My wonderful longtime friends over at Come due Maiali (Like Two Pigs) nominated me for this award. I love their blog and especially their take on locally grown foods and how they prepare them.

I did some research on the award itself and I could not find any criteria for how to win nor how to even compete. In effect it just seemed like a chain letter or a thinly veiled Pyramid scheme. I also do not see anyway to know that if I nominate fellow bloggers they will not have been previously nominated and will look disparagingly upon my insistence to comply with the rules.

The rules seem also to be a bit odd to me. Typically if someone nominates one for an award it is based upon their existing body of work. For the 7X7 Amway award it appears I have to actually do some work and tell you all some secret about myself. While I enjoy my Blissful followers immensely, giving away some personal secrets seems a bit invasive and especially without a prize involved.

However, I will dutifully tell you a secret about me and I will leave it at that. I am not willing to potentially SPAM my blogging brethren (most of whom only tolerate me a little and some of whom have told me not to quit my day job) and I am equally  reluctant to include links to my top 7 blogs. Sure, I likely could come up with a hierarchy of my work in my own eyes, and at the same time my opinion of myself rarely means much to anyone other than me (which is sometimes a blessing and often a curse)

Two Pigs, I am more than honored you would consider me for this and I really enjoyed your thorough participation in the exercise and especially your stories from your youth. I hope it will not cause you too much consternation that the chain will indeed break from my end and I will not ask all of my friends to post it to Facebook like some evangelical plea to save one's soul.

If the powers that be over at 7X7 can give me some concrete reason why I should blog at their behest or tell me about some 3 day cruise on Costa that I am missing, I will jump on it with fervor akin to a small monkey seeking to remove ants from his anus. In the meantime I offer a juicy little secret to mitigate any disappointment in my lack of participation and because I am a fan of the Two Pigs.

I. Share something about yourself that others don’t know.

The Blissful Adventurer is afraid of flying. That's right I hate to fly and usually have to medicate myself with anti-anxiety meds before I do. I love to travel and I hate to get there. It all began when I watched a documentary years ago on the Lockerbie, Scotland Crash. I had enjoyed flying immensely up until I watched that just a few short weeks before I was to fly to Rome for the first time.

I was always good with plane mechanical issues or engine trouble being something  that a pilot could control; it was the feeling that the side of the bird could just be suddenly pierced apart from a SAM shot from the back of a pack animal or from a duck blind in a covered marsh that got my imagination into overdrive. I always imagine myself enjoying a cocktail and reading a little Hemingway just as the nose of the plane disappears from sight and in that infinitely short forever before the tail falls backwards to imminent death I have the full knowledge that I am about to cease. I don't want to know and at the same time I do.

This is why I would love to be in the cockpit. If I am there as an observer I could at least use my powers of acute human observation to read the faces of the cockpit crew to know if the shit was indeed about to hit the fan. I don't want to be in steerage when the Titanic runs aground. I figure that every time I fly the odds of my demise increase. Yes I know that driving my car is much more dangerous and that I am much more likely to be wiped from the planet in a car crash, and I could give a flying flip about those stats. Fear is irrational and especially fear of flying which in my case is actually fear of being out of control.

So, when I plan trips I consult with my airplane engineer buddy to see which airlines have good maintenance records. I go for non-stop where possible so as to avoid additional take-offs and landings which I am certain increase my chances of a fiery exit. I even get enormously cold feet just before my departure and have lots of dreams about disasters: tornadoes, car crashes, and of course plane emergencies. I always seem to survive my dreams and usually even recognize them as dreams before they end but that does not help to assuage my irrational fear.

At the end of the day, my disdain for flying does not dissuade me from going, it just makes the process much more stressful than it need be. Xanax and 187ml bottles of schlock calm my nerves and ultimately dehydrate the hell out of me; it is what it is adventurers. This is my 7x7 secret shit storm of silliness. I don't want to go down like that nasty Air France flight from Brazil to Paris. I am reduced to a sniveling pansy the night before any flight but by security I am usually high as a 3rd offense meth-head and ready for my closeup with Jesus.

Buon Viaggio!