Travel Advice for Young Chauvinists (redux)

(First, you’ll find intercalated pustules of censer smoke ringed by ferrules of frankincense in your heart. They were placed there by us. Do not panic.)

Travel.

And when lost abroad …

You’ll find mussels in Malmo in an impossibly dry place.

Dresden is everything it’s cracked up to be, you’ll find Friday morning virgins there on Sunday afternoon.

Milan is … well … Milanese—and that is inauspicious—the rain incessant and the shops shuttered.

Don’t waste your time in Barcelona. You’ll find the last remaining speaker of Njerep there, displaced, and waiting for the placement of the final trencadis tile at the pinnacle of the Sagrada Familia.

Avoid the French.

In Lisbon the fog is impossibly thick and it smells of something long forgotten.

Decamp for home from the marshes of London.

Practice the cathecism of free markets, derivatives and tranches.

Breathe deep the smells of amok-capitalism in the morning (essence of napalm available for an additional fee).

AND sing the anthem—early and often.

Oh, the places you’ll go!

“It is still so difficult
to know what to fear, so we fear everything
& more—the new century’s anxiety
closing in on itself, until the decades just get
better at making caution shape its body so that we
don’t recognize it as strange.”

— Iliana Rocha / “Elegy Falling Forward & Down”