Richard Oh

I’ve always dreaded traveling. Don’t get me wrong though. I’m not some larded ass who prefers the familiarity of one place to another or some loon with a developed case of phobia for strangers. I’m way more ahead than any one of these fellows. I love the tingling serenity of the cabin, peering out through the plane’s window at the foaming clouds, my iPods plugged in my ears slowly building a mood of ethereal bliss. I love getting lost in the meandering streets of Rome or the perplexing Tokyo underground. I actually love being in another place complete with its various outlandish landscapes and idiosyncratic ways of life. I truly savor all that. It’s the idea of packing my luggage that gets me started anywhere south of excitement. Now, I’m not talking about puzzling over what clothes to put in to suit a certain climate. That never bothers me at all. It’s the thought of what books to bring with me that really gets me in a state of ineffable anxiety.

I read somewhere that Somerset Maugham had always lugged a suitcase full of books wherever he traveled. Lucky for him. He traveled in an age before air travel with the ground stewardess’s priggish glare fixedly at the scale for any sign of gross over limit of the twenty-kilos allowed on a hand-carry luggage. Recently, on a trip to the Byron Bay Writers Festival in NSW, Australia, I ran into such a fierce ground patrol virago. After a protracted exchange, in which I pleaded, begged and when nothing panned out well put down my weight only to be snubbed by her cool superior piercing indifference. I finally pulled out my laptop and my sweater and a couple of books and shoved my hand-carry luggage back on the scale. Smugly satisfied with what she saw on the scale, she issued me the boarding pass. To this day, I’m certain that she gave me a finger behind my back as I pulled my luggage away, with my laptop twisted in my left armpit and the jumble of sweater and books cradled in one hand. My spirits sagging, the next best thing I could think of to salvage any semblance of joy from the impending trip was to pretend to limp to the lavatory, take a leak and stuff everything back into the luggage and trundle it through the immigration and into the plane. That exactly was what I did. Unchecked. When the plane took off, my luggage safely locked away in the overheard luggage compartment and my iPod plugged in my ears, comfortably nestled in the anti static blanket, my mood air born, I began to open a page of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and read with priggish satisfaction.
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