On the Road

Fight Club UK
14 October 2002

In the movie Fight Club Edward Norton plays a traveling insurance guy who makes the acquaintance of Brad Pitt while flying from one place to the next. During their initial conversation, Norton makes a "clever" comment about single serving friends. They're the people you chat with on airplanes or maybe work with for a day or two, but then you go your separate ways. It satisfies immediate social needs, but the long-term benefits are nonexistent.

That concept haunts me now.

It's an unreal existence out here, one in which having a real "life" is impossible. Considering how I've been bounced from the Netherlands to Kazakhstan and back, with "emergency" long weekends, "emergency" vacations, and other nonsense thrown in, all followed by a ridiculously short trip home, immediately topped off with an ill-conceived trip to London, I've never known where I'll be from one week to the next and have had absolutely no ability to plan anything more than a couple hours in advance. Quite literally.

It sucks ass. I need more substance.

2002 has turned out to be a bitch of a year. I feel like I'm living Fight Club UK (FCUK - with apologies to French Connection UK). The fit is uncanny.

During the past few weeks in particular, I've felt more crushed by the world than on top of it.

The constant jerking around of travel, bouncing from one continent to the next and back again, followed by the conception of a "stupid" cold, has created quite a mind fuck and a sense of detachment.

Slowly, though, things are turning back around and I'm starting to regain ground in my ultimate goal: World Domination. I am confident achieving this will open a lot of doors for me - and maybe even get me a date or two. (Hey, if you're planning on world domination, you might as well dream big.)

Helping that storyline along was the chance encounter with an incredibly drop dead gorgeous blonde Dutch woman. Wow! She's 28, has a 10-year old daughter just about ready to overtake her in the height department, speaks five languages (Dutch, English, Italian, Russian, another one I can't remember, and a sixth which she writes off as being very similar to Russian). She's become an assistant/translator for a government official at meetings in Belgium, attends the opera with ear plugs because she hates it so much (and has hair long enough to cover the ears; she goes only for the company), and she'll be moving to England in April.

She's even been to Morrocco and found it as unpleasant as I did. It was great to find myself swapping stories with this woman.

But she's not perfect, sorry to say.

She's allergic to strawberries.

The most incredible thing about the whole package was how nice and pleasant she was. Jeezus Murphy's! She was ripped right off the pages of a James Bond novel! She's the kind of woman who actually raises the Mattopian standards to new heights. Name: Jasmine. Occupation: Goddess.

OK, her business card doesn't look quite like that but it might as well.

The past few months have made my life so scattered, I'm not sure what to do next in accomplishing that goal. Thanks to my Dutch acquaintance, though, I've become reinvigorated. She's living proof anything can happen at any time.

I guess I need to stay focused.

Stay within myself.

Keep my eyes on the ball.

You know... Stuff like that.

Yep. The fog is lifting, the head is clearing, and the Mattitude's coming back.

Please step aside, everybody. Ya need to make room.

Say it now. Say it loud.

"I'm Matt and I'm proud."

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