hell is khaki colored

What's the toughest challenge facing us as we prepare to embark on our mad journey? Trying to pack for 4 months through 9 countries and any number of unforeseeable situations? Trying to figure out how to dodge the stingers of Japanese enchephilitis-infected mosquitoes? Trying to find a secure hiding place on our bodies (and not including the anus) to hide valuables away from the legendary Muay Thai-trained lady-boy pickpockets of Bangkok? Actually, no, none of these. The toughest challenge is that Southeast Asia (in which we'll be traveling for about 2 months) is supposedly so skin-meltingly hot and humid, you are strongly advised - on fear of sweating yourself to a painful death - not to wear dark clothes.

Anyone who knows Maya and I is very familiar with the fact that our collective wardrobe is a pitch-black pit that sucks in light, tortures and then kills it. When we do laundry we separate our "blacks" and use special dark-colors-protecting detergent. As insane as this sounds, we've actually mellowed considerably with age. When I was in high school, I would wear black T-shirts and black military cargo pants tucked into my black combat boots even in the heat of summer. Now on an average day I'll wear blue jeans not tucked into my boots, and if it's exceptionally blistering out, maybe even put on a pair of shorts (holy shit!). But the point is that I still don't have a non-black T-shirt to my name, and Maya isn't too far ahead of me in the colors department, let alone the light colors department.

Fine. So we go to this outdoors supply store in New Jersey called Campmor a few weeks ago. It's a massive place stuffed with everything you could imagine needing for your nature adventures (from industrial-strength bugspray to freeze-dried ice cream), and it's way cheaper than any store in NYC. We go to the clothing department to check out what kind of hot weather attire they have, and a sickening sea of khaki, baby blue, light orange, and pink greets us. No army green, no gray, no nothing that looks even vaguely like something we would ever been seen dead or alive in. And it all comes in crazy techno-futuristic fabrics ideally designed for the brain-frying temps and bloodsucking swarms of places like Southeast Asia: fabric that "wicks" the sweat from your skin and moves it to the outside of the clothing for quick evaporation and cooling; fabric that repel insects; cool shit like that. But does any of it come in a color that won't promote vomiting in either Maya or I? Hell no.

Is this part of the establishment's conspiracy against metalheads? Is it another strike in the war that supposedly peace-loving hippies are waging on the few headbangers who are actually willing to venture into the great outdoors? Or is it just that the mainstream's lack of taste extends all the way from pop music and hit movies to camping/travel gear? I think yes, yes, and hell yes.