Gettin' Dirty Souther

This summer's two month Ann Arbor, MI adventure was my first independent venture outside the I-77 alley between Davidson and Charlotte, NC. Now, back with the 'rents in Davidson, gearing up for a Central American expedition of indefinite length and breadth, it's setting in that my life's going flip-mode in less than two weeks. The preparations -- purchasing backpacker essentials, immunizing and procuring insurance -- have been victimized by my procrastinating, attention-deficit and obsessive-compulsive tendencies: namely, continually delaying setting appointments for immunizations; taking tangential jaunts to visit friends scattered around the Carolinas; and the unenviable task of whittling 130 GB of predominantly enjoyable music into an iPod "essential" 27.82 GB, a process infinite with each morning's recollection of another album whose omission would surely render my traveling days a soul-corroding death march.

Finally I'm motivated to immunize after talking to Jackson, who got some requisite shots before refusing expensive malaria medications offered by the doctor -- because malaria pills are known to cause hallucinations and nightmares! Jackpot! We've decided to stockpile man's healthiest hallucinogens in Central America, where I hope they'll be easier and cheaper to obtain, and then introduce them to high school druggies and goth kids nationwide. Call me the Ronald Reagan of the anti-malarial pandemic.

More exciting yet are prospects that we'll be full-blooded members of MS-13 before the year's out, El Salvador positioned along our bus route into Central America from Mexico City. I want nothing more than to munch papusas and have MS and 13 tattooed on opposing eyelids.

When I think about it, I been preparing for Central America more than I realized or indicated above. I've definitely spent hours mesmerized by HBO's Sexo Urbano, which is ostensibly a spanish language instructional program for adults. Oh, wait, that's not right at all. A more accurate description is it's a documentary of life everywhere below American borders, orgy being an apt descriptor of the prevailing lifestyle, though our text books failed to mention the rampant nymphomaniacism. According to Sexo Urbano it is impossible to even trip without finding one's penis wedged inside an orifice of some perfectly proportioned beauty, which may explain the futbol player's penchant for flopping to the pitch.

I'm getting a new camera too, closer to the size and weight of a deck of cards than the brick with an upgraded 64 MB memory card I've been lugging for the past five years. If the new camera survives my MS-13 beat-in, this time I'll have a full 8 GB to spot and shoot mullets and the morbidly obese and to find creative angles from which to ruin views that are, even when shot by a camera on a timed cycle tossed recklessly into the air, typically breathtaking. I'm bringing the old camera too, but for self-defense.

A travel bag was another item on my list of needs, and I ordered the cheap, store-brand imitation of name-brand packs from eBags.com, which I saw somewhere called the "Wal-Mart of bags." The Weekender Convertible is a fraction of the cost of similarly sized and outfitted packs, and uglier too, but cost for functionality trumps aesthetics. Strangely, the description of the features on the value-priced bag is a list far longer than supplied for any of the thousands of other-branded bags on the site, though they're almost universally nicer. The Weekender Convertible's laundry list of features, impressive at a cursory glance for length alone, reveals itself to be bloated by facts that needn't be stated, some so inane it's not hard to imagine the marketing expert behind the descriptions was restrained from adding: "The Weekender Convertible has zippers," "The Weekend Convertible isn't made of paper," and ""The Weekender Convertible doesn't secrete skin-melting chemicals when wet." I'm pretty sure I've seen this guy's marketing before, plastered on the glass windows of the front office of some dumpy Florida motel, advertising amenities like color TV and electricity in the late 1990s, and, what I remember most clearly, mirrors. One of those cases where less advertising is probably more.

[If anyone has any travel tips or recommendations, perhaps items that you consider indispensable backpacking assets, and especially anything that's Central or South America specific, please leave comments.]