A Little Traveling Music
By Vic Socotra
(Scroll down for triumphant messaging!)

Socotra House Publishing LLC, Arlington Blvd, Arlington, VA 22203

Please join us this morning for a modicum of merriment. The guys from Production stopped by early yesterday as things we starting to wake up for the week of work. The Project had been sitting neatly in the on-deck circle for months now, and the dates associated with the publication have been corrected to bring them into the current one.

The Medical Adventure caused some delay, and that is a component that many of us share. We had rifled through some of the stranger locomotions we experienced around the planet, including a couple trips to the island of Hispaniola, home to two proud nations. One of them is coming unglued again, and was a central part of our lives and travel for several months a long time ago.

That caused us to disgorge some of the events in this “table of contents.” The events of that time have awakened to the strains of reprise, and led us back to the manuscript that had been languishing through the winter. We had been earnest enough in putting it together, but one afternoon review got us only to the century mark in the page count. We had taken a glimpse of the thrilling conclusion, which had some images brighter in color than we remembered some of the places we claimed to be talking about. Not the one on the cover, displayed above. That is one of us standing with the lovely Burmese activist Mimi Myant-Hui on the grounds of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, once known as Rangoon. We are following the instructions of the Pagoda-minders and are suitably bare-foot.

That was a fun excursion, about like the one below in which Vic and Congressman Bill Richardson visit the site of the John McCain shoot down in Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1995, the twentieth year since the Americans had pulled out.

Inline image
(Vic and Rep. Bill Richardson visit the John McCain shoot-down memorial in Hanoi, SRV. All photos Socotra unless otherwise credited).

So, the renewed trouble in Haiti got us to go back and dig the digital manuscript out of the encrypted archive. We had been apprehensive that the second hundred pages of the document would require intervention of indeterminate duration. Maybe some creativity inserted, with a modicum of humor?

You know how that goes. Some of the accounting is still fresh with (relative!) youth now a half-century or more in the traveling past. There are some rollicking accounts of strange travels on trains and boats and whatever those other things are that hurtle overhead. Part of yesterday was attacking the chores that used to be left to an individual called an “editor.”

Those were women and men- forgive us for the ancient terminology- who actually understood pens, papers, words and narrative flow. They could also compile these elements in an approachable and engaging manner. As you know, that is a trade that has been under assault through the last two technical cycles that have changed both home and business. You have seen pictures of people working at “desks” with devices called “pens” daubed in ink.

Evolution works, as best we can tell. Our Mom’s made us take a class called “typing” when we were far enough along in Middle School, and that led swiftly to the slidiing slope that made the keys slide from mechanical motion into production of smooth ones and zeros.

At the moment, we are abandoning the use of full words, which the military and their acronyms did long ago. You know- phrases like “C U L8tr” reduced to something that can be managed with a couple thumbs wrapped around a thin rectangular device that is almost always out of charge. But when so charged, it can shout at the bearer of the device, if held close enough to the face, and snap a picture.

We have complained about things like “disclaimers” and acronyms without obvious meanings, like “ISBNs.” Those are the International Standard Book Numbers, a 13-digit string of digits that enables tracking and sales of manuscripts of blather as actual volumes of words. The compilation of that data took a couple hours, but with the deletion of the erroneous conclusion, we realized the book was done. Here is some of it recently compiled for truth, retrieval and accuracy:

Publishing Info/ISBN:

A Little Traveling Music

Tour Guide for Trouble

by Vic Socotra

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra

Socotra House Publications LLC

4501 Arlington Blvd, Suite 118

Arlington, VA 22203

ISBN Numbers:

979-8-89412-892-4 A Little Traveling Music (Electronic) 18 March 2024

979-8-89412-893-1 A little Traveling Music (Paperback) 18 March 2024

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sea the World

Lost on the Way to the Lobby

Ancient Echoes: The Canal Zone

Let’s Get the Small Stuff Out of the Way

‘Roo Bars

The Middle Part

The Eighties in DC

Manger Square

The Mysterious East

Haiti Daze

The Official Version

The Russians Are Coming

Turn About is Fair Play: Going to the Russians +++++++++

Travels With Pete

STAFFDEL Wagner and the War in Europe

Hostile Fire Pay at the Five-Star Hotel +++++++++

Pariah State World Tour

Ninety Miles to Damascus

Fountain in the Moonlight Square
Channel Fever

There was a fair amount of relief in the Writer’s Section. We will probably lurching into production so those burly bellowing fellows from the Print Shop have something to occupy their afternoon. Meanwhile, the newest volume is something called “Living in the Fall.” We were originally going to call it “Life at the Fall of Rome,” but you can see that would naturally drag us back to travel tales and attacks by Gypsies on the Spanish Stairs.

We will keep you posted on how the Print Shop gang is doing on that, while we move to assembly of the newest book. We don’t know what the end of that one is going to look like yet. The intent is clear, though. We are trying to convey the way we are all feeling in a time that evokes memories of the Visigoths coming in to wave at the ruins of the Colosseum.

The books we have about the time Rome fell condenses it to something brief and dramatic. Trying to capture what is happening to us now has not featured either brevity or drama. Stay with us- we will generate something about the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions on use of social media this afternoon. Some of it may make sense as this astonishing history collapses upon us!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com