Our Canine Preferences

I'm back! On this episode of Uncommon Content I layout how my plan for a solo trip around the world for a year lasted five months, and only made it through 13 degrees of longitude. There were money mishaps, a soul-sucking paradise, Anthropological revelations, and the best roast chicken I have ever eaten.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

You are listening to the Uncommon Content podcast with Michael Derso. Good luck. Welcome back to Uncommon Content. I'm Michael Derso. Uh it's been a minute. I hope everyone is well. I'm great. I'm back. I got back to the U.S. just before Thanksgiving. Uh I landed in Oklahoma City uh to spend the holiday and then a few weeks with my sister. It was awesome. And then uh I road tripped with her back to Illinois just in time for Christmas. So I got the holidays back in the U.S. That was great. Seeing my dog was the best present. I was so excited that first walk. I was so excited to go for the Oscar again, pretending to pick her poop up and not doing it. That's home to me. I uh I am not in the studio and the sun is about to come up. So I do not apologize for the birds you may hear. I don't hear anything with the headphones on, and half of the love I have of podcasting is just hearing my own voice in the headphones. It's the narcissism at its best, I guess. Um that's it. You know, I uh I did not go around the world in one year, and I did visit Oklahoma. I swore I would do one, and I swore I would not do the other, and I did the exact opposite, which was, you know, perfectly predictable. Uh it really was. Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease. I don't know how I didn't see that coming. Nobody likes to admit failure, you know. I guess I swear I'll do shit because I think it'll force me to follow through. And it usually works, you know. But I guess as I get older, I'm starting to learn the difference between like intestinal fortitude, or what I think that is, and blind stupidity, which is what it typically is. I'm starting to do that. I'm starting to. So moving forward, no more swears. I'd swear there'd be no more swears, but that would just be another swear. So I'm not gonna do that. Or, you know, I could just follow through on everything. There's that, it's a possibility. Uh, I did love going to Oklahoma, though, and staying with my sister. She is the original occupant of Exception Island, its founding member, if you will. Uh, she gave me while I was there, she wanted some housework done. And she gave me a chainsaw and a fire pit uh to play with, and I just listened to book after book and burn shit and cut shit, and it was great. If you can have a good time while getting a job done, like you're halfway there. There should be a spot for men where we just play with chainsaws and fire, kind of like the axe throwing place, but maybe a little less dangerous. Uh the trip was awesome. I I can't really say it was fun. I'd love to say it was fun, but it's not the same. It seems silly to try to have fun when there's nobody else there, and and there was also nobody else there to dare me to do anything, and that was interesting. Anything stupid. And I love a dare. So it was, you know, I would dare myself. When you're by yourself, it feels like maybe your dare is you performing for a great story later, and it just doesn't feel genuine. And authenticity is kind of a requirement for real smiles, and they're a requirement for fun, and we all kind of know that. Like in the movie Groundhog Day, there is that first night he gets Rita, you know, and he doesn't get to sleep with her, but the whole evening is spontaneous fun. The kids are throwing snowballs at him, and it's all great. And he ruins it that first night, of course, and he tries to go back and do it again, and he can't recreate the authentic moment. And I think we all kind of know that. To me, movies are the soul of Generation X. I remember standing in line with my father to see Superman, the first one with Christopher Reeve, and it's my first real memory with detail. I remember the red velvet rope I had to play with for what seemed like an eternity while the people that were just ahead of me in line got to see the entire film before me. It kind of makes sense that my first memory is of me feeling slighted. It tracks for sure. The boomer soul is in its television. Before the boomers, it was radio and stage for millennials. It's obviously the internet. And I don't know anyone from Gen Z, so I have no idea, but it's probably down to a meme by now. But I digress. Uh, there definitely were funny moments on the trip if there weren't fun. And I mean from the very beginning. And a lot of them were only funny in hindsight, right? I cannot describe how like incredibly deflating it was to leave my debit card in the ATM at the airport in Mazatlan uh right after landing. I mean, I can't tell you how much work and effort and worry and anxiety went into arranging the money I had for my trip. That the fact that I was on such a tight wire and couldn't afford a loss here or there. And I and I was just protective on so many levels, had plans for everything, and the worst possible thing happens in the first possible moment. And it hit at the core of my anxiety. I just don't, there aren't words to express how that went down. Now it's hilarious. At the time it was not. And I didn't know that I'd lost my debit card when I checked into that hotel for the first couple of nights. I didn't, I didn't know I'd lost it yet. So I'm checking in, and this girl that's checking me in, she's a young girl, and she was uh she was nice and everything, pretty, and but she didn't speak uh very much English, you know, and she started to tell me I needed to pay a$200 deposit. And I was just like, I was immediately my fraud alert went up. And how dare you, this room isn't even$200. If I, you know, this is a shit hotel, it's just close to the ocean and is my temporary stay. Like all that's going through my head. I think it's a scam, you know, and I refuse. I will not. Uh, and she hates me, I can see it, but she checks me in and I'll be responsible. And I don't care, it's fine. I think I've won a victory, right? So about an hour later is when I found out that I lost the debit card, and I assumed that I left it up at the front desk. I did pay for the room, but I did not pay the deposit, right? And so I go up there and you can imagine my face, and the girl keeps telling me that I didn't lose it there. It's not there, it's not there, and in Spanish mostly, and I don't hear in that language. And I can't imagine, now in hindsight, I can't imagine how crazy I must have looked in a different language in that moment. And uh I'm like, this is a scam, just like the deposit, you know, and I that's all I'm thinking. And then for about a minute, I guess, minute and a half, and then all of a sudden, I realized it was all me. It was me. I everything was my fault. I left the debit card. There is nobody else to blame when you were all by yourself. I was crestfallen, and the same girl the whole time had to text me. That's how we communicated about room service, cleaning up the room, my coffee in the morning. There weren't many people in the hotel. And every time she would uh text me, she would send me an emoji with a saluting emoji, and it was kind of offensive to me, and I'm just pissy now. And I swear to god, days later, I was sitting in my Airbnb and it just popped into my head. She meant 200 pesos for the deposit. 10 bucks. That's what she wanted for a deposit. The thing that all of that was over$10. So when you're traveling alone, there's nobody there to tell you you're being a dick either. So there's that. Mazatlan was a great place to start. I did a couple of recordings from there. It felt Mediterranean to me with all the white buildings and the pebbly beaches. I really liked it. The Malacom was great. It was my favorite part of Mazatlan. It's like a 13-mile concrete monument to joy. It's all about enjoying the sea, and I really liked that. Uh my Airbnb was kind of great to me, but it was kind of shitty. It had a lot of room. But it was right above a tortilleria. I could get fresh hot tortillas like two inches thick for a dollar anytime. Uh, it was next to the market, which I love the big market. And it was about a 15-minute walk to the ocean. I had dinner before I left with the owner Alan and his girlfriend. He is Canadian. She is from Mexico. They were super nice. There are lots of Canadians living in Mexico. He said he has a nicer unit right above the one that I rented, and I can use it next time. So I hope I do. Mazatlan is definitely worth seeing again. I like that Mazatlan was stuck in 1985 aesthetically because it lost so much tourism so quickly. That that was interesting to me. Mexico did it on purpose. Like they actually did it. They built Cancun and at the same, you know, it they specifically built Cancun to become the tourist spot of Mexico. And I bet at the time the people in Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta, they were probably like, what are you doing? You know, and they're like, oh no, there's plenty to go around. Well, there wasn't. And you can tell Centro where I was is just totally locked in place, you know, for that time period. If my trip had a low point, it was Cancun for sure. I think Cancun is Mexico's Vegas, but worse, you know, all of the prettiest, least chaste women from around the country collect there, along with the worst, most manipulative of men. And you could just see it, you could feel it. I guess it's the nature of money for nothing, you know. In Vegas, it's fueled by gambling. Uh, that's where the unearned money comes. In Cancun, it's the tourism and the exchange rate, one, you know, big fat tip on a crazy inflated bar tab, uh, you know, and that's your rent. The thing I hated about Cancun is that you can't see the beach. If you're a regular person, if you live there, you cannot see the beach. And they have a law in Mexico, which is a great law that says that all beaches are public 65 feet in from the highest tide, and they're supposed to be, but that in Cancun they built all the hotels so close. I mean, they are angled, it's almost like it's on purpose. I walked the whole thing trying to find an angle to see the ocean. And at no point, right when you think you're about to turn a corner, there's an outbuilding from another resort that hides it. It's almost, it's, it's, you, you, it's the barrier of seeing this beautiful ocean, and I found that disgusting. I really did. I hated it. I'll never go to Cancun again if I can help it. I know I don't make squares anymore, but that one. I I just I don't see me really enjoying going there again. And that's the problem with places like Vegas and Cancun. It seems like nothing is honest or real, and every possible joy has been monetized to the absolute maximum. And to me, that is very wrong. Uh, I will not be fantasizing about places like that anymore. And uh not that you shouldn't fantasize about a week in Cancun, go right ahead. I'm not a hypocrite. I pretty sure I loved it as a regular tourist, what I can remember. I just can't unsee it now in Vegas or Cancun. The name Cancun is Mayan and it literally means nest of snakes. You can't make this shit up. The area was known to be a perfect environment for snakes for centuries when they built it. Now, if Cancun is Mexico's Vegas, then Playa del Carmen is its Reno. I only spent eight shitty days in Cancun before I took the ADO bus to Playa del Carmen for the rest of the month, and I liked Playa so much more. It was the best decision I could have made. Uh, it has a cool expat community. I didn't really get to know him, but you see them everywhere. I met a few. Uh, there's just lots of dropouts with, you know, just enough money to live in paradise for a while. And they actually say it. And some look like they've been there for 30 years. I guess you figure it out. I do have a confession to make, and it's bittersweet for sure. I drank. I drank on June 17th while I was on my trip in Playa del Carmen, and I know it was June 17th exactly because I figured out that that was exactly 18 months of sobriety that was going down the drain while I was walking to the store to get the bottle of vodka, and somehow I still talked myself into allowing it to happen. And it's surprising, but not surprising, I guess. I do know that when I went through the DTs the last time I quit drinking, you know, all alone, life in ruins again. I wasn't broke this time, but it that didn't seem to matter. And I didn't think I could ever feel that physically and mentally terrible, ever. You know, it was way past the checkout threshold for me. My heart, the uh hallucinations, all that crap. I have a vivid memory of trying to mentally bottle that moment. I was like, you know, there was a good chance I was gonna live through this and would want to live without alcohol. And I wish that I had this like perfectly horrible moment that I could bottle up and experience anytime I was thinking about having a drink. So when I was in Playa del Carmen, the first night I had a couple, the second night I had a couple to to get through, the third night I had a couple. Now, at this point, the 750 milliliter bottle of Schmirnoff has got a third left in it. And it was on that third night, I guess morning, it's probably two in the morning, I woke up, and of just a hint of all of those feelings that I wished were bottled up. It kind of reminded me of, you know, when you do a component wine tasting and I'll give you uh a little bit more and a little bit more of uh just tannin and water, and you start to recognize the flavor of tannin and water. And then when I give you a glass of wine, you can identify the tannin. And then from there on, you can you can give a measurement on tannin because you can identify the individual tannin. And it kind of felt like that with drinking. It was I got all of those feelings in a very small amount. And I am proud. I got up in the middle of the night, I dumped the bottle of vodka, threw the bottle away, and just put on uh a Fall of Civilizations podcast and eventually fell asleep. And I have not drank since. But I did turn my internal sobriety clock back to zero. And if you know booze, you know uh it's never over. I guess if there's one thing I got out of my failed trip around the world, is that I live in a little less fear of the next drink, uh, but also with more caution, if that makes sense. I mean, I don't think any alcoholic should try it for sure. Don't go testing yourself, but you know, it's so far so good for me. And this means now that it's St. Patrick's Day, I only have six months sobriety, but with the exception of Playa, it's been two years. So I'll celebrate both thoughts and know that it's something that will never end. That's what you just gotta know. It's a struggle for the rest of your life. There's two, I have two struggles. I'm gonna struggle with my faith, and I'm gonna struggle with my alcoholism for the rest of my life. Probably struggle with a lot more shit than that. Anyway, I liked Playa del Carmen a lot. I love that track was right next to my Airbnb. Uh, I hated even going back through Cancun to fly to Peru. Crossing the equator was one of my big goals, and I'm such a fucking 12-year-old. I was I was hoping the captain was gonna say something. I kept wanting to know when we were gonna cross the equator, and you know, nobody said anything, nobody cares. I don't want a certificate or anything, but I should get a stamp on my passport. I'm literally on the other side of the world, right? Like, I don't know. I maybe I'm just me. I will say that the vacation cities I was in, Mexico, they're just like America light, you know, because of the tourism. Most things are basically the same, and those things are usually shittier versions, right? The standards are different, the expectations are lower. I was in Lima for the start of the rainy season, but there's no rain, just a lot of clouds. I could have used more sun, but the weather was so comfortable. It was just perfect. I I for me, it was like 70 the entire time, and I couldn't have loved it more. I loved sitting out on my little patio and I had little cocaine tea. You're like it's coca leave tea. It it doesn't do anything for you, but I didn't have a coffee pot in that Airbnb, so my options were, you know, instant coffee and tea, and I would add a bad bag of the uh coca tea once in a while. Uh the parks were probably my favorite part of Lima. They built a bunch of them, you know, from about the year 2000 on. So they're kind of everywhere, and there's a lot of public spaces, and they're all clean, they're very clean. You pick up your dog shit, you know. It's a little different there. It's at gunpoint. I stayed in Cerquilo, which is kind of like a blue-collar area, middle of the road. I really liked it. Everything's pretty affordable there. The Ubers are super cheap, so I was able to get around. Barocco is is an amazing little uh oceanside place. That's real artsy. I loved going there, the bridge of size that's there. The Ubers were super cheap because the minimum wage there is like$500 a month, and it's not like an old thing. They just changed it in 2025. And so the Ubers were really cheap. And I like to call it the$5 Richard Petty driving experience because they were crazy. I would never drive a car in Lima. I don't think any of you could drive a car in Lima. It's it's a it is a different skill set altogether. I loved, I have videos of looking down on my patio and just watching 20 cars wove around one another. I just didn't understand how they could possibly pull that off. I loved going down to the ocean in Lima when you walk down there. There's really because it sits on a cliff, you got to walk all the way down to the actual ocean. And there's tons of little black rocks, and they're all flat. They've been flattened by erosion over time. And every time a wave pulls back, it flips over, you know, millions of these little rocks along this beach, and it almost it's like a wave in and of itself, and it it makes this shh sound, and it's it's like this little clacking. And I really love that. Lima is also where the best food of my trip was. Uh, it was not that food was not that exciting on my trip. I know that's not really me, but when you're by yourself and on a budget, uh, I really wanted to get to know the grocery stores more than I did the restaurants, but the roast chicken in Lima is like a is an art form, man. Every cafe's got one. Every cafe's got a half a roasted chicken, a plate of fries, and a salad for about eight bucks. And some of them are just amazing. They have whole chains uh uh of that set up. Lima's also got the best fried rice I've ever had. There is a ton of Chinese influence there in Peru. Not much American, very much Chinese. There's a lot of gold there, and that's what China wants out of them. The Bank of China is the largest building in the city, it looks like. But the fried rice I had there was the best I've ever had. I was hoping to compare it to China, but I haven't done the Asian portion of my trip. We'll see when that's gonna happen. Lima's also where the bipolar kind of kicked in or more like turns off. I always knew it was an insane idea to spend all my money going all the way around the world. And I knew that if I had enough, it would be just enough. I needed to get lost though, and whatever the old man version of my body could take of getting lost, you know, that's what I needed to do. And I decided the smart thing was to finish up Latin America and go home and regroup. And that's what I did. I really wanted to go to Cusco from Lima uh so I could see Machu Picchu, but there was no way I was gonna be able to afford that, uh, even on the cheap. And I almost went just because I was deciding to come home after that, but it seemed to defeat the purpose. Uh, I really wanted to see Mexico City, right? And so it did. It made Mexico City that much more enjoyable, that much more exciting. I spent more on lodging. I got a uh it was the most expensive Airbnb the entire time. It was fourteen hundred dollars for that almost month. Uh, I did not know I was gonna be there for the day of the dead, and that is a big deal, and that was why everything was more expensive to stay there. It makes sense, but it was worth it. It was very cool. I got to go down to the parade. Mexico City is definitely not a resort city. It is the most populated city in North America, and you feel it. I thought that was cool. I I enjoyed that sensation. Mexico kind of reminds me of a serfdom, unless you're in a cartel. That's a it's a way. It's a way to run a place. The cartels are basically a rebel army, you know, fed by drug sales. And I am guessing that I would have been in the cartel if I had been born Mexican. I mean, I'm just gonna throw that out there. Mexico City was crazy to me because of the mix of the two cultures and the way that that happened, you know, the Spanish and indigenous. They know that they're a mix, too. It's kind of interesting. Nobody's on stolen land or anything. My trip was more about anthropology, my anthropology interests, especially in Mexico City than anywhere else, because that place is like a buffet. You know, I was obsessed with anthropology before I even knew what anthropology was. I liked history, but I didn't understand that that aspect was something that I really liked. I have thought since I was a little kid that we are all way too strange to be born exactly the same. I was taught that the only instincts we were born with are the desire to cry, grasp, and suck. And we learned everything from there. All of our tastes and weaknesses, all of our good pieces, all of our bad pieces, all of the choices we made or were made for us, you know, are the result of our environment. All nurture, almost all nurture and no nature. It was like saying an old pickup truck and a Ferrari are the same because they both have two doors. It's tablo rasa and it's total bullshit. Our combination of genes are literally one in a billion, and they affect everything about us from the music we like to the position we prefer when we're doing it. How many studies and policies are still around that, especially ones involving kids that still try to make this work in the face of all of this evidence, and it's just dumb. I know why my generation still believes this. We all bought in because of the movie Trading Places. That one dollar bet between Mortimer and Randolph Duke made us all dumber forever. I think we need to learn how to trust our instincts. Again, listen to our heuristics a little bit better and maybe give common sense a vote. I think that if we start to link some of the things we do today to the way we first learned them and how they naturally evolved, which is basically anthropology, that we have a better chance of making that happen because we need those instincts. That was the kind of thing I wanted to understand better and was the goal of my trip. Like I really enjoyed going down and getting water, having to physically walk to the store to get all of my drinking water. It made me track the water I was drinking. And my ancestors did it much differently, but it was a concern of theirs. And while I was in south of the border, it was a concern for me. And it made me appreciate water more. Getting water was an adventure. I tried to plan an adventure every day of my trip. I took a couple of sick days, uh, and they were budget adventures, which were actually pretty cool in Mexico and Peru. Of all of them, my favorite, my absolute favorite of the whole trip was the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. It is a world-class museum, and I love museums. My first honeymoon was to the Smithsonian, and I had already been there once. The first Mrs. Mike Durso gets points for indulging my nerddumb. The museum security in Mexico City is different. The guards will shoot you and it's clear, but they also let you get a lot closer to the relics. And I thought that was a pretty good trade. And the museum only costs 100 pesos, which is five bucks, and 50 cents round trip for the metro, which is an awesome busy subway. I'll tell you, Mexico City was all planes, trains, and automobiles for me. Uh, it's surrounded by volcanoes, and the presidential helicopter took off and landed. It was stationed across the street, and I could stand on my 10th floor balcony and feel the thumping in my chest. I absolutely loved it. I'm basically a 15-year-old boy again in my head, except I'm not super horny this time, so it's kind of fun. The museum's great. It would cost at least$50 U.S. uh anywhere else in the world. It's in Chapultepec Park, which is more than twice the size of Central Park in New York, and it was a 25-cent subway ride away. And it was like it's filled with museums. It has a fantastic zoo. I thought it was cool. It has a giant panda zincin. It's also free. So is St. Louis, and that's really strange. That's very rare anywhere in the world. I thought that was cool. I went to the Anthropology Museum twice. It has one of the ancient stone handbags. Uh, it's it's fringe archaeology, but I love it. There are these ancient carvings that have been found all over the world showing, you know, gods or leaders carrying these small handbags. I'm kind of surprised, uh, Coach or Prada haven't tried to incorporate it into a commercial. I guess it's too fringe, but I think it's interesting. Lots of discoveries are found on the fringe. In all my research, I have found something unique in anthropology. I don't know if you can say I discovered it, but the AIs I asked uh can't find any reference to it, so I'll claim it. I believe that there is only one thing that we do exactly the same as our most ancient ancestors, you know, like one single behavioral act that is exactly the same, and that is doggy style. Imagine you took a couple of humans, they gotta be hairy, like, you know, hippies or Italians, and they're doing it doggy style, right? And you transported nothing but their naked copulating bodies back through time instantly to a cave 25,000 years ago, it would look and function exactly the same way. It really would. And they're not talking while they're doing it, that would be a totally different action. We speak completely different than our ancestors. We don't even speak the same as each other. The action in my study is just the doggy style. No other actions or possessions, just the doggy style is exactly the same way. And there is nothing else we do like this. I can't find anything. Even if Fred and Betty look over at your corner of the cave and and see you humping away like you got an old push mower, they wouldn't think twice. Barney and Wilma at it again, more mouths to feed. Doing it doggy style would look exactly the same minus the environment. I can't think of any other human activity that meets this standard. Uh, we all ate, drank, breathed, shit, everything, but not the same at all. And none of those behaviors meet the standard I've set. Not one. We've been having sex since we existed, but you can't say sex, it's too broad. We had to evolve to missionary scissoring all the way up your Kama Sutra, but Adam and Eve did it doggy style. How funny would it be if they figure out how to travel back in time, and the only way you can do it without causing the butterfly effect is doing it from behind. Uh, I can't wait for my Nobel acceptance speech. Well, that's about all I have for now. I am changing the name of the podcast to Five Monkeys. It's kind of the name I put on everything. I did an episode about that about a year ago. I want a new format, but I can't afford to have two podcasts because this is just a hobby. And I want all of the stuff I've done so far available. Uncommon content has all my secrets and confessions, and my whole book is on there. I won't reveal my plans or swear to do anything, but I'm sure I will do more episodes of Uncommon Cent the next time I do something stupid. But for now I want to focus on the other thing. Thank you to everyone that listens to this after such a drought in content. Uh, I spent$10,000 getting lost for four months and it was worth every penny, but there is no place like home. This has been Uncommon Content. I'm Michael Durso, and let's do it doggy style so we can both watch X Files.