Its a good thing I was an only child and had to learn to entertain myself...

I spend a great deal of time on my own, obviously. Luckily I am very good at keeping myself entertained. One game is to make up catch phrases for German signs, pretending that they are in English. Let me see if I can explain… For instance, 'Exit' is 'Ausfahrt' - which is the type of flatulence experienced by Austrians. 'Entrance' is 'Einfahrt', which I assume is special gas only passed by Einstein. There is a German bank called Sparkasse (shparkaasay). Which I can gather is only for people with hot bottoms. I could go on, but I have a feeling its only fun for me…

I think very interesting things. Oh yes, very interesting… such as the witty banter that I would have had onstage with Ani DeFranco had I been on tour with her as a burgeoning young solo artist in the mid '90's. We would’ve been great pals. I have developed a new video game that pits the cast of Star Wars against those of Star Trek. I have special moves figured out for all my favourite characters and everything. Star Wars would win every time of course, although the Borg would be hard to beat. You cannot steal this idea.

My favourite game is simply called `Dodge`. It, obviously, involves dodging things. With my bike. Usually it is a simple version called `Dot Dodge` where I dodge either the light spots in the pavement, or sometimes the dark ones, or sometimes both, depending on the challenge I am looking for. The stakes are higher if there is a lot of goose poop or glass on the trail. When it rains, snails crawl out onto the bike paths and then there are actually lives on the line. Its very intense and should only be attempted by those confident on a bicycle.

Also, due to my lack of actual human companionship, I have developed very close personal relationships with inanimate objects such as my tent and sleeping mat. In fact, I learned a very important lesson from my mattress the other day. I will try to be brief, because I am sure you don’t care. It used to be that you bought your thermarest with a bag. Nowadays you have to buy the bag separately (marketing genius at work). I bought the bag that the thermarest fit in most closely, hoping to conserve space in my kit. The problem is, of course, that you can never ever pack the thermarest as small as it comes from the manufacturer. Thus, every morning I have the same argument with my thermarest. “Why don’t you just FIT” I say. “Every morning we go through this and you eventually fit in this bag. So just get on with it and quit wasting my time”. Then one day I realized: this is not the fault of the thermarest. The thermarest is what it is, and cannot change. I am the one who chose the bag that it is supposed to fit in. It was my idea of what the mattress was supposed to be that was causing the problem, not the mattress itself. If more people applied this lesson to their interactions with others, the world would be a better place. I now refer to this as the thermarest rule. You can steal this idea.

So there you go. A window into what goes on in my head while on the road. Anyone wondering about the state of my sanity need not worry any longer. It is completely gone.