MY BROTHER DAN AND I ARE 40,000 FEET over the Atlantic, bound for Venice, where we will spend five days doing nothing much beyond paddling a kayak through some of the comeliest urban waterways on Planet Earth. A national media organ is picking up the travel costs. Yet, somehow, we are unhappy.

"I'm getting the feeling that this whole thing is gonna be an insane bitch," Dan says, glowering at the guidebook splayed on his lap. He's been reading up on our trip's capstone event, the Vogalonga, a 19-mile noncompetitive rowing regatta, held in late May, that promises a breathtaking tour of the old republic's lagoon and outer islands. "Man, you didn't tell me 'Vogalonga' means 'long row,' " he says. "And check this out." He flips to the guidebook's back cover, where the author has listed among his credentials "one attempted Vogalonga."

"Attempted," he repeats, anxiously pinching an ingrown hair on his cheek. "I'm a little worried we won't get this fucker done."

I'm worried, too, though not about the Vogalonga. What troubles me is the prospect of spending a week in a tandem kayak with Dan, whom I recently described in print as "the only person in the world I've sincerely tried to murder." Dan and I do not get along. Our last trip together (chronicled in the April 2008 issue of this magazine) nearly ended in a fistfight. More or less since infancy, our relationship has been a reliable source of juicy conflict, which I've exploited for a shameful volume of column inches. In recent years, I've made so many journalistic and literary meals out of our hostilities that when people ask me what I do for a living, I could pretty honestly say, "I don't get along with my brother."

Lately, we've both gotten tired of it. "Hey, do you think you could, sort of, not write about us anymore?" Dan asked after the publication of my most recent dispatch on the subject. "It's depressing."

"I totally agree," I said. "No more. Promise."

About four minutes later, my inbox chimed with an e-mail from my editor, who proposed that Dan and I head to Venice for a little float.