Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.08.2013, Blaðsíða 35

Literature35
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Reykjavík · Engjateigur 19 and Laugavegur 20b · Hafnarfjörður · Strandgata 34 · www.glo.is
This is Solla Eiriksdottir, the winner
of Best Gourmet Raw Chef and Best
Simple Raw Chef in the 2011 and
2012 “Best of Raw” Awards. Come and try out one
of her great dishes at her restaurant Gló.
went to his supervisors and told them
he wanted to quit, and they gave him
a seven-month leave of absence in-
stead—as if that had nothing to do
with dropping that resplendent smile,
the stupid, beautiful fuck.
“We should have told them we’re
not typical cruise-ship D-bags. We’re
on-land D-bags.”
—Bojo, on how we better could
have seduced two cruise ship danc-
ers we met in a coffee shop, who,
we figured, were probably only im-
pressed by good-looking D-bags on
their cruise ship.
I don’t think I exchanged more
than five words with Bojo during the
first six months I knew him. The guy
is preternaturally quiet even when
surrounded by his best friends. At
parties, he can blend into the con-
versation and stand without saying a
word for so long that you wonder if
he’s had a stroke. For someone who
enjoys talking out of his ass so much
that it’s kind of a waste my mouth is
located on my face, this is beyond my
ken. Our mutual friends and I often
wonder what he’s thinking about in
these moments, if he’s actually deep
in thought about the ether-bound
mysteries of the universe or if he’s
just humming in his head to the Raw-
hide theme, “Bojo-Bojo-Bojo! Bojo-
Bojo-Bojo! Bojoooo!”
But then you get to know the kid
and slowly discover that not only
is he an incredibly intelligent guy,
but he also has that weird sense of
humor, with an innate ability to say
something so perfectly goofy and ir-
reverent at the exact right moment. I
always tell him that he likes to save
it up, to say nothing for two hours of
a five-hour car ride and then hit you
with the off-the-cuff remark at the
precise moment you’re least able to
resist it. Taking it back to NBC sit-
coms, he’s Costanza making the one
crack at the boardroom meeting,
throwing up his hands, and leaving
the room. He also recently grew a full,
dark, jealousy-inducing beard, which
one of my female friends in Chicago
observed made him my second hot-
test friend (guess who took first?).
Bojo, also an engineer, worked in
the suburbs of Chicago for a manu-
facturer, designing parts for big in-
dustrial firms like Caterpillar, which
is about as outside of my understand-
ing as IBM consulting or not speaking
for an hour. His commute from the
city took an hour there and an hour
and a half back. This kind of daily slog
meant he woke at 6 a.m. and rarely
got home before 7 p.m. One can only
keep up that kind of schedule for so
long before either going crazy or mar-
rying someone awful and moving to
the suburb where he works. So Bojo
applied to grad school and decided
on the MBA program at Carnegie
Mellon in Pittsburgh. This meant he
too would be quitting his job, and it
just seemed clever to quit before the
summer began to join Trin for a few
months on his trip. After an exhaus-
tive search (you will quickly learn
that these two are into researching
things “exhaustively” before plung-
ing in, which only begins to define
the wonderful differences in our per-
sonalities), they found a cheap flight
to Reykjavík on Icelandair.
Enter Markley
Unlike Bojo and Trin, I wasn’t quitting
a job or going back to school. I’d been
underemployed for a year or more,
was in the middle of working on my
second and third books simultane-
ously and had just lucked into the fat-
test fiscal windfall of my life when I
sold the movie rights to Publish This
Book. Without going into the biogra-
phy of this period too much, I’ll say
that I basically used the cash to 1)
stop scrapping for freelance gigs to
focus on book writing for as long as I
could and 2) take as many pretty girls
out on dates as I could possibly fit
into waking hours.
[This had its benefits and draw-
backs. For instance, it got expensive
to have four dates in a week, plus
two weekend nights on the town that
lasted till 4 a.m. in order to find fod-
der for more dates. It only dawned on
me that I was going to blow through
this relatively meager movie money
way too fast when I bought an ex-
tremely pretty 41-year-old divorcée
(who clearly was an adult person who
made more money than me) $100
worth of casual drinks on a Tuesday
night.]
I also wanted to use the money
to take a trip somewhere I’d never
been before, and when Bojo and Trin
mentioned that they’d bought tickets
to Iceland, I flashed back to that long-
ago endorsement from the producer
of Hostel. Within a few weeks I’d
found a $600 ticket on Icelandair.
What This Book Is Not
Before we get to our story, we have
to go over a few things this book is
not so that no one is upset when they
begin to understand that I have no
recommendations for Reykjavík fine
dining, nor do I understand how to
say, “Which way is the potato farm?”
or any other Icelandic phrase. I know
nothing about Iceland other than
what I’ve gleaned from my travels
and read on the Internet or in this
archeologically fascinating educatio-
informatensil of our near past called
a “bok.”
[My editor says the correct spell-
ing is “book” but we will have to
agree to disagree.]
This is not a guide. I know no other
routes in Iceland other than the one
I took, and I know no other destina-
tions and sights other than the ones I
saw.
If I had to classify this, I’d call it
travel lit with a distinctly Markleyian
flare—“Markleyian” being the defini-
tion of any weird little fucking thing
that comes into my head stirred with
narrative and sociopolitical whining.
There will be stories that have
nothing to do with Iceland. There will
be vastly inappropriate jokes about
body functions and functions the
body was never intended to under-
take, and many of these will not be all
that funny if you weren’t there.
This is also not a “backpacker’s
guide” to shit. I did not live in Ice-
land for six months. I didn’t even
have a backpacker’s backpack. I had
a little rolly-type suitcase my mom
gave me several years ago, which I
wheeled around loudly over cobble-
stones looking very mom-like. My ac-
tual backpack I’d just gotten for free
from a friend, and it drew me only
because of its sheer number of pock-
ets. For some reason I find multiple
pockets a very attractive feature of
a backpack, especially because my
actual backpacker’s backpack, which
I’ve lugged around on so many pre-
vious trips, is this Osprey with just
one massive pocket for everything,
so all your clothes, books, toiletries,
and other possessions just end up in
a savage muddle. Though they sell
a lot of merchandise, I would gladly
enter an Oxford-style debate to argue
that Osprey doesn’t know dick about
backpacks.
I took a 2½-week trip and, let’s face
it: if you’re a debt-loaded postgrad in
this uncertain economy you probably
have to parcel out your travels uneas-
ily and even 2½ weeks seems like a
luxury of gargantuan proportions.
So if you’ve bought this book, just
know that it will be a little foul. It will
not teach you anything about Iceland
that you can’t look up on Wikipedia. It
may make you laugh, but people who
claim in the first chapter that the read-
er will laugh are usually assholes.
My hope is not only that somehow,
someway this becomes the indis-
pensable book that cool people read
before or during a trip to Iceland, but
that perhaps it inspires more people
to travel to Iceland. All I can say with
full credibility is that I went to Iceland
and kind of fell in love with the place.
This is how it happened.