Do you believe him? Do you believe them all?

Antalya harbor

“Where are you from? Ah.. California. I was in Oregon. Eugene. Yes, yes, the University of Oregon. Go Ducks!” Turkish air, Antalya street, tourist restaurant, but Oregon’s mascot. My brother said how he’d gone to U of O as well, and we all shared smiling nods and those lightweight laughs that come out through your nose. Not real laughter, but showing a complicit entertainment. How funny, that this guy had been to the same place! Or had he?

They weren’t quite pushy, but handed us the menu and promised that theirs was the best food in Antalya. It was the same menu as everywhere else, even the same photos, and the customary kabob carnage on its spit, yet we found ourselves considering going back there for dinner. After all, the guy had been to one of the same towns as us!

Tourist restaurant street in Antalya

The question of why that might matter is abstract and psychological enough that I’m going to leave it for another time, probably another species. What I’m wondering is: do you trust him?

Restaurateurs and hoteliers often know a phrase or two in a dozen or more languages, so why not more? It would be really easy to learn a popular city and school, plus some dominant detail. (Ever known anyone who went to U of O? “Go Ducks” is pretty darn dominant.) After all, Yankee hats speckle the globe, people remember Michael Jordan, and I met a man in Malaysia who cried “Go Broncos!”

But it’s also not complicated to buy a ticket, visit friends and family, and look for work in a healthy town. Is it arrogance to assume he hasn’t done the reverse of what I have?

So? Would you go back there to eat?

How to save the world and rock out at the same time

Plastic buttons could only click monotonously in flimsy “guitars”, and the rubbery cables were silent, yet the normally apathetic television emitted all the passionate rock ballad wails and foot-twitching beats of as many songs as we could download. It seemed a bizarre creation, but I understood the appeal of Rock Band immediately. This was good, since I played two songs in 2008, then put the thing down and haven't picked it up since.*

*Not technically true, but I'll save the story of our universally agonizing Thanksgiving 2009 sibling performance of “My Sharona” in front of our parents for another time. Though if you know the words, you already get the gist.

Princess Cleavage hath no need for backstory!

Video games grew up alongside me, my digital brother Mario and my digital sister Barbarian-princess-from-Golden-Axe (who didn't get a name as far as I knew, nor was specifically a princess now that I think about it, but deeply rooted sexism meant she didn't need such things, her tiny red scraps of bikini were character enough) and we were one happy 8-bit family. We graduated together to 16-bit, and I was a regional king of NHL 95, armed with the knowledge that the only way to score a goal was the end-around, using mindless defenders to block the goalie. Yzerman scores again!

Oh man, how much would THAT suck? Poor bastard.

But then something went calmly wrong in my video game family, and we grew estranged, only communicating through Aunt Freecell and Uncle Minesweeper. We had a reunion on the estate of the Playstation 2, but it was temporary, and it was only through social media that I learned of newborn buttons and acronyms. Who is MMORPG? Third cousin, twice removed and once upgraded? Is there such a thing as a step-TBSFPS?

Meanwhile, in the massively multi-player world called “reality”, which was too mundane to inspire video games anymore, things seemed to be falling apart for Level 1 humanity. I felt a tender kinship with the man who sobbed “Can't we all just get along?” even as I scoffed at his naivete, newly armed with adolescent cynicism.

But walking home last night through the enemy-less landscape of Oakland, I heard something that formed a mental meme, promising to bring together my long-lost digital sibling and my semi-functional IRL multiverse. It was, naturally, a TED talk.

Plunge people's hands into cold water and have them self-report the pain, first alone then with a friend and finally with a stranger, and you will find that we don't give a single XP/rat's ass about people we don’t know. Basically, we feel threatened by strangers, so can't relax around them, which inhibits our compassion, so screw 'em. BUT! Unite people through a bonding activity and all that falls away. What bonding activity, you ask?

Fifteen minutes of Rock Band will do the trick.

See, even Mortal enemies can be brought together

Something in the cooperative creation of music we know and love creates instant kinship. Primal bonding through rhythm and melody. So all we need to solve the world's belligerence is send Rock Band kits to Gaza, airdrop plastic guitars into the Sudan, and pause hostilities in Syria long enough for a few tracks of Michael Jackson, and voila! World peace!

I'm so proud of my digital sibling. I always knew it would grow up to do great things someday.

The problem with puppies

The problem with puppies is that they love too much. The small puppy ball, barely a foot tall, cute as can be, eyes teeth paws and all, found us again as we left Cirali. The three of us had met the day before in a dirt street chewed up by its impending evolution to pavement, and brightened each others’ days in the dust with scratches behind ears, tiny teeth grins, and irrepressible laughter. We’d parted as friends, and were reunited as the same.

But there was a problem. Schooled by our first episode on the Lycian Way, apprehensive in our minds and penitent in the soles, we were eager to begin the day’s estimated eight hours of walking, so could offer no more than a quick greeting.

The problem with puppies, is that they love too much. Quick greetings are not in their manuals. We asked him to stay, but he followed us across the bridge. We gestured him back, but he pattered along after us toward the trail. We earnestly entreated him to return, but his oversized paws paced us on the path that took us around the riverbend.

Trekking town to town with Max was one thing. He was a grown canine, clearly competent in the alleyways of the world. Letting a puppy trick itself into the wilderness was a whole different story. We apologized, explained, and made ourselves gruff. Tough love. The end of Harry and the Hendersons made an impression on both our childhoods, and here we were. And remember that time Marty Stouffer had to drive away his cub? That broke my heart in a way that has never been fixed.

All around the world, the language of humans and dogs includes the vocabulary of stooping to pick up a rock. Do that, almost anywhere, and the dog will back away, familiar with thrown stones. Not this time. Thank god this puppy hasn’t learned that lesson. But it sure would have been handy.

My brother thought he'd talked some sense into
the little guy, but no. Here he comes again.

We were at a loss as to how to leave our four legs of friendship...until we got to the ladder. Paws don’t work well on those. I don’t know how Stouffer did it, because a day after meeting this sweet-eyed lad, it was already agony to walk away from where those eyes watched us without comprehension, and hear the mournful whines that carried for a surprisingly long time. Go home, puppy! The problem with puppies, is that they’re lovable too much.

Twas the eyes, the gut, and the ancient dead people that made me stay.

My biggest blister was filled taut with juicy intimations of sharp fluids bursting and leaking, gushing through skin torn away from exposed nerves. But we would have gone on.

Knees like battered bocce balls (strung together, tenuous and tight, with rubber bands from the faded newspaper that lay in the garden all weekend), were creaky enough to ask for a day off hiking the Lycian Way. But we would have gone on.

My shoulder, curled forward in Quasimodo consequence of my messenger bag, kindly requested a respite...but we would have gone on. Physical complaints were insufficient to stop our striding soles, but there is more to a man than his component parts.

Okay, it was basically the component parts. But chief among them: the eyes, stomach...and perhaps one other part, too tender to mention yet. (And forgive me any inadvertent implications of genderism; we all know women are more hardcore than men anyway, I just happen to be of the XY cast.)

One of the realizations that enlightened us to being lost, up in the mountains, without much food, no water, no supplies, not even warm clothes as the cold came on and the sun went down (read that story here), was the epiphany that the epic peak that had been observing us all day was indeed Mount Olympos. We imagined the gods chuckling at our plight, perhaps betting on our odds of survival. Ares thought we wouldn’t realize our predicament until it was too late, the cynical bastard.

The Prenses Svetlana, forgotten but not gone

But with Olympus the mountain comes Olympos the ruined city, a purported 30 minute walk from where we slept. It was actually more like 10. So we self-gifted a day for the expanses of meat and bread which Turkey provides on its plates, and poking lenses at the flaking paint on semi-forgotten Russian barques. (I know, a barque is actually a grand vessel with at least three masts, but it’s such a fun word I’d rather misuse it here than never get to play with it at all. Again, forgive me.) (And I can only infer its Russianity from the name, so if it’s an unfair assumption, you’ll have to forgive that too.)

The necropolis in Olympos

As the day checked its 401(k) to see if it was ready to retire, I explored what’s left of one of the six great cities that formed the core of the Lycian League. Olympos controlled the sea routes between Syria and Rome, got rich, and ditched the League to join a bunch of pirates under chief Zenicetes. The life of a pirate is always one of comfort and ease, and they all lived happily ever after. Until the Romans showed up, razed the city to the ground, and Zenicetes had to go light himself on fire. Harsh butt.

After that, the locals played a spirited game of “Who’s going to sack us next?” for a few centuries, until the river silted up and they got tired of being stabbed. But they left behind some nifty things. Ancient baths, a necropolis city of tombs spanning centuries and civilizations, and a 26 foot temple doorway which stands over a fallen pedestal that once bore a statue of Marcus Aurelius, in a wall that encloses only memory and grasshoppers.

Something tells me I have more to
say about this fellow...

All those stone memories brought a smile to my brain, but it was the puppy that made me laugh. What is it with Turkey and dogs? The floppy footed lad found us in a dusty street where workmen carried pipes and flagstones. You’d think no one had ever loved on him before.

But we had nothing better to do that day than pet a puddle of puppy in the Turkish sunshine. But then again, who does?

I have a problem with Baltimore.

What's going on in Baltimore is important. Vitally so. But as a global citizen, how exactly do I hold it in mind when so many are suffering and dying around the world? Thoughts on Baltimore and elsewhere, on today's vagabondurges.com post, here.

Lycian Way Day One, the part where we almost died

The beach was so beautiful, so open and warm, I had no idea that within a few hours I’d be calculating the risk of death by exposure, freezing to death in the mountains versus self-immolation by cuddling open flames.

(Read the first part of Day One on the Lycian Way, here)

Our impromptu guide dog, Max, had led us across five hours of pine forested mountain slopes to reach this stretch of sand, and the world seemed perfect. Soaked in calm, we found the path off the beach, straight ahead and clearly marked with the red and white waymarkers of the Lycian Way.

A sunbaked moonscape of loose rocks added to the day’s toll on our aching feet with its hard edges and rolling ankles, but it was a soft and satisfied late afternoon without space for complaint. We passed a waymarker or two and continued up the trail. Up, up, and up the trail. Climbing without surcease. We put our heads down and stepped, past purple stone mined for chrome, over washouts and rockslides, steps slowing. Don’t think, because thoughts will contain complaints. Luckily my brother wasn’t quite as committed to this.

(Read the rest on the vagabondurges.com post, here.)