Some people can travel light. They may be leaving for a six month trip to the wilds of the Amazon rain forest, or to the outer reaches of Mars and all they need to pack are a change of underwear and an English to Martian Dictionary. (The dictionary comes in handy in the rain forest if you feel the urge to bean a wandering toaster. And on Mars the rocks speak nothing but Martian. Very provincial and very, very uncultured.

But, it’s Mars. You really can’t expect the local geo-fauna to be very communicative. It’s the red planet for a reason. The reason being that red is the least talkative of the colors…

…yeah, I’m so fucking out of ideas.)

I am not one of them. I travel heavy. Really, really heavy. I over pack so badly that some people may get the impression that I believe that my sole hope of salvation depends on me stuffing as many things as I can into my backpack. For instance, this last weekend, for an overnight trip to State College, I had packed two pairs of jeans, three T-shirts and for some strange reason four pairs of socks. One of those four pairs was a pair of formal dress socks (No fucking clue why I packed that particular pair).

I hadn’t packed any shoes, but I had the sock front fully covered. If there came a time for me to do my duty, and if that duty involved me having four pairs of socks, perhaps using those socks to fight off rampaging hordes of sock-less monstrosities, I would not be found wanting.

While packing my bag all this seemed perfectly reasonable. I needed backups in case I dropped water or coffee or alcohol over any of my clothes. And then those backups needed backups which needed backups that needed backups…unto infinty.

Eventually I only ended up needing one T-shirt.

…And I forgot my tooth brush.

…And especially for one person, loud explosions and lots of semi-naked women have now made an appearance in this post.