May 15, 2013

I’ll keep walking, walking at the end of the world

By Drew Jacob

Photo by Chuck Coker. End of the Great River Road.

I have never seen the End of the World, but I met those who went there, and it is good.

The End of the World is in New Orleans. Did you know that?

More specifically it’s in the Bywater, a ramshackle neighborhood that used to be swamp and then plantations and only when the city really, really grew did it become actual houses. The Bywater is the ghost of Before the Flood and it is a town unto itself, a town of hand-built drum machines, lumbering vardos, secret gardens and working artists.

You know how the grinds settle out in good coffee? If New Orleans were a cuppa, the Bywater would be that last rich sip with the grit in your mouth.

And somewhere in that mouthful, right around where you make that wrinkled face, you can find the End.

It’s just a strip of riverbank. It juts past the levee, unpoliced, a place to smoke your hashish. That is the end of Orleans Parish; that is the end of everything.

Then fog, murky water, dragons, Arabi, chemical plants, bayou.

I tell everyone I biked the whole length of the Mississippi River. It’s a lie. New Orleans isn’t the end, though many an adventurer has stopped there for good. Siduri has a back door, and she says keep going. Go past the End of the World.

So Saturday I bike 80 miles. 

With me is this sly East Coast girl who’s never pedaled more than 20. In her words: “what’s the worst that can happen?” I like her accent, like Old Fashioneds and empires.

80 miles on a narrow road in a land of semi trucks, refineries and sun. There’s nowhere to camp, nowhere good that we confirmed; but there are places no one looks.

What do I do things like this? Why go into the unknown? Is there, as it feels like, some current in the land that gathers in these lonely spots? And if there is, why is it so hard to feel once you’re out in the thick of the heat, the sweat, the fear?

The journey may be gentle or ungentle. We might succeed or fail. Smoke and towers in the bayou, two hearts under the sun. It’s worth the sweat. Somewhere down there the road just stops, it stops, and I’ll see it, and keep walking, walking at the End of the World.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Adventure, Bicycling, New Orleans, The Great Adventure, Travel

May 13, 2013

How to Talk to Depressed People

By Drew Jacob

This is an excerpt from Hyberbole and a Half’s illustrated guide to depression.

Hyberbole and a Half

The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief.  I had always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a weakness — annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn’t have to feel them anymore.

But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there’s a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck.

[...]

But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they’ll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face.

I loved and married a woman who became depressed. I didn’t do a very good job of helping her deal with it. The problem with non-depressed people is they don’t understand what depressed people need—what would actually help them.

Maybe this guide can help fix that, plus it’s funny. I hope you’ll read the whole thing, then leave a comment and share your thoughts.

12 comments   |  tags: , | posted in Spotlight

May 12, 2013

The Polymerase Chain Reaction

By Drew Jacob

This is an excerpt from the Noble lecture of Kary B. Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. 

Dr. Kary Banks Mullis.

…I’m going to try to explain how it was that I invented the polymerase chain reaction [PCR]. There’s a bit of it that will not easily translate into normal language. If that part weren’t of some interest to more than a handful of people here, I would just leave it out. What I will do instead is let you know when we get to that and also when we are done with it. Don’t trouble yourself over it. It’s esoteric and not crucial. I think you can understand what it felt like to invent PCR without following the details.

[...]

I never tired of tinkering in labs. During the summer breaks from Georgia Tech, Al Montgomery and I built an organic synthesis lab in an old chicken house on the edge of town where we made research chemicals to sell. Most of them were noxious or explosive. No one else wanted to make them, somebody wanted them, and so their production became our domain. We suffered no boredom and no boss. We made enough money to buy new equipment… it was a golden age, but we didn’t notice it. We learned a lot of organic chemistry.

[...]

I had made no professional plans that would work in Kansas, so I decided to become a writer. I discovered pretty quickly that I was far too young. I didn’t know anything yet about tragedy, and my characters were flat. I didn’t know how to describe a mean spririt in terms someone else could believe.

So I had to get a job as a scientist…

I didn’t know that the Nobel lectures of every prize winner are publicly available at nobelprize.org, and I came across this one obliquely while reading something else. I had never heard of Kary Mullis before, and I have only a passing understanding of what PCR is.

But Mullis doesn’t just explain what it is and why it matters; in fact he only does a medium job of that. He tells us a story, a true story—one both exciting and painful.

It is rare to read such a confessorial memoir, especially on the theme of scientific discovery. I hope you will read the rest and share your thoughts.

Dr. Mullis also keeps a personal website with lectures, his beliefs and a biography.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Spotlight

May 8, 2013

If Alternative Medicine Were Bricks

By Drew Jacob

Photo by Michael Kappel

“Bricks have been proven to function as one of the strongest, most reliable building materials available.”

They have been used in China, the Middle East and Europe for thousands of years. Even the ancient Romans knew the strength of bricks. Bricks are made from all natural ingredients.

Here are some great products we have made based on this research!

  • POWDERED BRICK. This powder contains high levels of brick sourced from only the purest, most reputable brickyards. Every bag contains over 50% brick carefully ground into powder using our proprietary technology. This guarantees that the brick can be absorbed into your home’s structure. In clinical trials, a preparation of brick powder using concrete as a “carrier” medium was successful in building houses up to 3 stories tall.
  • GAIA FORM BR. More and more homeowners want eco-friendly houses. They try many things including earth floors, clay walls and straw bale construction. All of these materials have drawbacks as they are not strong, long-lasting materials! But did you know bricks contain clay and straw? In fact many bricks are made mostly of these all natural materials. But that wasn’t enough for our research team—we decided to add even more all natural, renewable straw to our bricks. Gaia Form bricks are over 98% straw! That means less lime, less grit and a completely earth-friendly product. Plus the crumbly, burnt-brownie texture of these hand fired bricks makes each one unique.
  • MEGABRICK 770X. Every serving of MegaBrick 770X contains no less than 770 oven-fired bricks bound together using the patented “Adhezion” process into a single, giant block. This block contains more brick than an average garden walkway! MegaBrick 770X is sold in boxes of 100 servings, enough to build a massive pyramid-like house. That’s 77,000 bricks! When you consider how much it would cost to buy those bricks individually, you are saving a huge amount of money. Even home architecture guru Frank Lloyd Wright sketched plans for a giant block-built house!

(I will skip the painfully easy homeopathy joke.)

The problem with these examples is not that bricks don’t work as building materials. It’s that just saying something is “brick” doesn’t mean it works like real bricks, and the marketing intentionally obscures the difference.

Most of us intuitively understand what bricks are and how they work. We played with blocks as kids.

None of us played with peptides as kids. We did not have a talking teddy who inhibited the downregulation of adinopectin. We cannot, without extensive research and training, tell the difference between Brick Powder and a magnificent red brick house.

Which is something to consider when you decide to “try” alternative medicine.

14 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Uncategorized

May 4, 2013

How to Cross Mexico

By Drew Jacob

Sea kayak training

I was a stranger and this guy had a gun. He told me he took it everywhere so he could shoot whoever tried to mug him.

I told him I was camping out at the County Fairgrounds.

“You’re not gonna wake up,” he told me. “There’s stabbings there every night.”

But the police said I could camp there. They thought it was safe. He laughed.

“Go anywhere else. You don’t know this town. You’ll get robbed!”

I asked if I could camp in his yard instead. Of course not. So I went to the Fairgrounds.

It seemed really nice. I showered, I met the other campers and I slept all night in a windstorm. It was cold but the cold wind never did try to stab me.

That was in Mississippi. A white man named Whitman said I was going to die. He knew all the black people and how bad they all were. They all had knives. I only saw their kids learning to dance in the park and then some of the teens listening to music in cars. I guess they keep the knives really well hidden.

“They’ll cut your head off,” everyone says about Mexico. A lot of Americans tell me that. They sure know a lot about Mexicans.

But the dangers of Mexico are real. The top 200 miles of that country are a war zone. Foreign travelers aren’t really targeted but someone traveling alone on the highways would really stand out. Mexico is one of the safer countries I’ll cross on my journey—safer for an American than the US is—but parts of it are not safe at all.

Options

I basically had three options for how to cross Mexico on my own power.

  1. Bike it. I can make 50-90 miles a day and if I reach hostels before sunset I can just tear through the danger zone. I think this would be a poor way to go because it’s essentially fleeing from one of my favorite cultures.
  2. Pilgrimage. I could join a pilgrimage headed toward the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. We’d be on foot and I’d be in a large group, with a spiritual purpose, which is probably safer. I love this idea but it would also veer me away from my course toward Yucatán.
  3. Take to the sea.

Guess which one I chose.

Something like this.

Something like this.

Kayaking

Dawn lights up the waves like crowns on enemy kings. The weather report is clear—eat quick! Slam that coffee. Up, to the water, up!

The tide is going out and our little barks with it. We face the surf, those pounding walls of water diving into shore. They want to take us back; we are not going back. Paddles in the water, struggling from the hip, struggling from the back, arms taut and hair drenched in foam. Is this to trade one fomhór for another?

There is no other way: to reach the open sea we must break through the surf.

Out on the open, science is our concern; check the compass, point the bows, re-check the weather; are all heads present?

We go so far we cannot see land. Here the water is calmer. It is slow oliphants, not charging bulls and rams; it is the heaving shoulders of sleepy giants.

20 feet up on the swell; a glimpse of horizon, a blast of wind; drop back to the trough 20 feet below. A few paddle-strokes will do you but stay together mates, stay together.

We go like this for some time. There are snacks at sea, cameras come out of drysacks, distant boats are sighted and avoided.

Dolphins jump beside us. Did you know that dolphins will escort kayakers on the open Gulf?

Perhaps it’s sunset, perhaps the GPS says it’s time to make our camp. A hard starboard and we cut toward land.

Now the surf is with us, that hammering crashing wall will carry us to our beds—but it is not tame, no it is not tame. It is on the backs of bulls now, the churn of the stampede that we ride. Like Pamplona we make our run.

The final hundred yards. What speed! The beach looms pink before us, come in at an angle now, turn it to the side—there is no reason to rough up your boat.

Come aground, stow that gear; who’s scouting town and who’s making camp tonight? We need street food, we need cold agua. Welcome ashore, bold spirits, welcome ashore.

How?

The plan is this: reach Texas. Get a sea kayak. Learn to use it. Kayak 1,000 miles from Texas to Coatzacoalcos (see map), stopping every night at a different town or beach.

Considerations:

  • I will be a fluent Spanish speaker before crossing the border,
  • I will cross legally and abide by the 6 month maximum stay in Mexico.
  • I will train extensively in sea kayaking before making the voyage.
  • Assume I will procure all reasonable navigational and safety equipment.
  • Some cartels have boats, however as one experienced Gulf kayaker said: “Kayak jackings are distinctly less common than carjackings.”
  • I would prefer not to go alone.

I leave New Orleans in late June, and will arrive in Corpus Christi, Texas around August 7. I plan to practice on kayaks until late 2013 or early 2014, then begin the voyage.

I invite you to join me. 

The Open Call

I believe the myths are real. I believe we can do great things.

Adventure is my path to that. Adventure tests me, frees me, shows me to shatter past my limits. We are capable of great things: to adventure is to breathe them every day.

It’s not always pleasant. It’s not always safe. The adventurer shies away from unnecessary risk, makes every precaution, but when risk is unavoidable—we grin into the wind.

But it is to live, it is to know, it is to know the self, it is to know the self triumphant.

Often I say: there is no call to adventure. There will be no owl with your invitation letter; no wizard will abuse your door.

Today I prove myself wrong.

I invite you to adventure. I’m giving you notice. The true call is silent, it is urgent, it is in the blood: you feel it if you have the call. You must decide for yourself.

But today, one adventurer is reaching out to you. Come with me. Meet me in Texas, we will find you a boat; we will train together; we will do something great. It may not set records, it may not change history, it will challenge every limit we have, we will throw ourselves to that challenge because—

To adventure is to experience myth.

If you feel a call don’t put it off. Email me to discuss it; whether it’s right for you, individually. We don’t need to make a firm plan just yet. Let’s just talk options.

I’m drew@roguepriest.net and I would like to adventure together.

-

If you’re a new reader you may enjoy the report on the adventure so far.

23 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Adventure, Mexico, Sea Kayaking, The Great Adventure, Travel

April 30, 2013

Friend, you are talking about yourself

By Drew Jacob

This is an excerpt from a piece from Vodou Priest/blogger Gary Howell at Knitta Please.

Chapo m tonbe nan la Mer.

I have, for most of my life, enjoyed change. In whatever fashion Saturn reared His bearded head, I greeted him with a smile. “Burn the field,” I’d always say, “to make room for the seed.”

…As we sat over a tasty rose, I started to talk, and the more I talked, the more I sounded logical, sane, and strong; not traits that I think I carry on a day to day basis. Was it the wine? Was it the air of gotten stronger from not getting killed by the troubles that have been plaguing me the past months? I can’t honestly say, and I never want to find out.

But, as I was doling out my soothsaying, I more than realized that half of what was coming out of my mouth was meant for me. “Get up!” “Understand that you don’t need to go a long way, to find out you are something!”

Along my journey, many people take on themselves to deliver to me this sagely wisdom: you don’t have to travel to find what you’re looking for. I’ve learned to turn a stony eye to the arrogance of it: invariably, the words spill out of someone who has done little traveling, who lives a completely settled life. They sure feel confident in their evaluation of travel as a practice.

It might carry more weight if Gilgamesh said it.

But more than that, it’s just inaccurate: the journey has changed me. I am not the same person today that I was July 3, 2012—and the changes are an immediate result of how I have pushed my boundaries, far away from home and friends; and the continuous psychological challenge of being the only one to keep me going, toward a dream, toward a horizon I can never reach.

It’s a beautiful heartbreaking practice. It’s what defines me.

Out of all the people who have said “you don’t have to travel” Gary is the first person who then added that what was coming out of his mouth was meant for himself. And as soon as I saw those words, I understood every person who tells me the same advice: they mean it for themselves.

 

So, if you think I’m going to go 8,000 miles only to discover that I had what I needed the whole time, well, maybe you are right or maybe you are wrong, but certainly—definitely—you are talking about yourself.

Or, as Gary says:

“You know who you are, not all the time, but most of the time, so FUCK everyone else!”

I hope you’ll read the rest of his piece and share it widely.

7 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Adventure, Spotlight, Travel

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