"I never travel without my diary," said Oscar Wilde.  "One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

Oscar said that about himself one hundred years ago and shortly afterwards the clever fellow ended up in Reading Gaol.  Certain entries in his diary were a bit more sensational than the tail end of Victorian England was willing to tolerate.

Nowadays most people don't travel with diaries because they either don't have anything sensational to write about or, more probably, because they wouldn't know how to write about it even if something sensational occurred to them.  Cameras have long since replaced diaries when it comes to recording the notable events of our lives.

The majority of contemporary tourists are people who like to travel, but just wish they didn't have to leave home to do it.  In fact, if they could simply be someplace else without having to travel in order to get there that would suit them perfectly.  Ideally, that someplace else is just like home, but much more luxurious.  Luxury resorts around the world have been designed with this in mind.  Thailand has a number of these resorts.  Nearly everybody who works in the hotel, restaurant and shops speaks English, and in more than a few cases they speak it better than you do.  The rooms are spotless, the food is spotless, and the servants in their peculiar-looking uniforms are spotless.  The whole damn place is spotless.  It's an intensive care ward complete with radio, TV, telephone, mini bar, refrigerator, private movies, dancing girls (presumably spotless), golf, tennis and twelve-ply toilet paper that's so absorbent it removes a layer of cellulite with every swipe.  All is as clean and sterilized as a proctologist's rubber glove.  It feels pretty good too.  If it weren't for the suntan lotion you'd be able to smell the antiseptic.

Tourists of recent vintage tend to resemble traveling film crews.  There are photo cameras, video cameras, tripods, lighting equipment, and an assortment of sophisticated lenses that Cecil B. DeMille could only have dreamed about.  The problem is that these people seem to have virtually no sense of aesthetic discrimination.  They'll shoot anything.  Fortunately, they're carrying Nikon cameras and Sony camcorders instead of AK 47s.  I personally have been in their line of fire often enough to suspect that I've appeared on more reels of film than Charlie Chaplin had in his entire career.  How many times have Fred, Franco and Françoise said to Mary, Mario and Marie, "Look at that asshole who stepped right in front of my focus!" (Franco and Mario are gay, by the way)

Well, excuse me folks.  I didn't realize that the world had become a free fire zone for any jackass with a filming device.  There is not a doubt in my mind that these people spend more time looking at the photographs or film than they ever did looking at the objects of those photographs and film.  We are more addicted to images, the technological reproduction of phenomena, especially when contrived, than we are appreciative of the phenomena itself.  In fact, the more contrived the better.

"Let's use a zoom, fish-eye lens with an amber tint for the Temple of Dawn.  It may be high noon in June, but we'll make it look like dusk in December.  Never mind going inside.  It's just another old shrine or what not.  We've got to hit the Royal Palace and that Emerald Buddha thing before lunch, so snap it and let's go.  Tally ho!, as they say in wherever it was we were last week."

"England?"

"Yeah.  That's the place.  Loved that Big Ben."

"Who?"

"No.  The tower with the clock on top."

"Uh?"

"Never mind.  We've got it on film."

"Oh, thank god, darling."

"Yes, I know.  Moments may come and go, but in film the memories will last forever."

"But, I don't remember that clock."

"You will when we get back home and look at the pictures."

"Oh right.  I forgot."

That was me and my girlfriend fifteen years ago, so I'm not being a haughty sonofabitch picking on people that I don't know.  I will, however, engage in a bit of extrapolation once in awhile and, at the moment, it seems to me that people, in general, do tend to prefer the memory to the moment.  My girlfriend, bless her heart, ever since experiencing menopause, has been going along looking through a rearview mirror or a vanity mirror.  In her youth she used to fancy windows.  But, youth does not forsake us, we forsake it.  When you move from the window to a mirror the cells begin to degenerate.  Cameras have made it possible for man to look without seeing.  They have not enhanced our sense of sight; they have deadened it by isolating it from the other senses.

Plato spoke of shadows on the walls of a cave--mere facsimiles of the true ideal forms that are the only real source of wisdom.  Kant described phenomena as reflections of what he referred to as ‘noumena’ or the essence of the thing-in-itself.  They both maintained that our senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing can only provide us with illusions and opinions based upon illusions.  It is particularly disheartening, not to mention, inauspicious that some million years since living in caves the human race is still focusing on the effigies of essential truths rather than the thing-in-itself.  The only difference is the background lighting.  Instead of bonfires we use flashbulbs.  O.K., anyway that's my opinion although I am not quite sure why this paragraph is in here.  A side dish of intellectual affectation, perhaps.  Surely one of the hallmarks of contemporary discourse is its tendency to be discursive, but please don't call me deviant, which reminds me of a go-go girl I met in a Bangkok bar last month who had more tricks up her... Well, maybe some other time.

Now back to the salient point of this composition. 

The best part of a trip abroad for tourists who don't like to leave home is when they get home.  It is the recounting of glorified banalities that is the highlight of their trip.  Photographs of Fred and Mary in a sampan looking stupid wearing rice farmers’ hats at the floating market, Françoise and Marie looking equally brainless holding a headless chicken and, the Franco-Mario fraternity at the snake farm salivating over a pit of pythons.  It seems that their objective is to take as many photos and videos as possible with the hope of provoking their friends to envy an experience that they themselves were bored silly with.

Personally, I'd rather read Oscar's diary.  If only it had pictures!