Distraction for the frustrated proles?
This is – almost literally – a pork chop express.
Yesterday (while travelling on a train) I was told that writing or reading adventure stories is a cheap form of relief for those that are not moneyed enough to pay and live actual adventures.
Teaches me to try and write on a train.
But apart from this obvious lesson, the attitude of my conversational partner got me thinking.
And no, not just thinking about getting me a pointed stick.
And it did not even get me thinking about adventure reading/writing (not directly, at least).
No, what I started thinking about is – are there really out there people so stupid they think they can buy an adventure package and live an honest-to-goodness, planned adventure?
If this is thursday, those must be our cannibals.
C’mon!
Now, the guy I was talking to had had some real adventures, he said – he flew in a balloon over the desert, he rode a camel in the shadow of the pyramids, he swam in the shark-infested waters… of a Red Sea resort beach.
Every experience he mentioned had a price tag – so much so that I started thinking it was the money spent, not the experience, that was really important to him.
Not everybody’s idea of “an adventure”
So I thought about my own adventures – being lost in an unknown city, without knowing the local language; meeting face to face a wild boar in the thicket; facing a drunken fool who’s harassing a girl outside of a pub; climbing a canyon wall because I have been too stupid to plan for another route to get out of there; being attacked by a crazy woman throwing me billiard balls.
In none of these, money was an issue.
I did not pay for those experiences, and I did not plan those experiences, and those experiences are not the subject of what I write, or what I read.
My ambition is not to contribute a short story to All Star Wild Boar Adventures, to Drunken Fool Digest or to Billiard Ball Throwing Aces.
Granted, I can tap in what I felt in those moments (mostly panic), to fuel my narrative.
But adventure is not running away from a wild boar, as it is not snorkeling on the Red Sea Reef.
At the same time, the attitude of my fellow traveller, his eagerness to let me (and everybody else) know how well travelled and moneyed he is, led to the realization of the idea that an adventure is – to the members of a certain culture, at least – either something that’s reserved to an elite, or something the proles dream about.
Which is absolutely silly.
Adventure is the dominion of the unexpected.
It cannot be planned, it cannot be fenced and circumscribed, packaged for the rich or denied to the poor.
Adventure happens.
As boring fellow travellers do*.
——————————————————–
* Gets me wonder what the gentleman would have said had I answered his question with “I write science fiction” instead of “I’m writing an adventure story”.
Karavansara 
12 April 2013 at 11:53
Shrinking again the example set by your traveller companion: it’s all about money. If you got enough (can it never be enough for such a man?) you are fit for everything, if not you’re nothing more than a footnote in his price-labelled history. The word “jerk” came to my mind while reading this post, how curios.
LikeLike
12 April 2013 at 18:25
I’m very sad for that poor man
LikeLike
14 April 2013 at 15:01
Speaking about boars, some years ago I was coming back home, on foot, from a friend’s house. I live on a small village on the Appennines, surrounded by woods, and wild animals are everyday’s business. Deers, porcupines, badgers, sometimes but rarely the occasional wolf. And of course, boars.
But one thing is seeing them, on the side of the road at night (when they approach more easily human inhabited zones), when traveling by car, another one is being on foot and suddenly stepping in the middle of a nice family meeting of young boars.
There were three of them, or at least I could recognize those: I heard their grunts but with the darkness I couldn’t easily have a clear idea of the surroundings. They were young but not piglets, they were already grown up a bit. Anyway, they were near the path, between some houses, so they were exactly where I had to pass if I wanted to go home.
Now, basically the main problems were two: boars are rather dull and stubborn, and if they find you on their path, they don’t care and pass anyway. After all, their mass, size and hard skin allow them to do that without much worry, they are mini-tanks, the problem is entirely yours.
The second one, as young boars, it was possible that their mother was in the surroundings too. As anybody knows, being around a mother with her offspring is not a good idea, never. If you couple this with the boar’s own “nice” temperament, you could easily understand me if I say that I was almost paralyzed by fear, both in the body and the mind.
Then I did something that if I now look backwards maybe was the dumbest thing I could do, I started to make noise both with my mouth and feet, and in the end it happened that they were more scared than me and ran away.
I took the opportunity and started to run towards my house, some 50 meters away, with my legs that wanted to shake but were refrained by the rush of adrenaline that kept them moving, and my heart that was pumping as fast as hell.
Priceless.
LikeLike
14 April 2013 at 15:23
In my case, it was pretty sudden, we were at the bottom of a dry channel, and it was hard to tell which one of us was more scared, if me or the boar – but being in a confined space, we decided to run in opposite directions as fast as possible, and the incident ended there.
😀
LikeLike