All The Places I’ve Never Been

I’ve never ridden in a school bus so tiny and magical it can fly inside of a human body. Our micro school bus technology just hasn’t advanced that far and I fear it never will, not in my lifetime at least. So I’ll probably never know what it’s like to drive through an ocean of blood or what the heart sounds like when it is the size of a skyscraper or if dancing on top of a brain is like dancing on a bouncy castle. Because The Magic Schoolbus does not exist in real life, I’ll never go places closer to me than any other.

Where else, well, there are many towns in Canada I’ve never been. But Canada is so big and visiting everywhere inside of it would take too much time. But I do wonder, are there places I haven’t been – and not just in Canada – that are perfect for me? How many states and cities and lakes and waterfalls and deserts and prairies will I never visit but would I have loved more than any other?

I’ve never visited my mind. As a boy, my mom would say she wanted to open my head and take a look around, and I’d like a chance at that too. It’d be an abstract place, I think. I imagine it like that scene in The Simpsons when Homer goes 3D. But instead of numbers and equations and shapes like cones that collapsed his delicate universe, it is words and feelings and an assortment of hopes which have built up into a clogged dam of fear. I’ll never get to go there and take a stick of dynamite to explode everything.

Never have I been to North Korea or Cuba or certain other places here on earth because other people have set up rules making it impossible to go. Which is odd, I think, that after billions of years, after the first atom exploded and caused the forming of matter into planets and suns and space, after our world transformed into a sustainable floating globe of water and fire, after plates crushed together like titans and volcanoes oozed like pimples and made patches of dirt for us to stand upon where we could eventually settle and make huts and touch butts and breath air and make more of ourselves, after all that we would come to the conclusion that some places are prohibited because we, who are walking globs of watery bacteria, said so. As if we have the authority. As if we have any say in the universe. Tell an ant it cannot scurry where it wills.

I have never seen the whole earth from outside the earth. I’ll never touched the sun or put red dirt from Mars on my face. I’ll never go beyond that and be near a star as it implodes or feel with my hand the density of a black hole. I never wanted to be an astronaut so even the moon is out of the question by now. Unless we begin to unravel the mystery of light travel I don’t think any of us will ever know what it’s like just a few miles beyond the clouds we fly through. Which is amazing that we even go that high, but a plane must seem as primitive as fire to someone who has seen the outer reaches of space.

There are a number of states I haven’t visited. I haven’t been to Mississippi or Maine or Hawaii or Alaska or even Arizona. And sometimes I feel like I’m missing out by never visiting those places. But you can spend a lifetime traveling and miss more than if you had just stayed at home.

I’ve never been to Dwayne Wade’s house. I once saw an interview with him and his place looked really nice. It was right there on the beach in Miami. The sand was white and the ocean was glimmering and there was a long dock where you could jump into the water.

No, I’ve never been to the Caribbean either. None of the places they mention in the “Kokomo” video, and though I’m sure many of them are gorgeous and relaxing, I don’t think there will ever come a time in my life when I have enough money to up and fly to a island for the purpose of relaxing. That’s what money brings a person, the luxury to relax wherever they want. For the rest of us there’s TV. And I guess that’s depressing, but watching football on TV is better than watching it live so I don’t know why it has to be so different for traveling. I know it’s different, except, as Chuck Klosterman would say, when it isn’t.

I’ve never been to Bora Bora. But that’s the Caribbean times ten. I mean, have you looked on a map where it is? And it’s a resort?

Also, I’ve never been to that luxury restaurant by Machu Picchu. I don’t want to say on top of Machu Picchu because that’s not right, but it’s by it, somewhere. I saw it on one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows. Balls To The Wall Traveling, I think it was called.

Speaking of, I’ve never been to most of the places Anthony Bourdain has been. Not saying I wouldn’t like to go, I would, but I have to be honest and say I wouldn’t be as, I don’t know, faux proletarian as he is when I got there. Maybe because I am part of the proletariat.

But this isn’t about ancient Rome, or Anthony Bourdain, or Chuck Klosterman, or the Caribbean, or even Canada. It’s about nothing going nowhere, like it always is.