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Way Out
or, "The Almost-Entirely-True Adventures of an American Smartass in London."

Alright folks, it's time to snook the knackers and banger the loos, and get ready for a jolly good time as you follow the adventures and misadventures of your faithful narrator through the storied, historied, and oh-so-damp and cloudy streets of London. Rest assured, by the end, I was ready to start my own revolution and declare independence, but I felt that this would attract more attention in the airport pub than I could really afford, since I had a pint coming, and I was still trying to figure out what the little octagonal coins I had left in my pocket were worth.

Chapter 1: Just Say No

Let's say you have spent most of the last ten years moving around the United States of America at a rate of about once every time you do your laundry. Let's say you've finally found a place that you can stand living in, and have spent the last three months, and most of your money, getting this home fixed up just the way you like, so at the end of a long day, after nearly thirty years, you can open your front door without an overwhelming sense of despair, and an even more overwhelming desire for someone to hit you in the back of the head with a Buick. Let's just say that, although let's pretend we said it in shorter, more comprehensible sentences.

Now let's say that your boss takes you aside one day, as you were leaving the building that for a large majority of the daylight hours contains your new job, and asks you if you'd be interested in leaving all this for the chance at sitting around for two weeks in a foreign country wondering how much your coins were worth, and more importantly, how many seconds had to elapse before you could come home. The natural answer, if you're me, would be: "Hahahaha." However, I got barely the first "h" out before I realized that if I wanted to keep my new home, I should probably keep my new job. And if I wanted to keep that, then I probably wanted to keep one more thing, which was, my mouth shut. So I kept quiet, and kept my head absolutely still in a manner which most books describe as "an imperceptible nod." This is how my boss interpreted it, at any rate, as he then chimed in, "Great! Thanks a lot. Get your tickets from Cindy." (Of course, since this is not meant to be a definitive historical account, I'm not using Cindy's real name, which is Shawna.)

I did make a point of asking exactly what it was that I would be doing over in London, and was told that I was to be "available, in case of emergency," and in the meantime was to continue doing the work that I had already been assigned, while I waited for emergencies to occur. Since I was, at the time, feeling a bit spunky, I asked, "Wouldn't it make more sense to wait until an emergency happened before spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to send me over to a place that I really don't want to be in the first place and where I will most likely end up doing nothing but what I was going to do here anyway, except much more slowly because laptop keyboards are among the most unusable keyboards ever created, including Palm Beach County ballot machines?" The response was a considered, "Shut up." As an afterthought, the response then continued, "And anyway, their main guy will be out for those two weeks, so they'll need the help." Not content with my previous display of spunkitude, I fired back, "But if I'm busy helping them, then how am I supposed to get my own work done, deadlines for which have already been clearly and with no sense of casualness, defined?" The response responded again, "Shut up." They hate spunk.

The trip seemed like an eventuality at that point, although through careful procrastination of my passport acquisition, and other cleverly devised stalling plans, I was almost able to weasel my way out of it, like any right-thinking American would. However, my plans to have the trip fail at the last minute, failed at the last minute, leaving me a moping mess. My colleagues could not understand this, and for one full week did nothing but hit me with a barrage of inexplicable congratulations and envious foretellings of impending fun and happiness. "Oh, you're going to have such a good time!" I tried to explain in measured tones how, no, I was not going to have a good time, and that much I had figured out for myself. Never to be discouraged, they went on to tell me about all of the great beer I would drink, and all of the fun people I would meet, and oh, the joy that was in store for me. I began to explain how what they had just described was my apartment, which is at all times filled with great beer, and at least one fun person, at least when I'm there. Plus, my couch is there, which is more than I can say for London. Or even England in its entirety, in fact.

Although I'm sure I seemed like a bit of a gloomy gus about the whole thing, I had a plan. A brilliant plan, in retrospect, since it worked fabulously.

The longest airplane flight I had ever been on was the five-hour flight from the east coast to Las Vegas. This was one of my primary reasons for moving to California, since now it is only a five-hour drive, which is much better than a five-hour flight, because most airlines frown quite strongly on you blasting a stereo and leaning your arm out the window. Now I was faced with not only a five-hour flight, but a ten-hour flight -- nearly twice that. This concept was so at odds with everything that my mind perceives as being acceptable and tolerable, that to even consider it was to invite violent, shaking attacks of constipation and halitosis. But my plan was that if I could get myself in just a foul enough mood about the entire trip itself, that when I got on the plane, the interminable flight would seem simply like an extension of this misery, and I would hardly notice it.

I hardly noticed it.

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COPYRIGHT 2001 BY BEN PARRISH