25 hours. 25 Miles. Free Food Only. Never Let Go.

We suggest you read our praxes in the order above, although for all we know it may be more fun completely in reverse. In any case, please enjoy the musical backdrop for each, chosen from among those songs we sang during the 25 hour period as appropriate to the task.

Sunsets on the Sea

At 8PM, on a boat built by the same hands now at the tiller (the relative we were staying with in Canada), we joined hands and took pictures.



Within minutes of starting, by sheer synchronicity -


A giant transient orca surfaced beside us. The steam of its breath rose from the chilly waters four times, and then it dove again out of sight. This was something that had not been seen by our seafaring relatives in fifteen years, and we had the privilege not only to see it, but to photograph it.

Before my mind was able to get too much traction on the metaphor between the two astronomical unlikelihoods of seeing this whale, and being the one holding The Walrus' hand at the time, we had our first struggle on account of this task.



The orca surfaced again, and we had to get to the other side of the boat to see it. That meant moving across the narrow and swaying deck, holding binoculars, a camera, the handrails, and each other. Our reward was an impossibly timed display of serene grandeur. The Orca surfaced and dove in the same spot, some 30 feet from our boat, for over an hour. He traveled uncounted miles along the coast, and chose to fish close enough for us to hear each blast of breath between dives. In the exact direction of the rising full moon. During the briefest period of the year when the moon comes over the horizon just as the sun is setting opposite, and painting the world in shades of pink and purple.

Our next challenge was negotiating the steep and slippery path up from the boat dock to the house carrying supplies, and then walking back down in the dark to sleep on the boat. A bed shortage at the house meant that we have been staying on the boat, which is very useful for this task. The bed is too small for contact to be easily broken.

The Walk

The next day was our 25-mile, free-food-only marathon. Walking together in itself is a slight challenge for us - the foot difference in heights means that either the Walrus has to scurry or Waldo has to amble. Most other interactions just required much communication, especially blackberry picking. At first, we had to articulate exactly what we meant to do, but by the end of the day we found less and less talking was necessary as we became practiced at maintaining contact throughout everything else we were doing.

Changing the backpack over required a complicated two-step procedure, primarily enacted by removing a shoulder-strap from one arm while holding on with the other arm. Picture-taking was a slight problem, solved by keeping our feet touching while one of us leant back and took a picture of the other.


Sometimes we walked like this...

and sometimes like this.

Conversation was another interesting effect of remaining joined together. I realized how much of the day we spend not talking, something that only really comes home when linked permanently to someone. To fill the silence and hold monotony at bay, we played endless games of Double-Boticelli ( see below).

Inspiration

The Walrus and I went to Canada for two weeks, with some definite interest in tasking, and lately Bex's amazing completion has been on our minds a lot. A task like Dérive obviously has a takeaway message about how to live for a day, and maybe the next day, and maybe the day after that, which can make your life much more interesting. Other tasks though have merits which are harder to understand, and informing the way you live because of them is difficult. But Bex made a startling message.

We have been together for well over a year now, and have been friends since we were the same height, and I have never been happier.

But besides some public displays of affection, which always bring mixed responses from mixed company, we have always been very private about our feelings, to the point where friends have felt as though they are intruding on our time together, simply because our relationship was so distanced and impregnable to anyone else. The beauty of what Bex did, to us, was tear down those walls we build around the most beautiful places in our lives. Kind of the same existential sadness I feel when reading Tac's thoughts in his Dérive through all these back yards that are rarely used and never seen.

There was beauty in the writing because it was self reflective


and because it was pained


Through a vague intuition The Walrus and I hit upon the seeds of this idea when planning our triple-task, we had the notion that we should Walk 25 Miles because it is the sort of task that teaches you something about yourself, that Free Food Diet teaches you something about the world that we take for granted, and Never Let Go would teach us something about one another.

Double Boticelli

The virtue of this variant of 20 questions is that each step of the game requires an exchange of some tidbit of information gleaned from your opponent's memory. For those of you too lazy to read through the rules, I will explain our variant on the standard game in a way which gets the gist of the basic game across too.

Each player thinks of some person or character, with the only restriction that they must be at least as well known as the game's namesake Sandro Boticelli, who painted The Birth of Venus. They then give the first letter of the last name of their target, so if you picked Sandro Boticelli you would say "B", while your opponent might pick Queen Elizabeth, and say "E". There are some persons for whom it is unclear whether the letter you should give is from their first name, as it is the only name they go by (Cher), or whether their lesser-known last name should be used (Madonna Ciccone). Generally, just try to be fair.

Once each player has announced the target letter for their opponent, you each set about trying to work out who your target is, beginning in indirect mode. You get a point every time you think of your opponent's target, and they come up with a new target for you, while they keep guessing at their same target. While in indirect mode you have to stump your opponent with a question about some person with the same target letter. This stumping question need not have anything else in common with your target, just the letter. Your opponent must then answer in one of three ways:
- "No, I am not Blanky Blankerson" where Blanky would be a valid answer to your question
- "Yes, I am Blanky Blankerson" where Blanky is actually their target, and the only valid answer they can come up with
- "No, and I do not know who you are thinking of" which is self explanatory.

If your opponent cannot think of an answer to your question, you get to ask yes/no questions about the actual target you are trying to work out.

Indirect Mode Example
The Walrus: My letter is "L" (Thinking of John Lennon)
Mr. Cheerio: Mine is "M" (Thinking of Machiavelli)
*At this point, whoever thinks of a question first can go first*
The Walrus: Are you a south-african human rights activist?
Mr. Cheerio: No, I am not Nelson Mandella.
Mr. Cheerio: Did you go bald at an unusually young age?
The Walrus: No, and I don't know who you are thinking of.
Mr. Cheerio: Lex Luthor, Superman's nemesis.
The Walrus: Ah, ok. You've stumped me, time for direct mode.

When you are in direct mode the game just becomes twenty questions with a twist. You want the answer to every question you ask to be "yes", because once you get a "no" answer, your turn is over, and it is back to indirect mode. In this way you trade turns every time you fail to stump your opponent, or whenever your series of questions in direct mode ends.

Direct Mode Example
(continued from the example above)...
Mr. Cheerio: Are you now, or have you ever been? (Our convention for real/fictional)
The Walurs: Yes
Mr. Cheerio: Did you live in the last 2000 years?
The Walrus: Yes
Mr. Cheerio: Last 1000? 500? 200? 100?
The Walrus: Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes (condensed for your sake)
Mr. Cheerio: Alive today?
The Walrus: No.
*Direct mode ends and it is The Walrus' turn to stump me again*

The point of all of this ultimately is that if you have a huge overlap of experience with someone, the questions become more esoteric and subjective, and you can delight in knowing what the other person meant by some otherwise intractable clue. Whereas if you barely know the person, you learn a lot about them and their interests based on the sorts of people and facts they find worthwhile to remember and repeat. For The Walrus and I, the delights of the overlap were frequent and humorous (particularly some references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which The Walrus has been kind enough to share with me in the past few months), but also the inexhaustible supply of fascinating facts was a godsend when exhaustion and the lulling repetition of walking through beautiful scenery drained us of conversational thoughts.

After 12 hours the score sat with Waldo at 6 points, The Walrus at 4. Waldo worked out:
1. John Lennon (Who was not Lucifer, Richard the Lionheart, or L'Hopital)
2. Oedipus Rex (Boy was this a tough one. Sounds like an E, spelled with an O, has a last name that is an R?! Incidentally, this character does not originate with either Shakespeare or Sophocles, so we were very confused.)
3. Luke Skywalker (Who lived a long time ago in a galaxy far away, so was not from the future. Tricky.)
4. Q (Of 007 fame. Q was not Dr. Quatermass or Qui-Gon Jinn)
5. Condaleeza Rice (not Mrs. Robinson, to whom the Beatles dedicated a song, or Rorshach of Watchmen fame)
6. Jacques Cousteau (Famous for an athletic feat, but not an organized sport? What? Oh! First modern scuba diver, right. )

While The Walrus worked out:
1. Hunter S. Thompson (Who was not the famously rotund President Taft, and is famous for writing in a very obscure genre known as "Gonzo-Journalism". Working out his most famous novel was about a specific place, and then solving for Las Vegas was a good solution though.)
2. Robin Williams (Who was not supposedly waved at by President Bush. That was Stevie Wonder.)
3. Machiavelli (who indeed is not Mandela, Madonna, or Mahmoud)
4. Lucy (Australopithecus Fossil AL 288-1, who was not assassinated by the man who brought him his daily laxative. That was Abraham Lincoln.)