Dear Karl, you sorry sack of a travel writer

I just finished your New York Times Magazine article My Saga. A 10,680 word essay of your voyage tracing the steps of the Vikings through the New World. In response to your obvious cry for help, because let's face it, Dear Abby gets less pathetic missives, let's look at where you are going wrong.

There is no small irony in your commission as author of this voyage, because real vikings would have left you to die on an ice flow.

For starters, you're really using "My Saga" to document a couple of airplane and car rides between two first world countries? A bit of over-the-top hyperbole don't you think? I mean it's hardly the Iliad. It's less travel than the average snowbird with a Winnebago sees in two weeks.

You whimsically explain how you are incapable of holding on to personal property, not just your own, but that of your family. Passports, credit cards, computers, etc., things that impede travel and lodging, and things that you didn't get back until you enlisted the help of strangers in a strange land. Do you think this is fun for the people around you? For your family that can't count on you and for the police that then had to help you? Viking fail.

You are incapable of carrying out assignments as instructed and on time. Who takes a work assignment that requires driving in a foreign land without possession of a driver's licence? To that end, what kind of kind of narcissistic asshole goes anyway, expecting an embassy to act as your personal registry of motor vehicles? You are retracing the steps of men and women who crossed the Atlantic by longboat. Imagine the level of cooperation and survival skills that went into that voyage. You can't even get your shit together to obtain a copy of your driver's licence a year after losing it. Viking fail.

Vikings were experts at navigation and reconnaissance. You? You don't even know how to use the internet. Boo hoo the park is closed. It was two clicks to find that out from anywhere in the world. Boo hoo I don't know what to tip in North America. That's one click. Boo hoo, my waitress from outport Newfoundland is staring at me. Well she's probably never seen the Urban Dictionary definition of Eurotrash in the flesh. In Canadian centers, your aged 90s grunge band by way of Stockholm look would be written off as a has-been in denial, but in rural Newfoundland, you stand out like a fucking unicorn. As a party of one, viking fail.

Then there's your brilliant life strategy of ignoring every grown up responsibility that comes your way because your overblown sense of self worth leads you to think your self-inflicted suffering will result a masterpiece. Seriously, you are a 49-year-old father of four and no institution will give you a bank account, a cell phone contract, a mortgage, or a car loan. You are far too long in the tooth to be Peter Pan. No, you are just one divorce away from a deadbeat dad. I don't know if this is a viking fail, but it's a sorry ass excuse for life strategy.

Which leads me to the Dumb and Dumber portion of your essay. On a story about viking lands, you wrote almost 600 words about taking a shit and your inability to fix a simple toilet. Why? It made sense to make shit jokes in a low-brow Jim Carey vehicle, but you, believe it or not, are writing a travel piece. 

If this is the best you have to offer, eventually even the people who like your writing are going to realize that your gig is nothing more than intentionally wreaking havoc upon your life and the lives of those around you in exchange for self-absorbed, angst-filled writing fodder.

In terms of viking stock, Karl, you are dead last in the longboat.