I had hoped someone would come out–the seller of the hammock–and engage in some hammock shop talk. Hammock histories. Hammock love stories. Hammock underdog victories. Hammock bios. Like occurs in the Great Hollywood Scripts of Old.

Or at least what will have had occurred in the Great Hollywood Scripts of Old when we have moved into The Beautiful Hammock Future and are discussing the Great Hollywood Scripts of Old which feature the Great Hammock Endings of (what will be at that point) Old.

I would have loved to give them a tip for allowing me to use their hammock.

But to call it a tip would be coarse and not do the moment justice. It would be more like a perquisite of being a hammock retailer or a lagniappe for good measure. Or a sweetener sweetening the Sweet Livin’ pot of this wonderful hammock retailer’s already obviously sweet life.

Really, there should be a word unique to this moment, specific to situations like this, elegant in nature and probably retroactively rooted in French.

And there will be in The Beautiful Hammock Future.

After a famous French influencer influences such a word into the language and so readies it to be ready retroactively in the same Beautiful Hammock Future that the same famous French influencer influences us all towards.

But because we are not yet in The Beautiful Hammock Future, as painstakingly detailed here in this beautiful Hammock Review and not-so-consistently beautiful world around us, I must simply say I unfortunately did not take care of that beautiful anonymous Hammock Retailer; I did not leave the gratuity; I didn’t give that tip. And because I failed then, in that moment, in not leaving that offering, that bonus, which is more like a dividend of the hammock stock, I am trying to not fail now, in this moment. I am trying to make up for it here and now by recognizing the hammock in this, the most prestigious of Hammock Reviews, the classic compound interest of hammock debtors.

What better could one want than that?

Well, an actual tip of cash, of course, so that the Hammock Retailer could have done with it as they pleased, perhaps pursuing the more traditional type of compound interest that occurs in traditionally-recognized monetary terms and mathematics.

So in retrospect, I would have loved to leave a little cash underneath part of the hammock. How great would that be for someone to find some cash underneath this hammock? What a wonderful world this would be: the world Louis Armstrong envisioned*—if people saw a hammock that was not their own and then left some cash or a gift affixed to it in some form or fashion. Next time I have the opportunity then I will do just that. Then, while money never will grow on trees, it literally will grow on hammocks. #Gardening

Yes, what a wonderful world that would be indeed.

The Beautiful Hammock Future.

Where parents tell their non-financially-thrifty spoiled kids looking at the high-end knick knacks and other trinkets in the local department store’s toy section, “Look, Frankie and Freddie, I work hard to put money on the table for you. Do you think money grows on trees? No, it surely doesn’t. It grows on hammocks.”

But that’s talk for the future: and as we all know, there is a commonly held belief that "children are the future."

But in this moment, there was no children, and we were in the present.

And in the present, we were headed down the mountain, even happier than before.

My friend then retroactively advised:

“You should have drunk palm wine on the hammock.”

She was right.

And now that I consider it, retroactively, we should have done more than that.

We should have toasted with palm wine.

Yes, toasting with palm wine on a hammock: the perfect Hollywood visual to the Hollywood Hammock ending.

We both joked that we should go back.

We didn’t go back.

But the important thing was that I had infected another person with Hammock Fever.

Oh how Paul must have felt that way in his travels.

And in his writings.

Though he had not the luxury of the internet to send his writings nor the luxury of hammocks in his travels, not to mention the fact that he had not the benefit of airline benefits.

So probably the hammock journey I went on in just a few days could have taken Paul a few months or years.

Hard to say though: time flies by in religious texts. Plus it is not always certain what metaphor they use for hammocks.

But we continued to fly down that mountain and directly to the airport, where once again fate decided I would not get on a flight.

I wondered, after discussing the situation with fellow standbys who I had seen the previous day–including one who had now been trying to get on a flight for over a week–if I might try a different tactic.

The different tactic was to try to fly to Nigeria and leave from there. But there was the question of the visa. No one at the airport, nor the internet, seemed to have definitive answers about the Nigerian visa on arrival. I was told the airlines to Nigeria would have the definitive answers, but they were not open to the wee hours of the morning.

It was already almost the wee hours of the morning. Depending when the wee hours of the morning start. It was around 1am, I think. Probably after. But the wee hours still start probably later yet.

The Ghanaian stamps were accumulating in my passport after getting stamped back out of security again. So my passport was starting to feel heavy. I was also really tired and kind of groggy from all of the palm wine and the hammock excitement of the day. Probably similar to how one feels after winning the Super Bowl, World Series, or NBA championship in a locker room full of champagne popping.

And freshly-minted endorsement deals and other opportunities immediately arising. People offering you all sorts of things.

Someone was offering me and me a package deal of transportation to a hotel and night there at a place near the airport called the pig farm.

I sat on a bench there at the airport and considered the offer and thought about getting a different hotel. I was so tired, I could barely think.

I did not think.

I laid down on the bench to rest my eyes for a moment–and fell fast to sleep.

I want to say, of course, that the bench felt like a hammock. It is good for Hammock Reviews, you know, saying everything is like a hammock.

It is good for the simile industry.

It is also good for their brethren: the metaphorical metaphor industries we are trying to promote.

But I do not want to stretch the metaphorical definition of hammocks to state of elasticity beyond recognition. So I will not count it as a hammock in the official hammock numbering system of this Hammock Review and dilute the prestige of this prestigious Review beyond the metaphorical definition of a soup that would not satisfy the intellectual hunger that burns like an eternal flame in the stomachs of our Esteemed Readership.

With such integrity endowed in our fidelity to accuracy here, I will say that I slept more soundly on that airport bench than one may have expected given its adherence to hard ergonomics.

The only interruptions to my napping were airport workers concerned I was a passenger missing the lone outgoing flight at that hour. Any potential annoyance at being arisen from my slumber was stunted by the appreciation of their sweet (livin’) consideration.

When the hour came, when there were enough flights that no one mistook me for a wayward passenger and I awoke on my own, the airlines flying to Nigeria were also up in running. So I could get an answer about the Nigerian visa situation.

The Nigeria visa would not work.

That is okay. Because other tactics arise in hammock adventures.

The next tactic was not to buy a ticket back home–one way–for a similar price to what a roundtrip ticket would have been if I would have bought in advance. No, that was not happening.

Not primarily because of the hefty cost–over a thousand dollars, which is similar to what one would pay roundtrip if booking it “reasonably and responsibly” in advance, but also because such a purchase, in a way, would be giving in to planning, and structure and would be disrespectful to spontaneity, a close genetic relation to hammockkind. To be clear, buying a last-minute one-way ticket for the same price as a “reasonably and responsibly” purchased weeks or months in advance roundtrip ticket would be saying to the person who used the phrase “reasonably and responsibly” earlier in the sentence that they are right. Well, we are not going to simply suddenly ditch our morals like that and bow to that annoying, calculated and conniving non-spontaneous person, regardless of who they are. Even if they are ourselves. No, we won’t do that.

I could not disrespect spontaneity like that. I would not disrespect spontaneity like that, as the classic move from “could” to “would” goes in moral progressions.

But I wanted to morally progress even further.

And now was the chance.

To bribe.

Yes, I could morally progress from sometime who has never bribed someone to someone who has bribed someone.

My friend suggested it.

These were her words:

“What about bribing?”

My friend suggested I go down to the Nigerian Embassy and bribe them for a visa.

I laughed.

She asked why I was laughing.

Because I thought she was joking.

She was not joking.

But would that really work? I was skeptical.

It would really work. She was not skeptical.

That was not her feeling alone, but rather represented the general local sentiment as a couple other people I informally polled confirmed that opinion, that tendency towards romanticism.

My hopes got up: not just for the visa, not just for the chance to visit another country, but also for the chance to fulfill a childhood (if we allow ourselves to extend childhood into our 20s) dream of mine to successfully complete a bribe.

Wouldn’t that be great? To have bribed someone? Like the Great Fatcats of Old wheeling and dealing in cigar-smoke-filled rooms that you had to tap twice to enter even after the good old speakeasy days of Prohibition were long gone.

This was my chance.

So I went to the Embassy.

But there was no bribe window.

No bribe sign.

No door that could have been knocked twice upon.

No one telling me whom to bribe.

There wasn’t even a wink telling me to bribe.

Not even other body language indicating a bribe could or should be made.

It didn’t seem like a bribe could be made.

I wanted to ask, out of curiosity, “So just for the record: a bribe isn’t possible, right?”

But I did not.

Sometimes journalism has to take a backseat to more important things.

Like not doing journalism.

Especially in Hammock Reviews.

Which sometimes pursue accuracy in other ways.

But not normally polls, because we can all know how inaccurate polls can be (when they’re not the Prestigious Sweet Livin’ Productions World’s Best Bear Poll or The Gunslinger Poll, in which case we have no idea how inaccurate that can be).

So unfortunately there was no Hollywood moment where the actor gives a certain look to a cutaway of an ideal location to leave money for a bribe.

Or maybe it was there and I just didn’t notice it, like many things in life that have been right in front of my eyes that I didn’t notice.

But I’m not trained in the art of kickbacks, at least not the noun. I’m more trained in the intransitive verb version of kicking back in a hammock.

Which brings us to another possibility of what could have occurred even if there was the great bribe moment:

Insufficient funds.

That’s what my financial institutions have so often told me. One of their favorite refrains. So why not a gentleman that I’m trying to bribe? It is very possible that I would not have had enough money for a potential bribe anyway (or even if I did, what is an appropriate offer?). And I’m not quite sure that Hammock Tales are quite yet as valued as credit as they should be in the bribing markets. It is (extremely) unlikely the embassy officer would have appreciated me yammering on about Hammocks enough to give me the visa. That’s something for The Beautiful Hammock Future.

In The Beautiful Hammock Future, actually, I would have had insufficient funds, because I entered the embassy without a hammock in hand. In the Beautiful Hammock Future, you will walk into any embassy or consulate anywhere int he world, hand an official a hammock, and they’ll hand you whatever visa you want.

That’d be much better than all of the rigmarole you have to go through right now.

That would cut right through the red tape, a color of tape that won’t exist in The Beautiful Hammock Future anyway.

So, with Nigeria out of the picture, I purchased a ticket to the cheapest place I could likely non rev back home from.

Europe.

I flew to Brussels.

That (fate) gave me almost two more days in Ghana.

I went to a different beach.