Midgard Corp of Discovery

[gfish]

I just finished reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Pure, wonderful, vintage pulp. Pith helmets and dinosaurs! Awesome. And it started me thinking, as I am want to do, about the nature of adventure in the modern world. A line early on in the book particularly resonated with me: There are heroisms all around us, waiting to be done. I'm still unsure what adventure really means these days, but I'm continually amazed at how much of it there is for the taking. Linguists talk about 'speech acts': marriages, divorces, taking of oaths, etc. Words that change our reality in an intangible, yet deeply important way. I think choosing to look for adventure is like that. A speech act between you and the universe.

Along those lines...

A few months ago I was reading a list of travel tips, from a ridiculously seasoned roadtripper, and it included the line 'sometimes it's fun to drive from Chicago to LA using only a compass.' Ever since I've been thinking how amazingly cool that would be. Today that thought started to synthesize with the above, and I'm really starting to like the result. The concept: LA to Chicago. No maps, no GPS, no freeways. We have a compass, a chronometer and a sextant. Done right, I bet it could make a really interesting documentary. (Would have to actually talk to and interview random people along the way, though, which I'm rather poor at.) So I've ended up with another epic roadtrip idea. I'm booked for several years at this point. :)

Comments

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of the documentary as a fairly standard travelogue with an odd framing device. I'd like to play with the concept of rediscovering areas already well explored, inventing modern adventures, etc, but I'm not sure how much of that it could handle before becoming silly and pretentious.