Here’s a short story about a teenager behaving like a teenager. For you marketing folks, here’s a case study in how creating an image can flip emotional switches and influence purchasing decisions.

I had just turned 14 when Rolling Stone’s Hot List for 1998 issue came out. I have no idea whether Rolling Stone still so nakedly tries to be an arbiter of cool, but it certainly did in the late-90s, and I was a sucker for that kind of stuff.

The Hot List worked like this: Rolling Stone would create a niche category (“Import EP That Belongs In Your Car’s Six-Disc Changer”) then have a blurb telling the reader, essentially, what product in that category was so cool that he or she had to buy it right this very minute.

Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine” record had just come out that spring, and it was hot enough to merit inclusion on that year’s list.

Background

For context, it’s important to understand the state of affairs in late-90s music, at least as I remember it. Rock was still dealing with the fallout of grunge’s being co-opted, Puff Daddy was the face of hip-hop, and mainstream music in general was just awful (proof [note: I'm actually linking you to a Geocities page]).

But there was also strange electronic music coming out of Europe that had achieved just enough notoriety that it trickled down, still via old media channels, to a 14-year-old in Kentucky.

Prodigy. Raves. Electronica.

These were all facets of some ultrachromatic, viscerally indulgent universe from which I felt geographically excluded. You had to live in London, or at least Cincinnati, to have access to this universe.

So when Rolling Stone hyped some new and cool music from the UK, something I could experience at least at the CD level, I was interested.

The Sell

Now, I had no idea who Massive Attack were, but three things immediately jumped out at me:

1. The band name ruled.
2. The front cover featured a close-up of a scarab beetle or some such pestilence.
3. The music was called trip-hop, a pun that just blew my mind to bits.

What really sold me, though, was a quote in that blurb from some shop assistant in New York City. I’m having to work off memory, but I remember she mentioned how “Mezzanine” was her go-to ambiance music for the shop.

Someone an order of magnitude cooler than anyone else I knew was vouching for an exotic trip-hop record. I was sold.

I was at the Best Buy CD racks at once. I forked over $10.59 and absolutely simmered with excitement on the ride home. Here in my hand was the future of cool. A shop assistant in New York confirmed this.

Hype Exceeds Reality

I got home, pulled out the radioactive orange disc, opened the tray and hit play.

It was probably the most disappointed I’d ever been up to that point in my life. Here is the first track.

It’s obvious now that there was no way any record could have lived up to my internal monologue’s hype. I was looking for something revolutionary. I got mood music for a hookah lounge.

That’s not to say I wasted 10 bucks. Instead, I paid a small price for a lesson in irrational decision-making. As I thought back on this story, I realized my primary desire was a certain level of inclusion in this (imagined) universe where interesting, creative people led supremely interesting, creative lives.

I don’t think that’s an uncommon desire for 14-year-olds. That blurb in Rolling Stone capitalized on this sentiment and sold me a record on the basis that getting into Massive Attack was the first step in adopting the life of an interesting, creative person.

I don’t think that’s an uncommon way to sell things to 14-year-olds.

Or adults, for that matter. We’re all pretty easy targets. The “adopt my life” pitch is how fit people sell weight-loss products and how Four-Hour Workweekers sell lifestyle business ebooks. We continue to buy these things in the hope of modeling someone else’s success, and we end up disappointed.

Coveting the cool lives of others tends to make suckers of us all. Then we learn our lesson and move on.

Image Credit

A guy’s only got five senses, if he’s lucky, and he needs all five of them to absorb his surroundings. He needs to be able to hear the locals’ foreign tongues to get a feel for the place, to hear the sounds of everyone clack-clack-ing around on the ancient cobblestones that pave this picturesque Old Town he finds himself in, to hear, at the very least, the rumble of an approaching tram…

Sometimes, though, a guy has to shut those things out and provide a soundtrack of his own to the world around him.

College Hoops and Identity Crises

There are days on occasion when I would rather just be back in the US, where things are familiar and easy. Simple things like grocery shopping aren’t confusing back there. Old routines and habits, like watching college sports on Saturday afternoons, are just waiting for me to return.

I identify with things like CBS’s national broadcast of college basketball at noon on Saturdays. We obviously don’t have a noon broadcast of Big East hoops in Latvia, but the urge to watch still follows me. So I’m left feeling incomplete, as if there is something from my own identity missing.

And when a guy loses his identity, he loses his swag.

Hood Up, Headphones In

I was listening to “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” when I entered the supermarket. The little old ladies in headscarves tried to bottleneck in front of the turnstile, but the gaggle was no match for my spin move. I glided easily through their dottering.

I had to stretch to reach the onions because a middle-aged drunk in track pants was occupying the produce table for reasons unknown.

I slipped easily between a confused lady and her shopping cart to grab the 5-liter water jug on the bottom shelf and made it to the check-out just in time for the frumpy cashier to scowl at me as I was mouthing “I gotta get it / I got, got to get it.”

Normally, the shop next door sends me into agoraphobic fits when it’s busy. Customers bumble aimlessly among tight corridors, and the smells of body odor and cheap vodka barely drown out the curious stench that comes from the produce crates.

But if I have a good jam on, my swag overwhelms that anxiety.

Anchoring My Identity

I’m not a big hip-hop fan, but it’s my go-to music when I’m in public, especially in Europe. It’s this thing I can have privately, all to myself, when I’m in public.

And it’s something those around me probably can’t understand, most commonly for linguistic reasons (Cultural note: Non-native speakers cannot understand hip-hop songs. It’s too fast and too full of jargon. Actually, the same probably applies to native speakers over the age of, say, 45.).

It’s mine. I can identify with it. And I get my swag back.

To hell with the local language, whatever it happens to be. It’s barely distinguishable from the sound of badgers fighting.

And to hell with the ambiance in the Old Town. It’s just a gaggle of German pensioners shuffling to and from their buses, the pre-recorded click of an iPhone’s camera and some unfortunately polyglot begging for money.

And to hell with the rumble of an approaching tram … OK, maybe my cynicism could be fatal. But the cynicism’s always brief, I promise.

Bonus For Fellow Travelers: 3 Records to Turn Your Swag Back On

Keep these in your ear when you’re creeping down whatever strange streets you find yourself. (Please note, these are not affiliate links, but you will need Spotify to play them.)

1. Digable Planets – Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space)

DPs are at least as geeky as this post: A conceptual hip-hop group made of intergalactic bugs sent to Earth to resurrect the funk.

2.  A Tribe Called Quest – The Low End Theory

Q-Tip is probably my most-quoted person in existence.

3. The Cool Kids – The Bake Sale

My brain associates this record with a number of memories: Biking down Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago, a layover in Madrid, a night out in Costa Rica. I’ve worn this record out.

With the holidays, friends visiting, three new books from the “Song of Fire and Ice” series (shut it) and a personal branding business idea that I spent a week trying to fully conceptualize, I haven’t been at the computer much.

As such, my online efforts have suffered. However, now I’m back with a vengeance.

Short Term Plans for 2012

In March, we’re leaving Riga for Brussels. The lady has at least six months of work lined up in Europe’s capital, and I’ll finally have a bikeable city.

Brussels requires that I tweak my budget and income because $600 / month won’t cut it there, and I won’t be able to get by on teaching English, either. So I am throwing myself hard into my English Confidential service.

Stepping Up Marketing Efforts

As you can see in the right sidebar, I’ve got a big advertisement for myself. Having my editing service on a separate site — with a separate Twitter account and identity — means I have to drive traffic to two sites. With enough luck, I can cross-pollinate from here to there.

Also, I’ve taken out an ad on the Warrior Forum, a major resource for internet marketers. Admittedly, I’ve done a terrible job of narrowing my focus to a target customer. Recently, though, it occurred to me that the number of internet marketers and entrepreneurs — who rely heavily on published content — comprise a pretty big market themselves. Let’s see whether I can tap into that.

Adventures in Freelance Writing

Finally, I want to point out my new Writing page, up in the top right on the navigation bar. This will be my landing page for collecting all of my freelance work and guests posts across the web.

My latest piece for EuropeUpClose.com, a short guide to Latvian beer, caught a little bit of fire as a result of some good, old-fashioned networking. I mentioned Valmiermuizas beer in the piece, and when I was writing it back in November, I sent an email to the company asking for permission to use an image from their website.

The team there was very helpful and asked for a link to the piece once it went up. Once it did, they blasted it out via the company’s social network pages, and that apparently brought a good deal of enthusiastic traffic, because the piece got seven 5-star votes (thank you, Valmiermuizas drinkers!) and was tweeted out more than most articles on the whole site.

Thanks to everyone who’s bothered to read my unsolicited thoughts in the last few months! Here’s to killing it in 2012 and trolling around Belgium on two wheels!

I was trolling through some old emails this morning when I came across a back-and-forth I had with a friend where I spelled out some of my ideas for creating streams of passive income. Most of the ideas I actually pursued are now a few months old, and I think each represents a large enough sample size that I can analyze the results of each experiment and gain some kind of insight.

And what’s a sexier method of analysis than an income report?

In general, income reports are only popular among bloggers who have found real success in generating passive income online. For every success story, however, there are gobs of people — me! — who fail at the passive income thing for one reason or another.

So here are my failures. Let’s see what lessons we can take away from these failed hustles so that you can have a clearer idea of what works, what doesn’t, and where I got lazy.

THE PASSIVE INCOME HUSTLES

Etsy Store: Papyrus Vintage

I’ve written about this one before. With this store, the lady and I hoped to find new homes for some of the really sweet vintage and antique photos one can find at shops throughout Riga. We conceptualized a name and brand that we thought would resonate with vintage buyers and even packaged the photos to look old, as if they were delivered via Pony Express or something.

Marketing within Etsy takes hours upon hours of mind-numbing work. Handicrafts and vintage trinkets really have to be your thing if you’re going to network on Etsy. They’re not my thing.

After four months, we had sold 20 photos, which was enough to make a small profit on the whole operation, but the money earned per hour worked would probably be measured in cents, not dollars. The listings for the photos have since lapsed (Etsy’s four-month expiration date on listings is really a blessing for sellers who don’t know how to fail quickly).

Etsy Store: Astoni Handmade

This store has also since lapsed. It was actually a straight-up affiliate marketing hustle.

A local entrepreneur we know had a leftover stock of silk comforters from a previous business idea, and he wanted to move them for break-even money. He asked whether we could affiliate for him with an Etsy storefront and split the earnings 50/50. The asking price was almost $300 per blanket, so we thought the reward was worth the minimal risk ($0.20 to list each item and the time spent creating the site).

To no one’s surprise, people are unwilling to drop $300 on a comforter without being able to see and touch it first.

Fiverr

I was really intrigued by the Fiverr idea when it launched, and I thought my being in Riga was something I could leverage for $5 / person (note: $3.92 after Fiverr and PayPal take their cuts). I set up a gig in which I offered custom guides for anyone coming to Riga. They message me with a brief description of their personal interests, and I send a PDF with a breakdown of recommend hotels, restaurants, sites, etc.

The idea was to largely automate the process by having one master file to work from and just copy and paste based on customers’ requests. I got my first order in July and spent a whole Saturday creating the master file.

After that, I got no more orders.

Perhaps Riga travel is too small of a niche for Fiverr. Or maybe I should just sell garbage backlinks.

Niche Sites

The previous three hustles have all lapsed on their hosted platforms, so I can definitely rubber-stamp them with a big FAIL. My niche sites, on the other hand, are all live. That means they haven’t failed, simply underperformed. Or, more accurately, I haven’t done a good job of picking profitable niches.

Among four sites, the total costs have amounted to $87 because I’ve outsourced almost nothing. In theory, I need to earn back $87 off these sites to break even, but AdSense only pays out at $100, so I can really either profit $13-plus or lose $87, no in-between. As of this morning, my earnings are aaaaalllmost at $11.

INCOME BREAKDOWN

Papyrus Vintage

• Revenues: $127
• Expenses: $85.62
• Profit: $41.38

Astoni Handmade

• Revenues: $0
• Expenses: $1.00
• Loss: $1.00

Fiverr

• Revenues: $4.00
• Expenses: $0
• Profit: $4.00

Niche Sites

• Revenues: $10.88
• Expenses: $87
• Loss: $76.12

Total Losses: $31.74

THE NATURE OF THE HUSTLE

At present, almost all of my income is active, mostly from English Confidential and teaching English. For now, that works for me because I have enough time I can trade for money straight-up.

Meanwhile, I am still scheming on other projects. Of note right now is my BurritosInEurope.com directory, which continues to grow. I have a plan for this thing for 2012, and I’ll talk more about that as the time becomes appropriate. If you would like to help — or if you’re in Europe and need a burrito — why not follow my new Twitter account:

Follow @burritoseurope

It was only after the eight of us were packed tight in this stranger’s car and racing down a jungle road at night that we realized we’d been set up.

That’s a bit dramatic. Really, we just got caught up in a Costa Rican tourist hustle. It went like this:

Our man on the ground back back in Manuel Antonio, an apparently informed local, knew we wanted to go for a night out in Quepos, but the bus to the city was no longer running. He told us he would call a guy he knows, and the guy would drive us into the city. We all squeezed into his small sedan, and he suggested we go to a club run by a guy he knows, etc. etc.

This was a three-step hustle: The information source, the transport, and the club that needed all the help it could to drum up business. The club kicked back to the others for gringo referrals.

We arrived just after midnight and were the only customers in this club. This turned out to be a great stroke of luck.

Our group of seven worked at neighboring bars in Lincoln Park, Chicago. This was our week to unwind after football season and seemingly endless lake-effect snow. If any people on the planet could empathize with the bar staff and be karmically beholden to tipping very well, it was us.

I don’t mean to make us sound like whales going all-in at a VIP blackjack table in Vegas, but we did rustle up enough business that the club stayed open ’til sunrise just for us. And the DJ let Ian get on the turntables.

If this story has any moral, it’s that you should probably go to Costa Rica at some point.

Some Point

A couple of months back, I wrote about 311 leveraging their rabid fan base to pull off awesome projects such as offering their own cruises. Well, such good ideas are not only for the multi-platinum.

Copywriter / blogger / entrepreneur Ash Ambridge is offering a five-day small-business workshop in Manuel Antonio that sounds awesome. Full details here. This idea lies at the same intersection of hustle and adventure that inspired this blog.

This post is not meant to be an advertisement or endorsement of any kind; I myself won’t be going (I’ll be road tripping across the EU!). I just wanted this to serve as some inspiration, to demonstrate what fruit thinking huge can bear.

There was a line of customers to the door at the copy shop where I usually print off my class materials. I didn’t have time to wait. I knew I would feel like a bum, but I could still print the handouts at my student’s office, where we have class.

On my walk across town, I passed a photo-printing studio with an ink-jet printer clearly visible from the window. I popped inside and got the OK from the shop assistant to proceed in English. I asked whether I could pay some fee to have her print off my documents — better to overpay for copies than feel like a bum.

She politely told me the shop doesn’t offer such services, and I wouldn’t have the option to overpay for my copies.

I left seething. How could she not print a few sheets for a paying customer? There was no one else in the store!

My lesson the previous evening had evolved into a discussion on Latvian people’s relationship with money, and that was still fresh on my mind.

Latvians just don’t know how to recognize an opportunity. That shop assistant could have pocketed small — but easy — money, but she couldn’t think beyond the frame of, “This is a photo-printing shop, not a copy shop.” Typical.

I caught myself right there. As a traveler and curious dude, I’ve practiced my share of arm-chair anthropology. I’ve been guilty many times of taking a very small sample size about a culture — one conversation and one unhelpful shop assistant, for example — and drawing some wild conclusions.

If traveling has taught me anything, it’s that my inferences about a culture or a people, no matter how much evidence I have, pretty much suck. Cross-cultural communication specialists use an iceberg to illustrate why.

Most inaccurate inferences are harmless, but one can still catch a whiff of the thinking processes that turn ignorance into prejudice.

I didn’t want to be a hater on this mild December evening.

So I came up with a culture-independent model to explain what happened back at the copy shop: It was 5 o’clock. Some foreigner walked in asking something about PDFs. The girl at the counter probably speaks four languages, is educated to at least a bachelor’s degree level and spends her days monotonously printing photos. She just couldn’t be bothered.

Every few weeks or so, I have a business idea that gets me excited, and I spend some time rolling the idea around in my head. Thanksgiving weekend found me with such an idea. It’s not something that’s entirely in my wheelhouse, so I’m offering it up for free on here in hopes that it’s at least a nice mental exercise if not a viable business.

The Idea

This decade is beginning to see the convergence of three events that could overlap into an interesting opportunity.

First, the Boomers have all begun to retire, and they represent a massive market in the Western World. They might also represent the last group of Americans who can afford to retire en masse.

Second, economic hardships from credit and currency crises may tempt many of these retirees to look for cheap, sunny retirement spots abroad (Panama, anyone?).

Finally, technology in the last four years or so has given rise to a movement of lifestyle designers, location-independent entrepreneurs and technomads who have first-hand experience in settling into cheap, sunny countries where their money goes farther.

The collective knowledge of these nomads would be valuable to the new or soon-to-be retirees. It might be time to capture that value.

I envisioned a business with a headquarters in the US (or the UK, or France, or Germany, or Canada) whose primary function would be offering retirees help in transitioning to a new cheap and sunny life abroad: Visas, finding an apartment, budgeting, location expertise, etc. The primary offer is to help with the nuts and bolts of resettling.

Here’s the innovation: All of these customers would have long-term needs such as language learning, money management and community development with other expats. These people would in effect represent a tribe for whom an authentic, personal, long-tail marketing strategy would be perfect.

The USP

If you want to pack up your stuff and move to Central America, who better to lead you through that process than someone who has done it?

In my research so far, there is no business offering this service with this kind of first-hand expertise. The closest I’ve found is International Living, a business that started out as a magazine for living abroad and has since built a devoted following as a publisher of information with a heavy dose libertarianism. But IL is still primarily a source of information, not a service.

The Business Model

The business would first narrow its expertise on certain destinations — say Costa Rica, Uruguay and Indonesia — and function as a consulting service for retirees who want to find a warm place where their fixed incomes can stretch farther. The menu of consulting services would include visa application help, apartment searching and an introduction to the new country. Obviously, this requires specialists on the ground in the country of origin and at the destination.

Once the client is settled in, he/she/they will have location-based needs, for which the business would develop solutions (language courses, for example). Over time, as more and more people settle in, the value of that destination-country network grows and becomes a long-tail resource to tap for offering new services as they are requested.

The business would scale horizontally as in-house expertise in other target countries is developed. It would bring in Panama and Thailand and Brazil and whatever other countries would make fine retirement destinations.

Competition?

Perhaps this idea is too blue-ocean for direct competitors to turn up. I’ve found nothing. In fact, I can’t even find a dominant general key word in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to describe retirement abroad. The most common seemed to be [retire in] + whatever the destination country might be.

There are people on the ground at popular destination countries, but this industry does not seem to be well-developed.

If anyone knows any company offering a service as I’ve described, I’d love to hear about it. And if anyone thinks he or she would be perfect for organizing such a company, do it, then come back and tell me about it.

When I was studying in Sweden, our university had a sizable contingent of foreign-exchange undergraduates from one of California’s state schools.

I didn’t meet many of them, but one day, a friend from France remarked to me just how arrogant they were. This surprised me, and I asked what made them so arrogant.

“Because they always say, ‘I’m from California.’ Not the United States, but California.”

Assuming preferential status for the Golden State somehow rubbed this guy the wrong way. Looking back, I see he had a point. Sure, California is home to more than 35 million people and has one of the 10 largest economies on the planet, but “Californian” does not supersede “from the United States” in a person’s identity.

Wait until the landmass breaks off into the Pacific and you form a uniquely identifiable culture, Californians. Then you can introduce yourself as being from California when traveling abroad.

Introducing Yourself While Traveling

Introducing yourself seems incredibly basic, like a topic for Being Human 101. However, after traveling for long enough and after meeting enough people, you will understand that experience, culture and circumstance create so many permutations of self-identity that even a simple, “Hello, my name is …” can shake your worldview.

Hello, my name is Eric, and I’m from the United States, from a small town in Kentucky.

This is my standard introduction, and it works perfectly 99% of the time because it offers neither too much nor too little information. My introduction has two elements: A name by which you can call me, and where I am from. Let’s break down the two elements of an introduction to see all the strange ways your first encounter with someone new can get turned on its head.

Our Names

I offer only my first name as an introduction for the sake of brevity and so no one feels compelled to use a [First Name][Surname] format in conversation. It’s nice to save people three syllables when you can.

In much of Scandinavia, people introduce themselves with just their first names, regardless of age or whether they’ve earned a title (Dr., Professor, Mrs., etc.). This, to me, suggests a preference for pure equality among people, and I plan to continue offering anyone I meet an invitation for a first-name basis because of the equality it suggests, even if by chance I’m knighted somewhere someday.

Pay careful attention to the name others use when introducing themselves to you. It may be unclear whether a two-syllable sound represents a first name and a surname, a name and a title, or just a simple nickname. Also, encountering names that feature a brand-new arrangement of sounds can mess with your brain. I am in Latvia now, and half of the people I meet have names with no English equivalent.

To further complicate things, our names are hard-wired into our identities and our native accents, so most of us pronounce our names through our native tongues.

It’s cool. Just take it slowly and have the person spell out his or her name if need be. It is important to get the name thing right because of its hard-wiring into our human circuitry. Plus, people always appreciate your making an effort to really understand them.

Where We Are From

You need to identify with a geographical location on someone’s mental globe for the introduction to be full and complete.

Please note, unless you are from London, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau, New York City, Monaco, Gibraltar or the Vatican City, you should identify yourself by your nation of origin. Those 12 cities are either city-states or can lay claim to having a sufficiently unique image that supersedes the surrounding nation.

Also, please no fudging with suburbs and exurbs. If you’re from Yonkers, you have to say you’re from the United States. If pressed further, you can say your city is near New York City.

If you are from the United States, be careful about saying you are simply “an American.” This does not differentiate you from Canadians or Bolivians.

If you are from a nation that has a clear identity, such as Argentina or China, you can then feel free to be more specific about your city or region.

If you are from a nation that is not fully recognized as a sovereign state by all countries, such as Palestine or Kosovo, identifying your place of birth is not a political statement, and you should feel free to educate us about your home.

If you identify yourself as being from a nation that no one else recognizes as a sovereign state, such as Transnistria or the Basque country, your identity does become political speech at that point. Your story will get no protests from me, but it will from someone somewhere.

And if you are from a small nation with no more than a couple of million people, you might need to break out a map for some of us. Case in point:

I was on a train from Prague to Krakow a few years ago and shared a car with five Erasmus students, one of whom had a Maltese passport. She told me her country’s diminutive profile almost got her into trouble one day in Hong Kong.

She had lost her Hong Kong bank card and arrived at the bank at 4:30 in the afternoon on a Friday to apply for a new one. The bank clerks were mentally checking out for their weekend and moving slowly. When someone finally saw her, they asked for a passport as proof of identity. She handed over her Maltese passport.

The bank clerk snorted at the document and suggested that if she wanted to defraud the bank with a fake passport, she should at least copy one from an actual country.

The girl appealed to the bank’s management, apoplectic that the bank would not recognize her country of origin. As luck would have it, one of the bank’s managers had a big thing for Orlando Bloom, who had just recently finished shooting the movie “Troy” in Malta. She confirmed that Malta is, in fact, a country, and the girl was issued a new bank card.

Who Are You?

I imagine my oversimplification of geopolitics might stir up some trouble. That’s fine. We’re all here to learn. My name is Eric, and I’m from the United States, from a small town in Kentucky. I would love to hear about you.

Thursday's Geoff Rickly (Photo by Brad Gosser)

Sometime in the spring of 2003, I had adopted my habit of wearing a wife-beater under my t-shirts. That summer, after my freshman year of college, I found myself in a Days Inn bathroom in O’Fallon, Missouri, a western suburb of St. Louis, undressed as far down as my white wife-beater when I noticed a big, red stain on the front of it. It was blood, and lots of it.

I peeled off the undershirt and found a red geyser where my navel had been. Blood trickled downward and seeped into the fabric of my cargo shorts. The smell of infection filled the tiny bathroom.

My four road tripping companions were sitting on the beds in the room, watching “Ice Age” on late-night network TV. Actually, maybe that Days Inn had free Showtime and HBO. We had just come from Denny’s, across the parking lot, where we put away Grand Slams and greasy meats as if we were breaking a religious fast. When we got back to the room, I called first dibs on the shower.

Earlier that night, we’d been been at a show 270 miles east in Louisville, Kentucky. My favorite band at the time, Thursday, were doing a summer tour to build momentum for their second full-length release, and their show in Louisville was straight-up in an arcade.

Thursday shows are intense. The band emerged from the New Jersey hardcore scene in 1997 and brought with it the same sense of devotion and the same blood-and-guts live performances any hardcore scene worth its salt fosters. We fans must bring that same commitment to our side of the stage, and Thursday shows always turn into a big sweaty, heaving mass of bodies, pumping fists if anyone can find room. I always brought a clean shirt to change into after shows back in those days.

A group of 10 of us had driven up from our hometown for the Louisville show, and after Thursday’s set, a couple of us — hoarse, dehydrated, and drenched in the sweat of every other person in the room — struck up a conversation with members of the opening band, Murder By Death, whom we’d never heard before that night but absolutely blew the crowd away. They told us we should come check out the next day’s show in Columbia, Missouri. They’d put us on the guest list.

Magical golden doors opened before our eyes. Guest list? We had been granted access to The Dream.

Murder By Death's Adam Turla (Photo by Brad Gosser)

Half of our crew — myself, three dudes and a dude’s girlfriend — were in, no questions asked. We phoned home to say we wouldn’t be coming back that night and piled into my friend Brad’s Ford Taurus. He balled that thing at 100 miles per hour toward the Mississippi River, and we were in St. Louis by 4 a.m.

I didn’t change into my clean shirt because I knew I would need it for the next night. My doctor later said the four hours en route to Missouri in that sweat-covered shirt probably allowed some kind of germ to fester and infect my navel.

Back in the bathroom, I found a bottle of Listerine and poured it over my stomach, hoping to disinfect whatever was going on down there. It did the trick, or at least it bought me time ’til the morning, when I could go find some antibacterial ointment. I showered off and emerged from the bathroom smelling curiously strong of mouthwash. By then, it was almost 6 a.m., and we only had a few hours for sleeping before checkout and our drive onward down I-70 into Columbia.

************

News broke on Facebook last week that Thursday were calling it quits after 14 years. It’s a bummer for fans, yeah, but I understand. Fourteen years is a long time for a group of people to play music together. I imagine that once a guy hits 30 and the hairline starts to go, it becomes harder to summon the same fire that made him as a teenager want to play hardcore music.

That’s not to say the music itself has suffered. Their “No Devolucion” record, released earlier this year, is as inspired as any record Thursday have put out. But they also just did a tour to commemorate the 10th anniversary of their “Full Collapse” record. When the band that was so a part of your formative years starts dabbling in nostalgia, it’s probably your cue to do some reflecting yourself.

That’s what this is. This is a reflection, and it’s dedicated to the band that provided the soundtrack for what became the first of many great adventures in my life so far.

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The Taurus’ right rear tire blew out with a mighty ka-THUMP just outside of Vinita, Oklahoma, (home of Gene Autry and Dr. Phil) as we barreled through tight midday traffic. I-44 was a mess of construction, and we were in the left lane when the tire blew. The pop triggered a killswitch near the gas tank that was designed to prevent an explosion in the event of a collision. We wobbled to a stop at the concrete barrier in the median.

The shoulder was about a foot (30 cm) too narrow for the car, and because none of us knew about the car’s killswitch, we were stuck precariously with passing cars having to crowd trucks in the right lane to avoid us.

Luckily, an Oklahoma state trooper with a Sooners blanket draped across the back seat (sorry, Cowboys fans, if he happens to be your arresting officer) and a massive cattle guard on his front bumper arrived. Brad put the Taurus in neutral, and the officer pushed us across the highway to the right shoulder.

As any cop might, he had more than a few questions for us. What were a bunch of haggard-looking 19 year olds from Kentucky doing in northeast Oklahoma? We told him how we’d been in Columbia the night before and been guest-listed again for that night’s show in Tulsa and how we were cutting a big, magnificent swath through the Ozarks in search of adventure.

He was impressed. The word he used, I think, was “admired.” Oh, to be 19 and invincible.

The officer knew his way around a Ford and helped us get the thing started up again. We put on the spare tire, which was enough to get us to Tulsa, and were on our way.

Somewhere in sprawling Tulsa, we found a tire shop, where some locals were discussing a group of Democratic Texas legislators who had recently fled to Oklahoma in protest of some carrying-on or another down in Austin. The whole thing was cowardly, they agreed.

The mechanic himself was a friendly guy, and he perked up when we told him we were from Kentucky. He told us stories of how he used to spend summers in Burnside (the next town south of us) as a kid, swimming in the lake and chasing the local girls. At the time, I couldn’t appreciate this coincidence. I was far too concerned with going, going, going forward for any thoughts of home to resonate.

That night, at a venue called The Other Side, Murder By Death gave us a shout-out before playing “Killbot 2000.”

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I was having a look at the schedule for what has become Thursday’s farewell tour, and I saw that they’re playing Cincinnati tonight and Chicago tomorrow. I felt a pang of sadness when I read that. In other circumstances, I would be at one if not both of those shows.

The Chicago show is at the Bottom Lounge, the last place I saw Thursday play. The turnout for that show was pretty weak, and my friend Matt — who was also in that Taurus — and I were feeling a bit too old to thrash with the kids near the front of the stage. We hung back, PBRs in hand.

I don’t want that to be my last Thursday show. I still need to see “Turnpike Divides,” a song off the new record, played live. I know my friend Jereme, who was also in that Taurus, is at the show in Cincinnati tonight, and I’m jealous.

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We bid Brad farewell at the Tulsa Greyhound station. (“All that again?” “All that again, good buddy.”) The rest of us had jobs (hopefully) and angry parents to get home to, but he wasn’t done.

The bus ride from Tulsa to London, Kentucky, via Indianapolis somehow, was 36 hours long. By the time we got to Indy, the four of us were absolutely ravenously hungry, and in the 20-minute layover, we found a White Castle and ordered two dozen miniburgers. Mystery meat never tasted so good.

In Frankfort, Illinois, a short, benign fellow with a curly, red beard got on the bus and sat directly in front of us. We didn’t think anything of him until he turned around with his hand puppet. He performed a mumbled rendition of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” through the puppet, then turned back around.

We were delirious. Three days of haggard living and three nights of shows, plus the belly full of White Castle, had completely altered our understanding of reality. Maybe the hand puppet thing never really happened. Maybe the little bearded fellow was something I imagined. I really can’t say.

I don’t even remember getting home. I think Matt’s dad picked us up at the bus station. I got some stern looks walking through the door. Jumping in a car and heading for Tulsa was not my parents’ idea of how I should spend my summers.

A couple of days later, I gave Brad a call to see where the journey had taken him. He had gotten speeding tickets in three states in three days, but the states’ databases did not update every day, and he never got his license suspended for it. In Iowa City, I think, he ended up in a drinking contest with Thursday’s drummer plus the members of Cursive, a band from Omaha who were also blowing up that year. After the show in Madison, Wisconsin, he drove that beat-up Taurus back home, a solid thousand dollars poorer from the speeding tickets and new tire.

He and Jereme went to a Thursday show in Cincinnati a couple of years later and got the band’s logo tattooed on their shoulder and forearm, respectively. They had talked of doing this back in Tulsa, but they were told tattooing was illegal in Oklahoma.

I did some quick math on Google Maps a few years ago, and the miles traveled between Brad and I alone for Thursday shows would have taken us halfway around the world at the equator. That might pale in comparison to some Deadheads from way back, but it’s still good enough for a round-the-world trip at the 45th parallel.

A cold day and a canceled English lesson has me sitting in the kitchen, contemplating two grotesque jars of liquid fat. They look like grade school science projects. The briny, straw-colored liquid in each jar has a thick, white head, and I could almost pass the contents off as beer from afar were it not for the little chunks suspended throughout.

This was my first attempt at creating lamb stock.

I always admired descriptions of the Plains Indians (Plains Native Americans?) in school. Their culture revered the buffalo, and no part of the animal after it was hunted down was allowed to go to waste. Buffalo meat fed scores of people at a time. Buffalo hides stretched and dried were raw materials in housing; boiled and shaped, the hides made durable footwear. Buffalo horns likely made great drinking vessels or codpieces — the full extent of the buffalo’s repurposing was never really covered.

It’s with this noble reverence for the dead beast that I endeavored to make my own lamb stock. Over the weekend, we were gifted a 4-pound-or-so cut of lamb and made a stew with it. I accepted my manly duties to butcher the meat, which was a real task because 1.) I’ve never butchered anything but jokes (zing!) and 2.) the poor lamb had apparently had a layer of armor grafted to its skin that I had to tease away from the meat.

In the end, I had some spare parts left over that wouldn’t suit a stew, so I boiled them with some Louisiana hot sauce and garlic (it made perfect sense at the time) to make stock. The stew was hearty and filling; we ate on it for two days.

I fear that the so-called stock, however, will never find its way into any dish I eat or serve to another human being. So it goes for lessons in resourcefulness. I bet that first buffalo-hide tipi had problems of its own. I’ll resolve myself to the smug satisfaction that at least I didn’t forget to leave a hole in the top of my tipi to ventilate my smoldering campfire and asphyxiate in the night.

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This recent emphasis on resourcefulness stems from the fact that, for the last six weeks, we have not had a refrigerator.

We moved into a new apartment in early October on an exciting condition: We could live rent-free if we would make the place more habitable. The first days required a lot of work. The living room needed to be cleaned and organized. The kitchen needed a refrigerator. The bathroom needed a very thorough scrubbing. The gas valve going to the oven needed to be replaced (emergency services did that for free!). The windows needed to be weather-proofed, and the bath tub needed to be sealed.

We eventually made the necessary improvements … except we still haven’t bought a refrigerator. And in the last six weeks, we’ve grown not to even need one.

Benefits of Refrigerator-less Living

1. Focus On A Vegan(ish) Diet: Meat and dairy products cannot sit out on the table or windowsill for long at all, and they are why refrigerators are so important to so many people. However, grains, fruits and vegetables can last for a while at room temperature. Thus, our diet has skewed very heavily (though obviously not exclusively) toward those foods. In related news, I have lost about 10 pounds (4-plus kilos) since my arrival in Latvia despite keeping my level of exercise to a minimum.

2. Buying Only What We Need At The Shop: Because we cannot store much food, we are forced to buy only what we need for the next couple of meals. Thus, we see exactly how much our eating habits cost. This makes monitoring cash flow on a daily basis very easy, and it eliminates a lot of food waste. Yes, sometimes unused milk or creme fraiche goes bad, but we never have to worry about finding a six-month-old box of fish nuggets in the back of the freezer and wonder who bought such a thing in the first place.

3. Emphasis On Resourcefulness: Admittedly, my lamb stock was more an experiment than anything because we weren’t going to eat the meat we used anyway. Still, I enjoy the challenge of forcing myself to find a purpose for every ingredient in the kitchen. These will be good lessons going forward.

Safety Valve

I have to give credit to location and circumstance for making this transition to refrigerator-less living easier.

It’s not as if we will be forced to begin drying and salting meats or pickling vegetables as the winter goes along (though that could be interesting). We live next to a small grocery store and are within walking distance of two hypermarkets. If we need ice cream or frozen peas, it’s but a five-minute trip away. The key is that we can only buy enough of those things for one sitting or one use.

Also, we have been very fortunate with the weather this fall. As of writing, on the last day of November, Riga has seen no snowfall and only a couple of evenings when the mercury dips below the freezing mark. A steady pea soup of clouds off the Baltic has kept daytime temperatures around 41F (5C), which is the internal temperature of a refrigerator, anyway. If we need to keep something cold, we have a balcony.

Eventually, we will have to buy a refrigerator, as we agreed when we moved in. We will be leaving Riga for Brussels sometime in March. I’m betting that we will be leaving behind a brand-new, never-before-used refrigerator.