The Threshold

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Ah, the Threshold: that stage of the journey, that chapter of the story so thoroughly explored by lovers of adventue as old as Aristotle and further elaborated on by Jung and Joseph Campbell, and those more contemporary.

The Threshold is--of course--a literary device, a tool of storytellers, and an archetype. But, it is also a moment, a time and place. It is the time and place when an adventure truly begins. A switch is flipped in the life of the adventurer and the journey has begun.

I'm not quite sure when I crossed my threshold. Was it when i bought my one-way ticket to Thailand? When I said goodbye to the people I love as if it might be the last time? Was it boarding the Greyhound for my trip down the west coast? Was it when I stepped out into the streets of San Francisco, the first alien place on my journey? I don't truly know. What I do know is that feeling the packed 747 bound for Taipei, Taiwan lift off the ground and soar out over the Pacific Ocean was one of the most exciting and incredible moments of my life.


Broin' Down

Monday was my real last night to just bro down like a regular American dude. That means sit around on my ass and tell jokes and play video games.

I went to the Nelson Ranch out of Hoen Rd in Sedro-Woolley, home of longtime friend Matt Steinman. We visited with his brother Tyler and friend Ole from Norway. We also played Halo 2 until about 3am, which was totally sweet.

I let everyone know that this was my last night like this, that every night following would be some intense experience, and that I appreciated their taking time to just kick it. But, every good thing must end, and I went home, read a book, ground my teeth for an hour or so, and finally fell asleep around 5am.


Goodbye Dinner

Tuesday was frantic. I had to wake up quite early in order to get down to Seattle for a meeting. After that, I went back to the U-District to watch the kids pour into the nieghborhood for the start of fall quarter and say goodbye to my ex-girlfriend Christina. I thought we'd go to lunch, but she had plans, so I went and got some terriyaki on the Ave and ate it at good 'ol Mind's Eye Tattoo.

After the grub, I felt it might be a good time to catch up on all the sleep I wasn't getting. So, I trucked it up to the house formerly known as the "S.S. Bro Dangler", which I now lovingly refer to as the "H.M.S. Strong Dangler". And, just like my luck, the Dangler wasn't empty. No, I was one of three dudes that don't live there who were just hanging out for the day and taking up couch space.

We talked and joked and I told the guys about my trip... and we watched some TV and went down to the store... and eventually I got like a 45 minute nap right before dinner.

I woke up at 6:20 and my date was arriving in 5 minutes. AHH! So, I rushed and hurried and got on some nice clothes and shoes and combed my hair and brushed my teeth and all that garbage, and she was late anyway, so it was no big deal. In fact, everyone was late.

We all arrived at the restarant around 7:20 and waited in the bar for a table. They sat the ten of us at two tables and I immediately started rearranging people to suit my pleasure. I was incredibly excited to see 3 of my buddies there in decent clothes with beautiful dates dressed to the nines (that's not counting my date, who looked spectacular). I was also glad to see the two guys who couldn't get dates--to an all expenses paid, dress-up, fancy dinner with drinks--also dressed nice and grinning from ear to ear.

The first thing we did was order every appetizer on the menu, then it seemed like we ordered one of every entree, and some lobster tails and bottles of wine on the side, and quite a few drinks, and dessert, and by the end of it all my head was spinning--though I'm not sure whether that was from the hefty bill or the Pinot Noir...

The dinner was a great success, and--as I told everyone afterwards--it was the best that I ever spent. I was just glad to see my good friends so happy and entertained, in nice clothes, with nice food and nice drinks and nice looking women (and men) all around--the way they deserve to live. And I told them that this was the kind of life they better expect when I return. There's gonna be a lot of nice dinners and looking good and bringing your dates...


Greyhound and the I-5 Corridor

I woke up Wednesday morning in Seattle and had to swiftly get up to Sedro-Woolley and finish a daunting list of incredibly important and time-consuming tasks before getting on the bus that evening. Needless to say, I accomplished everything without error or incident and did indeed make it on the bus on time.

Saying goodbye to my parents was the hardest time. We seemed to drag it out for hours at the restaraunt, then dragging it further at the bus station, until finally the actually moment of severance was so brief and sweet that it seemed like cheating. But, that's the way I like it, I guess. No need to cry and hold on like you'll never let go. Let go. Smile. Wish well. Wave and think about the goodness and excitement that is to come.

That's what I did, anyway. And Greyhound did not dissapoint. I spent the first 20 hours of the bus ride sitting in the back with a guy named Tony "Tone" Davidson, a big black dude out of L.A. who custom builds motorcycles and has pretty much been through everything you can go through and still live to talk about it. We definitely talked about it. That's pretty much what we did for 20 hours, between sneaking pulls off our little bottles of wine and cracking on people during the bus breaks. We made a good team, but new passengers were still surprised to see the two of us broin' down so hard and leveling the kind of jokes at each other that we were.

We had to split up in Sacramento, though, and I got on a bus headed West to the bay. I don't remember the rest of that ride though, 'cause when I got off the bus in San Francisco, it was like a whole different world.


San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley

I've been to San Francisco before, of course, but it was always in a little bubble. Surrounded by friends and having strict agendas, I never got a real peek at this city. But I did on Thursday.

Unlike the little hick towns and truck stops we rolled through on the bus ride down (places where I know the drill and can fit in effortlessly), a city like San Fran is not only totally strange and unfamiliar to me, but also a little uncomfortable. First of all, everyone dresses really nice there. That's cool, it's their thing, and it is kind of comforting to see a homeless beggar in a $200 jacket, but I HATE fashion.

Fashion seems like the fuel that makes the wheels go 'round in San Francisco, and the closer I got to my friend Lindz's work counter in the downtown Nordstrom's, the more it seemed like I was headed into a freakin' refinery for the stuff. But, I still couldn't shake the impending-travel-grin that was splitting my face.

We headed back to the swanky new apartment her and her boyfriend just bought, and I took a shower to get ready to go. Laying out my clothes to get ready for the bars, I really felt like I had packed inadequately for this town. I had nothing that could be worn on these city streets without being scoffed at, so I just settled for board shorts, flip-flops, and a white dress shirt. We went to the Castro and had a couple strong drinks and some great bar food and by the time we got home I straight crashed.

We had breakfast the next day near the mortgage company's office where Lindz'd had to drop off some checks. I wanted pizza for breakfast, certain it would be my last greasy Amerian slice for quite some time, but she wouldn't let me. So, I settled for enchiladas. After breakfast, we walked through the Tenderloin (which is really quite tame, folks) and back to downtown where I left her at Nordstrom.

Downtown San Francisco is as bustling on a Friday as lower Manhattan, so I grabbed a smoothie and sat to watch some drums and puppets and dancers and later a reggae cover band. Then I caught the train to Oakland.

Oakland is not that much like San Francisco, aside from people dressing pretty nice, and it is a place where I can definitely hang. As soon as I heard the crackhead in the back start yelling out the window at people and the old gal up front start yelling back at him to shut up, it felt like home. I took the 57 bus all the way through that lovely city, chatting with high school kids about grills and tattoos and listening to the crackhead (who called me "Spiderman") tell me how cool of a dude I was. Eventually I got dumped outside Mills College.

Mills is an all-girls school that my friend Katie lovingly refers to as the "Most Liberal" in the country. I didn't really get a chance to see if this part was true, but it is defintely an all-girls school, and I like that a lot. There is something that really excites me about a campus full of intelligent, opinionated, beautiful young ladies--and no other dudes around.

I didn't get to really put Mills to the test, though, as Katie and I headed over to Berkeley on a bus to see what was happening there. The short answer: nothing much. It's a college town, pretty much just like the U-District, and we had a pretty uneventful time there. Uneventful except for the running and chasing for block after block that we had to do when we missed our bus--twice.

A $30 cab ride got us back to Mills, and I got on my bus to the train station, and I got on the train to the airport, and I got on my plane, and I was in heaven.


China Airlines

I will never fly on an American airline again, if I can help it. This flight had everything--pretty girls, good food (two meal services, with four dishes on each), funny movies (one about a Mexican wrestler and another about Jewish Bar Mitsvahs), little slippers for your feet, big blankets and pillows, the occassional round of warm moistened towlettes...

I made a friend on his way to Vietnam and he told me that the girls there are pretty and they marry them off young. I also met a group of retirees on their way to Burma that got me incredibly excited about a place called Inle Lake, where everything floats. That, and a 6-hour nap, and I was in Taipei.


Taipei and the Squat Toilet


The Taipei airport looked like a ghost town when we got off the plane, and there was nowhere around to help me find anything. So, I started to wander. I wandered into a cluster of free-use massage chairs, wandered into a room with free internet access, wandered into a convenience store where I had no idea what was written on even a single one of the labels, and wandered past people from all kinds of nations doing the same kind of thing I was.

Somewhere around then, I realized that I was no longer in Kansas anymore. I was over the threshold. And, somewhere around then, I wandered into one of the immaculately cleaned and well-appointed Taipei airport restrooms.

And that's when I saw my first squat toilet.




"Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of wisdom." - Havelock Ellis, British Psychologist

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Comments

[Erik Neighbour]

Taipei
The journey begins! Can't wait to see some pictures of the beginning. How many woman did you sleep with on the flight over?