Fuckit

One of the most amusing days of the high school, or occasionally, latter middle school, calendar is The Drug Awareness Day. The program is always the same. It opens with a display of photos: First comes the traditional blackened lungs from cigarette smoke, then it's missing cheeks from smokeless tobacco, followed by grown men drewling on themselves on a park bench in shaggy clothing from alcohol, and finally a sanitarium on a dark misty night looking like the set of a horror movie, in order to display the imminent outcome of acid use. The day platues with a formal training headed by the school psychologist to teach every child how to respond when a kid sporting a green mohawk accosts you with a lit blunt in the bathroom and blurts out "It's just a little weed." Then comes the climax - a real live drug addict who comes to lecture you on how much they love drugs. By the day’s end once the bell has rung every kid has the opportunity to share and tell with his or her friends about the stories they heard from their new-found favorite friend drug addict.

My brother Jordie had the pleasure of meeting one such lady addict that was fed up with her good friend Mary Jane. While she may not have deterred any young potheads from smoking more cheeba, to her credit, she did give it a go, and offered words of great wisdom. "The Problem with weed kids, and the reason it should not be used, is because it gives you the Fuck-Its, you stop doing anything, you just say Fuck-It." Leave it to a drug addict to aptly describe the real problem with marijuana, not the politicians, teachers, and shrinks. I’ve never heard any adult or child make a remotely sensible and accurate description of the harmful effects of smoking a bowl, but this woman was right on the money.

Now that my days of getting stoned are extremely few and far between (I do still have my fun with pharmaceuticals) I kind of missed that free feeling she so appositely described. After being in the overwhelming ridiculous mayhem of Bangkok many days in excess I found it only natural then that my girlfriend Shula and I should go to the island of Phuket, pronounced Poo-ket, but not by me. So I booked us a place at the fuck-it backpackers hostel, just off of fuck-it rd., rented a moped from the fuck-it bike shop in the heart of fuck-it town, rode on the left side of the fuck-it streets along the wide white sandy beaches of Patong, Kata, and Koron which are lined with fuck-it resorts. We also sought out some rural fuck-it territory away from the fuck-it tourists witnessing traditional fuck-it markets, fuck-it villiages, and fuck-it peoples, and took the fuck-it ferry to the astoundingly gorgeous paradise island of Go Pee Pee. Fuck-it really has it all.

The title of this beautiful diverse beach city embodies the quintessential spirit of the backpacking mentality. Our journey began with myself, a filmmaker AKA a slave and bitch for the movie industry, and my girl friend, who put a career in social work on hold to explore her artistic inclinations in the field of graphic design, quitting our jobs and moving out of our apartment. The goal was to get the hell away from the high stress part of the world in which we reside in order to attain some much needed time and perspective before figuring out, and taking, further steps in these endeavors. During this journey of ours we've met so many others just like ourselves - three girls from Montana wanting to put the real world on hold, Christoff, a naval officer from Germany needing to get away from his demanding position on the high seas, Mike from Australlia fed up with the expensive capitalistic nature of his hometown, two Swedish girls not ready for university, a man who let me call him Wolf when I screwed up his name stressed out from his task in China of overseeing safe product manufacturing before exportation, a couple on a nine month honeymoon around the world, numerous male and female loners on year long adventures, and so many more. All of us hoping, wanting, and needing something different, something better, and something more significant than our little lives back at our origins. Independently, but together, each one of us, and the thousands of backpackers we've encountered from Tokyo, Japan all the way down to Beppu, and from Chiang Mai, Thailand down to Bangkok, and further south to Koh Tao and Finally Phuket. We've all opted for the Fuck-It mentality. It's this mental state that has allowed us to let new sights, experiences, cultures, and perspectives swirl around, scatter, and jumble our once routinely organized left and right brains and temporarily hit the off switch and kill the patterned concerns and errands of typical daily life. To say "Fuck-It" is not apathy, laziness, or a lack of motivation. It means not submitting, giving-in, or giving-up. It's recognizing the need for the new, the fresh, the change. It's freeing yourself from patterns and dead-ends, and recognizing and not forcing what wasn't working. It's about listening to your inner flow, flowing with your inner go, and escaping the powerful grasp of the hand of conventional daily life. It’s about not settling for a life without meaning. It's good and healthy to ingest new experiences, attitudes, and substances and get your lips wet and your nose in the air. Don’t just take whatever bullshit shwag is being passed your way. As self help books will tell you, you need and deserve the good shit, the heady stuff, the kind of shit that will make your head fly off your body and float up to the heavens to the sounds of Jimmy Page's guitar, the shit that will give you a good, powerful, solid, kick-ass, bad-ass motherfucking case of the Fuck-Its.