Escape to Nature, and escaping the Escape to Nature

New Smyrna in a nutshell: do not kill the wildlife
with your four wheel drive.

After a city-locked summer, Nature was calling to this urban-dweller. Enough of city dangers. I fled Chicago this past weekend with my trusty peer Nicole, in the name of seeing our friend get married in Florida, but also to capture a Corona commercial beach moment. Atlantic coast, embrace our paleness!

[History nerd alert] As we passed a forest of scrub pines and palms on the drive to the shore, I admitted to Nicole that sometimes I try to imagine American places as the first explorers might have encountered them, centuries ago. When we literally pulled up to the ocean at New Smyrna Beach, Nicole quipped, "Well, if the explorers landed here they'd find a traditional highway."

New Smyrna Beach attracts a specific sort of beach-goer. Namely, one who doesn't want to leave his or her car. Smack next to the waves, opposite a worse-for-the-wear row of beachfront condos, is a two lane road. Neither Nicole nor I had ever seen or heard of such a thing, but man, was it eye-opening. We declined to drive our rented convertible on the sand, but took to the shore on foot to get a closer look at the spectacle.

So You've Survived the End of Days

"Nothing bad could come of this!... D'oh!"

Wow, human society can collapse pretty quickly, huh? Like in a week! A friend of mine convinced me to watch AMC's new hit, The Walking Dead, a story set in the Atlanta metro area...in the Zombie Apocalypse (whoops!). I'm addicted. If riding a horse into a concrete jungle only to have your trusty steed eaten from under you by a zombie mob isn't a city danger, I don't know what is.

New obsession aside, zombie flicks have never been my thing. I'm pretty ignorant of undead lore. However, The Walking Dead is also an 'end of times' tale and, MAN, do I heart a good end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it story. Actually, it doesn't even have to be good. Independence Day, Children of Men, War of the Worlds, The Matrix, District 9...and the granddaddy, The Day After Tomorrow. All tremendously entertaining.

Sure, we could probably draw deeper lessons on human nature from the CGI terror of alien invasions, nation-destabilizing infertility, and global megastorms. But I couldn't care less about morality metaphors when I watch an Apocalypse movie. I watch for one reason: "How would my survival technique compare to these idiots'?"

He Who Rules the Mob

Morning, readers! I am pleased to report that all City Dangers bloggers survived The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in D.C. this past weekend. Despite the estimated 200,000-strong crowd, and the huge potential for disaster, the day was a certified success... filled with sunshine, media-skewering jokes, and naturally, Ozzy Osbourne & Cat Stevens performing a duet.

A moderate and sane bottleneck.

While the politeness of the masses was appreciated at the time, it created a gaping void of topics for a new blog post. I was so sure we'd have a brilliant lesson in danger come out of the day, but in the end we were only moderately inconvenienced by a bottleneck upon exiting. Even then we had hilarious signs to entertain us. I'll leave it to my fellow blogger to hone in on any other slight Rally dangers.

But to take a cue from Stephen Colbert's fear theme, good-humored masses could VERY easily turn into an unruly mob at any moment. In fact, I encountered a much more dangerous group scenario at Reagan National Airport on my way home to Chicago.

"This is NOT civilization!"

Well, it's been a while since anyone posted on this blog. Perhaps you thought City Dangers was defunct, but I'd like to thank our loyal followers. Hi, Dad! Oh ... he left too? Awkward.

New business. I wait in line, then sell my front-row spot to the highest bid.

It turns out that a sizable city danger is the trap wherein you spend much of your free time working to support your urban lifestyle. A lifestyle you then cannot enjoy because your brain is Jell-o from squinting at Photoshop for 11 hours. Or, you know, solving world hunger. However you might be employed.

This Halloween, my reward for those long hours is a break from Chicago to visit an exotic and uniquely scary place: our nation's capital. Ostensibly, I am headed there to have sib bonding time and to reunionize with much-missed friends. But, there is also the matter of the small get-together on the National Mall called the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.