Climbing into Bed with Evelyn

It's after midnight here in Skagway, the wind is howling, blowing a snow as fine as flour. Having once again given up on the idea of ever falling asleep--as soon as I close my eyes, a thousand obessions begin to play across the back of my lids, everything from the scent of orca watching in British Columbia to my absolute outrage that we live in a world where people use the word "microwaveable"--I've got to kill the time somehow (but only in self-defense, as Peter DeVries pointed out), and so have climbed into bed with Evelyn.

Waugh, that is. For reasons that escape me, the Everyman Library issued Waugh Abroad, 1064 pages of sentences like "Prostitution and drug traffic comprised their modest interests, and they were too dense to find evidence of either."

Probably the mere mention of prostitution and drug traffic will move this blog sky high in the Google rankings. Reporting on high school booty dance and teenage take-overs of Victoria's Secret stores certainly did wonders for my friend Amanda's blog, Road Remedies.

Having never been blessed with a lengthy attention span, at any given time, I'm in the midst of reading five or six books. In addition to Evelyn (who is, by page 216, in Abyssinia for the king's coronation), I've been reading Pierre Burton's Klondike Fever, which seems highly appropriate, as the vast majority of people who actually did make it to the Klondike during the 1898 rush came through Skagway. The lot for the house I'm in was laid out back then, and the Dead Horse Trail begins about a block away. Those who did not come this way came through Dyea, which is out at the end of the road. Good to know when you go stir crazy, you can drive nearly ten miles to a ghost town that has been completely swallowed by the forest.

Online, in addition to Amanda's booty call, there's my friend Marie's blog, No Hurry in Kuwait, in which she tries to write a book about Africa (In Search of the Wild Dik-Dik, due out from Seal Press eventually) while living in Kuwait, working on, of all things, an Islamic superhero comic book. Camels with capes? A report in the international edition of the New York Times did point out that one of the female superheroes would be wearing full burqua.

Think how the ratings for the old Wonder Woman TV show would have dropped had she been veiled. And here's an utterly useless bit of trivia: Helen Hunt played Wonder Woman's little sister in the show.

For those who think travel writing is the career of dreams, Carl Parkes has a dose of reality. We're underpaid, underappreciated, over edited, have to actually take things like new paint colors seriously, and whine, whine, gripe, gripe, and the problem is, only other travel writers feel sorry for us. But Carl is dead on right, calling the profession to task in a way not done since the wonderful Motionsickness magazine stopped publishing.

What's the old song? "Why do the wrong people travel, when the right ones stay at home."

Again, because I have a seriously short attention span, I also read a bit of Frederick Copleston's massive History of Philosophy each night. I'm up to Johns Scotus, who was not, as one might assume, Scottish, but rather Irish, and he really had a bug up his ass on a few points.

Finally, just as I'm pretty sure when I went to see Alanis Morissette in concert I was the only man in the place there of my own volition, I get the same feeling reading Mimi Smartypants, who my cousin Patty has decided she wants to marry. Or at least wants to be.

Now, if only I could get some sleep.