Gay bars

• People think gay bars across America are dark cesspools of sex and depravity. If only they were! Usually, it's a smoky, dull place where the drinks are expensive and strong and tasteless, and thumping techno music makes it impossible to carry on a conversation. And why would you want to talk to anyone anyway? I've been one of three people in a club where the bartenders says, "It doesn't get crowded until later," and it's eleven o'clock on a weeknight. Who are these people? I've been in dull bars in Portland, Atlanta, and New York. All across Texas and the south there are lifeless juke joints where nothing is going on. Then, I remember that I'm surrounded by people just like myself... and that depresses me even more.

Mount Rushmore

• It's only two inches tall. Or at, least that's how big it looks after driving two hours past a constant line of junk t-shirt shops and gaudy tourist shacks. Its incredible tasteless, crass, and a big billboard farm. Finally, when you look at at the monument while standing in a sticky parking lot among one hundred children's tour groups, you have to be underwhelmed by the size. You could reach up and squish our nation's heritage with your thumb and forefinger, and I did.

Atlanta's Peachtree center

• Atlanta is proud of a racist 50's movie that wasn't even filmed there. Atlanta is proud of its tacky urban sprawl and merely-average economic growth. And Atlanta is proud of a shopping mall, and I can't imagine why. It was an ugly walk through garbage-filled streets to arrive at the town "center" which was nothing but a normal suburban shopping complex, with the exact same stores as everywhere else.

London's Picadilly Circus

• I traveled five thousand miles to visit a yuppie mall. Picadilly circus is a crowded intersection with dirty cars, loud twentysomethings, and a Virgin Megastore, and Megastore wanna-bes. The shopping sucks, the food was overpriced and bland, and everyone seemed to be yelling like fraternity football fans (American football) after drinking too much beer. And they say our country has no taste? I've never seen a place with so much history be so uninteresting. The entire city of London can go to hell as far as I'm concerned, and it has.

Boston Computer Museum

• (sarcasm on)Oh Boston, the powerhouse of computing (sarcasm off). The only reason I'm mad at this museum is that it has destroyed funding for what could be a useful, thriving computer history center on the left coast.

New York delis

• Incredibly overrated. New Yorkers pretend to be such food connoisseurs; and then they eat this crap. Egg cream is a delicacy? The delis were badly-light, garish slop joints with a nasty clientele. It's rather eat at a Denny's.

My first Pennsic War

• I drove a girlfriend and another couple across the country in my cramped Toyota Tercel. I paid the entire price for the U-Haul cartop that was full of their camping equipment and which scratched the top of my car and ate up my gas mileage. My girlfriend waited until we got to Pennsic to give me the news: she was breaking up with me. However, before she left to go sleep with an ex-boyfriend (who was also co-incidentally at the campground), she gave me a rehearsed list of what was wrong with me. She had quite a long list, starting with the fact that I was a wimp and let people walk all over me... presumably including her.

I sat in my car, playing the Pogues "If I Should Fall From Grace of God" at high volume, before putting on my armor and going out to fight in the Field Battle. I raged like a madman... there was a part of me that wanted to get hurt as well as a part that really wanted to hurt somebody. Not a good thing. I didn't see the girlfriend until it was time to leave and drive home. By that time, the ex-boyfriend had ditched her, and she wanted me to listen to her problems. The drive back across five states was very quiet. I remember letting someone else drive right after we hit Indiana. I warned the crew that we should fuel up and drive straight through Chicago, since we didn't want to get off the highway in the city. I fell asleep, and remember waking up as the car is making u-turns under a dank bridge in the middle of South Chicago. The ex-girlfriend wanted to find a bathroom, and the couple had taken an exit and promptly gotten lost. They couldn't find an entrance ramp or a public bathroom that was open at four in the morning in Chicago. Funny thing. We found a nasty 24-hour supermarket, and a sullen teenage checkout girl who led us through a dirty plastic-covered butcher shop so the ex-girlfriend could take a leak.

Raymond's apartment in Brooklyn

• I can't criticize the generosity of a friend, and Raymond was truly one-of-a-kind. I regret not getting to know him better. He was the only Hispanic drag queen that I have known, and he was kind and funny, even if he kept getting me to try on his new go-go boots and shimmy dress (I didn't take him up on it). The problem was, Raymond lived in a distant part of Brooklyn, and it took two hours to get into the city. By the time Mike and I got into New York, we were frazzled and in no mood to play tourist. Sure, Raymond saved us hundreds of dollars (and was a constant source of entertainment), but the only thing I saw was ethnic grocery shops, discount clothing stores, and ratty  tenement building through the dirty windows of the subway.

Virtual World

• In the dry strip mall that is Las Vegas, I was eager to see the intricately decorated bar at Virtual World. It was 10:00 in the morning, and too early to drink. However, when they kept me waiting for an hour outside the store, and then another hour in line, I was ready for a stiff shot of something. Remember, I was first in line, which was a problem because Virtual World tries to create a multi-player online video game. They took my $30, and placed a virtual reality helmet on my head. With no instructions, the game started... and there was nobody else there. I played Capture the Flag by myself for ten minutes before my time was up and I was shown the door.

Los Angeles band trip in the rain

• Our school band director took us on a road trip one summer. These outings were usually fun, and I have great memories of other trips. In fact, I think I lost my innocence during several of those... or at least my naivety. But Los Angeles was rainy for the entire four days we spent there. Everyone was getting cranky, and the director was no exception, he ordered everyone off the bus at the Grumman's Chinese Theater, even though it was pouring rain. I remember watching the concrete hand prints and foot prints fill with water. I guess it was another one of those "education experiences", but it's left me with a bad opinion of Los Angeles ever since.

Indian roadside stands

• Mike makes me stop at all of them, and I think they are simply depressing. They aren't as bad as Indian casinos, however. I have nothing against people making a buck, especially a group that has been subjugated for so long. However, it's fodder for the idea that money brings greed (and really tacky buildings).

Four corners Arizona/New Mexico/Colorado/Utah

• I can't say I've ever actually seen this landmark. It's always been closed when I've driven by. And what an odd thing to see... a locked gate across a dusty desert road that leads into the distance. For miles around, there is only scrub cactus and highways. I've heard you can lie on a dirty plaque on the ground and have each limb in a different state, like a game of Twister played in oblivion. For some odd reason I have a desire to see this useless monument to cartographic whimsy.

NE Wyoming wastelands

• You drive, and you drive, and you drive some more. Near Cheyenne, there's some eerie scenery, as everything West is lush and mountainous, while to the East is a gray, flat desert. It looks downright post-apocalyptic. And if you choose to take a "shortcut" through the wasteland to get to South Dakota (as I often did), you will feel like a character in a dream... a lone figure standing in a blank infinite void, with nothing in any direction but nothing. In an odd way, I have a feeling that this is good for the human soul, somehow.

Truck stop in Tacoma, Washington

• They call it the "Tacoma Aroma"... and now I know why. My grandfather always used to judge a restaurant by how many semi-tractor trailers were parked outside. His theory was that the truckers knew where the good restaurants were, and they discuss the best places to eat on their CB radios. Well, gambling on the theory, I took Mike to a truck stop eatery in Tacoma, Washington. And I have to say with all respect that my Grandfather was wrong. Or, maybe since he worked with truck drivers all his life, he just had different taste that I do. But this nasty luncheonette was filled with moody, downward-looking men rapidly chain smoking cigarettes and incessantly talking on their individual booth telephones. The air was so thick, you couldn't see to the other wall, and the smoke left a slick black stain on everything: the dishes, the menus, the waitresses. The food was greasy and expensive, and everything was a breakfast item. Sorry Grandpa, but I'll have to call you on this one.

Cheap hotel in Colorado Springs

• Once every month or so, I like to take a trip to Colorado Springs. Despite its reputation as a a right-wing prison camp, "The Springs" actually has a lot of wonderful used books stores, music stores, and ethnic restaurants downtown. It's almost an artist colony (... but only almost). However, my 25th birthday didn't work out very well when Mike and I drove down to spend the weekend. We didn't have a hotel reservation, and everywhere we tried was booked. We ended up find a (literally) rat-trap, flea-infested nightmare of a hotel across from a hip record store. Sure, it was cheap, but at what cost?

Royal Gorge

• Get this, in Canon City, Colorado, you pay $10 to drive to a bridge... that goes nowhere. You can't drive your car across the useless bridge, but have to park and walk. There's a miniature train that also goes nowhere, driven by a blank-looking engineer (far too old to be working as a carny) who mumbled some kind of travelogue as the train went in a slow tilting circle. Since the train was smashed against the parking lot and a large barrier wall, I don't know what scenery the conductor was describing to the kiddies, and I didn't want to pay and find out. When you finally get to the entrance, you can catch finally a long-awaited glimpse of the chasm. Sure it's deep, but that's about it. It's as if someone set up a science demonstration to describe what "depth" means. You're surrounded by souvenir stands and underpaid workers in badly-sewn character costumes that try and depict animals that look kind of familiar. After the thrill on staring trough the pedestrian bridge wears off, you think "yup, that's deep", and you wonder what you should throw off the bridge, and what would happen to it when it landed. Here's idea: throw off one of the guys in the Disney rip-off outfits. I bet it really smells inside one of those suits, and they would thank you for putting them out of their misery. Helllooooo? Eeeechoooo! Annnyboooody Therrre?

Las Vegas with people that don't gamble

• This was almost as bad as going to Las Vegas with a friend who did gamble, but was too cheap to eat out. Even though we were surrounded by some of my favorite restaurants on earth (Wolfgang Puck's, Tejas), he insisted that we eat at Denny's. Hell, even across the street at Circus Circus, I could get a shrimp cocktail for 99 cents. But Las Vegas with people that don't gamble (like my boyfriend) would be tolerable if only they didn't complain so much about all the gambling around them. Sure, they enjoyed the shows and the food, but they always made smug comments about how they didn't understand the mutants surrounding them, plugging money in the noisy machines.

Going to the top of the Bunker Hill memorial

• The famous "Freedom Walk" is over fifty miles of decaying cemeteries and faceless (but important, they assured me) decaying buildings. Ok, maybe it's not that long, but it felt like fifty miles. And worse, the final five miles takes you through the Italian section of town, down some seedy river front trash-filled alleys, and then across the river to see Bunker Hill memorial. There's nothing else over on that side of the river, certainly not any TRANSPORTATION BACK. It felt like a rip off... a come on so people would visit the empty neighborhoods and closed stores on that side of the bank. Since we had walked to the end of the trail, we felt obliged to climb to the top of the memorial. Up and up winding stairs that were so tight that my feet didn't fit on the inside steep stairs and the people coming down kept crashing into me. And as I was 3/4 of the way to the top, I felt like there was no air... and there wasn't. Some geniuses had covered over the openings AT THE TOP with Plexiglas, presumably so people would stop throwing things out the pointy roof. So, I stood sweating and panting without oxygen with twenty other people in the claustrophobic dark Plexiglas coffin, knowing that if I had a heart attack in the little room, it would take hours for my fellow tourists to pull my body back down the narrow stairs.

Homeless in Halifax, Canada

• I can't fault Halifax itself: it's a wonderful little seafaring town, that doesn't know how it has it. Locals complain about to many tourists invading their city, but it's really the best and biggest city on Nova Scotia - great museums, fantastic music, and good seafood (although lunch took up to 2 1/2 hours to arrive with a Socialist-style lack of service). I think that in ten years the place will really take off, and then place will be overwhelmed by Canadian out-of-towners looking at all the attractions. And that's the problem. There's currently not enough hotels for all the people, particularly on weekend when there's a festival or convention. During the summer, there's always an event of some sort, and all the hotel rooms were booked within a one hundred mile radius. Now this is one my "travel nightmares", being stranded in a foreign city without a\ place to sleep, and no way to get a rental car to get out of the place. My boyfriend and I ended up alternating between sleeping in a dorm room on a nearby college campus that was on summer break, and paying $150 American for a tiny bed & breakfast... unheard-of with the current exchange rate. I'd love to go back - but a better idea would be to invest in a hotel and car rental agency in Halifax before the place really takes off.