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?