Frontiers

Traveling isn't easy for me. Mostly because I like to be near my stuff. Proximity to my belongings is a big value for me. Always has been. Like that time when I was a mere scrap of a lad, standing out on the tarmac of Mexico City on the very beginning of what would be my family's grand adventure south of the border. My mom looked down at me, sensing the impending furrow in my young brow, "What's the matter?"
"You'll be mad."
"No. I won't. What's wrong?"
"I wanna go home."
And so the legend built from there, culminating for storytelling's sake with the grand tour of the Southwest I took with the girl I would eventually marry. We headed down to Santa Fe, then up to Moab, then back to Phoenix, over to LA and back up the coast to Oakland where I stopped moving. For a while. Over the next quarter century, I made trips of vacate and shun as well as those of necessity. Some of them by plane. Some of them by train. And a great many by automobile. There was even a cruise ship in there somewhere. None of which particularly appealed to me, since I tend to spend most of the time I am in any particular conveyance worrying about where I will land.
Where are the bathrooms?
Will there be a refrigerator?
How do I listen to my music?
What are the bumpers that will keep me from crashing into the reality that I am somewhere other than my own home?
Having comfortable ruts helps a lot. Knowing the layout of the guest room at our friends' homes helps calm me. I can imagine the extension of my personal space fitting into that zip code. Will there be a place for me to find peanut M&Ms? Comfort. I'm looking for that big cushy landing pad upon which I can come crashing.
Teleportation would take some off the edge of this trauma for me, I suppose. Stepping into that chamber that will transport my molecules across vast distances and reassemble them a moment later would cut down on the time I have to ramp up my stress level. Which probably means I would need to find a way to get it all packed into the seconds I have to wait for the machine to power up. Pre-teleportation angst. Frontiers in anxiety.