Northwest can do it in seven hours

Over the weekend I read "The Essential Lewis and Clark," a book-length compilation of excerpts from that duo's journals. Incredible. If it were fiction it would be unbelievable because the determination of every member of this thirty-odd man expedition was superhuman. If the grizzly bear was still charging with five lead balls in its lungs, they shot a sixth! If there was no food, they hung on till there was! If the wind wasn't strong enough to move the boats up the Missouri, they got out and bloody well pushed! These guys contended with more hardship every day than I'll face for my entire life. And yet it's notable that no one in the expedition died of starvation, exposure, trauma, Indian attacks, or being eaten by wildlife. One guy randomly died of disease practically before St. Louis was past the horizon. That's it. Everyone else lived. They vomited up their stomachs because of unfamiliar roots the Nez Perce gave them, they came within a hairsbreadth of drowning when an unexpected rain poured torrentially into the gully where they took shelter, they spent a winter practically unprotected from the elements on the north Pacific coast -- but they lived. They lived, they all worked together for over two years under the worst possible conditions, they did it largely without sacrificing their integrity -- and they found a water route through North America, not that it ever got much use afterwards. Strongly recommended for anyone who wants to know what a journey across the country used to be like two hundred years ago, or for that matter anyone who likes whopping good adventure yarns.

After reading the story of their journey, it's hard not to regard myself as pretty damn lucky in the resources I have on the journey I'm about to undertake. I won't have to push my boat; there are railroad tracks and an interstate system that connect the coasts. I won't have to eat my horse or dog; there are grocery stores every few miles, and trains have a dining car. And if I think talking to strangers is scary, at least they speak my language and I can be pretty sure they're not going to rob or scalp me. Lewis and Clark set an impossible example for a weak modern human like me to follow, but I can look to them for inspiration anyway and take a few lessons. Come prepared. Treat those you meet kindly. And if a grizzly bear attacks you, run into the nearest river.

One story building

Last week I wrote a pretty good story! It needs editing in places, particularly in the beginning before I was sure how I wanted to structure it, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the result. Distinctive, well-paced, some conflict, and with that wonderful somewhat inconclusive quality that separates much nonfiction from most fiction. If I can keep that up then on this journey I can at least produce something coherent enough to present to an editor as a strong first draft. I've got plans in place to do another practice interview, then interview a friend of Alice's who's a stranger to me, and then at last hit up someone for a story who hasn't already agreed to the chat.

One quandary that came out while I was writing had to do with who the main character of the story was. We're seeing everything through Alice's eyes; it's her memories, her experiences, her dilemmas. She's the main character, especially in the last couple installments. Yet she gets less direct characterization than Joel or his parents do. Alice tells you what kind of guy Joel is, but she mostly doesn't tell you who she is. I certainly can't tell you more about her than she tells me, because I'm writing this story under the pretense that Alice is a stranger. It's sort of a corollary of how in some first-person novels you can go the entire length of the book without discovering the narrator's name. All you know about Alice is the little she tells you plus what you can infer from how she talks and what she does in the story. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Should I at least introduce her as a blonde white woman in her twenties, single, who's lived in Fort Myers most of her life? Should I let that come out, or not, in the course of the story if it turns out to pertain to it? Or do these basic facts of biography always pertain to any story?

Another quandary: is it fair to Joel and his parents that I'm presenting Alice's judgments of them without a counterpoint? I suppose I could try to get in touch with them to get their sides, but I want these stories to be vignettes, not treatises. I don't think there's anything wrong with presenting only Alice's impressions, with the caveat that I've made the conscious decision to believe my subjects when I can. This credulity is necessary because of my format -- doubt on my part without opposing witnesses is gratuitous -- but it may also be desirable. I'm not going to get a lot of openness from my subjects if they feel like I'm looking for holes in their stories like some kind of itinerant trial lawyer. So I'll be gullible, which fortunately comes naturally to me.

The problem, of course, comes when someone is actually lying to me, or exaggerating to the point of lying. They're still telling me a love story, I suppose, but not a true one, and possibly a slanderous one. This is why I'm always going to use pseudonyms for anyone I haven't interviewed; I'm not interested in being an accessory to libel. If I should catch a major inconsistency in someone's tale, I'm not going to think of it as a lie but as a literary coup. I have to ask them to clarify -- since if their story isn't coherent mine certainly won't be -- but what an opportunity to see how people remember (or choose to remember) the events of their lives! If I necessarily let the subjects paint their own self-portraits through their storytelling, then how interesting it will be to see whether they are realists or impressionists, or whether they gloss over faults or exaggerate them...

Now all I need is subjects!

Alice's story, conclusion

"Oh my God, if you guys threw that away, I swear, I will kill you. No, no, no. All relationships aside, say you took it down and hid it somewhere, that's fine, put in in the attic, okay, but throw it away, no! No, no, no!"

"Not that one, not that one!"

"No!"

After Alice and Joel awkwardly fell apart, Alice's reception by Joel's parents was not the same. Before they'd treated her like a daughter-in-law; now they "hated her guts" -- Alice's words. I'm about to prompt Alice for a specific example, but I don't have to. She goes off on a story.

Alice may have mentioned somewhere already that she's the artsy type. I don't think she'll object if I go further than that and say she's an artist. For as long as I've known her, she's surrounded herself with the fruits of her creativity: paintings and sculptures, some very personal, others just pretty. As befits an artist, Alice draws material from her own experiences, and her relationship with Joel was no exception. "I did this beautiful portrait of Joel. This incredible portrait of him. It won awards at art shows. It was one of my favorite works," Alice recalls. It was called The After-Dinner Look. Alice describes this warm moment frozen in time: "It's him stepping in from their patio with the pool behind, stepping in from the sliding glass doors toward the kitchen. And he kind of has this sort of looking up, this 'So you wanna...' expression. Which, I dunno, maybe other people wouldn't see that in the portrait, but I do, because I know what it means." Alice is fond of this painting not only because of its skillful execution or its nostalgic subject, but also because of the secret in Joel's smile. It's her own personal Mona Lisa.

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it does when Alice tells me the lesson she took from this portrait: "Never give artwork like that to the lover." After the breakup, Alice let herself into Joel's parents' house with her spare key to drop off some stuff she'd had of his, his hockey jersey and the like. It must have been a bitter moment already, and it grew more so when Alice saw that The After-Dinner Look was no longer hanging on the wall. "God only knows what happened to it now, which is my biggest heartbreak," she says. She thinks Joel's parents might have disposed of it. Mona Lisa, meet trash compactor.

If Joel's parents did throw the painting away, though, Alice got her revenge in one small way. The After-Dinner Look was not the only memorable scene from their relationship that Alice committed to canvas. She describes a second painting, called Home Too Early -- "because that's what happened," she explains, "when we did the deed for the first time." She describes her painting -- an Impressionist-style piece, all in yellows, because she was trying to paint the light rather than the objects. "And it's us in bed, and it's a sideways shot of the bed, the window of the bedroom in the background. And I'm in the foreground, and you just see sort of my figure, and my hair. And then Joel is sort of behind me, and his head's popped up, and has a really alert expression." Alert, of course, because Joel's parents had just unexpectedly pulled into the garage. It must have been terrifying then, but Alice laughs now as she describes the scene.

Well, Alice kept that one. "And of course, when I met Everett" -- she continues, referring to her next boyfriend -- "I changed that painting and gave him longer hair... because now I was sleeping with Everett!"

And that's Alice's story. The only thing I feel compelled to add, because I'm not sure how well it came across in this first exercise in biography, is that for all the awkwardness, frustration, and eventual animosity, Alice remembers her relationship with Joel very fondly. "A wonderful soul," she says. "He was such a dear, kind, generous... he would give you anything, if he could give you anything at all, if he had to sell a kidney to do it." She's even wondered if the relationship might start up again someday. And thus the wheel turns.

On Monday we'll return to my desultory musings. The following weekend I hope to have another interview, and maybe the weekend after that we'll finally get around to talking to strangers.

Alice's story, part 3

"When he left to go to West Point, I was seventeen, and I knew he'd be gone for about four years, at least, and I was going to college..."

"When did you discuss this with him?"

"Well, shortly after his parents had me over for dinner. After Joel had left they invited me over for dinner, and they sat me down, and I realized how unhealthy their affection for me was, in some ways. Literally, to boil down the conversation in a nutshell, it was like: 'You will marry our son, right?' And I was like: 'I have to go now.'"

It didn't take long, as Alice and I talked, for me to understand how eager Joel was to please his parents. What took longer to understand was how possessive Joel's parents were of Joel. At first Alice described them in rather positive terms (at least apart from her vivid commentary on the odor of Joel's father). "They were very attentive," she said. "It was a lot of fun when I was dating him in high school because they instantly felt like my other parents." It's fair to say that Joel's parents were welcoming, even getting her drunk more than once, but that wasn't the extent of it. "Looking back," Alice reflects, "his parents were asking us to do it." After dinner Joel and Alice would go to Joel's bedroom, close the door, play music, and "act like bunnies." His parents never flinched. Alice says it never even occurred to her that they had any idea what was going on in there.

If this couple felt like Alice's other parents, however, perhaps it was because they already thought of her as a daughter-in-law. "I even remember conversations his mom had with me about grandchildren," she tells me, disbelief still evident in her voice. "I'm seventeen, lady, I am seventeen!" I wondered if Joel's parents had themselves been early bloomers. Alice answers, "They did meet when they were very young; they also got married when they were very young. But their parents didn't make them do it."

No, Joel's parents didn't make Alice marry him, but listening to her you'd think they might have if they could have. The culmination of Alice's story is her two-week visit with Joel and his parents to Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, immediately before Joel entered West Point. She was uncomfortable to begin with in that fantastically wealthy borough, perhaps best known as The Sopranos' shooting site: "I did not fit in there, because I'm an artsy, independent type, I'm not the Prada-carrying, Abercrombie & Fitch-wearing type." She was there to see Joel off, and she put up with the trip for his sake. What she hadn't counted on was Joel's parents' motive for bringing her: "His parents wanted to parade him around their friends and family before he went . . . and I was really the trophy girlfriend. That was my function. Look, this is Joel, he's going to West Point, and this is the woman he's going to have babies with. That was the whole of the trip."

And her pride and shame? In spite of her discomfort, "I had so much fun, and I loved standing beside Joel and going 'My Joel.' He was My Joel. He was very dear to me, my very very best friend, he's going to West Point, and I'm so proud of him -- his parents' goal has been achieved, he's going to have his freedom... and at the same time, I felt so awkward and clumsy, this sort of feeling of -- yeah, but." But what? "I'm not a military wife! God no! This isn't going to go anywhere -- and here I am almost playing along with everyone in this sort of parade . . . and that's not who I am!"

Maybe Joel's parents sensed Alice's tension. They dialed up the pressure so far that Alice reflected even at the time that if her own parents knew the burden being laid on their daughter, they'd object to it. And as awkward as Alice felt about her own uncertainty, "the most overwhelming thing that I was really uncomfortable with was his parents were like, afraid to let me go. It made me just feel like if they didn't see me crying and Joel going through the West Point gate and me waving to him with a handkerchief it wasn't going to come true." Well, they were right. Alice didn't see Joel through the West Point gate, but instead flew home by herself from JFK. It was 2003; paranoia about flying from New York was high, Alice was coping with others' expectations and her own confusing emotions, her heart was breaking over leaving Joel, and the security guard said her photo ID didn't look like her. (Symbolism, a small part of my brain announces.) Alice burst into tears at the airport -- and while she'd had the idea for a while that this relationship would have to end, "it was kind of then, on my return flight, that I was kind of like yeah... I think... it's unwinding now."

And that was it. There was no moment of truth when Alice told Joel that they were through. They just unwound. Alice tells me that since then, Joel has been engaged three times, and each time the engagement has been broken off. He's looking for a goddess, she says, "and eventually the person he's with feels so much pressure from that, and so awkward from that, that they back away and think I can't commit to this, because eventually I'll want to shoot myself." That's speculation, though. She renewed communications with Joel recently; before that, it had been years since they talked.

There's still a little more story here. Chronologically it happened before the trip to Monmouth Beach, but narratively it belongs after you know how it all ended, and the part Joel's parents and Alice's reaction to Joel's disposition played in the ending -- because all of that foreshadows, or maybe hindshadows, what is in some ways the most poignant part of the tale. I hope you'll forgive me my literary devices. Tomorrow we'll find our closure.

Alice's story, part 2

"He was in ROTC. His dream was to go to West Point. Well, I think --" she corrected herself. "The thing with Joel was that it was his father's dream for him to go to West Point."

"He wasn't sure whether he wanted it himself?"

"No, he wanted whatever Daddy said he wanted."

As Alice and I continue talking, it becomes increasingly clear that to understand Joel's relationship with Alice you have to understand Joel's relationship with his parents. Not that it was abnormal, exactly. He wasn't rebellious or anything. In fact, Alice found him almost suspiciously compliant. A giggling Alice describes Joel's father as "a planet;" she means that he was a heavy guy, but she could just as easily have meant that Joel was a satellite in his orbit. Or to use a different metaphor, Joel was a vessel for his dad's ambitions. "His dad could say, get a haircut; and he'd go do it the next day," Alice explains. West Point was Joel's dream because it was his father's dream.

Nor were his parents the only ones whose goals Joel adopted as his own. As the relationship wore on, Alice says, Joel was deferential to a fault to her as well. "Hey Joel, what do you want to drink with dinner?" "I don't know, hon, whatever you want." "Really, I've got milk, water, or orange juice, which one do you want?" "Surprise me, I trust you." Alice snorts. "It drove me mad!" She doesn't look mad, though; she looks a little wistful. She goes on to explain that she took solace in Joel's care and attentiveness. It may have been true that "he didn't have his own personal drive," but sometimes that was what Alice needed.

Later Alice would make a confession. I'd asked her what her faults were after she complained that Joel overlooked them to a degree she found noxious. "I think my biggest fault with him was, subconsciously or not, sometimes very much taking advantage of him," she answered haltingly. "In the sense that, like... with Joel, really, all I would have to say is, 'I really love that necklace' -- once -- and I'd have it within a month. And I'm not a gold digger! Or else I would stay with him. But sure there were times when I'd say 'I really love that,' or 'I want to go there...'"

I'm Alice's friend, so I can't claim to be impartial, but as I listen it's hard to hold her occasional use of Joel this way against her. After all, it sounds like he wanted what she wanted -- and as Alice says, "I'm sixteen, what do you want from me?" -- but it's hard not to hear in this story a teenage boy who's building an identity out of completing others' identities. Perhaps surprisingly, this made for a lot of fights between Joel and Alice, and not just over what to drink. Often these fights centered around his parents. "His mom or dad comes in, and he's just like oh, don't upset them! And I'm like, no, sometimes that's okay! Sometimes you do things because you are an individual with your own thoughts opinions and plans, and they don't exactly correspond to your parents', and that's okay! Not for Joel."

I can't help wondering out loud whether Joel had any motivations of his own. Alice says he cared about succeeding. That answer puts me back on my heels for a minute. Joel, she's saying, was happy to let others set his destination for him; his pleasure was in doing his honest best to get there. We say sometimes that life is about the journey, but is it really okay, I wonder, to follow others' stars on the way? Alice later revealed that Joel got into West Point and is now in Iraq. I'm certain he's a model soldier and a credit to his country. But whose path has led him there?

More tomorrow! After all, we haven't gotten to Alice's pride and shame yet, and to get there we'll need to study Joel's parents a little more.

Alice's story, part 1

"Suggest a topic!"

"Something that made you feel very proud or very ashamed?"

We're comfortably ensconced in Alice's living room. Alice's two dogs kick back belly-up on the floor while a ferret clan clambers around a tall cage behind me. I've known Alice for two or three years, but I've never heard the story she's about to tell.

"He wasn't my first boyfriend," she explains, "but definitely my first real boyfriend. I was very certain I was going to marry him." She's talking about her high school sweetheart, a fellow we'll call Joel who she'd met through a dinner set up by a mutual friend. He was dorky, she says, but had a great body, and Alice and Joel quickly discovered shared interests from musicals to Monty Python. She recalls the early days of that relationship: "He always wore too much Adidas cologne. The couch would smell like him for days. And I remember those first uncomfortable nights where he would sit next to me on the couch and you don't know how to act around each other because you're in high school, you don't have any experience." There's a big smile on Alice's face here. Time has worked alchemy, turning these awkward early moments into fond reminiscences.

For my part I momentarily feel fractionally more awkward, reflecting that I'm still not totally sure how to act when I sit next to a girl I like on the couch, but the moment passes.

Alice mentions offhand that she found Joel more handsome as their relationship grew deeper. I wonder aloud why that was. Alice answers almost immediately: "I think whenever you establish a relationship with someone you begin to understand their quirks. You understand why they toss their hair a certain way. You understand when they wink like this or when they smile like this it means... this. So you begin to notice -- he kind of had this certain way of looking at me, and I knew that what he was saying was, oh my gosh I love you. And so that look became just the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen!"

I listen carefully. It's interesting to hear Alice echo something I've noticed in my own friendships and relationships; I always find women more attractive when I'm friends with them, and my last serious girlfriend said the same thing about me. (I wasn't sure whether to be happy or chagrined.) Alice's explanation makes as much sense as anything I've been able to come up with myself. That, and just having enough positive associations with a person turns their face into a welcome beacon.

For these first minutes of our conversation, Alice only foreshadows what would eventually come between her and Joel. Actually, I wouldn't have predicted it. She's mentioned his parents, but mostly in a positive context: "they instantly felt like my other parents," she said of how they practically adopted her. "They were very attentive." It turns out, though, that attention is not always a good thing. We'll get into that tomorrow.

Lessons from the frontier

I'm writing this post the night after my very first interview! For a first try, I think it was a tremendous success. I interviewed a friend, who I'll call Alice, at her apartment after we had dinner together at Perkins. It was a comfortable way to go into my first interview and both of us felt relaxed as we sat on her sofa, Kino listening from the coffee table, and she began to tell her story.

The content of the story is a topic for later this week. Today I want to talk about the interview as an interview, and in particular what I learned from it. In gross terms, the most surprising feature of our chat was its length: it clocked in at a cool forty-seven minutes! I'd been expecting that interviews would be shorter than that, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Probably they will be; strangers haven't set the evening aside for me like Alice did, and Alice is talkative by nature. This is important. Pascal said that he wrote a long letter for lack of time to write a short one, and my experience tonight makes me think something similar will be true of interviews. Tonight Alice and I had time to explore several different angles of her love story. I won't always have that luxury. Getting enough interesting detail to make the story unique in ten or fifteen minutes will be harder than doing it in just under an hour.

Which leads into another aspect of interviewing I didn't realize was important until tonight: finding an angle. Boy meets girl is a good story, which is why it's been told so many times, but it's never told the same way twice. Romeo and Juliet is "boy meets girl, only they're from warring clans;" Pride and Prejudice is "boy meets girl, only they're of different social strata;" WALL-E is "boy meets girl, only they're robots;" and so on. These are oversimplifications, but the point is that the story always has a premise beyond the fact of love. Sometimes it's a source of conflict, sometimes of novelty. The same has to be true of my subjects' stories. My job as an interviewer is not just to facilitate storytelling; it's to capture the most unique aspects of the story and how they relate to the common ones. Never at the expense of reality, of course! I'm not going to write caricatures that emphasize an element that was unimportant to the subject's actual experience; I'd sooner not use the interview. But I will find and focus on important elements that distinguish this story from every other love story. Tonight that meant asking questions about the dynamic between Alice's high school boyfriend and his parents. Theirs was an odd relationship that was the source of some tension between Alice and her boyfriend and bore indirectly on other frustrations she had with him. If I could do the interview again I would have focused more on that -- though thanks to the interview's generous length I got an interesting story out of it even without knowing going in that I needed to look for an angle. The hard part will be sussing out that angle under the pressure of time.

Enough for today. More tomorrow!

Semper probe in extremum

I did my taxes today. I mentioned yesterday that I'm something of a procrastinator, and filing my taxes is no exception. My 1040 had been sitting in a pile on the floor for about two months, getting covered up with and superseded by other mail and paperwork, and it wasn't until I realized I no longer knew where it was that I decided it was time to sit down with it. Even then I put it off until today, a short day at work which I was determined to put to good use. Because I'm self-employed I have to file two schedules in addition to my 1040, and of course they refer back and forth to each other and it's chaotic, but actually the whole process of filling them out only took an hour or so. I guess that's the payoff for keeping a careful account ledger during the year; when you need your revenue and expenses they're already calculated and ready to be plugged in.

Anyway, between filing taxes and watching Persepolis I spent a good deal of the day thinking about America. Or feeling about America, I suppose would be more accurate. I've spent my entire life here, apart from a week abroad here and there; it's easy to forget that the United States is one of a select few countries that Lover's Lanes could ever happen in. Other countries are too small, or too insular, or too uniform, or they don't have developed interstate systems, or their governments regulate travel or the press or for that matter love. Even America regulates love to some degree, of course -- but I can interview someone about how laws against gay marriage affect his relationship, and while my country still says he isn't entitled to the same stability and protection as a straight man, at least I'm permitted to write about it. That's the value of free speech and of democracy. When there is injustice, you can change minds and change hearts, and in the long term that is enough to change the law. To hell with "in God we trust;" our motto could be "we get it right, eventually." Semper probe in extremum. The story of our history to date, and hopefully far into the future.

And yet we're so diverse. It's breathtaking to remember that this is a country that unifies the Appalachian Mountains with the Mojave Desert, New York City with Oklahoma City, and a million points in between. I really can travel for a day and end up in a different culture. Yes, the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us, but which do you think we notice first? That's part of the reason the idea of Lover's Lanes has such appeal to me: love is one thing I can count on to be universal, though how we feel it and how we act on it might not be. I want to hear the stories of someone whose life has been different from mine, who seems to bear no resemblance to me, and see if I can find in the tales of such an exotic person themes I know from my own years. I want to find the common humanity that underlies our experiences. My subjects and I are all American. Can I discover our united states?

Pheidippides, at your service

There are two schools of thought surrounding cold swimming pools: you can wade in gradually, or you can take the plunge all at once. The same goes for removing Band-Aids, filing taxes, and enduring various other minor daily discomforts. Slow and steady wins the race versus it hurts less if you get it over with. On the other hand, you don't approach a marathon that way. You can't just run it real quick and get it over with; unlike ripping off a Band-Aid, marathoning has to be slow and steady. The same goes for training for a marathon. Coaches use the rule of thumb that a marathoner in training should increase his distance by no more than 10% per week. If you can only jog one mile at the outset, it therefore takes eight months to train for the 26-mile race. You build up to the event slowly and with discipline if you have any real ambition of success.

All this circumlocution leads up to this question: is interviewing more like a Band-Aid or a marathon? Do you have to work up to it by degrees, or can you just do it? The idea of asking a stranger for an interview has not grown less terrifying over the last month and a half; on the contrary, as the event has gotten closer the proximity has made it seem larger. Should I treat interviewing as a cold swimming pool which, perhaps, one should just dive into -- begin straight off with asking strangers for love stories? Or should I treat it as the marathon -- begin by interviewing a friend, and work up to strangers by degrees as I grow more comfortable with the process? I'm inclined towards the latter, but then I would be; I'm a procrastinator in some ways and wouldn't mind putting off the moment of truth. Yet to be fair to my own instinct, I might very well be more comfortable approaching someone unfamiliar if what I approach them with is not also completely unfamiliar. (It's partly for a similar reason that I want to start my interviews with easy questions like "what do you do?" and "how long have you lived in East Kudzuburg?" -- my subjects will be more comfortable if they don't have to plunge right into deep and private waters, and for that matter, so will I.)

So I'm hoping that this weekend I'll be able to get together with a friend and do some conditioning, to return to the marathoning metaphor. I'm a lot less likely to be turned down, and maybe afterward they can share feedback that might help me conduct a better interview next time. Then I can return home and play back the recording, courtesy of Kino, and listen for questions I missed. If I can't get a hold of anyone, I'll work on an alternative.

Unasked questions

Mission accomplished! It turns out the laptop-ready Internet card costs $60 a month with a minimum commitment of two years. Ouch! The question I forgot to ask, of course, is whether there's a way to get the card without the commitment, since I don't expect to be on the road for more than three months. I ran into this problem while apartment hunting, too: there is always a question you forget to ask, so ultimately you always act on incomplete information. The trick is finding some joy in this, which comes from listening to your gut and not making everything an optimization problem. Still, more bills...

Speaking of questions to ask, I want to do my first interview this weekend. Interviewing, however, is a difficult skill! My interviews are going to be what sociologists call "unstructured" in that I'm not going into them with a list of preset questions to ask, but that doesn't mean they don't require preparation. Even apart from needing courage to approach someone -- a private struggle that I'll blog about once I understand it better -- the best way to handle an interviewee is not obvious and probably varies widely. My goal is to get my subject to tell a love story in a way that puts me and my readers on the scene. The first obstacle, once I have a willing subject, is that they may not have a story in mind. I'm coming up with some "kindling" to help get the fire burning -- prompts like "Do you remember your first date?" or "How about a moment that made you very proud or very ashamed?"

Once they've settled on the story, the next obstacle is striking a fine balance between asking questions and listening. I need to be quick to intercept my subject if I need to ask a question about background, whether that's "who's Joanne?" or "wait, why were you swimming in a shark tank in the first place?", lest the tale become incomprehensible. I need to stay curious so that I don't forget to ask important questions (while accepting that to some extent it's inevitable, as I said above). On the other hand, I don't want to tread on the narrative. I can't interrupt them every few words; to some extent I have to trust them to tell their own stories. It's tough. Fortunately, many of the skills involved are a lot like the skills you use in having an everyday conversation -- which I want my interviews to resemble -- so none of this should be completely exotic. The hardest part in some ways may be communicating my sympathy, which is necessary if I expect my interviewee to be open with me, and doing it with subject after subject for however many thousands of miles the journey runs.

A challenge! But then, professional journalists do man-on-the-street interviews all the time and apparently get people to talk to them. I'll keep thinking about what approach to use, while remembering that the body of the interview is basically a special kind of conversation. I can handle conversations.

Further training

I called Amtrak about half an hour before their daily northbound train from Orlando was due to leave this afternoon, and there were still seats available. So much for the idea that I'd have to book well in advance! Interestingly, though, it turns out that daily train leaves for different destinations on different days. Today it was going to Washington, but tomorrow it goes all the way to New York. You can put it down to the recession and reduced freight on the tracks -- or at least, that's what one article my awesome friend sent me would attribute it to -- but it makes travel both more complicated and in some ways more interesting. There's something glamorous about hopping on the next train out of town no matter where it happens to be going. Waking up, checking the schedule -- oh, today there's a train to Phoenix, awesome! -- and off we go. Of course, I have no idea what it's like in cities other than Orlando, where they keep a station manned thirteen hours a day for the sake of the one or two trains that come through. Amtrak is a totally different animal in the northeast, and I imagine its transcontinental trains are more frequent than once a day too. Chicago in particular is a hub for them. That station is open eighteen hours a day, with a train coming in just about every hour. Good thing, too. You can't go coast to coast on Amtrak without passing through Chicago or New Orleans. If I go by train I'm not going to get away without visiting Chicago, probably more than once.

My goal for tomorrow is to visit a local AT&T store and ask them about the network card I mentioned yesterday. One way or another, I also hope to conduct an interview this weekend!

Chugging along

I didn't get much done over the weekend. I'm still standing at the divergence of two roads, or more accurately one road and one pair of rails. I did speak to one of Best Buy's computer people about the laptop, though! He said there's no real danger to my computer in connecting to whatever network is available wherever I happen to end up, so I don't have to invest in a security suite beyond the usual. He also brought my attention to what is called a LaptopConnect card, which in principle enables your computer to connect to the Internet from anywhere in the country using AT&T's wireless network. If I go by train this is probably indispensable, since I doubt Amtrak cars come with ISPs. Based on my research online, you ought to think of this card as a cell phone for your computer; as with a cell phone, the card is approximately free after the mail-in rebate, but then you have to buy a contract to make it work. There's sort of a multiplicity of contracts available, and the price scheme doesn't seem to be available over the Internet. I need to go to an AT&T store to find out whether this is affordable.

Tomorrow I'm going to call the Amtrak station in Orlando -- the closest full-service station to Fort Myers -- and ask them how far in advance you typically have to book in order to ride. If the answer is more than two or three days the train option is problematic. Amtrak's website seems to think that I could leave from Orlando tomorrow if I felt like it, and it says full bedrooms are sold out on that particular train, which suggests that if there were no space available in coach the website would know that and wouldn't let me book. I don't intend to travel the whole distance coach, of course; if one is going to travel for days at a time, at some point one would like a bed and some privacy. I may have to make do with coach for some stretches, though, because upgrades to a modest "Viewliner Roomette" cost more than the entire fare. A lot more. You can ride coach from Orlando to Seattle for $336, but if you want to avoid coach on all three of the trains involved, it's more like $1700. Not bad for what I'm planning -- if I made a beeline to Seattle by car, stopping only to eat and sleep in the nearest budget inn, I wouldn't get away with much less than that -- but entirely uneconomical for an average passenger. To be fair, though, there's a lot of difference between a seat in coach and a roomette, especially considering that the roomette comes with meals included plus various room amenities like A/C, an electrical outlet for the lappy, and an in-room sink and toilet. (You still have to use the communal showers; to avoid that you'd need a full bedroom, which runs an extra grand or so over the course of the trip.)

Of course, I won't be making a beeline for Seattle, no matter what mode of transportation I settle on. The trip will be made in shorter hops, hopefully with a few days spent at the cities that serve as my waypoints. If I go by train, I'll probably take coach on shorter trips and enjoy a roomette for longer ones.

Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance

...Or, I could go by train.

A dear friend of mine wrote me on Wednesday to suggest this option. Cross-country journeys don't have to be taken in a car. Amtrak is faster, safer, and cheaper. It liberates me from spending hours behind the wheel and worrying about where to sleep and eat. Perhaps most importantly, on a train people expect to chat with strangers. It's a more natural context than a laundromat to approach someone, tell them about this cool project you're doing, and ask them to tell you a story.

On the other hand, this convenience comes at the expense of breadth and autonomy. I sure won't be stopping in every city I pass through; I'll have to rely on the city to serve up new people with new stories. Which raises the question: is it still a cross-country journey if you get on at Tampa and off at San Francisco without visiting the towns in between? You're still visiting with some of the people from those towns, distinguishing a train journey from an airplane trip, so the answer might be a qualified yes, but you sure don't get to immerse yourself in local culture. No visits to Spring Hill College or the Grand Canyon; all you get is the changing landscape out the window. You also lose a ton of control over your route, since coast-to-coast trips invariably go through Chicago. In theory you can get around some of these disadvantages by booking trips with multiple legs. This gets expensive fast but is probably still cheaper than going by car. I wonder how far in advance you have to book. Can I take it one leg at a time, or do I have to plan a complete itinerary while sitting at home in one corner of a country that boasts 3.8 million square miles?

These thoughts were running through my mind when I opened up a collection of W.H. Auden's poetry that night. Flipping through at random, I happened on one of my favorite Auden poems, The More Loving One. I smiled and went on to the next poem -- and what should it be about but the comparative virtues of driving and riding a train! I am completely serious. It was one of those coincidences that just floors you, like God has appeared beside your bed amidst a chorus of angels to send you a portent. I read the poem, A Permanent Way, three or four times looking for this sign from Heaven. ...Yeah, it turns out Auden is ambivalent. Damn you, Auden! This is the problem with your poetry: you're too much like me!

What do you think, gang? Compared to going by car, would going by train be cooler? less cool? or cool in a different way?

Filler

I wrote a nice long blog post on office paper today at work between sessions, about a very exciting topic. Then I left without it. Dammit. Actually, I haven't done much of anything right today since leaving the office; I yelled at my dog for being loud, I got into a political discussion on LJ that I shouldn't have, and I screwed up an extremely basic omelette -- twice. At least I'm not my dad, who, as I discovered when I got home, tripped this afternoon while doing yard work and put a serrated palmetto branch through his face. He was just getting back from the hospital when I came home. So yeah, I'm giving myself the day off from blogging. Y'all will get the post that was supposed to go in this space tomorrow.

One piece of good news, though: I'm now fully certified with CouchSurfing! Basically that means that they've confirmed I live where I say I live, which makes other members more inclined to trust me when I ask to borrow their couches.

Day's anatomy, part 2

To see how the three-day rule works, let's try a test case: Mobile, Alabama. I chose Mobile because I know absolutely nothing about it and because it's an early stop on the first-draft route of our journey.

The previous stop will probably have been Pensacola; I'll just have driven an awesome bridge stretch of I-10 that spans Mobile Bay by way of various islands and peninsulas that stud the delta. Though it's a long bridge, it's a short drive. Google Maps estimates 55 minutes from Pensacola to Mobile, and that may actually not be too unrealistic; with the magic of Street View I can see that the bridge is actually four lanes, which I wouldn't have guessed, so I'm unlikely to get stuck behind a semi. If I leave Pensacola at eleven I can be at a Days Inn near I-65 by one at the latest.

Why Days Inn? Because a friend of mine who went on a road trip of her own last year reports that Days Inn is the best for having safe, comfortable, affordable rooms, and also because it's everywhere. I could look into local bed and breakfasts or something, and maybe sometimes I will, and I'm now a certified member of CouchSurfing.com so I have that option, but Days Inn will always be a good fallback.

The particular inn I'm looking at in Mobile is near the mall, which is a minus in terms of noise but means I'm likely to be in a district where I can buy groceries and get laundry done. What's more, it's spitting distance from Spring Hill College, which according to Wikipedia is a historically significant Jesuit college full of young people whose love stories just might have something to do with their faith. Score!!! I can probably visit on the day I arrive while I wait for check-in time at the inn. The University of South Alabama is only a little farther afield and might make a good Day Two destination.

A quick search for laundromats turns several up nearby, along with two Circle K locations, so necessities are covered after check-in on Day One. Nearby Dauphin Street is crowded with restaurants if I feel like splurging. With the interstate nearby it's mostly fast food, but there's also a Chinese place, and there are several cafes near the college and elsewhere, which just might mean more love stories. Bizarrely, there are four nursing homes within a mile of the inn, also good story repositories. And who knows what I'll pass on the way to and from all these places that might draw my attention. Plenty to fill Day Two even if I don't make it to the university.

If indeed the second day is as fruitful as I hope it'll be, I'll spend another night in Mobile and continue along I-10 the next morning. Biloxi would be the obvious next destination, or I could plow through Mississippi the better to reach New Orleans, surely one of the ten most important cities to visit on a trip like this. Either way, I'll have had a great visit to Mobile, busy without being exhausting, and full of stories!

Day's anatomy

It's not clear how much you can "plan" a trip like this one. You can prepare for it, at least to a certain extent; you can buy provisions, chart a course; but if I tried to make a day-to-day itinerary I'd be off it by day three. So much is unknown -- not just because I've never done this before, but because, if nothing is certain but death and taxes, nothing is uncertain like travel and people. Want to know where I'll be on a given day? I'll let you know when I flip over the calendar page. Okay, maybe I can do a little better than that... but not by much.

What I can do is think about what I'll do within a day. That begins with figuring out what proportion of my time I want to spend on the highway as opposed to in a city. I have a few philosophical options here. I could stay as long as I feel like in a town, collecting stories until I feel the urge to move on. But this is a little too sedentary an option for me; Lover's Lanes is about motion and emotion, and staying in each town indefinitely doesn't put quite enough emphasis on the first. In fact, when I first conceived of Lover's Lanes I thought I'd keep moving whenever possible, never staying in the same town twice except perhaps in allied ports where I have a friend to stay with, stopping only for necessities like food and rest and love stories. This is still tempting in some ways -- constant motion! -- but logistically it may be unwise, unfun, or impossible. Navigating within towns will probably take more attention than navigating between them. It takes some time to figure out where the love stories are, after all, not to mention the challenges of stocking up on supplies and doing laundry in a town you've never been to before with enough time left over to get to the next port of call. I'd be more comfortable with a local base of operations outside my car, and that will usually mean a hotel room I leave in the morning and come back to in the evening.

Which means that I'll be better off adopting Kino's rule: don't stay in one place longer than three days. That seems more resonant anyway given the influence of Kino's Journey on how I'm thinking about the trip. I can cheat on the rule when I have a (broadly defined) good reason -- I don't have Kino's phobia of attachments -- but the three-day rule seems to give me enough time, if not to get to know a city, then at least to take what I need from it and be ready to move on, and keep me from getting too seasick. At the same time it will keep me moving at a good clip and ensure that the scenery of the trip changes often enough to keep things interesting without being my own personal Bataan Death March. The rule also gives me a very approximate way of making a calendar -- or at least it will, just as soon as I get a route planned out and ascend to infallibility.

Aphrodisiax

I didn't get to do any work on my journey over the weekend, because I spent it under sedation. My new medication apparently does that for the first few days, weeks, or months of treatment, depending on the patient.

But let me back up. Many of my readers right now already know this, but I've struggled with anxiety issues all my life and depression since college. I've been in and out of psychiatric treatment since my second year of college -- longer, if you count the spells of therapy in elementary and middle school. By my count I've taken ten medications in the last six years, and none of them has yet done a thing for me in the long term beyond sedating me or possibly making me bipolar. You might call my continued attempts to find a medication that works faulty pattern recognition, and I admit it sounds like grasping at straws at this point, but any hope is better than no hope. It's not like you can treat the causes of these things. Mental illness, at least for me, seems to have no etiology. Like consciousness, it's just an emergent phenomenon proceeding from a particular configuration of neurons. You can change those, but that requires electroconvulsive therapy or lobotomy, which seem to be off the table. So all I have to treat are symptoms -- and we haven't even been successful in treating those.

My depression in particular bears on Lover's Lanes in several ways. One, the depression tends to make me pessimistic about the whole project -- which however is just one more obstacle to fight through, like having to buy a car or figure out how to approach people. Two, and ironically, Lover's Lanes is in part a way to escape from various things that I perceive as depressing me for a few months -- and if everything goes perfectly and the book is salable, maybe longer. Three, and correspondingly, the journey is a way to fight depression; I'm less depressed when I'm distracted, and nothing un-depresses me like being in the middle of succeeding at something cool. Four, and conversely, it's possible that my depression will be more pronounced during the trip, which will take me away from my support network, present me with lots of stressors, and give me copious opportunity to fail or be disappointed. Five, and proceeding from the last point, I have to find a way to be stable if I'm going to take the trip responsibly (which does not necessarily rule out taking it irresponsibly).

Which brings me back to medication. Starting tomorrow I'm on three different pills, two of which are strong tranquilizers. The most recent one in particular, Seroquel, seems to cause sedation universally; it even gets prescribed off-label for patients with sleep disorders. It seems I've passed some kind of threshold where making me feel normally is no longer on the table; now the game is one of tradeoffs, looking for drugs that relieve more problems than they cause. My impression is that you don't generally prescribe Seroquel to a patient you think has a chance of ever feeling 100%, because Seroquel knocks percentage points off the patient's ceiling. Fortunately, some people become acclimatized to the roofie aspect of the medication over time and are no longer affected that way. Others apparently never normalize.

We go through a lot to give ourselves hope. Hope is a lot like love that way. It isn't enough by itself, but it's better than nothing.

Change comes from within

No real change on the practical front today. This week's been spent dealing with exigencies and, when the exigencies have died down enough for me to notice I'm stressed out, destressing with a jigsaw puzzle. So this seems like as good a time as any to talk about the pertinence to my trip of what is probably the best-selling novel you've never heard of (at least of the last century of Western literature): a Brazilian story called The Alchemist.

I know! I hadn't heard of it either until a few months ago. But Wikipedia says it's sold more copies than The Da Vinci Code and has been translated into sixtysome languages from the originial Portuguese. Mind you, I was suspicious; I had heard that the book was as much philosophy and self-help as literary fiction, so I was afraid that The Alchemist would turn out to be the unholy offspring of The Secret and Atlas Shrugged, a ridiculous pseudo-religious tract disguised by a thin veneer of plot.

And in a way that's what it is... but it turns out to be pretty darned good anyway. Atlas Shrugged and The Secret are each annoying because they beat you over the head with their dogmas of moralism and magical thinking respectively; The Alchemist, on the other hand, is basically just a self-conscious folk tale, as though Joseph Campbell had sat down to write a novella illustrating the point of the hero myth. What's most central to the story is the idea of a "personal legend." It's not quite the same thing as a destiny, though it's close; it's more like a dream specific to you, the pinnacle of your potential in your own mind, which you can reach or not depending on whether you can muster the courage to face the obstacles that await you, the strength to overcome them, and the wisdom to learn from them. There is a pseudo-religious gloss on all of it, but I take it in the spirit of the folk tale; after all, perhaps it's true that when a person has the courage to accept the call to the journey and sets his sights on achieving his "legend," the world takes on a new significance that could almost be called religious.

Is Lover's Lanes a personal legend? Sure it is. It's a journey of the hero in the best Campbellian sense, as I suggested yesterday: a dangerous voyage with uncertain risks and rewards, which in the end must be undertaken not to gain anything in particular but for its own sake. I'm following my bliss -- or at least I hope this will prove to be my bliss. It might be better to say I'm following my gut. And while I doubt I'll find the secret to eternal life along the way as the medieval alchemists hoped, I might at least find the secret to living well.

Mass times velocity squared

Today is the one-month anniversary of Lover's Lanes!

A friend at Mozilla tells me that the newest corporate catchphrase is "stop energy." It means approximately the same thing as "resistance." The reason your idea didn't get incorporated into the final version of the product is that it encountered stop energy. My friend poo-poohs this phrase because he sees it as evasive, a way to avoid having to explain who blocked the idea, how, and why. (He also just doesn't like catchphrases.)

I didn't much like the phrase either when he first blogged about it. Since then, though, it's begun to grow on me. "Stop energy" is more flexible than "resistance." Resistance is something you can only encounter from people with the power to nix your project. If you have an idea and a friend discourages you from pursuing it, you wouldn't normally say your idea is hitting resistance, since in principle you don't have to pay any attention to your friend, but it is hitting stop energy. Similarly, self-doubt is not resistance, but it does generate stop energy. Maybe a better synonym for stop energy would be "inertia." It's always struck me as ironic that the First Law of Motion is that things don't move unless pushed.

I'm pushing Lover's Lanes forward like a delicate but burgeoning katamari of narrative and interstate highways, and I'm fortunate to have friends who are cheering me on. But I'm also encountering stop energy from any number of sources. The money is tight. My self-confidence is sporadic. My dad thinks I should be home by mid-August so I can resume my day job as soon as possible. (The bad thing about living with one's parents is that they know how you're spending your time and you have to care what their opinions about it are.) One way or another, this is going to happen. But it will not be without cost. I will have to muster all the "go energy" at my disposal to attain critical mass and escape velocity. (At which point this mixed metaphor would make me a nuclear reaction in space -- in other words, a star -- a mixed metaphor I can live with.) And if I ever return to Earth it will be under changed circumstances. Suddenly the whole journey sounds downright Campbellian. And if mine is an (Anti-)Hero's Journey, the only proper way to go about it is to answer the call to the journey and not come back until the dragon is slain.

March forth

Today's date. It means "to move forward in a decisive and orderly fashion." So today we have a list of things I want to get done in the next month or so, as my still-flexible start date approaches.

- Get a laptop. This entails: talking to a techie about what a cross-country laptop needs; deciding on an operating system; deciding on software; and buying the actual machine. If I end up with a Mac for security reasons, I need to figure out how to play the .wma files Kino produces.

- Field test Kino by asking a friend for a love story.

- Field test both Kino and myself by asking a stranger for a love story. Still need to figure out where; probably a coffee shop.

- Buy a car. Still hoping I get to buy a lightly used Honda Civic.

- Get some cheapie business cards printed from any of a dozen online vendors. Needs to include my name, website, and email. A publicity tool and a way to stay in touch with interviewees as well as a way to seem more credible.

- And get that email (loverslanes at gmail dot com) to forward to my personal email address so I don't have to check it separately.

If these things are done in a month I'll be ready to leave in June easily. I'll have the technology. All I'll need then is the planning and the willpower!

The Chinese room

I first heard a couple years ago that the Chinese word for "crisis" was composed of two characters. The first, it was said, meant "danger;" the second meant "opportunity." This struck me as one of those claims that's fabricated out of whole cloth for a political speech or a mailing list thought of the day, so I Googled it. The skeptic in me was pleased to discover that I was partly right; while the first character of the word does mean danger, the second means a crucial point, which is not the same thing as an opportunity. Still, the saw was closer than I expected to the truth -- and whether or not it's true, it could be true. Many crises do contain seeds of opportunity, as much as I prefer to think of them as situations to be skirted whenever possible and torn through in the most expedient possible way otherwise.

Case in point: this morning my desktop computer got a virus. Actually it got the virus last night, but it wasn't until this morning that it quit working. Beyond my ability to fix; it wouldn't even let me reboot in safe mode. I handed it over to a technician this afternoon. He seems optimistic, but there's still a pretty good chance I've seen the last of my old compy.

So you have your danger. At the same time, though, it's an opportunity: I was going to need a laptop for Lover's Lanes anyway. This episode gives me the impetus to look into laptops sooner than I might otherwise have. I'm typing this post on a discarded laptop of my brother's to find out whether his oldish machine might nonetheless serve my purposes. (Two trojans in four hours so far, so early indications are not promising, but I've still learned something and will sleep well tonight.) Tomorrow maybe I'll go on Dell's website and see if there is such a thing as a high-security version of Vista for wi-fi compatible laptops. If, God forbid, my desktop doesn't come back to me all sparkly shiny and happy to see me, it'll just mean I'll have a laptop that much sooner.

I am philosophical to avert a nervous breakdown.

But it's still all true.

What will happen on the road if my computer gets a virus? I'm gonna be connecting to a lot of different networks. I'm going to need a first-class firewall, aren't I? I should find someone who knows more about technology than I do to talk with me about the challenges of cross-country travel with a laptop.

Spreading the love

Happy March!

Over the weekend I realized that I have no idea how many people read the average post here. I thought I had no way to find out until I realized that Google AdSense is basically a hit counter. Based on its stats I seem to average about ten hits per day. Assuming half of them are me, that's five readers per day (more per post), which is actually surprisingly high, I think! Maybe search engines' webcrawlers count as hits? Anyway, I was surprised that Lover's Lanes is popular enough to merit a few people reading it per day. I'd sort of thought I was talking to myself half the time!

And I realized almost immediately that it doesn't matter. I love that people think this project is cool enough to be worth following. I think it's cool too, and I'd much rather have you follow my (mis)adventures than not. But whether my followers numbered a hundred, ten, one, or zero, I'd still want to do this. Because -- and this may be the first time I've been able to say this about an aspiration in years -- because this is something I want to do in and of itself and independent of what other people think of it. Mustering the will is easier with moral support, and if you're reading this, thank you for yours. But if you're not reading this, that's okay too. I am all I need to make this journey a success in my own eyes.

That was a pleasant revelation.

That said, I wouldn't mind if my audience swelled. I want to write a book, after all. I wonder how a blog like this one grows its readership. The stuff I post about these days is all prep work, quotidian stuff, perhaps not of interest if you don't already know me at least a little. But when I get in the car in June or so and start posting tales from the road, from living rooms and laundromats and coffee shops -- in short, when I start doing things most people have never done -- maybe there will be more people who'd like to read about it. How do I find them? Do I run ads? Email webcomic authors who have never heard of me and ask them for free publicity? Call NBC-2 and ask if they want to cover my departure as a human interest story? How do memes -- in Dawkins' sense, not 4-chan's -- spread?

By being good, is the short answer. So I'll do that. Meanwhile, thanks to those of you who drive down Lover's Lanes a couple times a week and see how the neighborhood is changing.