The DOZ Creation Tale

It started in Spain. I was sitting in the hostel bar enjoying cheap half-liters of Amstel with a veritable UN of backpackers. The usual questions flew—where are you from? Where are you headed? How long have you been out? James and I thought that last question was pretty meaningless. In our separate travels we’d met all kinds of people and to our thinking, many of the greatest, wildest, most epic backpackers we’d met hadn’t been out long, and wouldn’t be. But they knew how to spend the time they had. We began to question the wisdom of marking journeys by weeks and months, and instead marking them by experiences—cities or girls or metro tickets or drinks. Saying “three months” means nothing if you spent those three months holed up in a hotel room emailing home every few hours. But saying “four continents” or “seventeen plane rides” or or “85 email addresses” or “150 pints” meant something. They equaled experience, conversations, discomfort, lessons both hard and simple. It was then that I decided to no longer measure my travels in standard increments of time. I’ll be in Australia for ten months, but how many bus rides is that? How many miles of city streets? How many cups of coffee in sidewalk cafes? How many lovers or drinks or concerts or sporting events? The answers to those questions will dictate to a much greater degree how much I really experienced, how much I learned and how much I did.

All experience can be quantified to at least some degree, but the practicality of counting steps, or numbers of animals seen, or conversations with locals is questionable at best. So I decided to choose drinks. I drink often—far too often, according to many people and the modern science of addiction—and given my social tendencies, quantifying drinks might give a more accurate portrayal of what I’ve done and where I’ve been. Certainly much drinking will be done, as it is being done right now, in the comfort of my single bedroom in the far corner of my house, well away from prying eyes and accents, but much drinking will also be done at social functions: at parties, in restaurants, clubs and pubs, in different cities, in different states, in different countries, on trains, buses and planes, in public and in private with different people. Keeping track of that will be interesting, challenging, and probably surprising, but I’m resolved to do it. Of course this will not be the most precise science, but few sciences are. In fact, if I go out and can only remember that I went to three pubs with my room mates and not precisely how much I drank, that means I was more concerned with experience than counting, which is good in its own way.

It's on....