Editor’s Note – Issue 5, Volume 5, July 2009

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I’ve been in France for the past several weeks visiting my family-in-law, so you’ll have to forgive me if I appear out of touch.

It’s a wonderful place, France, and not without its flaws– much like here — but undeniably an altogether different country. And while relatively close, as all nations seem to be these days, thanks to the internet, satellite television and swift, frequent air travel, France is, we must remember, very, very far away — in more ways than one.

I’ve never been one of those travelers who feels the need to keep up on events back home while I’m abroad. I don’t own a cell phone, a Blueberry or a laptop, and avoid internet cafés like the plague. I prefer to immerse myself wholly in the place I’m visiting and blend chameleon-like into the crowd. I like to sever all ties with my homeland, the better to experience the true wonder of foreign travel.

Barring a handful of instances, I spoke only French, albeit a shot-in-the-dark variety that once found me “sexually excited” by the prospect of shopping for apricots when being “mildly expectant” would have sufficed.

I ate 49 different varieties of cheese and a kind of thick paste made from what I gather to have been a duck’s neck; wore a scarf in 35° C weather; drove through school zones like a syphilitic maniac, and drank a bottle of wine for dinner every night before fecking off to bed promptly at 23 o’clock.

During the span of my stay, I never once turned on the television, and a newspaper never entered my field of vision. I heard a nary word about America but for the day when Obama popped over to Normandy to commemorate the 65th Anniversary of D-Day. As someone who’s always prided himself in being blissfully out of the loop, this ignorance of American news was, if you’ll forgive the pun, liberating.

So you can imagine my surprise when I debarked in Orlando last week to hear from my dear brother that Ed McMahon, a true American icon, had shuffled off this mortal coil. To add insult to injury, I learned that Farrah Fawcett was now pushing up the daisies as well. As we all know, celebrity deaths come in threes, so it wasn’t without some surprise that I learned of another icon’s passing: Swedish author Willy Kyrklund.

Bill O’Reilly? Alas, still kicking.

Thank the good Lord I still have tickets to Michael Jackson’s comeback concert in London next week. They cost me a small fortune, and I wouldn’t miss seeing the little guy moonwalk across the stage once again for all the world.

… What?

The Editor.