The world is not beautiful; therefore it is

I’ve mentioned Kino’s Journey in my very first post to Lover’s Lanes and again in my previous post. For some reason I’ve never bothered explaining what it is. It has to do with the nature of writing. You’re on one subject and you think of something relevant, so you include it, but then you can’t explain what it is or why it’s relevant without changing the subject. Good writers stay organized so that they’re not constantly referring to people you haven’t met yet; that, or they make the mystery of who those people are part of the experience of reading. Mystery adds depth. It reminds you that the narrator’s a complete human being, the sum of whose experiences will not fit in a book of any length.

With that in mind, I’m almost tempted not to tell you about Kino’s Journey. I could do that. Just let you wonder what left such a mark on me that I named my audio recorder after it. But then if you were really interested you’d just Google it and you’d get a sterile Wikipedia treatment of the show’s premise, cast, and prevailing themes. I’d rather you learn about it from me so you understand at least a fraction of why it’s so important.

What I want you to imagine is that the world is a collection of city-states separated by wilderness. These countries are works of man, and as such are all deeply dysfunctional; yet each has its own underlying logic, its own myth, its own beauty. There’s the land of perfect democracy, where by majority vote the citizens gradually ordered each other executed as traitors until only one citizen was left – an absolute king over a democracy of one. There’s the land of wizards, a place where the value of a person or idea is judged solely by what they contribute to agriculture, and yet where one woman lives who dreams of flight. There’s the land of empathy, where the citizens invented a potion that let everyone know each other’s thoughts – and where, terrified by what they saw in the minds of others, the people withdrew one and all to live like hermits.

Through this beautiful, broken world travels Kino. She’s a young girl who escaped from the land of adults, where people have an operation to make them compliant executors of their assigned occupations, to find her own way. She rides a motorcycle named Hermes which she inherited from the previous Kino, a man traveling through the land of adults who gave his life to liberate our Kino. Hermes can talk, and as with a child every other thing out of his mouth (or rather speakers?) is a question. Kino, on the other hand, tends not to talk. When she does she hides behind allegory, or riddles, or banalities. Instead of talking, she listens. She travels to each country, staying no more than three days, listening to the people and trying to grasp the riddle the city presents. When she’s done, she moves on, often without comment, to the next country.

The countries themselves, of course, are allegorical to problems faced by real societies and for that matter by individuals. Kino is the vehicle we use to travel from one country to the next. But she is also an intriguing enigma in herself, and her internally contradictory and eternally wary psyche contrasts in its complexity with the simplicity of the places she travels. Kino and her world both stick in your head. But what sticks in your head most is the journey, because it’s through the journey that both the destination and the wayfarer are revealed.

I’m not out to recreate Kino’s Journey – which is an anime, by the way, as I somehow forgot to mention, you see how that happens? – with Lover’s Lanes. But the aesthetic of a journey that is about both the stationary points and the moving one – that’s what I want to capture. To the extent, in fact, that Lover’s Lanes wasn’t even my first idea for what to call this project. The Japanese name for Kino’s Journey is Kino no Tabi. Kino’s name sounds a lot like kinou, the Japanese word for yesterday. So my first idea was to call this project Ashita no Tabi – Tomorrow’s Journey, or Journey into Tomorrow. I rejected it because it was in Japanese and didn’t make sense and anyway I like Lover’s Lanes better. I’m just including this vignette to help you understand what effect Kino’s Journey had on how I think about this project. Without Kino’s Journey there would be no Lover’s Lanes.

What do you call a blank audiobook?

Behold the Olympus WS-321M. It is a digital audio recorder that sports dual internal microphones, runs on a single AAA battery, and doubles as an MP3 player (albeit a small one at 1GB).

Her name is Kino.

Okay, so I stole the name from my friend's laptop computer. See, the portable computer gets the name of a traveler. (Kino's Journey deserves its own blog post one of these days.) But this is not a laptop computer; this is the device that will hear the stories of the people in each land I come to. Kino is tiny at 1.5"x3.75", yet her fidelity and playback are remarkable and entirely adequate for my purposes. A double-USB wire is included so I can easily upload her stories to my laptop, though with 35 hours of storage space she can go a long time between transfers. She is quiet and discreet, yet it's easy to tell when she's recording, so no one will complain that they didn't know the mic was on. She is the perfect vehicle for a story on its way from your memory to my catalogue.

Douzo yoroshiku, Kino!

A Song of Air and Fire

I was talking about Lover's Lanes with my dad the other night. He understood the part about wanting to travel, but wasn't sure why I wanted to collect love stories. Why do you need a theme?, he asked.

Really there are two answers to that question, but I can sum them both up with one diversion into Tarot. There are four suits in a Tarot deck, two feminine and two masculine. The masculine suits are Rods and Swords. (If you're not sure why these are masculine suits, consider enrolling in a course on Freud.) Rods and Swords embody two different ways of "being a man." Rods are about energy, adventure, even animalism, like the magic wand of a magician; their element is fire, and they show it in their passion and love of novelty. These are the mountain climbers, the bungee jumpers. These are the guys who pick up and drive across the country to collect love stories on a moment's notice.

But I'm not a Rod. I'm a Sword. Swords are about finesse and careful consideration. They approach life with the perfectionism and discipline of a fencer honing his craft. Curiosity, sure -- but in contrast with the exuberant experiential curiosity of a Rod, a Sword's curiosity is intellectual and is about patterns rather than experiences. Swords are the suit of air -- not in the sense of freedom but in the sense of coolness and living on a higher plane than the brute material. Swords think; Rods act.

But Swords are also the suit most prone to make problems for itself. I certainly have. I think too much. It makes me anxious and depressed. I insist too much on everything going according to plan; I have trouble living in the moment. I am a Sword, but I am broken.

The first reason I'm collecting love stories, not just traveling, is that I'm a Sword. I need structure. I need to have a reason for what I'm doing, a purpose guiding my blade (or my Honda). What's more, the act of studying or cataloguing anything, like love, appeals to the Sword in me. It makes me more willing to do something Rodlike, like go on an adventure.

Which is good, because motive number two for collecting love stories -- and the trip as a whole, really -- is to become more comfortable with my Rod side. The future is a terrifying place sometimes. If I could just approach it with the anticipation and glee of a Rod rather than the skepticism and defensiveness of a Sword, maybe I'd have less trouble facing it. And maybe, if nothing else comes of my journey, maybe I'll learn that not knowing what town I'll be in tomorrow night or when I'll find my next willing subject or even whether my voyage will succeed -- in short, the uncertainty of the future -- is cause, not for panic, but for excitement!

Plus I just really want to hear people's love stories. There's that too.

Making (a) good time

"How long will you be on the road?"

When I mention Lover's Lanes to people I get this question a lot. And I mean it's a fair question. A month-long trip is subjectively different from a three-months-long trip, or something even longer. It's just that I have no idea how to answer it.

I mean, I estimate I'll need to cover twelve thousand miles if I want to hit all the cities on my dream route. I expect to stay on interstates most of the time, and be speeding for some of that time, so if I'm lucky I'll average 70 mph. In an average day of driving I'll probably drive two hours, take a break, collect a story, then drive another two hours. At that rate it'd take about 43 days of driving to complete my route. If I spend about as many days off the road as on, spending the time collecting stories instead of driving, that's 86 days total, about three months. So that's what I've been telling people. About three months.

But that's conditioned on about a thousand assumptions. What if it turns out that four hours of driving is too much for one person (other than a professional trucker) to do in one day, every other day, for three months? Or what if because of the way towns fall, four hours of driving is an unrealistic average? The run from San Antonio to El Paso, for example, is a very dry zone in every sense of the word; it might be wise to try to drive six hours a day there. While in southern New England you can plop down in a random spot, collect stories, drive half an hour, and be in a completely different town with completely different stories. Or maybe I'll get to Seattle and discover that gosh darn it I like it in Seattle and I want to stay here for a week. So Lover's Lanes is something that can only be "scheduled" in a similar sense to how American business is "regulated;" there will be oversight, but there will be oversights, and the latter will tend to overwhelm the former. In the end, if this is worth doing, it's worth doing with a spontaneous spirit. I just hope I don't lose my chance to stay with friends because I can't give them exact dates of arrival and departure!

On On the Road

You know what Jack Kerouac is not very good at describing?

Travel.

I've been reading On the Road, that Great American Classic of the Beat Generation, for the last few days. It turns out this book has a problem. You expect that a novel should move, because if nothing happens then... well, nothing happens. But what I've learned from On the Road is that constant movement does not make a good narrative. Here, take a look at this passage from page 15:

I went right on into Des Moines, about four miles, hitching a ride with two boys from the University of Iowa; and it was strange sitting in their brand-new comfortable car and hearing them talk to exams as we zoomed smoothly into town. Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks -- and there's a lot of them in Des Moines -- and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved into the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards.

Do you see the problem? He's giving us all this detail, which might in principle be interesting, but we don't care. We don't have a reason to care. The characters are disposable. The setting is disposable (Des Moines appears on page 15 and is gone by page 16). There is no plot or theme to speak of. We don't have any reason yet to care about the narrator, Sal (remember, this is page 15). So Kerouac has spent over a hundred words explicating detail that will be irrelevant in another hundred words.

But it's not all bad news. There are parts of On the Road where you sit up and start paying attention. The weird thing is that it doesn't happen on the road. It happens when Sal starts getting attached to something -- some person or place -- and stops moving for a few pages. You actually begin to understand who he is, the tension in him between the needs for responsibility and for freedom, for friends and for individuality. He's less well articulated than Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye, maybe, but he's broadly similar and interesting. But then we pitch back into motion and Sal resumes describing how he gets from one place to another. That part is boring. And as for Dean, who most readers seem to regard as the piece's main character, his mind never comes to rest long enough to understand what he's all about. In fact, that is what he's all about. That's the point. And as a result there's nothing there to relate to, at least for this reader.

Lessons for Lover's Lanes? No one cares what interstates I took or what I saw out the car windows or what hotel I stayed at. Maybe they're worth mentioning occasionally -- I don't want you to lose the road noise in your ears as you read -- but as a rule if I'm not going to spend at least one full page exploring a person or place, it's probably not worth mentioning. Italo Calvino knew that when he wrote Invisible Cities, and now I know it too. And the narrative voice, the part of the book where you get to know the traveler and not just the travels, is crucial. Calvino knew that too. Kerouac perhaps not so much.

VI The Lovers

I know rather a lot about reading Tarot cards, at least for a layman. Ask me a question and hand me a pack of Robin Wood and I'll tell your fortune. But I don't actually believe the cards have any kind of supernatural power. I don't really go in for the supernatural; the way I figure it, it's outside my area of expertise. Science I understand. Art I sort of understand, at least to the extent I understand beauty. God is above my pay grade.

So why read Tarot? Because it's fun and because sometimes it leads you into new ideas you wouldn't have had without the cards as a creative springboard. I've been getting back into it lately, partly as a result of playing Persona 4 and partly because of a thread on a nearby anime forum some of you may be familiar with. I've done a few readings for myself lately. The weird thing is that -- if you impute any kind of consciousness to the cards -- all the readings have been rather insistent that Lover's Lanes is a good idea and that I should do it. I did a three-card spread on the project? The Sun, The Hierophant, the Five of Pentacles. Translated, that's approximately "this is going to cost you some money, but you will learn a lot (and/or teach others a lot) and have a stunningly positive experience." Last night I did a spread on relationships that indicated I should learn about them. And tonight I did a spread on impediments to happiness; at the head of the wedge to smash through the impediments was the Two of Wands (exploration, creativity, and faith) -- and the one card behind the impediments, the reward for smashing through, was none other than The Lovers. I shit you not. I don't even believe in the Tarot and I was overjoyed.

Still, I was even more interested in the parts that didn't fall instantly into place, since those are the ones that are a springboard to learning. Showing up as impediments were cards like the Ace of Cups, sort of the embodiment of the suit of love and emotion -- but it showed up as an external impediment, not a self-imposed one like, say, the Chariot (issues with control and direction), so it made me think about how other people's emotions might get in the way of my fulfillment in general and Lover's Lanes in particular. The Page of Cups was right beside it; generally court cards represent people, but I don't know who she is or why she might hamper me, so I assumed she was noise until her brother the Knight of Cups turned up as part of the solution. That made me think maybe both of these cards are me and I'm supposed to move from the Page to the Knight -- transcend being the messenger and write my own message. Which in turn bears on how I approach Lover's Lanes as a work of art. Not a demand, not even a suggestion. Just one path I could walk down.

The minor fall, the major lift

I talked yesterday about coping mechanisms, and I left one out: music! You can't have a road trip without music. It's a contradiction in terms. So I'm left with the pleasant chore of assembling a list of road songs and love songs from my collection of music. My collection is deep but not broad; I've got everything Suzanne Vega ever sang and a lot of Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon, but ask me to cue up some AC/DC or Hootie and the Blowfish (or for that matter to name any song either band ever produced) and I'll come up empty. Fortunately, Vega, Cohen, and Simon all sing a lot of love songs, and Simon in particular has a lot of songs that intertwine travel and love -- Hearts and Bones, Train in the Distance, the Myth of Fingerprints, Homeward Bound, and Slip Slidin' Away all occur to me without consulting a playlist. (They are all also absolutely first-class songs, with the possible exception of Homeward Bound, which is second-class but catchy and charismatic.)

As I may have mentioned, I don't have a lot of experience of music, but I'm pretty sure you could listen to every platinum record the RIAA ever certified and not do better than Leonard Cohen for the sheer quantity of soulful, lyrical ballads about the melancholy aspects of love. Here I have to consult a playlist just to narrow it down. You have the complexity and rawness of Hallelujah alongside the simple, imagistic, sad velvet of Alexandra Leaving. You have the surreal yet eviscerating pathos of One of Us Cannot Be Wrong alongside the very concrete and oddly refreshing memoir of Chelsea Hotel #2. Not a lot of road songs, though, just love songs. Where Paul Simon treks through Africa to get ideas for his music, you can tell Cohen is a homebody; even his songs about freedom don't usually invoke the imagery of travel.

Suzanne Vega's love songs are maybe a hair less complex than Cohen's but more varied. For all his permutations of flatware and condiments, at times you get the sense Cohen is serving you basically the same steak in nine out of ten of his songs. I've never felt that way about Vega. Her songs have a higher standard deviation of subject and significance and resonance. So you get some songs that are perfect road/love songs (Ludlow Street, Calypso, Penitent, World Before Columbus, and In Liverpool leap to mind, each a five-star song, the latter three almost celestial in their beauty) along with a bunch of songs that I really honestly dislike quite a lot and have nothing to do with my themes.

And then there are the few outliers, the songs by other artists I've been accidentally exposed to. Everything off Anjani Thomas's album is a love song ranging from listenable to almost pull-off-the-highway-till-your-eyes-clear in quality. A couple Feist songs here for letting the mind drift, a few Liz Phair songs there for grit, and in case I get bored of the singer-songwriter stuff I have a little Tokio Hotel and Evanescence and Vertical Horizon (not to mention the entire soundtrack of Avenue Q) to provide a change of pace.

So let me put the question to you, if you're reading this: what's your favorite song that integrates themes of travel and love?

Love is not enough

I don't really feel like composing a post today. Business issues, interpersonal tensions in my family, emotional problems, and life just generally being complicated. Which raises the question: what do I do when shit happens on the road?

There's a lot that could go wrong, as I've alluded to periodically since I started blogging about this hare-brained idea a couple weeks ago. I could have bad luck getting interviews. My car could break down. Murphy's Law being what it is, I'm not going to drive up the West Coast and down the East Coast without having shit happen at least once and probably more often than that. I'm not good at dealing with shit. You could call that the central problem of my life. And a lot of things fall under the rubric of "shit," including money, work, hostility, complexity of any kind, and the unexpected. I'm hoping that leaving my comfort zone -- putting my comfort zone up to 2700 miles over the horizon, actually, given what a big country we live in -- will help me learn to deal with shit, but that's not enough. I need a plan.

I have a cell phone. (I need to switch plans, but I'm having trouble arsing myself to do so; see above diatribe on the subject of shit.) The cell phone (in places with towers) and the laptop (in places with Internet access) will help tie me to my support network, so I don't have to deal with everything alone. I want to minimize how much whining my friends have to put up with, though, so I also have to be able to cope by myself. If things are going badly, some days -- if I'm in a friendly city -- I may just skip the highway, pay for an extra day at the motel, and kick back. Maybe look for one interview; maybe not. Decompress. Then get back on the road.

So between now and then I need to work on my coping. Remind myself that what I'm doing is worth it. Because if I stop believing that then there is no journey.

Pen/Dragon

A cross-country love story road trip involves a lot of driving and a lot of thinking. Thinking without being able to write down what you're thinking is torturous when your memory is as bad as mine. I want to be able to write while I drive, or at least get my thoughts in order. So I've been doing some Google and Wikipedia research on speech-to-text software.

I knew going in, of course, that Dragon is the industry leader, as it has been for the better part of a decade. I had expected, though, that by now it would have a number of competitors, including at least one freeware program distributed through SourceForge or something. Nope. My admittedly rather cursory research indicates that all other speech-to-text software is focused on letting you give your computer oral commands, build a phone menu where you "press or say 1," and so on; Dragon is the only program I found that types text as you say it. Dragon is pricey, receives mixed reviews, and only functions when you're using the official Dragon microphone headset; I don't know how I feel about wearing a headset while driving.

So I was pleased, as I was reaching the conclusion that I might have to shell out for an inferior product, to discover by accident that Windows Vista comes with a built-in dictator program, Windows Speech Recognition. This is really cool, since I'm going to need a new laptop for this project anyway. Apparently WSR is slightly behind Dragon in terms of accuracy -- but I'm just going to be talking to myself, I don't need a 100% accurate transcription. I wish I could find some kind of demo version that I could test on my XP desktop.

Paging Dr. House

When you're planning something you've never done before and you're not busy thinking of ways it could go wrong, you're consumed by the potential of what you're doing. I wrote down a fantasy of mine today, and it occurred to me that the people I talk to this summer might tell me their fantasies instead of true-to-life love stories, or at least might embellish the truth to turn crushes into lovers, prostitutes into mistresses, and "it's not you, it's me" breakups into "the bitch cheated on me" breakups. I'm not sure what to do about that short of offering each of my correspondents a sodium pentothol cocktail before the interview, so I've resolved to believe everything I hear while I'm sitting down with them listening to their story. Skepticism can wait until I'm back in the car. After all, the way in which the storyteller lies says a lot about the storyteller, and the reader's choices about what to believe say a lot about the reader. The fine dance of those near-identical twins fantasy and reality will add a certain texture to the stories. It's not even clear which twin will teach us more about love.

V-Day!

I think I'm going to try to settle into a weekday-only posting schedule, but this is not just any weekend. Today is Valentine's Day. I thought a lot about what to post today -- maybe a poem, something of Donne's or Shakespeare's, or that Cummings piece about the syntax of things. In the end I decided to celebrate the holiday by sharing a love story with you. One of my own, since I haven't collected anyone else's yet. It's the story of my first crush. I'll call the girl Ann because I've never known a girl with that name.

Ann and I were in the same grade, in middle school. I saw her a lot during class, but we interacted mostly during after-school theater, when we produced musicals together. We were low on the totem pole, doing behind-the-scenes tech work or bit parts on the stage. She hugged people a lot, and to be honest that's probably where the crush came from; I've always been vulnerable to that, as though to hug a person were to love them. To be fair, though, I also digged how she threw herself into the work -- optimistic, commited, and extroverted. She seemed like should have been happy, and some of the time she was, but sometimes she seemed cloudy instead. I wanted to make her feel better.

Ann had nothing up front, and as a result the other boys in the class made great sport of her. I remember one boy once saying she had "negative tits;" I don't remember whether she was in earshot. I never joined in, but I never stood up for her either. I guess I should be a little ashamed of that, but you know how middle school boys are. Or maybe you don't. Just in case, what would have happened was that I would have been ostracized even more than I already was -- middle school was when I was just beginning to be socially accepted after a very rocky time in elementary school -- and that the other boys would have mocked me by spreading around that Brian had a crush on Ann. The response of a leader to that kind of thing would have been to own up to it proudly and take advantage of the publicity to ask her out, but I was an introverted middle school boy and I was terrified of girls in general and rejection in particular (so not that different from now). So instead I just sat there when they called Ann ugly, thinking to myself "well -- I don't think she's ugly."

My fantasies about Ann were pretty chaste, as you'd expect from a middle schooler still a little unclear on the mechanics of sex or why people were so interested in it. In my imagination, we were in a dark place and something terribly upsetting had just happened to Ann. We leaned on each other and she cried on my shoulder. I rubbed her back and we held each other. The fantasy was just that -- nothing particularly sexual, just what one friend would do for another intimate friend. But then I've always had trouble with the difference between friendship and romance.

I don't remember when that crush went away. It was probably when I got hit on for the first time, a completely different story that led to my first relationship. But that's a story for another time.

Happy Valentine's Day, lovers! And Happy Valentine's Day, Ann!

Go, Venusaur!

I'm not the first to collect love stories. Chicken Soup for the Soul does it -- sometimes nauseatingly and omitting unhappy endings, but Chicken Soup for the Soul does it. In a way Dan Savage does it every week. And of course compendiums abound of fictional love stories -- by Shakespeare, Chaucer, Masters. Their stories come from letters, emails, conversations with friends, or their own panting imaginations.

None of them ever had to chart a course.

Lover's Lanes uses the Pokemon model of love story collecting: you can't catch 'em all by staying in one place. You have to get out in the tall grass. You have to hit Viridian City and Pallet Town. That game would not be much fun if you could catch all the Pokemon without going on a journey. As for love stories -- even if you could somehow capture the entire range of them without leaving town, all your tales set against the same backdrop -- would you really want to?

So I'm charting a course. It's still inchoate, only gradually taking shape as I get feedback from friends who might be willing to put me up and as I decide where I need to go to make my own story worth telling. Las Vegas, of course. Can you imagine the stories a showgirl would tell? -- or even a man on the street, in a place like that. New York is also can't-miss, though my friend there tells me she may not be around in the summer, a great pity. I have a concentration of helpful collaborators in San Francisco (itself a must-visit city), Portland, and Seattle, so it's safe to say I'll spend a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest. And I definitely want to hit a recession-stricken hub, say Detroit or Cleveland, to find out how people live love when living life is hard enough.

Here's the thing. Even if the cities I've mentioned all lay on the same straight empty road, by the time I got back to Fort Myers I'd have gathered a bounteous cornucopia of experiences, eclectic and fascinating, to spill onto the rose-scented page. But they don't. To pass through those cities and return home I'm sure to encounter Orlando, Houston, Phoenix, LA, Denver, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Atlanta -- and innumerable points besides. That's if I don't detour up to Minneapolis or Boston or over to Memphis or to other cities that are natural stops on a lover's lanes. If just five or six cities' worth of experiences would leave me with a cornucopia, what will I have after my tires see the asphalt of dozens of freeways and cities? Will it even be comprehensible? Will I persevere?

Invisible stories

I've been reading Invisible Cities, sort of a novel-poem by Italo Calvino. The premise of the whole story, not to give too much away, is that Marco Polo goes on journeys to fantastical cities, then returns to his lord Kublai Khan to describe what he saw. A friend of mind recommended it to me when she heard about Lover's Lanes, since they're both travelogues and anthologies of sorts.

Marco Polo's emphasis in his storytelling is usually on the city -- the civilization -- first, and only after that on what sorts of people live there. Lover's Lanes is not like that. I hope my correspondents' stories shed light on the places they live -- but I intend to tell the story of the jilted young actor set against the backdrop of Hollywood, not the story of Hollywood as manifested through the jilted young actor. I'm not worldly enough for the latter; I can't presume to know Hollywood from the few interviews I conduct there. I am provincial, and so my storytelling will also be provincial, though I hope it will be universal at the same time.

Still, there were passages of Invisible Cities -- which is a fantastic book, by the way -- that did speak very directly to my own journey. Here is an excerpt from the story of Euphemia, a rich merchant city. People who enter and leave Euphemia do so to trade ginger for poppy, nutmeg for muslin. But they trade something else, too.

You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says -- such as "wolf," "sister," "hidden treasure," "battle," "scabies," "lovers" -- the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and every equinox.

Civic duty

Fifteen minutes ago I liked the name "Honda Civic" almost as little as "Honda Fit." Civic is such a stuffy word. It makes you think of the drab buildings where they hold traffic court. Or paying your taxes. It is not a good name for a car.

But then -- soaking in the spa and staring at the moon, which cliched as it sounds is when I get all my craziest ideas -- I thought about the root of the word. Civic is from civilization. Civilization is just a bunch of people and the relationships between them. My journey is about one particular type of those relationships, so my journey is intimately tied to civilization.

And that in turn got me thinking about Freud. That son of a bitch wrote a little book called "Civilization and Its Discontents" decades ago. I read it last year. Part of his idea, this half-crazy genius of the psyche, is that what's most basic in us are the creative and destructive impulses, and that part of the creative impulse is the libido. So we all want to go out there and find someone to focus our libido on. The problem is that we need food and water and other stuff, and if we try to take care of all of that on our own we don't have much time left for sex/cuddling. We form civilizations to help make it easier to satisfy our biological needs so we can devote the remainder of our time to our libidinal ones. But now there's a new problem: civilization requires upkeep (we go to work), which requires time, which again is time we're not spending having sex/cuddling. What's more, that damn destructive impulse keeps threatening to tear everything down. So civilization requires us to restrain our destructive impulse, which is where Freud got the idea of the superego. And that superego polices all kinds of things, including our attitudes towards our own relationships.

The point is that civilization, for Freud, is all about relationships. Civilization is why we can devote time to our relationships, and it's also the principal reason relationships are so complicated. Which touches me, in spite of Freud's pedantry about the whole thing. And I bet a lot of the stories I hear on this trip will have as much to do with the civilization their characters live in as with the characters themselves.

So now I am thrilled that I may be making my journey in a Honda Civic and hope my own superego agrees that it's the right car for the trip.

Carsick

Today I visited three auto dealerships in hopes of refining my options. First thing I decided was that I'm not buying American. I know, you're supposed to drive a Chevy or a Buick or at least a Ford for an all-American road trip, but I just can't bring myself to spend that much money on a pile of metal that was not all that good a car even before their parent companies started talking about bankruptcy.

So instead I went to Kia and VW and Honda. I really liked the Kia Spectra. Sweet car. Classy and sleek. I felt nice in it, and it's pretty cheap to buy new. Sadly, word on the street is that Kia has a tendency to break down, and I want no part of that. Then I went to VW, where the salesman led me to the Rabbit. Another nice-looking car, and it's got my favorite name of the three cars I sat in today. Worse mileage than the Spectra, though, and someone needs to send a memo to VW management to hire salespeople who can give me a ballpark monthly payment in under twenty minutes of calculation; it turned out the Rabbit is a bit too rich for my blood, and the Jetta even more so.

That left Honda. They let me test-drive a used Civic. I would almost feel bad buying a Civic (or a Toyota Corolla or even a Scion) because it seems like everyone and their auntie is driving one these days, but apparently there's a reason for that: the Civic gets 36 mpg on the highway and Honda has a great support network. The car drove like a car should drive; it had this calm energy, no drama, just motion. I probably can't afford a Civic new, but I might be able to lease one or buy used.

This is all probably too much car talk for a blog that's supposed to be about love stories, isn't it? I want to be singing poetry at you and instead I'm drowning you in pragmatics. So I'll leave you with something called Flight by Louis Jenkins that pretty much sums up how I feel about the trip.

Past mishaps might be attributed to an incomplete understanding of the laws of aerodynamics or perhaps even a more basic failure of the imagination, but were to be expected. Remember, this is solo flight unencumbered by bicycle parts, aluminum and nylon or even feathers. A tour de force, really. There's a lot of running and flapping involved and as you get older and heavier, a lot more huffing and puffing. But on a bright day like today with a strong headwind blowing up from the sea, when, having slipped the surly bonds of common sense and knowing she is watching, waiting in breathless anticipation, you send yourself hurtling down the long, green slope to the cliffs, who knows? You might just make it.

All you need is love. Love and a car

People do walking tours of America. Did you know that? People literally walk from coast to coast. I guess they do endurance training for months before they leave and have camping gear strapped to their backs for the nights they don't end up near a town. One guy walked from L.A. to Boston to "discover America." Apparently he actually made it. Then a couple walked from Oregon to New Hampshire in order to prove that Ron Paul was awesome. They made it too, though mysteriously Ron Paul still lost the election. People who walk from coast to coast are hardcore.

By contrast, I can jog a mile, but I am pretty badly winded afterwards and have to sit down. Therefore, I will need a car.

Now yes, on some level it is tempting to get a pimpmobile, but red 'vettes are really more suited for making love than for studying it. So what I need is something inexpensive but reliable, something that can drive ten thousand miles without breaking down, something with good gas mileage -- but at the same time, something that looks, feels, and sounds like a car you make a trans-American journey in.

Take the Honda Fit. The Fit is cheap, foreign, and gets 30 mpg. Nice. But it is called the Honda Fit. The Honda Fit, guys. "Hi, I'm driving across America collecting love stories, and I was wondering if you would --" "What kind of car you drive?" "A, um, a Honda Fit." "Good luck."

If you picked ten words at random out of the dictionary, nine of them would be better names for cars than the Fit. The Honda Mantis. The Honda Wake. Fuck, I'd take the Honda Scooter over the Honda Fit. They should let me name cars.

Now take the Nissan Versa. That's a name you can get behind. Vaguely combative but at the same time suggests poetry. Looks pretty nice, too. But it's sort of small and I'm six foot two. I am going to be spending a lot of time in this car.

I had a friend suggest the Volkswagen Jetta. Apparently they make them with diesel engines, which means my mpg would be off the charts good. I don't know how that impacts the price of the car, though; tutoring for three years has left me with a bank account, but not enough of one to blow all of it on a car, and I would like to buy or lease new to be sure of reliability.

Fortunately, I'm not leaving soon and have plenty of time to tour car lots and figure out what's what. Anyone have any success stories -- or cautionary tales -- to share?

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime

When John Donne wrote that line he was trying to convince the sun to quit shining through his window so he could stay in bed with his lover a little longer. That guy was a class act. His love poetry is among the best in the English language, and I hope he's watching this project with amusement from his tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral.

Love may know no season. People do, though, and I need to figure out when to set off on my odyssey. Summer is best for me; I tutor high school students for a living, so July and August contribute butt to my bottom line. But is that the best time to collect love stories? I'm guessing that one of the two kinds of people most likely to sit down with me and talk love are college students, who'll be harder to find in the summer. On the other hand, most colleges have summer programs, don't they? Maybe I'm making this a bigger deal than it is. But then back on the first hand, with half the country on vacation are the roads going to be crowded, making driving a chore?...

You can see I'm in a worried frame of mind. Been thinking a lot about that wild card I mentioned yesterday, the one about finding willing interview subjects. If I build it, will they come? I've been consulting with my friends about it. No one is sure. Fortunately, a good friend -- whose name I'll withhold because she's likely to also be a subject -- has offered to spend a couple days with me before I set out in earnest teaching me how to approach people.

What this drives home is that this journey is not just about compiling love stories or writing a book; it's also about self-discovery. Even if I come back without understanding a lick more about love than I do now, I'll have met a lot of people and learned how to talk to strangers. I'll still be an introvert, but you can't spend ten thousand miles asking people for their love stories and not come out of it feeling closer to the center of the human heart. To return to Donne, I'll be less of an island entire unto myself. And that alone would be enough.

You can trust me, I'm an itinerant anthropologist

The hardest part of this journey will have nothing to do with the journey. The car could break down in the middle of the Sonora and that would be tough. I could get mugged by a couple of laid-off auto workers in Detroit and that would be tough. My funds could run out in Bangor and I could find myself sleeping in the car for a week on my way back to Florida and that would be tough. But none of these things would be as tough as something that is absolutely certain to happen -- maybe several times a day -- for as long as this journey lasts.

I'm going to have to go up to people and ask them for their love stories.

See, it's a little weird with me and people. Sometimes I roll a natural 20 -- that's like being dealt a straight flush, if you don't know what I'm talking about -- and I am the most charming, engaging person on the planet. The rest of the time, though, I'm awkward, nervous, reluctant to make the first move. Once I'm sitting down one-on-one with a person I can hold up my end of the conversation, as long as my end involves more listening than talking, but getting to that point scares the hell out of me.

So what the heck am I going to say to people I want to interview? I've been thinking about various lines and none of them sound quite right. "Hi there, do you have a minute? My name's Brian. I'm driving across the country collecting stories and writing a book about love. Do you have time to tell me a story?" I mean, okay, not bad, not too aggressive, casts it as a favor you can do for me, establishes me as an author (the rare demographic people still trust), and gets the point across, but makes me sound scruffy and doesn't encourage real emotional engagement. Or maybe it does because love stories are by definition about emotional engagement. That's the best line I've got so far.

And what the heck are they going to say to me? What percentage of my potential interviewees are going to be creeped out, or figure I'm selling something, or get offended about being approached by a stranger about something so private, or freeze up when put on the spot? Or just be too busy? People are busy a lot. I guess that's the advantage of talking to people in laundromats and diners and such -- places where people have nothing else to do. It might also help to approach couples or groups, which might make things less intimidating for the interviewees (and have the added benefit that I get stories out of more than one person).

So there are difficulties on both ends. I have to be willing to put myself out there, and I have to be willing to understand when other people won't. The first I can control; the second I can't. What would you say if someone came up to you in a bar and asked for a love story?

Chambers of the heart

So I'm thinking my journey is going to be about ten thousand miles long. That's something like four times the distance from Los Angeles to New York City as the crow flies -- plenty of room to explore this astonishing country of ours. But it's not the kind of trip you make in one day.

Where to stay? I've got a few family members and college friends living far afield -- Seattle, Charlotte, Kansas City -- and their houses and apartments will be landmarks on my journey, but this isn't the kind of trip where you make a beeline from Point A to Point B. Love stories are like butterflies; sometimes you have to go far afield to catch them. So the vast majority of my nights will not be spent with my friends and family. I'll spend a lot of nights in cheap motels, and that will be an adventure too. But I'm also hoping to take advantage of CouchSurfing. Have you ever heard of this? It's a bunch of people willing to lend a couch to travelers passing through. I'm grateful this exists; on some nights it might mean a free bed and a story to add to my book. Every night is an opportunity to collect a story, just like every day is an opportunity to collect a story. I can't wait.

The urge to go on a journey

When we are children we all believe we are the main character in the story of the world. Part of adulthood is accepting that while we may be the main character in our own stories, as far as the rest of the world is concerned we are at best extras in a cast of billions. Unless, perhaps, someone loves us.

I am an extra in your cast. But I beg you to honor me by allowing me the conceit that I am the main character for just a few paragraphs. I will even help you by explaining what kind of main character I am, so that you know whether to fall in love with me -- and allow me, within the spare walls of this blog, to share your inimitable spotlight.

To begin with, I am an antihero. Not the Han Solo kind, the selfish rogue with a heart of gold. Not the Arthur Dent kind, the hapless oaf caught up in a world he could never have controlled. No, I am the Holden Caulfield kind of antihero. I was born to an upper-middle-class family with blessings and advantages that few in the world can dream of. I graduated valedictorian from my high school, double-800s on my SATs, and went off to one of the best colleges in America. I took home my double major after three and a half years of study. And then the whining began.

You see, I am one of those people who have never quite accepted that they are not the star of the show. That what we want, we must earn. Most of the things I've ever wanted have fallen into my lap, either through the beneficence of others or through natural talents that have no need of discipline. When it came time to work to earn my living, I couldn't do it. Working three to eight, I earned more per hour than most people earn in a day, sitting in a chair helping high schoolers learn math, and called it arduous. My kind friends, in dire financial straits like recent college graduates should be, reassured me that pain is deeply personal and that my dissatisfaction with one of the world's best jobs said nothing about my ingratitude. But even they didn't know what to say when I complained that I hated my life so much, and had so little hope for the future, that I was considering suicide. What do you say when "the heir of all the ages, blessed with the material splendors of the Promised Land" -- as a critic once wrote of Holden Caulfield -- tells you he'd rather be dead?

I am coming to the point now, so please bear with me just a little longer. On some level in my ungrateful little self-tortured mind, I am convinced that if I had a girlfriend this would all be better. A girlfriend would give me a reason to look forward to the future, to feel like I was worth more than the trifle I produce. Love, that is, is all I need. But my luck with the ladies hasn't been so hot lately, perhaps because desperation and fantasies of self-slaughter don't exude the right pheromones.

So the other day I saw birds flying through the sky, and just like they say, I got the urge to go on a journey. A quest, if you will. Not for love, exactly -- I'm not ready for love. I'm looking for wisdom. I'm going to drive across America. Stop in cities, towns, hamlets, roadside inns. And everywhere I go I'm going to ask the people who live there to tell me a love story. A story about -- How did you fall in love? Was it love at first sight? Did you grow to love a friend you'd known for years? Did you have an unrequited crush? Were you stalked? When was the moment you realized your love loved you back? When did you realize the glow was gone? When did love give way to sex -- or sex to love? And above all, what lessons did you take from your story?

These are the questions I'll ask. I expect I'll get a lot of different kinds of answers. Maybe so many that it takes more wisdom than I have to assemble the wisdom I receive, like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without the cover. But whatever gold I snatch from the riverbed of human experience I will pass to you. I hope you will find it useful as a prop in your own drama, now playing on the sound stage across the way, in the studio we built apart but maintain together.