Then paste a bunch of that email robot jibba-jabba below it and the hate mailer’s original message below that. Then go in and quickly change the user name that appears on your emails (this is easily done if you use an email client like Outlook) to ‘MAILER-DAEMON’ – don’t forget to change it back when you’re done. Then send the message.

You’ll get anywhere from two to 17 follow-ups from the hate mailer, resending the message over and over from different accounts. Sometimes they’ll go through the trouble of creating whole new accounts, with a bonus fuming preface at the top of the message detailing how much time and effort went into sending you their hate mail. Always reply with the failure message above. When the messages stop coming, you can rest in the probable knowledge that the hate mailer has been forcibly institutionalized by local authorities and will be composing future hate mail with their tongue while strapped in a straitjacket.

That concludes this lesson on dealing with hate mail. Tune in next time for tips on how to avoid being cajoled into doing practically free work with the promise of a “small time investment” on your part and eventual monster exposure only to find yourself sitting there two years later, 15 hours of you time pissed away on the editor’s anal retentive edits and rewrites, bringing your earnings to about US$1.63 an hour and the shit still hasn’t been published.

[Photo credit: Jonno Witts]

I’m a disaster of aches, pains and ominous symptoms lately. I’ve always been a passionate hypochondriac, but this is starting to get ridiculous. And it all started almost overnight. Well, over-month, but still a relatively short period of time. As of the time of writing, I’ve got two painful teeth (yes, in addition to the one that I got fixed last month in Romania), a tender hip that’s shooting pain lasers into my pelvis, lower back and knee, insomnia, a rash that may or may not be flesh-eating and most recently mild, yet unsettling vertigo.

If I die in my sleep of an aneurism, I want to leave my laptop to Alex, my magazine clippings to Frank (just white out my byline and type in yours), my Playboys to Lucas (start a blog dude), my 27 gigabyte Michelle Hunziker multimedia stalker files to Elfin and the remainder of my Romania and Moldova work to Catherine who is trying to break into Europe, FYI LP editors.

Regular readers (especially Twitter readers) will be most familiar with my achy hip that started for no apparent reason in April and, not surprisingly, didn’t get any better after a month of being on my feet for 12 hours a day in Romania.

My robust network of enablers seems to think it’s Sciatica, an affliction with numerous, vague symptoms and even more numerous treatments that are either too time consuming (yoga), too expensive (surgery) or too illegal (medical dope) for workaholic guidebook writers without heath insurance. So, as is my way, I’m treating it with the Complain Incessantly Method, which has gotten me several offers for butt rubs, but otherwise not much relief.

Meanwhile, a few helpful, drunken bystanders have made suggestions as to how I can ease the pain for my looming three week trip to finish road research in Romania, which is how the concept of a Medical Burro™ was hatched.

Just plain walking around sucks enough ass (pun intended), but carrying my bags is pure agony. Enter the Medical Burro. I can just sling my specially designed laptop and gadget saddlebags over my Medical Burro and we’ll saunter inconspicuously down the streets of Bucharest, the envy of all guidebook writers we encounter. Best of all, it appears that you can rent a Medical Burro (because in this economy only an idiot would lease or buy a Medical Burro) and after only a little training I bet my Medical Burro can probably take better notes than I can.

The sweetest part is that it’s a Medical Burro, which means they legally have to let you bring it on the plane. That’s a guaranteed pass to exit-row seating people.

I’m looking into it, but I’m pretty sure that my LP on-the-road insurance will compensate me for my Medical Burro rental, however, I’m not sure if I can rent my Medical Burro here in America and bring it with me. That’d be ideal, cuz Romanian Medical Burros drive like shit.

If you’ve got the stomach for it, I’ve posted yet another bitter rant about newspaper work over at This Is Why I Love Minneapolis.

I just wanted to remind everyone that I own that book title for all eternity, even if the universe collapses in on itself and I never get a deal for my memoirs, so don’t even try to lift it. And yes, “Lamborghinis and Blowjobs” is too close.

I was thinking of this title last week as I sat down and finally started writing up the research notes from Romania and Moldova. The transition from road research to write-up is not an easy one. Self-starting in a solitary, familiar, static environment and staring at a non-lethal laptop for 10 hours a day can be challenging after a month of sensory overload, frenetic movement, red-lining physical and mental stimulation, incessant cultural challenges and adrenaline spikes while cheating death 47 times a day. I sat down to start writing when the hangover cleared on Wednesday afternoon. Actual writing didn’t begin until late Friday morning.

After the first 12 hours, the productive unease in the room was palpable, so I decided to have a quick motivational dialogue with my brain. I said “Brain, it’s time to start marking up maps, updating hostel prices and writing nice things about Bucharest that won’t make you hate yourself so we can pay the bills.” My brain countered by saying “I’m not doing squat until I’ve traveled at 130KPH on the third worst roads in Europe and come a whisker away from a head-on collision with an escaped cow. Now go get daddy some bon bons.”

So, I’m rethinking the title of my memoirs to reflect this perennial, seesaw internal struggle that all travel writers face. Something like “Lamborghinis and Valium – Why I Sometimes Have the Productivity of an Italian Bureaucrat”.

In the days since, I’ve satisfactorily re-discovered (because it’s constantly changing) the optimum combination of caffeine, semi-nude pictures of Michelle Hunziker and bon bons to make the Pulitzer-winning magic happen. My brain, conscious and body rarely agree on critical issues lately like when it’s time to sleep, when it’s time to wake up, which line at immigration will move the fastest and no, one more Strongbow wouldn’t hurt. At any given moment, the damage control I’m dealing with over here is akin to walking into a pre-school class two hours after the teacher accidentally locked herself in the bathroom. If I’m lucky, I get 2/3 of the room to cooperate, everyone else is eating worms and peeing in the fish bowl.

Finally, I’m not so narcissistic yet that a well-timed groupie email doesn’t totally make my day. No matter how much dope was smoked before the email was composed, it’s still flattering to be mentioned in the same breath with Tim Cahill. Scantly clad groupie-portraits are also warmly welcome, though people like Frank should use their best judgment.

Though my Romania research is only a little more than half completed (I return July 9th for three more weeks on the road), I’m long overdue for a positive post about this country just to pacify those of you that are undoubtedly wondering why I keep coming here.

Lists are nice. Let’s do that:

• The countryside: parts of this country are so unspeakably beautiful that your brain tries to reject it as a hallucination as a defense mechanism so you don’t go insane, like during hostile alien invasions. Driving through northwest Moldavia into Maramures (specifically between Gura Humorului all the way to Vadu Izei) I wanted to stop the car every 30 seconds to take pictures. As it was, I only stopped once. The instant I fished out my camera clouds descended, but I took the picture anyway.
• On that note, the villages in Maramures are just so infectiously quaint and peaceful that you have to wonder if there might be a Valium factory nearby, pumping 50 tones of byproduct into the air every day. If they had reliable internet, I’d probably never leave.
• Wine: so good and cheap that I’m surprised the EU hasn’t outlawed it. You can get a perfectly good bottle for about 3 euros (about US$4.50) – and it gets even better in Moldova.
• I never get tired of simply strolling around cities like Sighişoara, Braşov and Oradea. They’ve got this living museum effect, like Venice without the flooding.
• I would almost live in this Podunk village just for the name alone. (NSFW)
• Ţuică: Dangerously lethal plumb brandy moonshine, but if you get the good stuff from Maramures, don’t ask me why, hangovers are surprisingly mild.
• The women: you’re all so heart-breakingly, bug-eyed, lip smacking beautiful. Every time I leave the country I want to pop out my eyes and put them in a jar, so if some accident should befall me before I return, the last thing I ever see will be your faces (and stuff).
• Parking: with the possible exception of Italy, Romania has the most lenient parking restrictions I’ve ever seen. Though I’m sure the law books say otherwise, in reality the only restrictions are that you’re car must be at least 3/4 of the way into the space and you must move your car before 8am on July 12th, 2017.
• With very rare exception, the hostels here are great and getting better. They should send every HI hostel owner in France, Italy and Spain to Romania to teach them a desperately needed lesson.
• Oh no she di’in’t! (NSFW again)

That’s all for now. Part 2 in July will take me to the clothing optional utopia that is the Black Sea Coast. A hail of purely accidental Not Safe For Work images are sure to ensue.

The dwindling elbow room on my shit list got a lot tighter last week when about a dozen members of Romania’s so-called “news media” pissed me off so much that I didn’t even need Novocain when they drilled out my cavity later that day.

I had no idea what a bunch of hacks these people are. Pitiable, bandwagon, lazy hacks. I mean, I’ve seen people hack before, but these are the hackiest bunch of hacks that ever hacked.

Why am I resorting to cheap name-calling and a thinly-veiled theft of a great Simpsons quote? Well, because a bunch of these hacks hacked me last week during a very, very slow news day with a hack story that displayed the astounding hacky breadth of their hack journalism practices. Now I know how Britney feels. Needless to say I’ll be watching how I exit a car on those days when I choose to go without knickers from now on.

From what I can piece together, my victimization at the hands of these hacks goes like this: some desperate, reading comprehension-challenged hack found the Warnings page on my independent Romania and Moldova Travel Guide web site. They apparently read it quickly, glanced around the rest of the page for a split second, saw that I am a LP author, then made a world record setting, triple-jump hacky leap to conclusion and wrote a story attributing some of my clearly tongue-in-cheek comments to the “Lonely Planet 2008 Guide”.

Based on online posting dates and times, the ‘story’ ‘broke’ over at Mediafax, where some hack, we’ll call him Alpha Hack, went so far as to date the alleged LP comments to last Tuesday, suggesting that LP had released some kind of new, earth-shattering Romania travel guide that day, rather than admitting that this was simply the day he stumbled on my 18 month old web site during idle Googling while his Nescafe was still brewing.

The story was then re-printed by Beta Hack over at HotNews.ro, who very clearly did not bother to verify the source or even attempt to re-arrange the words from the original story in an interesting way. Nice one Beta.

Let’s start by dissecting Alpha’s and Beta’s simple tell-it-like-it-is pieces, devoid of an actual point other than to sound vaguely hurt and offended that I stated well-known facts about their country’s problems with taxis, ‘community dogs’, and pick pockets. First, and most importantly, there is no goddamn “Lonely Planet 2008 Guide”. The most recent guide to Romania is a luminary works entitled “Lonely Planet Romania and Moldova”, written by me and Robert Reid, that was released in May of 2007. Assuming one isn’t a hopeless hack, one can independently verify this fact with about 20 seconds of online research. Or better yet, they could have emailed me (since they were trolling my site, where my email address is readily available) or even contact LP if they wanted some kind of eye-catching executive quote.

Also, Alpha Hack committed the cardinal sin of pulling sentence fragments out of context and then rearranging them to suggest that comments I made about the Bucharest menu scam applied to the entire country. And as for the tip I give about keeping close tabs on your backpacks and purses, this is common sense for any country in Europe, not just Romania, but this rudimentary logic was not applied, because Romanian media hacks love nothing more than to hack out stories about how badly foreigners misunderstand their country.

So, primary blame goes to Alpha Hack for bending the facts and not bothering to verify anything before publication. Beta Hack is merely guilty of shameless, pseudo-plagiarizing of Alpha Hack, again without spending even a minute checking any facts.

Then all hell broke loose. Irresponsible, parrot-like hacks in both Iaşi and Suceava – heretofore referred to as the Hacksie Twins – “fleshed out” the story into consternated opinion pieces, written in a tone suggesting that I made everything up and none of this stuff ever happens in their idyllic cities. Again, the Hacksie Twins attributed all the quotes to the LP guide rather than my personal web site and of course neither bothered to contact me.

Then, I was informed that the local radio talk show hacks (The Hackensack Sister’s Breakfast Time Hack Show), who have even worse hack reporting instincts than their print media counterparts, spent the morning droning and bemoaning how foreigners are so ignorant of Romania.

Since not a single person in this motley crew of feeble, hack-happy ‘journalists’ bothered to check a source, they simply succeeded in exacerbating Alpha Hack’s criminally inaccurate article, drawing newer, wildly less accurate conclusions of their own, and writing off my gentle warnings as complete fiction.

Despite the firm conclusions drawn without a minute of research, in reality every single warning on that page has either happened directly to me or was reported by several first and second hand sources, either directly to me or through reader’s emails sent to LP. Hey, I appreciate national pride just as much as the next guy, and I’m painfully aware of how easily the Romanian national conscious gets bruised (I’ve had to start storing my Romanian hate mail on an 80 gig external drive to free up that space on my laptop), but to sit there and suggest that actual events that happened to me are fantasy just because you don’t agree with them is just flat out arrogant and irresponsible. Is this kind of denial of reality in place of prudent investigation really the course of Romanian journalism?

Furthermore, these are not conclusions that I arrived at while sitting alone in an office in America. I f*cking lived in Romania for a cumulative 16 months and have traveled here for several months more. During that time I visited nearly 60 Romanian cities (see the full list here), repeatedly in several cases. There’s a very good chance that I’ve traveled the country more thoroughly and written about its tourism offerings more repetitively than any other modern journalist, local or foreign. My conclusions we drawn from these travels/experiences in addition to lengthy frank discussions with locals who unanimously agreed that the roads are shit, taxis are a problem in Bucharest, ‘community dogs’ exist, emergency medical care could be better and restaurants in Bucharest sometimes try to cheat tourists. Anyone who wants to deny any of this is more than welcome to do so, but since I have voluminous evidence to back-up my comments, you’ll have to present voluminous evidence to back-up yours. That’s how non-hacky journalism works. Even travel writers that have punched their ticket to hell know that.

Finally, none of this uproar would have occurred if the first author had simply included this quote from the introduction of my Warnings page:

“I’ve bobbed and weaved through my fair share of scams and bribe solicitors and I’ve heard loads of anecdotal tales from others, so I’d be remiss in not sharing these experiences with you, even though you’ll probably never encounter them yourself. So, let’s get on with the stories.”

I added the bold text just now for emphasis. Perhaps I should bold it on the web site too to assist reading comprehension-challenged hacks.

As a result of this cheap smear campaign, I’ve gone back and edited the Warnings page. It needed some updates anyway (i.e. the number of ‘community dogs’ in Buch seems to have dropped after the city-wide clean-up for the NATO summit this spring), but mostly I had to take out a lot of the humor and clarify the text so that future visiting members of the Romanian Association of Media Hacks and Hearsay Artists won’t jump to conclusions when they find my web site during a smoke break.

Ya bunch of hacks.

Apart from that unnecessary drama, this Romania tour was absolutely perfect. Traveling the country in May is a real pleasure. Perfect weather and not too hot, though it did hit 90°F one day, which has me nervous about the kind of heat I’ll be facing when I return here for three weeks in July.

I’ll follow-up in a few days with a list of sights and experiences that made this trip so great so as to cleanse the palate from this unpleasant post.