Lover's Lanes

Endings and transitions

2009-08-03T20:23:00.005-04:00

With the road trip over, Lover's Lanes is going to update a lot less frequently. I did collect one love story that I hope to get typed up soon, but Blackbird has taken her last cross-country flight for a while. It's back to LiveJournal for a while with me! But first, this trip deserves an epilogue.

The night before I set out, I wrote this: "I don't know what's going to happen -- whether this will be one of the best or worst times of my life, or what kind of meaning it will turn out to have, or if it might turn out to have no meaning. I don't know. But that's the point."

Now that I do know what happened -- well, more or less -- I have the benefit of hindsight. These weeks fell squarely into the "best times" category. Viewed episodically, most of my time on the road ranged from average to fantastic. I had my share of hours, evenings, and even days of relative depression, but with so little of the mundane world to get in the way, I found it easier to transmute sadness into lessons and even pride. ("So I'm feeling threatened by Winnemucca, Nevada? Wow, that means I must be in Winnemucca, Nevada. What the hell kind of craziness made this possible? Wait, I got here by myself? Maybe I do have what it takes to step into a casino, then...")

Meaning is a trickier question. I can say Lover's Lanes was meaningless, or that it taught me about the importance of self-reliance or friendship or motion, or that it made me more of an American or an adult or a man. But the proof of any of those "meanings" is in the pudding. If I now return to my old routines with my old attitudes, Lover's Lanes was just an unusual vacation. And maybe that would be fine with someone else. But it's not fine with me.

The day before yesterday I applied to the University of South Florida's library science degree program. If they accept me, then next year I'll begin working towards an MLS. I've talked to a number of librarians and haven't heard one yet say "this is an awful job," or "I made some bad choices," or even "meh, it's a living." Is this the right job for me? Could it even be a career? I don't have the first idea, but I do know that by the end of the year I will have been in the business of tutoring for about as long as I was in college, and that alarms me. Tutoring was an experiment, an important and lucrative one, but it's an experiment that got out of hand. It's time to recork that particular test tube and try the next one. It's a big lab, after all, and time flies!

Lover's Index

2009-07-31T22:09:00.003-04:00

Nights on road: 46
Miles driven (approx): 9,900
Maximum altitude (ft): 10,600
Maximum depth (ft): 1,120
Pictures snapped: 867
Hot girls cuddled with: 2
Distinct cities slept in: 29
Distinct states and provinces passed through: 24
Distinct countries visited: 3, counting the West Coast
Cars ridden in: 7
Mechanical breakdowns overcome: 0
Emotional breakdowns overcome: a few
Cats petted: 7
Birds hoisted: 6
Foxes bought: 1
Hotels stayed at: 15
Bank account impact: none of your business
iPod usage (hrs, approx): 100
Audiobooks consumed: 4
Blog entries through July: 102
Word count through July: 55,536
Cost of a book self-published through Lulu.com: $5.76
Old friends seen: 14
New friends made: 11
Cities I can see myself living in: 6
Cities I would never go back to: 0

Nagareru mama, sekai wo hashiru

2009-07-29T21:49:00.003-04:00

I'm ho-ome!

And it's an extraordinarily complex feeling. One of the most textured I've experienced. It doesn't quite fit into the rubric of happy or sad, relieved or disappointed, though all of those are facets of the feeling. A few things I want to write down before I shower, because showers are second only to good nights' sleeps in tempering our emotions, and I don't want to temper this one before I record it.

I'm relieved, of course. I've lived in this house all my life; I grew up in the room where I'm typing this post. This is not a hotel or someone else's house. I don't have to set up my laptop and fiddle with wireless networks. I don't have to find out whether the water is potable. I don't have to appraise the bathtub or curtains for adequacy. I don't have to fold out a bed or toss out the sleeping bag, nor test the mattress to see if it's safe to fall onto. I don't have to find an unobtrusive corner to empty my pockets on. I don't have to figure out where "gratitude" lies on the continuum from passive to active with respect to my current host. (Well, maybe a little.) The space I'm in is made for me to live in, and that is a relief.

I'm baffled, because although I spent forty-six nights on the road -- which felt like twice as long, three times, to the point where I can hardly remember what I was doing the last time I was in Fort Myers and look around my room with perplexity at what all these things are doing here -- the memory of the journey is already fading away like a dream. This old familiar place, so dense with memories itself, is drawing me back into that life and away from this one. Could it really have happened? Can I really have driven from here to Vancouver and back? It seems more likely I made it all up and spent the last forty-six nights zoning out on the Internet like usual. And with that thought comes a sense of great loss which I hope washes away in the shower, because it's so important to me not to forget what I did and all it meant.

I'm disgruntled, because my parents are both exhausted and couldn't give me the king's welcome that on some level I wanted. Mom is recovering from acute appendicitis and the ensuing surgery; she just got home from the hospital yesterday and is hardly walking, much less jumping up and down with excitement. Dad has been doing all the legwork involved in ferrying Mom and Grandma (who developed a carcinoma on her nose) to and from various doctors and doing all the chores that the ladies couldn't attend to, all on a bum foot with a six-month case of tendinitis and an artificial hip that needs replacing. For them, my being home is one more in a series of stressful events; they took it pretty much in stride, because they didn't have the energy to do anything else. And the whole place feels somehow bleached, like it was left in the sun too long and faded away into dotage while I was gone. I'm not sure the person I was yesterday fits into the place I'm in today. See also: Heraclitus, river of.

And perhaps above all I'm wondering where my closure is. You would think that finishing a journey would leave you with a sense of accomplishment, a tome to close and file in your mind's library. But no, I still feel like I might have to leave for another town tomorrow. Maybe it's just force of habit at this point, thinking "where next?" and "what now?" as I have most nights for the last month and a half. But I have the sinking feeling that it's not that: that I'm not feeling closure because I haven't left the trip closed. The roads may have come full circle, but the journey is not over and never will be until, perhaps, I die or go mad. There is so much left to do. I have an appointment with my shrink tomorrow; I need to get Blackbird's oil changed; my suitcases need unpacking; I need to call about our stove being broken; and I have a list of people banging down my door for tutoring now that I'm back in town, which will lead to further journeys, these down roads I've already wandered and am not really looking forward to treading yet again. I'm coming to the conclusion that no matter how many times one asks "Am I done yet?", the answer is always "No." Sometimes I'm in the mood to find that beautiful.

A last hurrah

2009-07-28T22:33:00.002-04:00

My drive today took me back to Eustis, north of Orlando. For only the second time this trip, I revisited a town -- the first was Seattle -- and for the second time I spent the evening hanging out with Alex (my Floridian friend from the Utena forum, who again is not to be confused with my brother Alex in Charlotte, my college friend Alexis in Seattle, or my new friend Aleksa in Chicago).

The drive, as so often happens, was not very interesting. It was marked by my final admission of defeat in the struggle to keep Zhuge Liang attached to the dashboard. (For those of you who read only periodically, Zhuge Liang is my GPS; I am not keeping an actual Chinese tactician attached to my dashboard. Or anything else, for that matter, but I'm getting to that.) The sticky disc the GPS came with gave out way back at Lake Tahoe. I'd been using double-sided tape to keep it mounted, replacing the tape periodically as the sun's heat melted the adhesive, but as both the GPS and the dash became increasingly marked up, the tape became less and less useful. Finally, I believe in Indianapolis, I decided to try Velcro. This turned out not to be such a great idea; the Velcro did not stick any better than the tape had, but its residue is much harder to remove. So with only a couple days to go, I threw up my hands and have been riding with Zhuge Liang perched in the front seat with my foxes. Sometimes you have to know when to say when.

Anyway, as I was trying to say, interstate driving is boring, especially in the South, where the road is flanked by generic trees and you can tell this is not an actual forest: you're not seeing landscape, just landscaping. So I listened to some NPR, cued up my favorite traveling songs, and sang along to lunch in Jacksonville and at last to Alex's house in Eustis. Here, after other nocturnal activities -- the 1984 edition of Trivial Pursuit at Olivia's Cafe (where it turns out Edgar Cayce is the right answer to every question), dinner at the Mason Jar, and watching Perfect Blue, to name a few -- we went out on Alex's porch to look for lacewings. We didn't find any, but we did discover the praying mantis. I mean that in the same sense that Columbus discovered America -- it may not have been new to other people, but it was new to him -- and the emotional content was the same as if we had never known such a thing existed. We oohed and aahed as she showed off her spindly, frightening arms as if posing for a textbook photo (which Alex's mother indeed tried to take). Eventually she marched off into the bushes, wagging her butt at us, leaving us to look instead for the large toads and tree frogs that densely populate Alex's yard and, apparently, her grill.

Tomorrow the two of us will drive into Orlando to meet Andrea, another forum friend. We'll tour some gardens and go to some kind of tea and coffee market that Andrea says is brilliant, and then, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, I will get in the car one last time and point it towards home. Tonight's is my 100th post to Lover's Lanes. In the spirit of adventure and shooting for beyond the horizon, my post from home concluding this long journey will be #101!

Through the monsoon

2009-07-27T19:55:00.003-04:00

Woke up, finished Haruhi, said goodbye to Alex -- who I hope very much to see again soon -- and left Charlotte for Savannah at about noon today. The drive was uneventful. I could not have guessed what was going to happen that evening.

I checked in at Savannah just after four and went exploring. I wanted to know how this town became famous for its beauty. I quickly found my own answer: it's the proliferation of Spanish moss hanging from every tree like Christmas streamers. Driving down a main boulevard is like taking a walk in the woods. After a stop at a used bookstore, I continued my sojourns with a trip east on US-80. You see, all this time I've been telling a fib. I've been calling this a coast-to-coast journey, and since I started on the Gulf Coast that is technically true, but that's not what people usually mean when they say "coast-to-coast." To really earn that title I had to see the Atlantic Ocean. I resolved that Savannah would be the place, and I chose right. To find the ocean I took the highway all the way out to Tybee Island, across bridges spanning the less solid parts of the swamp. Looking out over the railings of those bridges, I saw dark clouds gathering, and in the stormwrought half-twilight the bright grass and dark water clashed joyously. My heart beat faster.

My visit to the Tybee Island beach was quick and professional. I took pictures of the seagulls swarming a woman who was feeding them bread, then strode to the water to sample it. I can report that the Atlantic at Savannah is less salty than the Pacific at San Francisco and much less salty than the Great Salt Lake, and has a thinner consistency than either. These tasks done, my journey had spanned all the coasts. I turned around to go back to town...

...and ran smack into some Weather. In the hour I'd been gone, Savannah had begun taking what might loosely be called an urban bath, if you drop hairdryers into the bathtub a lot. I've driven through slightly worse rain on the interstates, but never through flash floods, and never through a storm so vicious and full of crackling electricity. The lightning was nonstop and deafening even from inside the car. One bolt struck a transformer on the opposite side of the road, which exploded like a shotgun and spat sparks into the air. My emergency flashers flaring a few feet into the evening, plumes of water overwhelming my tires and windshield, lightning crashing for moments on end into some unlucky tree not very far away, I thought: This is going to make a fantastic blog post.

If I asked you to guess what sort of restaurant I went to, you would be unable to match the truth for aptness. My eatery was the Pirates' House, a tavern which grew up around a shack built by James Oglethorpe's men in 1734 when Georgia was first colonized; by 1753 it was a functioning seafarers' inn. What I'm trying to say here is that this restaurant comes by its piracy motif legitimately, and that I am not the first to seek shelter from a storm within its walls. I chatted with the waitress (no, this is not usual weather for Savannah; yes, the cornbread is fantastic) and asked for the house specialty, fried chicken. The fried chicken was not only tender and delicious, but also -- bear with me, guys -- covered with a thick sauce of honey and pecans. I ate half a chicken as the thunder rattled the walls and nearby couples complained about the roof leaking.

By the time I had finished the storm had abated some, and the night had gone from invisible to pearly and luminous. Marveling at the astonishing light, I fought the storm one more time on my way back to the hotel. I believe I came all this way to be blinded by the sun's reflection in the Savannah pavement as it conquered the clouds, its inverse twin casting my shadow on the dashboard. And fuck me if, pulling into the Microtel at the end of this brief but eventful evening, I didn't see a double rainbow -- for the second time in my life, and the second time in the last two months -- arcing across the opalescent clouds, from one pot of gold to another.

Pics and it happened

2009-07-26T10:46:00.008-04:00

Charlotte has been a nice, cozy dream. I've been holed up with Alex playing D&D and watching anime and doing other things that don't photograph well. So this seems like the moment for another photo post!

Among my first views of Yellowstone National Park!

Mule deer like this buck are everywhere in Yellowstone. This particular specimen was grazing right next to the visitors' center. Attention whore!

Ground squirrels!!! They're a lot like the normal kind, but without the tails. These two live near the petrified tree, which makes me wonder if they eat petrified acorns.

But what of sweeping Yellowstone geological panoramas, you ask? Well, this is a start! It's hard to capture scenic beauty, because I've come to the conclusion that "scenic" means "uninteractive and remote," but this is one of the better landscapes that came out of that expedition.

Caterpillars or worms of some sort, crawling all over the handrail of a boardwalk in west Yellowstone. The other tourists were all grossed the fuck out. I was just wondering what they metamorphose into.

BUFFALO! This bison came close enough to the pullout that I could have touched him. I didn't. He looks very sad in this picture, but in real life he looks like a decaying zombie bison.

Yellowstone is of course known for its thermal springs. Here's one of them, practically unmarked, beside the road.

And here is a more famous geothermal feature: Old Faithful in mid-eruption! I have a picture of the geyser at full mast, but it's on its side and this picture does a better job showing what the geyser actually looks like.

Last Yellowstone picture. See the horizontal line in the center of the photo? That's where incinerated forest ends and live forest begins. The transition is that stark. Controlled burns, I guess?

Obligatory Mount Rushmore photo! TR looks left out back there.

And on the way back from Mount Rushmore, I stopped at the Reptile Gardens, which host an impressive collection of gross creatures. These are death's-head cockroaches.

This snake's name has been lost because I was careless about snapping the nameplates, but isn't he pretty? Don't you just want to give him a big hug?

The Reptile Gardens had a bird exhibition, too. Action Wildlife Photographer makes his return in this startling picture of a bald eagle striving for liberty against its oppressive and probably British captor!

The Reptile Gardens cost rather a lot to run.

The Badlands were to my mind much more dramatic than Yellowstone, but they were equally hard to photograph. They're like a mountain range in miniature!

The Badlands are not at all uniform in height, shape, or composition. Every turnout offers a different view!

A pic from the Sioux Falls butterfly garden. These two were kind enough to let me get close. One butterfly landed on me and gave me a kiss!

And in other insectoid news, here is the sculpture that welcomes you to Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. Made entirely out of scrap metal, this waspish monstrosity is a sight to see.

And here is the Forevertron itself! Towering over visitors in its steampunk glory and studded with strange machines and decrepit spiral staircases, it begs to be climbed on! But you're not allowed! >.<

A velociraptor menaces visitors to the dinosaur exhibit at the Brookfield Zoo in La Grange, outside Chicago. His head, arms, and tail move periodically to startle tourists. I can't imagine why these things needed to hunt in packs.

Aleksa was terrified and fascinated by the dinosaurs. She spent that walk clinging to me and cringing whenever an animatronic reptile looked at her the wrong way. But she enjoyed herself, and I did too, partly vicariously thanks to Aleksa!

Polar bear!!! Wait, polar bear? Yes, Brookfield has two polar bears. This one was one of the more active animals at the zoo; he showboated for us a little, lumbering around the front of his cage. His back is dyed green because of the chlorine in his wading pool. I have mixed feelings about that.

And at the other temperature extreme, camels! Two humps means these guys are Bactrian camels. I'm not sure whether you sit on a hump or straddle the space between them.

At Indiana University at Bloomington, the Lilly Library collection of rare books displays this lock of Sylvia Plath's hair alongside a couple poems she wrote. Who got a hold of a lock of Sylvia Plath's hair, why, and at what point did they decide it should be put on display for the edification of the public?

John James Jingleheimer Audubon's illustrated book of birds is as large as a toddler's mattress when opened, though because not many original copies remain I don't suggest you actually use it as such. Every week they turn the page, and this week was grackles!

The proper orientation of this photo of Ogle Lake, east of Bloomington, is left as an exercise to the reader.

And at last, here I am ensconced with Ruth and Robert in Indianapolis after a Haruhi Suzumiya marathon. I'm on the right. It's late in the evening and we're all a little tired, but an Utena forum member threatened to perform certain acts on us that don't bear repetition in a family blog if we didn't post pics, so here we are! Stay away from my butt!

I haven't taken many photos since Indianapolis, and I haven't uploaded the ones I have. I may get to make one more photo post before drawing this blog to a close. Tomorrow night, God willing, I'll be in Savannah, the next night in Orlando, and the following night... well, I'll be back in a place I've been away from for both too long and just the right amount of time.

Winning the Charlottery

2009-07-24T16:32:00.002-04:00

I've spent the last two nights with my brother Alex here in Charlotte -- not to be confused with my hostess Alex in Eustis, nor my hostess Alexis in Seattle -- and we have had multifarious Fun Thymes! Fortunately for the length of this entry, most of these Fun Thymes have been of a catching-up and sharing-cool-things nature that don't really need recapitulation here, except to say that I have infected Alex with the Haruhi Suzumiya meme I got from Ruth and Robert. I am an anime proliferation vector! But we've done other things, too. Most novel: rock climbing! I've never been rock climbing before, but on Wednesday I scaled a 25-foot wall and on Thursday a 30-foot wall at the National Whitewater Center. Guys, rock climbing is hard! My fingertips have muscles I didn't know about, and they hurt!

What struck me about rock climbing, which I think of as a dangerous sport, is how safe it is as practiced at the places I went. You can scale walls at four years old. It's all because of the belaying: a person or mechanism is gripping a rope run through a pulley at the top of the rock down to a secure (and package-flattering) harness strapped to your waist. If you fall off, which you will, the belayer controls the rate of your descent, and you land like a feather. For the same reason, you don't have to climb down, which would be perilous because you can't see what you're doing; once you've reached the top you just let go. As a result, what could be a terrifying activity is actually exhilarating, fun -- and very difficult for those of us who aren't especially flexible. Getting from one finger- or toehold to the next requires a certain amount of yoga and stern control of one's center of gravity. Otherwise, well, you get a free ride down the rope.

I also got to catch up with a college friend, Laura, who I haven't seen for five years over lunch this afternoon. She's living here in Charlotte working as a substitute teacher, having spent two years with Teach for America and another two in area high schools. But she's like me: education isn't a calling for her, not a career, just a job. Which is not to say she's not good at it!!! -- and anyone who works with inner-city middle schoolers has my respect -- but she and I are both holding out hope that we'll find something else out there. We also talked about creative writing; I shared a writing exercise I invented and Laura told me about a short-story she's writing and her problems coming to grips with how to write a monster convincingly. It was fun chatting like old times, though I was sorry I couldn't ask if she wanted to go to Edwardo's for dinner. I may get to see her again this evening, unless Alex and I end up playing D&D. And then there's a forum friend I'm hoping to link up with while I'm here! So much fun to have, so little time!

Bullet train

2009-07-21T23:58:00.004-04:00

Another missed post means more bullet points!

- Indianapolis activity 1: puzzles at the Lilly Library! This library, which houses UI's rare manuscripts and such, had an exhibition on mechanical puzzles ranging from tangrams to Rubik's Cubes to twisted pieces of metal you had to figure out how to separate. I accidentally spent two hours there playing with the puzzles! Also there: a gigantic edition of Audubon's guide to birds. They turn the page every week. This week was grackles, which seemed appropriate for the blackbird theme of the trip.

- Indy activity 2: hiking in Brown County! The sign said "Ogle Lake," so I did.

- Indy activity 3: watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with Robert and Ruth! I'd never seen the show before, and now I've seen the first five or six episodes (in broadcast order, not chronological; this is important). Now I too can participate in the fan-wankery over this show! It is a lot of fun, at least as far as this particular normal human being is concerned.

- Missing: cottonwood seeds. They'd been drifting across all the non-coastal interstates since Denver and I'd gotten to like them. Now I'm either too far east or outside of cottonwood seed season, and either way there's no more cotton drifting around. Also missing: Rene, Al, Aleksa, Ruth, and Robert. There's nothing like making new friends! -- and then having to drive away a couple days later. >.<

- Passed: a guy driving a beige car with a U.S. Marines bumper sticker. Thought: Hey, mister tan Marine man, play a song for me.

- Currently residing in: the Red Roof Inn in southern Knoxville, Tennessee. Entertainment: nature! Their Nature Center here has a parking lot eerily reminiscent of the Calusa Nature Center back home. Their trails, though, are more convoluted and easier to get lost in, which I did, to my delight! There was forest and rock and the Tennessee River and lots and LOTS of bright blue damselflies. Also attempted: McKay Used Books, a warehouse of a used bookstore that turned out to have the same isolating feel as Wal-Mart. I did not know a used bookstore could feel like that.

- Next stop: Charlotte!

I woke up in a car

2009-07-19T22:43:00.003-04:00

A "usual" day on this trip, if there is such a thing, is that I have a hotel on one end, a hotel or friend on the other, and some driving in between. Today was unusual in that I had friends on both ends! I spent this morning in Chicago helping Aleksa claim the last two Power Stars in Super Mario Galaxy; she has now unlocked Luigi and thinks I'm a video game deity (which, one gets the impression, is pretty high up there as deities go). But in order to have happy welcomings one first must have sad partings, and I said goodbye to Al, Rene, and Aleksa at around 10:30. As planned, I stopped at the Parthenon for lunch -- their slogan should be "nothing is ever as good as you remember it, except the Parthenon's saganaki" -- and then made for Indianapolis to stay with Ruth and Robert, aka Mylene and Paradox from the Utena forum.

I'd woken up early, at eight, to have time to play with Aleksa before leaving. (She slept in till 8:30 by accident, and yelled at her mom for not waking her up sooner.) As a result, on the way to Indy I encountered a problem: I kept nearly nodding off. That's no way to make a road trip, so I pulled over at a Mobil station and took a half-hour nap in the driver's seat. The reason this event was significant enough to mention in this space is that I'm pretty sure if I'd been making this drive a month ago, I'd have tried to soldier through the fatigue, thinking "well, I can't exactly pull over at a gas station and take a nap, can I?" It turns out that yes -- yes, I can -- and it feels good. I drove the rest of the way to Indianapolis full of energy and ready to meet two new friends!

And it turns out that Ruth and Robert are both swell people! Ruth's a public librarian, Robert a code monkey for the VA. They met on the Internet because of Sailor Moon, explored their shared geekeries on online forums, role-plays, and chat, and ended up going to school together at Purdue. They got married in 2003. This trip isn't about collecting love stories anymore, but if it were, this one would be a heartwarming tale about love persevering across distances (Robert is Texan, Ruth Indiananinian) and through economic hardship.

Yes, they're a sweet couple. They're also both wonderfully nerdy, so we spent much of the evening, including my first-ever dinner at a Japanese hibachi place rather similar to having a Mongolian barbecue right at your table, chatting easily about anime and video games and the Internet. You'd be surprised watching us to learn we were meeting for the first time! Shared subculture is a great social loosener, and of course it helps that we've been reading each other's forum posts for a couple years. In fact, things have gone well enough that I'm staying another night! I'll spend tomorrow exploring upstate Indiana -- there's a puzzle exhibition at a library in Bloomington, conveniently near some hiking trails that Robert and Ruth assure me are beautiful -- and then, time permitting, make the obligatory visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There's a race this weekend, so it might be an interesting time to visit! Unfortunately, I'll be making these trips alone, since my hosts have this "work" shit they have to do, but we'll be able to spend the evening together!

To avoid road naps tomorrow I'll go abed now. Until the morrow!

Most true of all the true, say we

2009-07-18T23:02:00.004-04:00

I missed an update yesterday for the first time in -- well, a while! That's because I'm having a blast in Chicago. This is the city where I went to college with many of the friends I've been staying with, including Wiley in Aurora, Sushu and Jono (the bride and groom) in San Francisco, and Alexis in Seattle. Here in Chicago, I'm staying with Jono's family: his mother and father Rene [sic] and Al, and his nine-year-old sister Aleksa. They are fantastic hosts! Aleksa and I have been playing a lot of Super Mario Galaxy. She got 100 stars by herself and we're trying to crack the last 20 before I leave tomorrow. These are some of the hardest stars in the game, which means they're stars I've attempted dozens of times at home, which in turn means that I've gotten disproportionately good at them; Aleksa is very deeply impressed and says she wishes I could stay here forever. :D Rene and Al have also been extremely welcoming, and took me to two fine eateries for dinner yesterday and today.

All this couldn't be better suited for the breather I needed Chicago to be. Video games and nice meals are a little taste of home here in the Windy City. I've managed to get out of the house as well, though: today I drove down to the university, where I took a deeply nostalgic walking tour of campus. I have memories attached to almost all of those buildings, and I remembered a few stories I'd forgotten just by walking by the places where they happened. There's also some new alongside the old: the street-crossing lights are the countdown kind now, and oh, right, there's a frigging enormous new dorm being built right behind my old digs in Burton-Judson. Everything was closed, of course, this being a Saturday in summer, but the feeling you get walking around your old college, a mix of nostalgia and mastery and regret, is powerful, an aesthetic experience in itself.

And then I went to Edwardo's, my once and future favorite pizzeria of all time anywhere ever. They tried to serve me a "mini-pizza," since I was alone, but I know their wiles: the mini-pizza is prefabricated and not half as good as a freshly baked pie. I got the delectable, made-from-scratch deep dish and downed it while thinking of all the times I'd been to that restaurant before, who I was with and what I was literally and figuratively carrying.

When I got back to the house, Rene took Aleksa and me to the Brookfield Zoo! It was full of the exotic fauna that most Americans only get to see in zoos. The giraffes were especially funny: the way one of them spread his front legs and stooped to get water, the way another spent ten minutes licking a tree trunk with her blue tongue. I also loved the monkey house, which is a spacious series of chambers that create a huge three-dimensional habitat for its simian inhabitants. Rene and Aleksa wouldn't go in with me because it smelled bad. In fact, it smelled like monkeys, that's all. My favorite exhibit in the monkey house was a gap in the wall inscribed with the text "Look through here to see primates behaving socially;" the gap looked back on the tourist path, and through it you could see all the zoo visitors chatting and gawking.

Social behavior, after a week of near-solitude, has been a fun challenge for me as well! It's complicated by the fact that both Al and Aleksa are hard of hearing; Aleksa in fact was born with a vestigial right ear with no canal and needs an unusual hearing aid for her left. Seating at restaurants and walking on paths always has to take into account who can hear out of which ear(s). Combine that with my own challenges understanding conversation, particularly in noisy and crowded places like zoos and restaurants, and you have all you need for some memorable interactions!

But these two halcyon nights in recollective and unseasonably cool Chicago are at an end with tonight's stay. Tomorrow I'll rustle up a lunch of flaming saganaki at the restaurant that invented it, another of my favorites from college, then make the drive to Indianapolis to stay with Ruth and Robert: two of my peeps from the Utena forum who I know only through their posts. Where I'll stay after that is still an open question; will I dart to Lexington to make Charlotte in two days, or take my time through Louisville and Knoxville? Either way, I'm slowly but surely heading southeast, back to where I began...

Various forms of steam

2009-07-17T00:02:00.006-04:00

As of this day, I have achieved the Grand Isthmic Bifecta: I have visited every major United States city that is built on an isthmus! That is, both Seattle and Madison! Congratulations to me!

Today I rode on a train as a result of asking a question I already knew the answer to. Here is how that happened. Last night I was looking for something to do between St. Paul and Madison, and in my Googling I came across something called Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. In an alternate universe, the Forevertron is a device designed to propel Dr. Evermor [sic] into space on magnetic lightning bolts or something; I didn't quite follow that part. In this universe, the Forevertron is the world's largest sculpture made entirely out of scrap metal. It looks awesome. It is every steampunk novel or RPG you have ever seen, done, or eaten, like Jules Verne and Ludwig von Beethoven collaborated on a lunar rover. It is also surrounded by other scrap metal sculptures, from gigantic to tiny, of insects and birds and little tiny protestors and such. These sculptures are clearly the life's work of the couple responsible for them, and there will be ample pics eventually.

But that's not what I was trying to tell you about. I was trying to tell you about this train ride. The thing about the Forevertron is that it's located in a junkyard with no physical address in the deep rural wilds of North Freedom, Wisconsin. Nonetheless, I had managed to pull directions off Google Maps and had written them down. You'd think I'd have been happy with that, but when I stopped for lunch on my way to North Freedom I happened to pass a tourist bureau, and on a whim I decided to stop in and ask if they knew how to get to Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. This question had gotten me weird looks at the restaurant, and it got me a weird look at the tourist bureau, too. The lady working there had never heard of it but was otherwise very helpful, and I mean that sincerely; once she realized I hadn't just made up a tourist spot she was all over Google and Wikipedia trying to get me an address. I stopped her, since I'd done the same already to no effect, but not before she told me that North Freedom is really known for its railroad museum with hour-long train rides on refurbished cars from the 1910s. A train ride, you say?!? I rushed to North Freedom and arrived just in time for the last railroad expedition of the day. It was fun letting the engineer drive for a change! I also learned that -- at least in those days, no idea if it's still true -- locomotives have both forward and reverse gears. So in theory the locomotive could have pulled us forwards to the quartzite gravel quarry that was our endpoint, then pushed us backwards to bring us back to our starting place. But that's not how you actually do it, because then the engineer couldn't see where he was going on the return trip. Instead, the engineer de-couples the locomotive from the rest of the train, runs the locomotive alone backwards along a set of parallel tracks, passing the cars, then runs it forward on the original track and couples it to the caboose. Then he pulls the cars back to the starting point in reverse gear. At no point does the locomotive make a U-turn -- you can't do that on a train track; the locomotive faces forward the entire trip, even though it's pulling backward for half of it. It's designed so that the engineer has line of sight in the direction of motion either way. This is probably something some of you knew when you were six, but for this suburban boy it was a revelation. So that's how they do it!

Not much to speak of this evening. Had a quiet dinner and ice cream at the University of Madison campus; still need to plot my evil deeds tomorrow morning and hopefully see something else that makes Madison cool before I go join Jono's parents for Thai food and subsequent hospitality in La Grange, a surburb of Chicago. (Spelling matters. If you type in Lagrange, Google Maps will send you upstate.) Sadly, the Forevertron trip left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, because I talked to a woman there, a local tourist if there is such a thing, who perceived that I was in a hurry, and I am indeed worried about being in too much of a hurry. I mean, just one day in the Twin Cities? You could spend a week there and just scratch the surface. I tell myself you pass through a lot of towns on a cross-country road trip and (without a ton of time and money) you can't delve into all of them. The trip's already taken longer than I expected it to. But in some sense I am hurrying, and I don't like that, because who knows how long it will be until I'm in North Freedom, Wisconsin again, you know? It's like speed dating. You're just getting to know the town, and then whoosh, it's gone, time for the next one. Fortunately, Chicago is a city that I already know at least a little bit from my four years in college there. I know some of the good restaurants and intend to reacquaint myself with them, while also enjoying the companionship of semi-familiar faces for the first time since Seattle. Two nights in a city I already sort of know means less hurrying. Onward, upward, and southeastward -- but not too quickly!

Emo but in a good way

2009-07-16T00:47:00.004-04:00

Bullet points today because of time management issues in connection with the slowth of Holiday Inn's Internet combined with my own slate of activities!

- I'm in St. Paul, Minnesota tonight. The drive from Sioux Falls was not arduous and doesn't want to stick in my memory. Driving is like dreaming. Sometimes you think of neat creative ideas, or you notice something and say "I want to remember that," but when you wake up it's gone. I should make more careful use of Kino for moments like that.

- Before leaving Sioux Falls I visited their butterfly garden! Hundreds of tropical butterflies flapping everywhere, absolutely beautiful, like flying flowers. They only live a couple of weeks, so the greenhouse is constantly importing more of them. My camera's batteries gave out, so I didn't get as many pictures as I might have liked, but fortunately I brought a cigarette lighter/AC adapter and charged the camera in the car.

- Before checking in at St. Paul I drove through Minneapolis. Gorgeous skyline! I stopped in at the Smitten Kitten, a somewhat netfamous adult toy store notable for their friendliness, professionalism, and sponsorship of the Sex Is Fun podcast. It's nice to be planning a visit to a city and have an "aha!" moment when you remember a place there that you never expected to be able to actually visit. The store's much smaller than I imagined, but the staff lived up to their reputation! And it turned out I even got 10% off the book I bought by mentioning the podcast.

- Later I returned to Minneapolis to the Acme Comedy Club for an hour and a half of fun times. This was at my brother's suggestion; he said he vaguely remembered going to a comedy club in Minneapolis, and that sounded like a fantastic idea to me. Some gems of jokes in there. Their headliner was very much an SMBC-style comedian, for those who know what SMBC is; basically, very good at saying something mundane to rather funny, and then saying something else that casts what he previously said in a completely new and utterly hilarious light. Simple example: "I hit a blue jay with my car yesterday. [Cue "awww" from audience.] Yeah, it's very sad. He may never play baseball again." His name was Emo Philips, and apparently I should have heard of him; he could have been George Carlin. Just now in the process of writing I Wikied him and was shocked to discover that he is a well-known comedian who actually is 53, as he claimed; he looked to me like a very talented thirty-year-old in a gray wig who was using a "slightly senile old man" persona as part of his schtick. Actually, he said he'd let his hair go gray for a movie. He wanted to get in cheaper.

Well, past my bedtime! Tomorrow I expect to be in Madison, Wisconsin; I was hoping to stay with my cousin Susan, but sadly on this day of all days she's going to be in Chicago, where I'm going to be the following night. D'oh! So Days Inn it is...

South Dakota, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain

2009-07-14T23:51:00.005-04:00

I survived last night's thunderstorms! No one seems to have been hurt by tornadoes, so it was a false alarm. Probably happens pretty often up here. Still, the memory of the hail and the shaking street lights is sort of unsettling.

To catch up with yesterday, I neglected to mention dinner, which I ate at a firehouse that had been converted into a microbrewery. (This provides some nice symbolic unity with my first stop of the trip, where I visited a firehouse that had been converted into a museum.) I had a microbrewed root beer! It was nice -- about halfway between grocery-store root beer and the dark, rather bitter stuff at the Fort Myers microbrewery restaurant, and better to drink than either one. I've mostly been avoiding soda this trip, but I make exceptions for unusual stuff. No other culinary adventures yesterday or today, though; getting enough calories at the right intervals in interesting restaurants has been a little problematic in Wyoming and South Dakota, so when I find a place to eat I tend to order something I know I'll like.

Also left over from yesterday are two odd phenomena about South Dakota. One is that some restaurants have smoking sections. I was taken aback to be asked "smoking or non?" when I asked for a table! The other is that in South Dakota, not only is gas very cheap compared to other states I've been to, but mid-grade "plus" gas is cheaper than low-grade gas. This bizarre inversion is present at every gas station I've seen in the state. I'm told it's because they put 10% ethanol in the mid-grade gas and get big tax breaks for it that allow them to lower the price, but then why don't they put ethanol in the low- and high-grade gas as well? An enigma the gas station attendant was not equipped to answer.

Today was mostly driving end-to-end through South Dakota. The big adventure of the day was the Badlands. For context, let me explain that South Dakota is basically four hundred miles of open prairie with one town (Rapid City) in the west and another (Sioux Falls) in the east, and today I drove from the former to the latter across all that prairie. I'm emphasizing the prairie here because the Badlands is utterly shocking, terrible and eye-boggling primarily because of the contrast it makes with the grass and scrub. The Badlands look like this:

Two hundred years from now, some mad scientist invents a tractor beam and a time machine. He travels back in time to millions of years ago, where he uses the tractor beam to capture several large asteroids full of ravines and ridges and odd jutting contours like nothing on Earth. In an attempt to destroy the world, he crashes the asteroids into what will become South Dakota; this causes the extinction of the dinosaurs. The asteroids, however, do not destroy the world as planned. Instead, the above-ground parts of the asteroids loom ominously over the Dakota prairie, emitting their odd chemicals into the soil and fouling the land and water. The grass tries to reclaim the land from the asteroids, hardy weeds cropping from the rock where they can find a foothold, but in the end this feeble growth only makes the asteroids look more unearthly.

The Badlands, of course, are not actually asteroids, but they should be. You look at them flabbergasted and say "how on Earth could that have happened?" (The answer is almost invariably "erosion," so it's better not to ask.) I liked them better than Yellowstone. Less wildlife, to be sure -- only a few brave species are well-adapted for life in the South Dakota Badlands, such as the critically endangered black-footed ferret -- but the terrain was truly different, while Yellowstone was just "things you've already seen this trip packed into a smaller space." Of course, I'm prejudiced by the sheer fun I had climbing over the ridges of the Badlands. You can pull over at any number of turnouts and trek as far as you care to into that country, every step treacherous, the dirt and clay loose under your feet. I climbed the north side of one ridge and got it into my head that I had to go down the south side, which was steeper. I went step by step as far as I could, but in the end I had no alternative but to crouch and slide down the side on my sneakers, ripping at the earth with my palms to keep from somersaulting down the rocky slope -- sneakerboarding, if you will. This could have torn my hands open but didn't, so it was a good day. Afterwards I chatted with a woman from Atlanta returning from her own West Coast road trip. She had wisely stayed on the boardwalk and suggested gloves if I should try that sort of thing again in the future. One thing I didn't think to pack...

Speaking of which, I haven't been doing badly on talking to strangers recently. I've swapped stories with this woman from Atlanta, a guy from Quebec, a Texan, a New Yorker, and some others. From our chats, I'm astonished how un-unique my journey is -- how many people share an experience like this one. My Atlantan traveled the Trans-Canada Highway, which is by some metrics the longest single road in the world, end-to-end and had a fantastic time. It seems almost everyone has driven coast-to-coast, though not too many have done it solo. Of course, my sample is biased -- I'm surveying only people I'm coming across in my own coast-to-coast trip full of places tourists go -- but it's interesting to reconcile my experience of Lover's Lanes as a personal and irreproducible journey with the ubiquity of the transcontinental road trip in the American collective consciousness.

A holy place

2009-07-13T22:12:00.006-04:00

In American Gods, the novel generally considered Neil Gaiman's best work in conventional prose, it turns out that America's holy places are the kitschy roadside stops that travelers flock to without ever being quite sure why. Pulling over to stare at the world's biggest ball of twine or whatever is a form of worship, according to Gaiman's mythos, and so when gods in America want to have a meeting, they hold it at a tourist trap that has been sanctified by the gawking of people like me.

By this metric, Mount Rushmore is possibly the holiest place in America.

It's just a bunch of presidents carved into a mountain. It's not even an especially impressive mountain by local standards, and the statuary is inconsistent; Washington's face is well articulated, while Lincoln looks like the artist forgot that people's heads have backs. But it's a symbol of America we rank just behind the Statue of Liberty and the bald eagle. And you know what, it is pretty awesome to round the corner and discover, wtf, there are presidents on that rock! And we've lavished so much attention on it that by reason of its popularity alone it has actually become a symbol of America up there with Lady Liberty.

I snapped a few shots, the same shots every tourist snaps, put in my worship, and went into the gift store to see if they sold the Constitution, as I thought they should, since the gentlemen on the mountain were among the luminaries who wrote it, fought for it, died for it. To my delight, a nicely bound Constitution was just $10! I picked it up -- a Mount Rushmore Constitution -- along with a similarly small volume containing the three poems Abraham Lincoln is known to have written and which I have never read. I'll let you know if he's any good.

I also need to write about the Reptile Gardens -- but first, oh my gosh, guys, the sky out there is getting dark! They're saying a terrible thunderstorm is heading towards where I'm staying in Rapid City, and there's a tornado warning out. It would be the day I'm doing my laundry. (The Days Inn has facilities.) So if you're not reading this, it may mean I'm being absorbed by a tornado and need your help right away!

Where was I? Right, the Reptile Gardens. The path to Mount Rushmore is like Carnival -- the parts that aren't federally protected, anyway -- lined with lesser holy places trying to pick up some of the mountain's powerful tourist radiation. I picked the Reptile Gardens to investigate, and it turns out the park's collection of reptiles is among the most comprehensive in America! They had at least half a dozen snakes of varieties that you literally can't see anywhere else in the country. I think it was the enormous animals that made the biggest impressions on me, though: the crocodile and the Komodo dragon...

Holy shit, the street lamps are shaking back and forth outside. I'm going to abbreviate this post.

P.S. Editing this entry to say I'm still not dead twenty minutes later, but I wanted to mark that today is the one-month anniversary of my departure. It staggers me to think I've actually taken care of myself okay for thirty days and nights, usually not sleeping in the same place two nights in a row, and have crossed America one and a half times in that span. (I'm definitely clear of the Rockies now, though the foothills persist; those mountains never end, they just roll away.) I'm both bolstered and sobered by what I've achieved. Now I just need some luck with the funnel clouds and I may even make it home in one piece!

P.P.S. It's hailing out. In mid-July. 70-mph wind gusts. The guy on TV says it's going to get worse.

The middle of nowhere

2009-07-12T22:14:00.007-04:00

I had a very lucky morning today, in the following way.

I'd made plans to take a long route through Yellowstone, but an hour into my explorations I realized I had forgotten my stuffed fox Kazuko at the hotel. I toss and turn a little in my sleep, and she must have fallen onto the floor and escaped my notice as I was packing. I panicked. It was already past check-out time, and I had no idea what the Super 8 does with stuff its guests leave behind in their rooms. I sped back to the hotel, going well over the restrictive Yellowstone speed limits (while still driving safely, I thought). And wouldn't you know it, I got pulled over for speeding for the first time in my life.

Here is where the luck comes in. As luck would have it, the officer who pulled me over had not had his radar gun turned on, and as a result couldn't issue me a ticket. He sent me off with a stern warning that if I was pulled over again in the next three days I would get an automatic ticket; the whole encounter took less than a minute. I was soon back at the hotel, where I discovered housekeeping had not gotten to my room yet and Kazuko was right where I'd left her. I restored her to my car with apologies, and I actually cried quite a bit. I'd been so scared I was going to lose her.

Which of course is rather odd. Over a stuffed fox I got myself pulled over and worked myself into a small emotional meltdown. I guess I can't attribute it to anything other than needing the familiarity that Kazuko -- the only other pair of eyes that's gone with me in every phase of this journey -- represents. I feel isolated and far from home. Maybe that's also why I found myself oddly unmoved by splendid Yellowstone, its peaks and canyons and steaming springs so different from Florida terrain. I didn't feel emotionally up to a hike, and apart from hiking all there is to do in Yellowstone is drive around staring at pretty things, all of which look pretty much the same. Thus it came to pass that I actually found myself bored in a national park famous for a breathtaking view around every corner.

Old Faithful I liked. The geyser's eruption itself was pretty aesthetically astonishing even to my jaded eyes, but I found the mathematics even more astonishing: the reason Old Faithful reaches the 150-foot height it does is that eight thousand gallons of water pass through a four-inch opening in about three minutes. What's more, the eruption was predictable down to the minute (2:07 PM), which I learned is more complicated than I thought; Old Faithful has long and short eruptions (defined as whether the eruption lasts more or less than two and a half minutes), and the interval after a long eruption, 90 minutes, is different from the interval after a short one, 65 minutes. There is nothing in between. There are no medium-length eruptions that produce intermediate intervals. The rangers didn't seem to have much of an idea why you get these two lengths and no others, though they were very helpful in explaining that the reason Old Faithful is so faithful is that it doesn't share its water source with any other geysers in the park, so there are few variables that could affect its timing.

The most moving thing in the park, though, was the color of the sky above Yellowstone Lake, a deep, pure sapphire blue that I've never seen in midafternoon east of the Mississippi (but saw once in Oregon), and which the lake reflected back a shade deeper and purer. That and the massive burnt forest, tree after tree barren like abandoned frameworks in a housing project almost as far as the eye can see, to my mind outdid the geyser for beauty.

Also beautiful: the green waters of Buffalo Bill Reservoir, somewhat east of the park, smooth and unruffled, with small grooved hills gently rolling out of them as though patting the reservoir on the head. In fact, I thought Wyoming got more beautiful once I'd left Yellowstone, the buttes more interesting, the gorges more -- well -- gorgeous. And at length the prairie set in, just grass and grass to the horizon, often flat, and that reminded me of home. There's a joke that since I've never been to Wyoming and I don't know anyone who has been, the state probably doesn't actually exist and cartographers just made it up to fill the space. Well, now I'm here, and I stand by it. This is the middle of nowhere. And I sort of like it.

I am also a fan of the little town I'm in tonight, Greybull. From these few hours' observation, Greybull is desperately trying to be the Wild West. The local steakhouse I went to tonight was all done up with adobe pots and rugs knit with the traditional Southwestern motifs, every other guy is wearing a cowboy hat, and even the blanket on my bed at the Greybull Motel is cowboy-themed. I half expected to see artificial tumbleweed made from Easter grass blowing across the road. I thought about why this was funny and realized that in a way, Greybull is the Wild West. Tiny town, built around mining (bentonite), everything falling down around the edges, most everyone just passing through... even the modern aluminum warehouses, dented and with piles of rubble everywhere alongside them, feel like they could be from Buffalo Bill's time. If you wanted to write a novel set in the modern Wild West, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Greybull.

Tomorrow I'm making for Rapid City, South Dakota. Depending on how I do on time, I may be able to tell you about Mount Rushmore and/or the Badlands tomorrow night!

More of a Boo-Boo than a Yogi

2009-07-12T01:53:00.003-04:00

Brief one today because it's late and I'm tired. I'm posting this from Gardiner, Montana, a tiny town in the south of the state that exists solely to serve as the northwest gateway to Yellowstone National Park. Originally I planned to spend two nights here, the better to see more of Yellowstone, but a combination of several things -- the price of the hotel, my eagerness to return east, and my early arrival at the park today, to name a few -- made me decide otherwise. Today I explored the northern reaches of Yellowstone end to end. This was not entirely planned. I had meant to go to Tower Falls, in the central north part of the park, and then go back. But coming out I managed to make a wrong turn that resulted in me driving all the way to the northeast corner of the park, actually reaching the exit before realizing I'd made a wrong turn. This was even more remarkable because the scenery was rather different than it had been on the way in, and everything had different names, yet apparently I noticed nothing wrong. I think the angel of adventure was steering at that moment.

But all went well. If I hadn't made that wrong turn, I wouldn't have seen the herd of easily over a hundred wild bison grazing on the mountainous plains. I wouldn't have seen a few curious bison up close, standing right next to (and in one case, on) the road, inspecting the traffic as if posing for photographs. Wild bison are ugly sons of bitches, with mats of fur and big dead black eyes. I would have preferred to see more of the small black bear, who flashed once between trees, visible only for a moment but in the center of my vision. He caused a traffic jam. I'd read about "bear jams" at Yellowstone, but I'd somehow thought they were caused by bears standing on the road; I now think they're mostly caused by tourists trying to photograph bears standing beside the road. In addition to these megafauna and some tame mule deer who live near the Mammoth Hot Springs, I made the acquaintance of some odd rodents who look like squirrels but have almost no tails, or like large chipmunks but with no markings, and also two species of insect I haven't come across before. One in particular, which emits a loud flapping buzz as it flies, is paranoid and extremely well camouflaged, lost against the scenery the moment it alights and impossible to photograph.

Of course the scenery is beautiful, but other than that it is unremarkable.

At several points during the day, such as when I glimpsed a hawk perching atop a nearby rock in a picturesque fashion as I drove past, I wished I'd had the presence of mind or reflexes to take a snapshot (as I did of many other scenes today). I caught myself slipping into the "pics or it didn't happen" mentality that is why I distrust cameras in the first place. So I want to state right now that there was a hawk, he was perching on a rock, and he was very handsome, and although I would like to share the moment with you, it happened whether you can see him or not. I remember.

Tomorrow? Cody, Wyoming, if the park ensnares me as I take the long loop through it past Old Faithful and Yellowstone Lake; or Greybull, Wyoming, if I am less captivated. The angel of adventure is pulling for Cody.

Angelus rampant

2009-07-10T22:55:00.006-04:00

Woke up, got dressed, drove to Missoula. That was my day, mostly. It takes about seven hours to get to this mid-sized university town in Montana from Seattle. I was eager to get off to a strong start on my way back to the east coast, and seven hours in the driver's seat -- taking me through all of Washington, the Idaho "panhandle," and western Montana -- qualifies. On the drive I listened to "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (my second to last audiobook -- must practice conservation!) and watched the forests transform into high plains in hilly and occasionally dramatic fashion. One hillside had lots of trees but no brush whatsoever, creating a ghost town effect. While I gained some altitude today, I've hardly begun to re-penetrate the Rockies. Those mountains are not something you drive across in a day, though you can get across the wicked part in a day. Today was canoeing down the Hudson River; the wicked part is canoeing down Niagara Falls.

Since I have so little else to say today, I thought I'd post an imaginary dialogue that I think does a pretty good job illustrating what most days are like for me out here. This is how I got dinner tonight. I hung up with my parents saying I was going to Perkins to get some comfort food after some subpar Ethiopian last night. But the angel of adventure, who was sitting beside me, said, "Nay! We shall at least check Google Maps first to see what unique local eateries might be in the area!" I let him do it, and he discovered that in downtown Missoula there is a place called MacKenzie River Pizza Co that Google Maps rates five stars. "Let us then abscond to the pizza place," he said. "But Perkins is right down the road and I know it'll be good," I protested. He chided me: "Lo, you have been bugging Us for good pizza for weeks now, and now that pizza appears on Our doorstep you wish to eat at Perkins?" "Fine," I said, and we got in the car.

We drove downtown, a short and pleasant drive, and there was a wait. While we waited for a table, we looked at the menu. "I can't wait to have some of this classic mozzarella," I said. "Hold!" replied the angel of adventure. "It says on this menu that this is a gourmet pizzeria, and therefore we shall have gourmet pizza!" "Mozzarella can be gourmet," I pointed out. "Mozzarella is less likely to be gourmet," said the angel of adventure, "than a Thai Pie, which is a pizza in which tomato sauce has been replaced with peanut sauce, and which is topped with basil chicken, mandarin oranges, scallions, red peppers, peanuts, and cilantro!" "Is that even a pizza?" I asked. "I do not know!" answered the angel excitedly. "Therefore, let us order it and find out!" "I was promised pizza," I grumbled. "And verily, you are getting a Thai Pie," said the angel.

The Thai Pie, to my surprise and frankly I think to the angel's too, was indeed a pizza, and it was delicious. It was more delicious than mozzarella would have been.

Now to the pictures!

Speaking of angels, here's the statuary trumpeter atop the central cathedral in Salt Lake City, Utah, at sunset. No post-production effects have been applied to this picture. This is how it really looked.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, through the fence on the south end. This is not the classic view of the bridge, which is taken from Marin County on the north end on a clear day, but this picture is closer to the reality of the bridge as I experienced it in the fog.

Jono Xia (nee DiCarlo) denounces the evils of socialism in full wedding regalia.

Sushu and Jono, all dressed up in their self-designed wedding couture. Aren't they radiant?

Brian Auriti, Action Wildlife Photographer! That is a wild deer who lives on a steep and exhausting three-mile trail in Muir Woods in Marin County. The hike was beautiful but did not photograph well.

Run, it's a tsunami! Oh wait, no it's not, that's just the fog rolling in on Pacifica, the Bay Area town where the Raskin clan lives. I stayed one night in their place. Never having seen a tsunami, I actually was momentarily worried when I glanced out of my car window and saw this panorama.

And in less threatening landscape capture, the sun sets here on quite a different bay, eight hours' drive away in Waldport, Oregon.

Run, it's the Fremont Troll! This guy lives under a bridge in Seattle and is a piece of public art. The things I learned in Seattle were generally less photographable than the things I learned elsewhere, so this is the only picture from Seattle in this batch.

One of a thousand views of the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver. Photos are not very good at capturing motion or depth, two elements very important to understanding how beautiful this garden is, but I couldn't very well not include any photos of this tranquil place.

And a few blocks away, here's Vancouver pot culture. It's a little blurry because I was holding an umbrella in the other hand. Does rain bring out the potheads, or is downtown Vancouver always this smoky?

I touched the moon! This was at the otherwise not very interesting astronomy museum in Vancouver by the southern bay. The rock was very smooth, worn down by God knows how many thousand or million fingers.

Vancouver as seen from Queen Elizabeth Park, the highest point in Vancouver. Funny how in many ways this view is better than any view of the city I took from atop the tourist tower (visible at right; it's the one with the needle) or the skyride at Grouse Mountain (the one on the right).

Wildlife Photographer 2: Electric Cockatoo! At Queen Elizabeth Park there is a greenhouse containing a wide variety of tropical plants and birds -- yes, in Canada. I don't know what species this guy is, but he very much enjoyed strutting his stuff for all the photographers.

And here is an axe thrower at the lumberjack show at Grouse Mountain. The axe is actually in the air here, near the target at about two o'clock from the bullseye; you can see it against the light brown pole if you look carefully. He landed the bullseye a fractional second after the moment frozen here.

There! Now I can procrastinate on posting a whole new set of pictures, once I have some! :D

Repatriating

2009-07-10T00:55:00.003-04:00

I spent the morning and early afternoon exploring Grouse Mountain, which, like everywhere else in Vancouver, was under heavy construction that blocked off some of the paths I'd really wanted to walk, but which, also like everywhere else in Vancouver, was a pleasure to walk around. Grouse Mountain is sort of a small mountain Disneyland. You take a skyride -- a hundred-person gondola -- to get up, gazing out the windows at breathtaking vistas of the entire Vancouver metro area, which the mountain overlooks. Or at fog, if it's this morning. There were places where the fog was so thick you could only see two trees at a time in the dense alpine forest outside the carriage. The lack of a view was disappointing, but I was cheered by the prospect that I was going to explore a park located inside a cloud, which would have gone into my wedding story if it had happened earlier in the trip.

The highlight of my time at Grouse Mountain was the chair lift. I got there at a time no one else was there, and took the fifteen-minute lift to the mountain peak without seeing another soul... through the fog... in near-perfect silence. You could be moved without even trying. There was nothing to do at the top for those of us who don't want to spend $70 to ride a zip line, but you could ride the chair lift down again, which was just as fun as riding up. The lift plus the lumberjack show -- watching a couple extremely talented saw operators ham it up for the two-hundred-strong crowd, racing to chop logs and throwing axes at bullseyes thirty feet away with deadly accuracy -- was probably just about worth the price of admission. One of them used a chainsaw to carve a baby chair out of a log in under a minute, and gave it away to a mother in the crowd. Good times in spite of the mist, and when I went back down the skyride some of the fog had burned off and I got some great pictures after all.

And then I drove back to Seattle. Vancouver was a good time! I have to say, though, that it didn't feel very different from a town in America. Apart from the different currency and the unpatriotically starless and nearly stripeless flags, there was nothing quintessentially Canadian about it, nothing that screamed "YOU ARE IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY." Indeed, I caught myself thinking about Vancouver in terms of Seattle geography twice. I didn't hear the word "aboot" once, nor see the glory of socialized medicine in action (though I did get to hear a rant about what a mess the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has made of crossing the border and the ensuing economic downturn), nor see a lot of French signs once I was out of the federally maintained border area. So Vancouver was basically another typical Pacific Northwest city, only with flashing green lights that don't change for cross traffic but do change for pedestrians. Nice enough, but I don't feel that my soul is forever captive to that skyline or that country. I'd go back, though.

I was hoping to post photos tonight, but the Internet is being slow and reluctant, and Blogger's picture uploading tool is sluggish at the best of times. I've been staring at the "uploading" screen for twenty minutes. Photobucket is likewise uncooperative. For my own reference, though, the pictures I want to post are numbered 193, 255, 267, 277, 322, 334, 340, 346, 362, 367, 380, 391, 416, and 428 -- whew, that's a mouthful! One of them will be subtitled "Wildlife Photographer 2: Electric Cockatoo." (I don't know if the bird in question is actually a cockatoo. Maybe one of you can help me!) Perhaps tomorrow I will post the pictures, if I have time? -- when, God willing, this blog will come to you from Missoula, Montana, en route to Yellowstone!

Kingsway

2009-07-09T02:15:00.003-04:00

I drove to Granville Island first today -- peninsular in truth -- an oddity, at once for tourists and Vancouverites, where toy stores flank the artists' spare boudoirs. I saw a fleet of private yachts for sale, so many that the bay they rode were parched. I dined there at an overpriced cafe (organic free-range eco-chicken breast -- they'd call it vegetarian if they could) and walked the rather overcrowded ways. I almost bought a plush toy fennec fox, but didn't like the roughness of its locks.

I forged ahead to see the space museum, a disappointing place that seemed as though it came from when Atari was high-tech and people were impressed by flashing lights. They spent their budget, every silver cent, on simulated-motion rides to Mars and one enormous planetarium; the rest was photos you've already seen. The writing and the acting both were canned, but I'll admit their starry sky was grand.

Vancouver's half Chinese, and I've been told their dim sum is the continent's most lush. It falls to someone else, alas, to praise such fare firsthand, for I could not discern the way to lay one's hand upon those buns: I tried three places, failed to eat three times. My Western expectations led me wrong; I wasn't seated, told to seat myself, or shown a counter whence to order food, but entered indistinguishable space. I couldn't tell the patrons from the hosts, and no one stood to say hello to me. As I don't know a word of Mandarin, I ended up with more pan-Asian fare, a chicken moo shu at a nearby place where printed menus put the English first. Authentic it was not, but to be fair, it tasted more substantial than thin air.

The day's redemption came at Shakespeare's hands: I'd made a reservation for a show at 8 PM beneath a circus tent, a yearly celebration of the Bard. I came at six to snag a better seat (the waiting's part of this tradition's lore). I passed the time conversing with a guy from forty minutes north, a frequent guest who told me all the things I should have done instead of the museum and the park. Some I will do tomorrow, some I can't; we live and learn and hope to rule ourselves. At eight the kings and earls began their rounds -- corruption, wisdom, treachery, and woe, all written to become a grand cliche. Richard II is an awesome play.

But I'm exhausted, sore, and still without a clear plan for the morrow's parting joys. As Calvin said, it's hard work having fun, and right now what I need's a bath and sleep. For them, then, I will quit my pen and ink. Blank verse is somewhat harder than you think.

I'm coming to your country, guy

2009-07-08T00:13:00.004-04:00

Today I left Seattle for lands to the north. I was not disappointed.

It was no more than a couple hours from Seattle to the Canadian border. The other traffic was almost exclusively Washingtonian, and I felt special for being a Floridian on the road to Vancouver. The border crossing team thought I was special too; when I told them it was my first time in Canada they had me park and go inside for a security check. I gave them my passport, car keys, and cell phone -- harsh! -- and waited in a folding chair until they cleared me to enter their country and be an expatriate for a couple days. Then I drove to East Vancouver while singing what I can remember of the Canadian national anthem, as well as, for some reason, the "Charge of the Light Brigade" song my brother made up fifteen years ago. It's his birthday today (the 7th). Happy birthday, Alex!

Though the cities are comparable in size, Vancouver driving is different from Seattle's. In Seattle, I-5 and I-90 pierce downtown and are major urban thoroughfares. By contrast, there are no highways that run through Vancouver. BC 99, which took me to the city, stops being a highway when it enters city limits. I'm not sure what drove this decision; the lack of a central artery robs one of a way to orient oneself within a city. On the other hand, interstates are ugly and no one likes them; long-distance travelers like me especially hate them when they run through cities we don't intend to visit.

The good news, when I crossed the border, was that Zhuge Liang (as I dubbed my GPS, after the Chinese strategist) knows Canadian roads! The bad news is that, as I learned online, downtown parking in Vancouver is very, very expensive and time-consuming. So after establishing myself at the Days Inn, I hopped a bus. It was my first public transit of the trip, and getting on the right bus (the 19) going the right direction (downtown) to the right place (Pender and Carrall) was an adventure. I almost couldn't get on; bus fare is $2.50 and requires exact change, and the smallest thing Bank of America had given me when I visited them in the morning was a ten. But by a stroke of good fortune, the fare machine on the 19 I hopped was out of commission, which meant I got a free ride!

Where was I going? Well, to the obvious place when one visits Vancouver, of course: the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden! Apparently twenty-three years ago a master Chinese architect came to British Columbia and, taken aback by its beauty, offered to design a scholar's garden in the style of the Ming Dynasty in downtown Vancouver. British Columbia obligingly bussed in sixty builders from China who were schooled in traditional fifteenth-century methods of architecture and had them erect a garden using only the materials and techniques that would have been available in Ming China, right down to the then-contemporary understanding of Feng Shui. The result is fucking gorgeous. Though situated on just three-tenths of an acre, the garden feels like it must be ten times as big due to the manifold and canny tricks of perspective employed by the architect. You can look at a stone, take two paces left, and look at the same stone again, and you'd swear it was a different stone in a different setting. And all the perspectives would be breathtaking if they weren't so serene. What's best, perhaps, is that the garden is no replica, not a copy of some Ming garden in China; it is an original, built to take best advantage of the space and scenery of Vancouver. There's even a red maple tree planted alongside bamboo in the eastern (yin) side of the garden to symbolize the union of China and Canada in the accomplishment of this project. This is the sort of thing you only get to see once, so if anyone visits Vancouver, look this garden all the way the fuck up. Take the guided tour.

Oh, and go on a rainy day. It turns out cool, rainy days in early July are the best time to see Vancouver; everything's open but there are no crowds, even downtown. I got lucky, because today was just such a day. Vancouver rain is the finest rain I've seen, transparent and inaudible; you go out without an umbrella because it looks like such a light rain, and a block later your clothes are soaked. Fortunately, I brought an umbrella, and it protected me as I went to a big ol' downtown tower to snap some shots of the city from up high. I walked to the tower from the garden, about eight blocks, along Hastings Street through the center of downtown. The pot-smoker concentration in that area was even bigger than Portland's. What follows is an actual conversation I had on the way to the tower:

"Hey, man, you have the time?"

"Sure! Um, 7:05."

"Cool. Man, you want a toke?"

And it was thus that I learned that if you give someone the time in Vancouver you will be offered a joint. I declined. Marijuana is de facto decriminalized in Vancouver: it's illegal, but no one's likely to cuff you for it as long as you don't call attention to yourself. I will post later a picture I took of a pot-related merchandise outlet situated next door to "The Amsterdam Cafe." As an American I find this highly amusing, along with the bilingual road signs (everything's in French, even though I heard a lot more Mandarin and Spanish today than I did French) and more liberal attitudes about sexuality. (One store near the garden played a song whose refrain was "birthday sex, birthday sex" over the speakers, and one of the buses I took had a free sex-ed ad up top.)

It's funny how long this post got, and how much longer I could make it go on, considering that all I did today in the way of touristy stuff was go to the garden and tower. The lesson is that when you're on the road in a really new place, a lot of small things become adventures. I could talk about the very yummy pho I got near the hotel (it's a Vietnamese vermicelli variant that uses rice noodles, for those who don't know; I discovered it first in SF). I could talk about how Canada has $1 coins and $2 coins, and how weird it feels to carry a $2 coin around in your pocket, and how Canadian coinage makes different clinking sounds from American. I could talk about the beautifully tranquil traditional Chinese-style framed painting I practically stole at $15 from the garden gift store, the cheap price being for no reason other than that it was done by a Caucasian -- who the lady at the counter raved to me about, saying how sincere the girl who painted it was and how much that girl would love to hear from me by email how much I liked the painting. I could talk about how the posted gas prices in Canada don't look like gas prices in America -- no decimal point, strange configuration of digits -- and I still haven't figured out what that's all about. There's so much! But this will have to serve, as I need to lie in a warm bath with a Neil Gaiman book and recover from all the fun I'm having. Today was beautiful.

Late light

2009-07-07T02:42:00.005-04:00

The sky stays light very late at this latitude. 9:45 and there was still light in the sky here in Seattle, even now, two weeks off the solstice. (Has it been two weeks since the solstice? Is it possible there's only a week left until I'll have been away from home for an entire month?) The length of the daylight is disorienting and strange, and it will only be stranger tomorrow, when I make my drive to Vancouver. I'll arrive in time for a late lunch, I think, and spend the day downtown. Unstructured time, guided a little by my reading at the invaluable wikitravel.org. Since I'm going all the way to Canada I might as well spend some extra time, so July 8 will be entirely in the city, and I have a reservation to see Richard II at Vanier Park that evening. In the process I'll need to figure out how public transit works in Vancouver, since parking downtown is likely to be an expensive hassle and my GPS doesn't have Canadian maps anyway. And I'll be alone for the night for the first time since hitting San Francisco.

I'm nervous about tomorrow. More nervous, actually, than I was on June 12, the eve of this whole great adventure. I think the difference is that on June 12 I knew that, if things went terribly, I could be home again on June 14. But the port I'm setting out from tomorrow is already across the continent from my comfort zone. This, of course, is why I'm going to Vancouver. Seattle is the farthest I knew I would get from Fort Myers if all went well, but if I go that far and no farther, I'll feel like I'm straggling home. Vancouver is a victory lap: a way to say to myself, convincingly, "and there's more where that came from." And there is. But I'm nervous anyway.

My time in Seattle has been important. It's a city they've got here -- decisively bigger than Portland, I found to my surprise; more to see, more right and more wrong turns to make. There was a shooting in front of the community center three blocks from Alexis's flat yesterday while we were fooling around in the farmers' market. On the other hand, there's a lot to love here, too, and I'm not talking about the kitschy (but kind of cute) Space Needle; I'm talking about the blackbird art in the UW library, the used bookstores that give 20% off if you know what book a quote comes from, the fact that this is simultaneously the town of Boeing and Starbucks, Bill Gates and Dan Savage. I like that Seattle's City Center, where we are, supports not one but several Ethiopian restaurants, a kind of cooking I didn't know existed until a few days ago. I don't think I would want to live here. But if I did live here, there would be a lot to love. Seattle is a city that has got a personality, distinct and complicated; it doesn't feel schizophrenic like San Francisco, monomaniacal like Winnemucca, or empty like Hays. I don't think we're compatible, Seattle and I. It is too much like Alexis's cat, adorable and fickle. But I understand this place now in a way that goes beyond "it's a town in Washington."

I'll probably be back in Seattle on Thursday. But from now to then, it's north...

Fuck yeah America

2009-07-05T02:40:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, July 3, I arrived in Seattle just as planned and commenced celebration! I've now driven corner to corner through this country of ours, and have completed this phase of the journey in time to celebrate our national birthday. Seattle was built amidst a Byzantine maze of rivers and lakes, and it was Lake Union, in the heart of the city, that Seattle chose as the site of its Fourth of July celebration. The lakeside Gas Works Park, itself built upon the ruins of a defunct power plant, was the center of the celebration, so of course Alexis, Aviva, and I avoided it like the proverbial restaurant no one goes to anymore because it's too crowded. Instead we found a nice public pier on one side of the lake to watch the show from.

The story of how we found the pier is itself worth telling and involves a firecracker, a frying pan, and the Seattle police department. The firecracker was employed by the neighbors in holiday festivities at about 2 PM, when we three were at Safeway, and caused a fire to start on Alexis's lawn. The frying pan was also employed by the neighbors, this time to put out the fire. The Seattle police department was employed by Alexis to file a nuisance complaint to cover her butt in case the landlady wondered why there was a five-by-twelve scorch mark on her lawn, and while they were here ("Ma'am, are you aware you're not supposed to set your lawn on fire?") Alexis asked where we should watch the fireworks from. They suggested the east shore of the lake, so that's where we went. Through the help of a privately employed security officer, we then discovered a pier that most people didn't know about or notice, yet which was perfectly public and centrally located -- best seats in the house if you don't own a boat. Anecdotally, I heard over eight hundred thousand people were there, eyes focused like mine on the water.

While we waited for the big show to begin, we picnicked on salad and sandwiches, chatted, did Tarot readings, had poking contests, and watched the various illegal private fireworks shows light up the sky as the sun dipped below the horizon. But when the real show started and the first glittering flares went up from the barge, the breath was taken away, and it didn't come back until the final explosions twenty minutes later. There were spheres, cubes, smile faces, planets, and stars; the booms had shapes too, but English doesn't have easily accessed words for them. The magnitude of this fireworks show could be measured on the Richter scale. It was a fantastic fucking show. I'll tell you, whatever faults it might have, let no one say America can't paint the sky gold.

The show ended at quarter till eleven, and there was a little traffic, and long story short I'm exhausted from all the cheering and swearing. I'm going to bed. Tomorrow Aviva will say her tearful goodbyes and board a Greyhound bus back to Portland, and sometime soon -- the next day? -- I will say a goodbye of my own, kick patriotism across the curb, and set sail for Vancouver.

Internal Oregons

2009-07-03T02:27:00.004-04:00

Up from Waldport to Portland today! After the promised hike to the top of a foxglove-lined Cape Perpetua trail and the gaping at its nonpareil view of a surf-beaten Oregon coast, we piled back in the car and undertook what seemed like a short jaunt compared to yesterday's marathon. Our one stop amidst the pine forests was at the cheese factory in Tillamook, and if that doesn't sound like a good time to you then you have clearly never been to the Tillamook cheese factory. Their signature product is cheddar, and based on their samples it is by my estimation very fine. But what was even better was their ice cream -- I had two scoops of blackberry -- and what was even better than that was the production floor. So many machines and people working in tandem, executing one of the innumerable minute steps between milk and packaged extra sharp cheddar cheese! It was like something out of Adam Smith -- or Rube Goldberg. Totally worth taking the detour rather than the direct route to Portland.

We arrived in Portland before six, leaving plenty of time to explore. Isaac grew up here and Alexis lived here for a few months; between their narratives and our foray downtown, I've already had more education about the culture and characteristics of Portland than about most of the other cities on this trip. Here are some tidbits before I pass out from exhaustion.

1. From the perspective of Isaac, a musician aspiring to become professional, the distinguishing feature of Portland is its very lively indie music scene. Sometime in the last decade, downtown Portland became Mecca for both "hipsters" and "aging hipsters," to Isaac's mixed delight and disgust.

2. Portland has cable cars and light rail in the same places, often with intersecting tracks. Bicycling is also big. As a result, bicyclists commonly get stuck in the grooves of the PT rails, leading to nasty falls. There are yellow signs illustrating this road hazard.

3. One can have any kind of cuisine one can imagine in Portland, served out of a van that camps out in the same place every day like a restaurant on wheels. I had Indian food tonight. It was average in quality but cost $5 for twice as much as I could eat, so you don't hear me complaining.

4. To celebrate saving money on dinner, it is possible to go to Powell's Books to spend money on books instead. Powell's is a new and used bookstore that must be three times the size of the Barnes & Noble in Fort Myers -- three enormous floors of books of all subjects and languages and editions. I bought three, including a book that's been out of print for twenty years and is difficult to find at a good price online.

5. On the first Thursday of every month -- like today -- downtown art galleries have free exhibitions, drawing out the art crowd. Perhaps as a result, today I saw a greater density of people obviously hopped up on one illicit substance or another than I have ever seen before in my life.

6. Especially during the recession, which has hit Oregon hard, Portland's downtown businesses have a very high turnover rate. The places where Isaac hung out when he was little are gone, as is the place where his dad used to buy cookies. One porn shop literally disappeared off the face of the earth overnight, leaving a vacant lot on the corner. You have to be paying close attention to the indie scene to know where the culturally important clubs of the moment are (and generally you have to sell your own tickets to play at one and receive some fraction of the proceeds).

Tomorrow, after a nice sleep on a mattress at Isaac's dad's house, I'll explore Portland some more with him and Alexis and perhaps Aviva, who lives up here and drove separately. Then in the afternoon Alexis and I will make for Seattle, arriving neatly before Independence Day so that we can relax on the Fourth instead of fighting traffic. Till then!

What not to do while on a road trip

2009-07-02T01:06:00.003-04:00

When I drove from Eustis to Atlanta in a day, then drove from Paducah to Kansas City in a day, those were some pretty long hauls. They were about as far as I'd want to drive in a day. They were also substantially shorter than today's drive, which took me virtually nonstop from Pacifica, in the south Bay Area, to Waldport, Oregon, about halfway up the Pacific coast of that state, on Route 101, which is two lanes and 55 mph for much of the way. I spent twelve hours in the car, getting on the road at 7:30 and not stopping till Waldport at the other 7:30. I will not be doing that again this trip if I can reasonably help it.

Fortunately, having friends in the car makes time go faster! Alexis and Isaac both joined me for this leg of the trip and kept me awake. I arrived rather happy and wired at the home of an online acquaintance of Isaac's, whom he was meeting for the first time -- a beautiful house overlooking Alsea Bay and the Pacific Ocean -- which is where I'll be sleeping tonight. On the way we somehow managed to squeeze in a few en-route adventures. We stopped for lunch in Arcata, where I had an enormous burrito (the first burrito I've ever liked, though I was intimidated by its size), followed by a regional treat called an It's-It: vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two soft oatmeal cookies and with a chocolate shell. Absolutely delicious, of course, and how could it not be. Apparently northern Cali is the only place you can get them!

In Oregon I made a surprising discovery: it is illegal to pump one's own gas in Oregon. All gas must be pumped by a gas station attendant. Isaac, who lives in Portland, says this idiosyncracy is just make-work, and I expect he's right. Nevertheless, gas in Oregon is a quarter cheaper than gas in northern California.

Driving up the coast, we saw some of the most amazing scenery of the trip in the form of enormous redwoods, white water and beaches on the Pacific, and cliff faces that looked like something out of an adventure or romance film. Tomorrow we'll likely head back south a few miles to properly check out the trails around Cape Perpetua, then make what I'm assured is an easy three-hour drive to Portland. And then, the world!

Verbal snapshots

2009-06-29T18:06:00.004-04:00

Until today, when a hike in Muir Woods yielded them in abundance, I've almost completely neglected to take any pictures of my manifest and wonderful activities since Friday. Things have happened quickly, a camera would have been inconvenient, I plumb forgot, etc etc. -- but I do think I've been more in the moment without one. In the absence of such pictures, though, there are a few memories I need to preserve in words for recollection.

- Standing atop a boulder at Golden Gate Park and looking down at nearly the entire city of San Francisco from the hillside
- Running across the wet beach in my sneakers to taste the Pacific Ocean. It is salty, but not as salty as the Great Salt Lake. Its waves are bigger, though. In fact, they're bigger than Gulf waves, which accounts for this coast's legendary surfing.
- Making enormous bubbles at the Exploratorium, then making enormous smoke rings at the Exploratorium, then making enormous towers on wobbly tables through the use of counterweights at the Exploratorium
- 1999-Sushu's letter to 2009-Sushu, written ten years ago as an essay for her Chinese class, which correctly predicted what she would major in, her current unemployed status, and the fact that she'd have a wonderful boyfriend; she also admonished herself not to get complacent, as hard times are ahead. Sushu's mother presented the letter via overhead projection at the dinner.
- Jono's extemely sensual presentation of the Rocky Horror Picture Show's "Transsexual Transylvania" at karaoke
- Wearing the Raskins' python as a hat
- The plenitude of Asian restaurants in the Bay Area, and the extremely concrete and real distinctions between Japanese, Thai, Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Szechuan...), Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian, Cambodian, and other Asian food, in contrast with Fort Myers' all-pan-Asian all-the-time approach

And then today I went for a marathon hike on the steep trails of Muir Woods. It was about a 2.5-hour walk during which I climbed, then descended, over a thousand feet through a gorgeous redwood forest and a rolling meadow with amazing views of the surrounding hills. I met two deer and a goldfinch along the way. Yes, I know, you want pictures. I was going to put them up tonight, but it looks like I'm relocating to Pacifica tonight in preparation for an early start towards Seattle tomorrow morning (not sure yet where I'll be tomorrow evening). I'll have Alexis's company, as well as (last I heard) Isaac's, though he may yet decide to ride with Aviva. All concerned have been warned that my backseat will be cramped with road tripping supplies.

Gotta get going if I want to make it to Pacifica by seven through rush hour traffic. Till next time!

Man and life

2009-06-29T02:15:00.000-04:00

I've spent the last few days hanging out with old friends and meeting some new ones. Most especially, though, I've spent them delighting in Jono and Sushu's newfound matrimony. The weekend has been a whirlwind. Hell, in a one-hour span today alone I established in-jokes with my buddies about buffalo, pagodas, and pylons in separate episodes. (Golden Gate Park has all three.) For the record, Stephen's buffalo call is "buffalo!" said in a slightly different voice, and the famously bizarre (but perfectly grammatical) sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" relies on the word "buffalo" being a collective plural noun, a transitive verb, and an adjective, properties we couldn't think of any other word that fit. (The sentence means "Buffalo from a city in New York who are bullied by other buffalo from a city in New York bully still other buffalo from a city in New York.") The stories for the pagoda and pylon are similarly elaborate. We all learned the word "equitational" in connection with the latter.

But I digress. I should really start with Friday, a day spent mostly at the home of the grandparents of Aza Raskin (a webfamous software developer) exploring their wonderfully eccentric farm and treehouse. They have chickens, goats, alpacas, a dog, a cat, a python named Monty, an African gray parrot (not a Norwegian blue), a swing hung from tree branches perhaps thirty feet high, and two tree forts connected by industrial-strength rope netting. I traveled this strange realm with friends old and new; it's been a pleasure getting to know Aza's sister Aviva over the weekend, and I hope we stay in touch! (They have a third sibling, Aenea, and if you are observant about language you will notice that their parents have a particular playful naming convention for their children.) At the Raskin clan's house Alexis and Aviva baked a red velvet cake to complement the wedding while I wrote a story to perform at the picnic, a work of fiction based on the tales I've recounted in previous entries here; it includes elements from Ruby Falls, from Tunnel Hill, and from Winnemucca, and tells how my nonexistent friend Richard had a surreal experience while on a road trip to San Francisco to pick up a statue of St. McGuffin.

The following day I actually told this story in front of the picnic crowd of about sixty people, to general applause! Other acts included a trumpet/cello duet (?!) written especially for the wedding, some really fantastic juggling with that spinning thing on a wire, two ukulele songs, and embarrassing stories about the many ways Jono has almost killed himself over the years. During the eating portion of the picnic I wandered off with Alexis and Aviva. We found a creek, took our shoes off, and had a foot dip. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but it was for me, maybe more than the storytelling. Spontaneity is difficult! I love spontaneous people, but I have trouble cultivating that quality in myself. I can't go out and mindfully practice it, either, because by definition you can't plan spontaneity. So instead I just have to be alert to the times when I can break out of my own expectations to create something unexpected and wonderful. In this case I came out refreshed and with dirty feet. The willingness to accept dirty feet as the price of being able to tell this story is relevant to what I'm trying to say here.

After the picnic there was the wedding dinner, where I sat at a table of twelve and was very nearly socially functional! The toasts and well-wishes would have been nauseatingly sweet for anyone but Jono and Sushu, who are superhumanly sweet themselves and deserve all the sweetness the world can bestow on them. Afterward there was karaoke. That started out okay, but it turns out that when you pack forty people into a room with flashing lights and loud music and bad technology and people trying to make conversation with you in this environment you have a recipe for social disaster. I fled the scene after about an hour and spent the rest of the evening in my car until the friends I was driving home were ready to leave, turning the car on only to play "Blackbird" softly. I felt really awful. This is the same as the creek story except for the outcome. But I don't want to beat myself up for that; karaoke could have been fantastic and I gave it the opportunity to be. Adventures don't always have happy endings, but most happy endings come about because of adventures.

And then today I got to meet Jono's very little sister Aleksa, who is without doubt the nerdiest eight-year-old girl I know. (I'm guessing at her age.) Jono, Sushu, Aleksa, and I played some Rock Band together, and it turns out I'm best at the drums while Aleksa is best at singing. Then there was tourism: the Exploratorium, a San Francisco interactive science museum full of the coolest exhibits I have ever seen, from magnetic sand to imaging technology that draws evolving, moving stylized sketches of you in real time as you stand in front of the screen gaping at it; and Golden Gate Park, which I've already talked about. That plus the amazing Asian food that my visit to Cali has been full of made this a day well worth getting out of bed for.

It looks like I have two more full days in the Bay Area. I'm driving Alexis and possibly our fellow anime club alum Isaac up to Portland and then Seattle later this week, probably Wednesday, in convoy with Aviva. Until then I will happily stay in these bay cities that have afforded me so many adventures!

Bullet points of golden glory

2009-06-26T01:53:00.004-04:00

Exploring San Francisco and catching up with both my aunt and my anime club friends has been exhausting! I missed last night's blog entry and don't want to blog tonight, but then I would be in "I've put it off for so long that it is now impossible to act" territory, which I'd rather avoid. So here is a succinct resume-style summary of the last couple days!

- Learned about Bay Area microclimates, whereby the weather in one neighborhood is not correlative with the weather in the next neighborhood over
- Saw San Francisco's magisterial town hall, inc. AIDS quilt where each patch is made in memoriam of a victim
- Visited large Episcopal church that had prob'ly a .2-mile-long path twisted in a circle on the floor with radius about ten feet (pic soon)
- Ate fantastic Chinese food of unknown animal provenance with Ellen and Wendy
- Captured several beautifully fog-shrouded shots of the Golden Gate Bridge
- Walked along Pacific Ocean coast
- Watched movie "Welcome to the Dollhouse" in Ellen and Wendy's home theater; good but painful
- Missed bridge tour this morning but drove across bridge to Marin County
- Toured San Francisco Academy of Sciences, whose aquarium is fantastic, particularly the upside-down jellyfish
- Got together with U of C friends for dinner of a Vietnamese soup called pho; yummy and full of noodly goodness
- Bought used copy of The Brothers Karamazov, figuring that I have to read at least one Russian novel at some point in my life and it might as well be this one
- Took pictures of bride and groom in full bridal and groomal array, respectively; he is wearing a top hat and monocle with otherwise traditional Japanese dress and looks silly but in a good way, while she is wearing a beautiful scarlet dress with veil and black shawl

I'm not an authority on the Bay Area yet, but I'm getting closer by the day :) We'll probably drive out on Sunday. Till then, I'll continue tearing up the city with my friends!

Tough row Tahoe

2009-06-24T02:14:00.002-04:00

Today I'll be relatively brief, because it's late and I'm tired. I got the hell out of Dodge (okay, Winnemucca) early this morning to give myself time for a long detour on the way to San Francisco. My target: Lake Tahoe, the well-known resort lake on the California/Nevada border south of Reno. The lake is almost lost behind an enormous hillock that you have to crest before you can reach it, an artifact of the glaciers and volcanoes that worked in concert to create Lake Tahoe as we know it. The lake is... absolutely gorgeous. It's not at all like the Great Salt Lake, where the appeal comes in part from the intellectual act of trying to come to terms with the scope of what you're seeing. Lake Tahoe is just vibrant with uncomplicated beauty, clear and blue and with mountains on all sides. I rented a kayak from a guy in a big straw hat and paddled around for half an hour, happy as a clam. Would've paddled longer but didn't have the abs for it. Took some nice pictures, which will be up when they're up. Afterwards I grabbed a quick lunch of chicken skewers and peanut sauce and packed up for Frisco.

And that -- or more specifically, Berkeley -- is where I am now. The first leg of my transcontinental trip is complete. I've driven from Florida to California. It's a momentous night, and to celebrate I kicked ass at chess and Pente against my aunt Ellen, who's hosting me for a couple nights. I also ate her girlfriend Wendy's halibut, which was mild and yummy with some lemon and ginger on it. Once again I'm the beneficiary of touching generosity. My hosts, my hotel rooms, and the road between them -- the scale of this trip has been larger than anything I've done before. And because I'm in San Francisco and the only way back home is to drive, I know the journey will grow larger still. The next leg will take me up to Seattle, but only after a layover of several days here in the Bay Area, where I will frolic with my aunt and then with my anime club friends and their relatives, all in from out of town for Sushu and Jono's wedding. Lots of (challenging, character-building) fun ahead!

The dusty Winnemucca road

2009-06-22T23:14:00.003-04:00

I bade a fond farewell to Salt Lake City this morning, but first I set out to explore its greatest remaining mystery: the Great Salt Lake. One would think that it would be impossible to drive past the Great Salt Lake without seeing at least three billboards for boat tours of the lake, but as far as my Googling and inquiries can discover, all the lake's boat tours are either luxury or bankrupt. The best way to experience the lake seemed to be driving across a bridge to Antelope Island, where there's a road that showcases the lake on one side and native flora and fauna on the other, but it would have been two extra hours of driving with nothing to do but gawk at things from the car. I generally like activities better that let me gawk at things from outside the car, so I took a pass on Antelope Island. Instead I pulled off I-80 at a beach (yes, the Great Salt Lake has beaches) and waded out to the water. The interesting thing about the Great Salt Lake is that you experience it with all five of your senses. The other interesting thing about the Great Salt Lake is that none of those senses can distinguish the lake from the Gulf of Mexico, the coast I'm most familiar with. There is simply no way to tell that this is a lake and not an ocean. Indeed, the early explorers thought they'd reached the Pacific.

Wishful thinking on their part. They still had a ways to go. The western mountains in this country simply do not end! Whenever you crest one, there's another behind it. Sometimes they're craggy peaks, sometimes mesas, sometimes big ol' hills that look like contour maps out of an MMORPG. But there are always more of them. It's a good thing I'm driving primarily to see the country, because if I were driving primarily to reach a destination I'd be frustrated to no end. In fact, I was frustrated today. I turned off the interstate to look for a canyon they advertised. It turned out to be a forty-mile round trip, and so inadequately marked that I never did find what I was looking for. I did hit a prairie dog while looking, though. I don't think it lived. I cried a little bit on my way back to the interstate. I was going a little over the speed limit, and if I'd been going slower I might have stopped in time. It was one of the small, careless tragedies that happen every day. I'm so sorry.

Later I finally reached Winnemucca. Winnemucca is a small town that appears to be built entirely on transient tourism like mine. Small-time casinos are everywhere, poised to rake in the passing traffic. Well, I reasoned, if I want to experience Nevada I have to go to either a casino or a prostitute, and prostitutes are expensive. I got $40 turned into chips. This was my first time gambling and very nearly my first time in a casino. I didn't know the rituals. You pay for your chips in cash, no credit. No blackjack till six. Chip bucket on your lap, not the table. Only one hand on the cards. Scratch the cards on the table to hit, shove 'em under the money to stand. No touching cards other than your first two. Drinks are free while you play. I didn't know any of that stuff, but I walked in knowing there was a lot I didn't know. I still don't know how many of those rules are universal to casinos and how many are specific to Winners Hotel & Casino. What's important is that I overcame my intimidation -- and Winnemucca is an intimidating, masculine town -- for no other reason than to practice courageous living. I didn't do too bad, either! Conservatively, I kept my winnings separate from my principal and left when my $40 was gone. At that point I had $29.50. So I paid $10.50 for a drink, some entertainment, and a bracing memory. Absolutely a fair transaction.

Exhausting the list of things to do in Winnemucca was Sid's Restaurant, sort of a de-chained version of Perkins, walls decorated with everything from framed artwork to My Little Pony coloring book pages. I asked the waitress what her favorite dish on the menu was and got a chicken focaccia sandwich -- which was not at all what I'd been going to order but turned out to be very good! One thing I've learned repeatedly on this trip is that people who know more than I do about an area, or a restaurant, or a culture, are to be treasured; it's through them that I can approach that knowledge. They don't always help, but they almost never hurt. Of course, sometimes I stumble across things on my own, too, and that kind of knowledge is also sweet, like a little secret. Which I promptly blab about to all of you. :)

City on a hill

2009-06-21T22:10:00.002-04:00

I left Grand Junction this morning without it leaving much of an impression on me. Not that I didn't try to have an adventure! -- but adventures are harder to come by on Sundays, and Grand Junction's museums and wineries aren't really my scene anyway. I settled for the Trail Through Time, just west along the interstate. The trail winds through the hills beside a mesa on the high scrubland, showcasing classical Wild West terrain to great effect, and runs past many dramatic rock formations, some with dinosaur and plant fossils embedded in them. Courtesy of the trail, I had an invigorating and nearly solo morning constitutional, then set out for Salt Lake City.

Utah's cliffs and plateaus would have seemed breathtaking back in Kansas, but seemed gentle and a little boring after yesterday's Rocky Mountain passage. They were a welcome reprieve from the constantly-one-second-away-from-death peaks of Colorado. (Though there was some snow on the road at one point!!!) To pass the time while driving I listened to an audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," courtesy of Wiley. Audiobooks are much better than music as a way to kill time; they hold your attention and let your muscle memory deal with the road. Outliers is pretty good. It's a lot like The Tipping Point in that it's a book-length elaboration of a single self-evident sentence, in this case "even for the talented, success relies on being in the right place at the right time." But also like The Tipping Point, the case studies Gladwell uses to make his (foregone-conclusion) argument are fascinating in themselves. It might be better to think of Gladwell as a talented essayist who organizes his monographs around central themes rather than the social visionary he presents himself as.

But you're not here for my literary criticism, are you? Outliers was just a means to Salt Lake City. I exited the interstate at a randomly selected mile marker within the city and began exploring downtown. I soon found myself driving up a steep grade and staring directly at the Utah State Capitol, an architecturally gorgeous building very much modeled after the U.S. Capitol in Washington. I couldn't go inside because it was Sunday -- go figure -- but I got a couple pictures, plus a pamphlet about Temple Square from the tourist information center across the street. Temple Square is Salt Lake City's Loop -- a block of buildings with names at the heart of downtown. But where the Chicago Loop is very commercial, Temple Square beams Mormonism. Its centerpiece is Salt Lake Temple, which unfortunately I couldn't visit due to construction -- it figures that the one building you'd expect to be open on a Sunday was closed for a different reason! I did, however, sit in a pew inside the Salt Lake Tabernacle and snapped photos of its organ, one of the twenty biggest in the world. Just sitting in that building is a remarkable experience; the tabernacle seems bizarrely full of space for its size even though it isn't as lofty as one expects from a religious structure.

Once I was done wandering around Temple Square I got back in the car and headed for Red Iguana. This Mexican restaurant shows up in all the travel guides as a culinary center of the city. It's a pretty large place with lots of parking, yet still has a hole-in-the-wall atmosphere that makes you feel cared for even as you're stuffed into the dining rooms with a few dozen other parties. (At 4:50 it was already on a 45-minute wait! I read some Neverwhere until my name was called.) I ordered a pork shank that was served in a thick, savory sauce made from a couple different kinds of chili. It was pretty good -- which if you know how I generally feel about Mexican food you will understand is high praise!

Of course, food tastes better when you're in a good mood. I was, and still am! Salt Lake City is unflaggingly welcoming; I haven't met a person here yet who seemed jaded or standoffish. The camera around my neck earned me welcomes here rather than the benign contempt I get in other areas. The city is also very easy to navigate, either on foot or by car. This place and Eustis are the two cities I've seen so far this trip where I might actually like to live -- though every city without exception has been fun to pass through!

Tomorrow I'll tour the Great Salt Lake, then set off for the little-known town of Winnemucca, Nevada, my last waypoint before my San Francisco terminus. As usual, I don't know what to expect from Winnemucca. Making up your adventures as you go along is fun!

Over one week of junctions

2009-06-20T20:38:00.006-04:00

I began my day in Aurora 5,471 feet above sea level and I'm now ending it in Grand Junction 4,597 feet above sea level. On net I lost about 900 feet. This does not quite tell the whole story. The whole story requires you to know that in between these two cities I passed through Alma, a town of less than two hundred people which is 10,578 feet above sea level. Yes, kids, I crossed the Continental Divide today. Don't think I didn't notice!

Unfortunately, prose is unable to convey the impossibility of the peaks and canyons of the Colorado Rockies to anyone who hasn't been there. Pictures are only slightly better. Lost in clouds though they were on this overcast day, the Rockies captured my eyes whenever I could spare them a glance as I navigated the winding roads. Poor Blackbird couldn't figure out where all the air went and had trouble maintaining her speed on the hills. She'll be happier in California. I don't have many stories from today, as rain limited my outdoor activities and the Rockies don't have a lot of indoor ones, but I do have pictures dating back to Paducah...

My room in Paducah, the first hotel room of the journey. Kazuko reclines on the bed at right. This seems like a really long time ago. I don't have any good pictures of the city.

Tunnel Hill in south Illinois. Longer and mistier than it looks. I also have a picture taken from inside the tunnel; all you can see is mist and some light at the other end.

Independence Temple's spire. The temple is the site of Jesus's Second Coming according to the Mormons. They may not believe in evolution, but I guess they believe in architecture. Magnificent.

A rose from the garden across from Jacob's flat in Kansas City. Jacob taught me how to use my camera's close-focus feature. It's the button that looks like a flower, appropriately enough.

A very relaxed raccoon at the zoo in Oakley, Kansas. He probably wanted to be asleep, but tourists like me kept interrupting him.

This prairie dog, on the other hand, was bright and alert, as were his hundreds of cousins swarming the zoo!

Wiley's mother tends her lake garden in Aurora, minutes after being terrified by a snake. The native snakes are apparently eating her fish. It's a dilemma.

We close with three views of the Rocky Mountains.

From Panorama Point on the Denver side.

From Colorado Route 9 in the midst of the Continental Divide.

From Grand Junction on the west side, where the mountains have given way to mesas and the West proper has begun.

I have plenty more photos, but these tell the story as well as any ten photos can. Time will tell what I photograph tomorrow on my Sunday pilgrimage to Salt Lake City!

Life at altitude

2009-06-20T00:48:00.003-04:00

After a second day in Aurora, Colorado, I once again greet the evening exhausted but full of life. I've stayed both days with Wiley and her family -- who, along with my previous hosts Jacob, Zach, and Alex, must be some of the best and most generous hosts in America -- and will forge west tomorrow morning with fond memories of the Mile High City.

The days here seem to blur together, as my head is fuzzy from fatigue and altitude, but I remember a lot of words. I've had plentiful and often hilarious conversations with Wiley's clan about topics ranging from tomatoes to economics to charismatic megafauna. I've heard stories about tornado chasing in Denver, President Clinton's personal troll doll in Washington, and signs informing tourists what to do if you encounter a cow in Switzerland. We had conversations over dinner last night at a charming local Persian restaurant whose combination lamb and beef patties were new to me, over Wiley's mother's koi pond this morning as she recovered from being attacked by a vicious garter snake, and over lunch today at a Boulder tea house imported piece by piece from Tajikistan.

I've also learned many things about life in the mountains -- some from the family, others from direct experience. Most of the direct-experience items have to do with the atmosphere of a town a mile in the air. For one thing, I've spent much of my time here suffering from airplane ear from climbing and descending the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. For another, the lack of air means Aurora is far cooler and less humid than Kansas City; Wiley tells me that every thousand feet of altitude means the temperature drops three degrees. Yet in spite of the cool air, it's easier to get sunburned or dehydrated here; less air between us and the sun means that everything the sun does in Florida it does better in Colorado. I learned this firsthand as Wiley and I walked a 2.5-mile path in Golden Gate Canyon State Park outside Boulder after a dizzying climb to nine thousand feet that Blackbird struggled to surmount. I'll eventually post photos, but as usual they will be a pale imitation of the wonders that are the Continental Divide and mountain creeks and aspen groves. There was a fifteen-degree difference between sunlight and shade, and my water vanished quickly as we trod the steep paths alert for mountain lions or grizzly bears. (No "charismatic megafauna" was in evidence on the trail, but we saw some awkward and cute mule deer from the car.) The hike was the defining moment of my time near Denver, the part that made me understand how everyday life here is different from life in Fort Myers.

There is of course so much more to say, but I can never say it all and I have to hit the hay now so that I can hit the road later. Tomorrow I detour from the interstate along a circuitous route recommended by Wiley's mother. I'll get a king's view of the mountains and visit the highest incorporated town in the lower 48 states. I hope to blog next from Grand Junction, Colorado, near the western border of the state. Until then!

I don't think I'm in Kansas anymore

2009-06-19T00:36:00.004-04:00

This post comes to you from Aurora, Colorado, just outside Denver. My hostesses this evening are my college friend Wiley and her mother, who -- like all my hosts so far without exception -- have been wonderful to me and ready to help in any way they can. In fact, I'm going to stay with them tomorrow night as well. This traveling has left me breathless! I need a one-day "weekend" when I don't have to drive five hours and can just recover from my adventures so far, and tomorrow is it. I expect I'll still be blogging, though.

Today started way back in Hays. I ate a continental breakfast of oatmeal and then set out for Fort Hays to see if I could uncover the reason a town of 20,000 grew up in rural Kansas so far from a large city. My instinct was borne out on this one! It turns out the town grew up around the fort, as the wives and children of the officers and enlisted men tried to carve lives for themselves out of what was then (in the barely postbellum United States) the frontier. The fort in turn was established as a staging area to protect the railroads from Indian raids. It was named after General Alexander Hays, a veteran of the Battle of Gettysburg recently dead at the Civil War's Battle of the Wilderness. The tour of the fort was itself interesting -- it was much, much better to be an officer than an enlisted man, by the way -- but the reason it will stick in my memory was that a very old stranger from the Wichita area who I hadn't even spoken to went ahead and paid my $3 admission without so much as asking first. We chatted during the tour. He's a pleasant guy who seemed like he would really rather be sitting in an armchair than taking a walking tour, but he was in good humor. He left a big stack of printed cards under my windshield wiper evangelizing the Gospel of Matthew -- a stack that I've duly put in the souvenir bin to remind me of him and the fort.

In between Hays and Aurora I was intrigued by roadway signs advertising the "world's largest prairie dog" and various other prairie animals. On their cue I pulled over in a tiny town that turned out to be Oakley, Kansas. The zoo there was full of native fauna -- coyotes, foxes, buffalo, rattlesnakes -- and the kicker was that it was built atop a live prairie dog town. The whole grounds were studded with holes that prairie dogs darted in and out of constantly. They are adorable creatures. (The "world's largest" is a six-foot plastic molding of a prairie dog in the back of the zoo.) I was a little worried about whether the animals were well cared for in this fairly primitive roadside facility, but I didn't let it stop me from enjoying my first sight of many of these animals. Afterward I went across the street and lunched at a surprisingly yummy buffet before getting back on the road.

I'm not ready to write about Aurora yet, though there's plenty to say! I'm tired and need to go to bed. What I can say is that one's first sight of the Rocky Mountains as one approaches over the eastern Colorado hills -- when you first become sure that what you're seeing are snow-capped peaks and not low-hanging clouds -- is magical and nearly traffic-stopping. This first sight was another milestone on the journey, one more reminder that I'm far from home with no way of getting back but to drive myself and with every intention of venturing further still!

Purple Hays

2009-06-17T21:16:00.004-04:00

The skies are indeed purple over Hays, Kansas, a city of 20,000 in western Kansas. The landscape is sort of purple, too, and my mood is purple to top it off.

Today's my birthday, and it got off to a great start with a gourmet breakfast prepared by Jacob, then a lunch of a ground beef popover and a chocolate "Matterhorn" (a mountain-shaped chocolate baked atop a cookie and served with sweet cream) at Andre's Patisserie. I reluctantly bid him goodbye in the afternoon, then drove four and a half hours to Hays without stopping except to refill Blackbird's tank and empty my own. (Rule of traveling I've discovered: never pass up the opportunity to take a leak.)

I took the interstate after all, having been assured by Jacob that there is equally little worthwhile to see on any route through Kansas. I don't agree with his assessment that it's boring, but it's certainly rural, and tourist attractions are few and far between. The land's green and brown spaces are amazing. The high point of the drive, however, was certainly the expedition past a massive wind farm. There must have been hundreds of individual mills gyrating in the breeze. The three polished, rotating blades of each turbine looked so sleek and modern, like something out of a TV commercial for either renewable energy or Mercedes-Benz. If they had no purpose at all, their beauty would make them a landmark and a tourist attraction. It's odd that they're not viewed as one, and there are no roads leading from I-70 to within the churn of the wind farm.

The four and a half hour drive felt longer than it was, and I arrived in Hays feeling drained. Here I made an unpleasant discovery: my cell phone does not have any reception here. Investigating online, I made an even more unpleasant discovery: AT&T does not cover western Kansas at all, and most of the western United States in general is covered only through AT&T's presumably less reliable "partners" or is completely uncovered. Virtually all of Nevada, for example, is an AT&T dead zone. This knowledge scares me. If I break down on the highway in a dead zone I won't be able to call AAA, and God knows I have no idea how to fix anything on my own. Fortunately, I've been able to make contact with Wiley, my host for tomorrow, through Gmail, and she's expecting me in the early evening. But I need to think about backup plans for communication, or else make sure I stick to paths that get reception.

Hays itself feels oddly tense. The people have a look on their faces like they're besieged. Maybe it's the weather, which NPR says may reach 100 degrees tomorrow, or maybe it's my imagination, me projecting my anxiety onto the strangers around me. I ate dinner at Montana Mike's Steakhouse, which served a passable ribeye. I've been trying to avoid soda this trip, but I couldn't pass up the most unique thing on the menu, Sierra Mist with pear flavoring. Sweet! The pear taste was overpowering and delicate at the same time. As usual, I almost didn't order it but then thought "what the hell." I'm learning to recognize the moments when I should say "what the hell" and live a little.

Happy birthday to me! With luck, the next post will come from Aurora, Colorado, outside Denver. In the meantime I'll try to figure out why Hays exists, out here in the boonies, as opposed to being a tiny interstate stopover like the other towns I passed.

Everything's up to date

2009-06-17T00:05:00.003-04:00

Today I'm posting from Merriam, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City! I'm staying with my friend Jacob from the Utena forum, who's already shown me a good time in the form of a rose garden and lively conversation and will show me a good breakfast strata in the morning. I'll post all about KC when I've seen more of it. Today I post about the in-between space and time.

I closed my stay in Paducah by visiting the riverfront. I owed this city, which grew up around the Tennessee River, at least that much, and this is the part of the Mississippi my trip takes me across. It was... cool, if not exactly visually stunning. Actually, I found the insect life more interesting. The pier was overrun with bugs I've never seen before; they looked like large earwigs flying around on damselfly wings. I asked a passerby about them (he was on a road trip himself, from Texas to Pennsylvania) and he says the locals call them sand flies. Wikipedia's idea of a sandfly looks nothing like these bugs, unfortunately, so I can't tell you what they were.

As I drove across southern Illinois en route to Missouri, I pulled off the interstate to check out a winery advertised on the roadside. I couldn't find the winery, or indeed any other human beings at all. Instead I found a trail called Tunnel Hill -- a cliff-bordered nature walk, miniature creeks flowing on each side from recent rains, unkept and gorgeous in the heavy morning fog. After a quarter of a mile, the trail entered a tunnel which was itself probably about a quarter of a mile long. Its interior was completely dark except for the points of light at each end. Walking through it bordered on a religious experience, each step an act of faith: will this step be the one that lands on a rattlesnake or in a bottomless pit? I was afraid, but I pushed forward and exited the tunnel at the other end, very proud of myself. Sadly, I soon had to turn around again because it had started to rain.

And what a rain. It was the longest, hardest sustained deluge I have ever driven through. Lightning flared down in all directions and the winds buffeted brave Blackbird as she strove across southern Illinois. With patience we continued our mission in spite of the blinding rain. In the end we were rewarded as we pulled into sunny lands whose gas stations have quarter-operated cologne dispensers in the restrooms. (I got a teaklike fragrance that's supposed to be a knockoff of something called Aramis.)

In St. Louis I had to use a parking garage by myself for the first time. My city friends and most of my suburban friends are cracking up right now, but it's true! I had to find a parking garage and keep track of where it was all by myself, even as I ate at Einstein Bros. Bagels and toured Forest Park afterward. I didn't get to see much of Forest Park, a very large place where the World's Fair was once hosted; what I saw was verdant and pretty but not memorable. The seemingly endless straight drive across Missouri along I-70 afterwards was more memorable, if only because I had finally joined the artery that will carry me most of the way to the West Coast.

When I finally arrived in Kansas City, I checked out the Mormons' Independence Temple (the future site of the Second Coming of Christ according to their church), which has an architecturally gorgeous spire that I took a good picture of. This aesthetic experience, however, was far overshadowed by the artistry that was Korma Sutra, an Indian restaurant in Highland Park that Jacob recommended to me. The A/C was busted and they hardly spoke English, but the food was by far the best Indian food I've ever eaten, and probably the best food of any kind I've had since Balthazar in New York City last year. I ordered lamb marsala and chai; instead I got lamb marsala made from Aries' own daughter, chai spiced with clove and cinnamon and ginger, and many foods I didn't ask for, such as garlic naan, a toothpick of creme bruleeish ice cream, some kind of pita that I very much liked with the spicy dipping sauce, something Jacob tells me was called "gulab jamun" that consisted of caramelized who-knows-what whose sweetness concentration was so high that my mouth nearly melted, and some kind of milk/melon concoction that Jacob can't identify from my inadequate description of it. The whole culinary masterpiece was topped off with an actual hand-bath administered with warm water poured from a pitcher by my waitress while I squeezed a piece of lime between my fingers. Six stars out of five, if you want my Zagat rating.

And that was today, pretty much! Now to find out what tomorrow is like!

Days like this, part 3

2009-06-15T22:04:00.007-04:00

This is the third and last part of a three-part post. Please read part 1 first; it's two posts below this one. Blogs aren't like novels; you have to read them in reverse order. It's like the movie Memento, except not actually intended to be viewed that way. Bizarre.

Decatur, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, was my next stop after Eustis. I rushed to Decatur to meet my host Zach, who was generous enough to wait for me before heading to a biweekly get-together at his friend's house to play tabletop games. I was looking forward to getting to know Zach (a friend's friend who I'd never met before) and his cohort over a board game -- but things didn't quite work out that way! Zach's friend was MIA, and through a series of increasingly frantic phone calls Zach eventually discovered that game night was canceled. He didn't even hesitate before dialing yet another number, then several more, organizing an impromptu meet-up at a local Thai place. The ginger chicken was nice and savory, and the conversation was a real challenge; I navigated a sea of unfamiliar names and relationships that emerged among the four of us there. Unfortunately, amidst the general rush of the evening I didn't have my camera with me, and the Slug Incident back in Zach's apartment was a sucker punch that knocked any will I might have had to photograph anything out of me. I feel very much like Bilbo Baggins -- someone not naturally proactive or good with exigencies who nonetheless finds himself on an adventure and doesn't always know how to cope with it.

I mentioned in the last post that the three towns I've stayed in have been completely different, and Decatur is the polar opposite of spacious Eustis -- ultra-urban, with everything crammed into as little space as possible, bending streets and buildings in the process. It's not a pretty place -- is what I thought driving in on Sunday evening. But this morning (was it only this morning?!?), driving out, I saw the way the skyscrapers vanished into the dawn fog as though their tops were rubbed out with an eraser the color of the sky... and I decided maybe Decatur wasn't so bad.

I did get a picture from Decatur, but it's not the skyscraper one. It's the side of Zach's apartment building, a poor picture that could have been taken anywhere. I wish I had pulled over and snapped the shot of the skyscrapers.

As I passed through southern Tennessee on the way to Paducah, I saw several signs for some tourist spot named Ruby Falls. I was on track to get into Paducah very early and had some time to kill, so I figured, what the hell, waterfalls are pretty. Right decision. Turns out Ruby Falls is an underground waterfall at the end of a half-mile cave a thousand feet beneath Lookout Mountain, just outside Chattanooga. Twenty bucks bought me a gorgeous tour -- and one that I do have pictures of.

A tourist-oriented cave tour is not photography-friendly. Though everything is lit just right, you're never at rest for long, and when you are there are heads or hands between you and the thing you want to photograph. Nevertheless, I got some fantastic shots, which I present here without further comment, except to say that they are all much more beautiful in person. If you're ever near Chattanooga, go.

And now is the part where I want to regale you with tales of the wonders of Paducah... only writing these posts has ended up taking most of my spare time this evening, so I haven't seen much of the town. Actually, I'm glad. The last few days have been full of sensory overload, and so for once it's probably better for me to sit inside staring at an electronic screen than to be outside getting fresh air and discovering things. I'm sorry, Paducah. You seem like a nice town. You are two hundred years old and full of river lore. If I ever come back I promise I'll give you the exploration you deserve.

Days like this, part 2

2009-06-15T20:48:00.006-04:00

Before you read this post, please read part 1, below, which is about the act of traveling. Done? Okay, good. Now we can move from journeys to destinations. Or rather interim destinations which are themselves waypoints in the larger journey.

I've stayed in three towns so far -- Eustis, Decatur, and Paducah. No two are anything like each other. My camera is full of Sunday's pictures from bucolic Eustis and its neighbor Mt. Dora, both rural communities in central Florida where tractor supply shops are cultural hubs. Those pictures mostly do not do the area justice. The horizon over Lake Dora, for instance, is far more beautiful than a camera can capture, at least in the hands of an amateur. But here are a couple snapshots that did turn out well.

Snap! The great heron of Eustis, commemorated in fountain statuary. Does it represent ibis-headed Thoth and my symbolic entry into the underworld of my own psyche? No, it's just a bird, but thank you for giving me so much credit. That's downtown Eustis in the background. That's all of downtown Eustis.

Snap! Olivia's Cafe, Eustis hotspot and beacon for open mic night devotees. My hostess Alex and I were entertained by live performers on the cramped stage in front of the bar more or less throughout our evening in the cafe. I sipped ginger peach tea that you taste with the roof of your mouth instead of your tongue -- you have to taste it to understand -- and taught Alex chess.

Snap! Here she is after her narrow defeat. During the early game both of my bishops got exchanged for both of her knights, leading to fun situations where she learned the potency of her long-range alternate-color bishops as well as that of my leaping, forking knights. I think bishops are probably her favorite piece now.

Snap! Alex with her favorite chicken -- one of many her family farms. She also has a dog, two cats, a beehive, and a cockatiel. All are adorable, even the bees. Alex says her dad fancies himself a "gentleman farmer" (though he's actually an accountant). Whether that's just his fancy or not, the hens' brown eggs are real, and they are delicious. Bubbles the cockatiel also lays eggs, but I guess you don't eat cockatiel eggs. Alex worries about Bubbles depleting her calcium.

Snap! The roof of the Donnelly House, a sightseeing spot (and Masonic lodge) on the National Register of Historic Places. The Masons are big in central Florida, apparently. I think of the Masons the way I think of the Mafia -- once influential, now moribund -- but in Mt. Dora, at least, being a Mason (Masonry?) is still a way of life for some. These are the things you learn when you have a host.

Snap! The Mt. Dora historical museum, once used as a combination firehouse and jail. One jail cell is visible in the back right. (I have a picture of myself in jail, too.) That hand-cranked record player still works. I got a personal tour by virtue of Alex's serendipitous employment with this very museum, which is normally closed on Sundays.

Things I didn't get pictures of: the church sign in Mt. Dora reading "Life is fragile. Handle with prayer." The alpacas farmed down the street from Alex's house. The moment when Alex presented me with an extremely comfortable belt, whose infinitely adjustable metal buckle is helping to hold my pants up even now. (I swear to God those pants fit when I packed them. They got looser as the day went on until I could hardly stand up.) The aging, slightly awkward guy who ran a roadside boiled peanut stand -- another cultural phenomenon I had no consciousness of until Eustis. And much else. It's amazing how much Alex and I crammed into my short time in Eustis!

Next post: the other waypoints!

Days like this, part 1

2009-06-15T19:00:00.008-04:00

Happily ensconced in a cozy Days Inn in Paducah, Kentucky, I sit down to write a blog entry and realize there's so much to record about my trip so far that I'm already (after just three days) having trouble holding it all in my head! Why haven't I written a nice long entry sooner, then? Part of it is that I've been effing tired from all the driving; I'm still getting used to feeling my buns fall asleep as I spend seven consecutive hours behind the wheel punctuated only by a gas stop. But today, while I'm tired, I feel better, and moreover I have my own private room. This last matters. I've loved staying with my hosts -- people who know the area, can take me to the good restaurants (or cook up something delicious themselves!), can chat with me after a long and lonely stretch of road -- but one's own room is comforting in a different way and engenders a different kind of consciousness that's more conducive to writing.

Now, how to write? There's a certain irony about roadbound travelogue in that driving is the common and dominating feature of my days, yet there's not much to say about it. I've been on the interstate since Eustis and so I can't share quaint rural towns' oddities as observed from the car. (I think I'm going to take the back ways through Kansas in a couple days.) The most interesting thing about the driving has been the changing landscape. South Florida, for those of you who've never been there, is flat like a board. I'm not used to driving on hills. The pita-bread terrain of north Florida and Georgia was a novelty, but it wasn't until the long march through Tennessee where I-24 is flanked by sheer cliffs as it jags in all three dimensions that I realized how much hills matter in driving. Cruise control does not always work on hills, and the gas pedal doesn't work normally either. Fortunately, Blackbird is tolerant of my learning curve; she is a fantastic car. Later, after a breathtaking series of interchanges in Nashville that would have been nigh-unmanageable without GPS, the skies opened. As the rain poured down I wondered how people in the Rocky Mountains get around during a storm. Nice thing about that is, I can just ask my friend in Denver when I get there in a few days.

While my eyes scan the road, my ears are kept busy with music, NPR, or random local radio stations. I listened in fascination to a Georgian call-in show aimed at conservative housewives; the hostess spent fifteen minutes promoting a website billed as a Craigslist for conservatives, which helps make sure you don't accidentally do business with a liberal. Not that she's a liberal-hater, exactly. She was just using conservatism as an index for cleanliness and conscientiousness, and I have to admit that if I was going to hire a lifeguard from Craigslist sight-unseen, I'd be reassured to know he was a Mormon. Talk radio: a window into culture, including our own.

At this point in the entry I'm conscious that this is getting a little long. I have a lot more to say and no knowledge of when I'll have another writing opportunity like this, so I'm going to plow right along but split this post into a few parts. This way, if you don't want to read the whole update, you can stop here and come back tomorrow! But first, check out the double rainbow my friend in Eustis and I spotted outside her house...

Sluggish

2009-06-14T23:02:00.004-04:00

I am exhausted and lightheaded from seven straight hours of driving. I got out the pillow I'll be using this evening to find, when I got it up to my host's room, that there was a slug on it. Now I'm terrified that my whole trunk might have slugs, but I can't know till the morning. I feel petrified! I desperately need sleep and so I won't elaborate, except to say that first thing tomorrow I'll figure out whether I have a problem and then how the hell one deals with slugs in the trunk.

But on the bright side, finding my host, who I'd never met before, was easier than I expected, and he drew me a map showing several breakfast places in the Decatur area. However else I may feel when I set out tomorrow, I won't be malnourished! And the slug, the exhaustion, are part of the adventure. True, I didn't specifically foresee that slugs might be an obstacle on my journey, but I DID foresee that I might encounter unforeseen obstacles, so I give myself credit where credit is due. Must sleep now.

A double rainbow

2009-06-13T21:19:00.004-04:00

The first half was the drive. Four hours from Fort Myers to Eustis, where I'm typing this entry. It was exhilarating and triumphant, the culmination of the preparatory journey I talked about in my last post. I listened to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" on NPR, then turned on the iPod, which randomly blared songs including I Woke Up In A Car, I'm On A Boat, and I'm On A Blimp, giving me a travel theme to go with my first day of journeying.

The second half was Eustis. My tour guide was a friend from the Revolutionary Girl Utena forum, and she showed me the prettiest parts of this rural community a hundred years old. (Tomorrow I get to see the most historic.) I taught her how to play chess, and she taught me how to play with chickens, of which her family keeps something like fifteen. The highlight of the evening was our visit to Olivia's Cafe, an adorable hole-in-the-wall run by Santa and Mrs. Claus, right down to the board games stacked on a bookcase on one wall. I couldn't have asked for a better first day.

Tomorrow it gets harder. More driving and a late arrival in Atlanta to an address I don't have yet. It'll be an adventure! I'm already foreseeing a problem with the writing end of things, though; I'm tuckered out after writing this post, and I didn't even have to design an itinerary today. Hopefully as I get into the swing of the journey the writing will become part of the routine. Until next time!

Every exit an entrance

2009-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

Well, here we are at midnight. It's been a frantic couple of weeks, but everything's in place with eleven hours to spare. What's funny is that getting this far has been a journey in itself. I've had to walk a long way down the footpaths just to find the beginning of the highway. So tonight and tomorrow morning mark not only the beginning of one journey but also the end of another. Now the terrain changes. I've prepared, but not for everything. I don't know where I'm staying on most nights, how I'm getting from Denver to San Francisco, or even where I'm doing my laundry. That's enough planning. The future is a glorious mess. For the next month, preparation and execution will be simultaneous. I don't know what's going to happen -- whether this will be one of the best or worst times of my life, or what kind of meaning it will turn out to have, or if it might turn out to have no meaning. I don't know. But that's the point.

The car's name is Blackbird. That's also the name of the song I'll cue up on my iPod when I pull out of the driveway. I'll see you next on the road!

Tremors

2009-06-11T20:38:00.004-04:00

I'm not shaking.

I could be. I'm excited and nervous enough. I'm leaving in a day and a half and it still seems like there's so much left to do. I have to get my checks and credit cards in order, transfer my files to my laptop, pack everything, shave, try to sleep... and I have five hours of work tomorrow that God knows how I'm going to focus on. And when that's all done and I set off at 11:00 AM on Saturday I'll be embarking on a journey of I-don't-know-how-long to I-don't-know-where. I'm scared. But I'm not shaking.

And as long as I'm not shaking my hands can hold a steering wheel.

Packing list

2009-06-10T16:30:00.003-04:00

As of this writing, I've got all the following, mostly ready to go.

- My car. Still unnamed. (I discovered that when she's coasting down from a high speed she makes a subtle noise like a siren or whistle. It's very distinctive. She should have a name that honors that.) Also, car supplies: tire gauge, tire inflator, spare tire, directions, AAA member card, windshield fluid, paper towels, and requisite paperwork proving ownership and insurance.

- Seven or eight changes of clothes; also, a laundry bag and an extra pair of sneakers.

- Sleeping bag and pillow.

- Groceries: plastic silverware, various nonperishable food items like snack mix and canned oranges, a few perishables like bread, cheese, and jam in a cooler with ice packs, and lots of water.

- Toiletries, including medications; also, emergency medical kit, containing various Band-Aids, antiseptics, Tylenol, emergency blanket, etc.

- Six electronic devices and their power supplies and other cables (see last post).

- Small box of surprises.

- Cash, credit cards, and passport (in case I can't resist hitting Vancouver).

- Books; pens and paper.

And I think that about covers it! :D We're close now. If all goes well, in 72 hours I'll be touring Eustis.

Dreaming of electric sheep

2009-06-05T21:47:00.003-04:00

My God you guys I am so busy! So much time and so little to do! Wait -- strike that -- reverse it. Thank you.

Today I thought I'd share my electronics catalogue. I'll be accompanied on my journey by no fewer than six gadgets. To wit:

- My cell phone, of course.

- Kino, my voice recorder.

- A Garmin Nuvi GPS for the car, which nearly guarantees that as long as I know where I'm going I will never get lost.

- A brand-new Sony digital camera.

- An Inspiron laptop, a very old one that my brother used in Japan; it's slow as the devil to load up, but it'll serve my purposes.

- A 30-GB iPod Classic, which just arrived today.

My brother argues my car should also count as a gadget, but I think he's being silly. The car is a car. It is way above the level of gadget. (And as of tomorrow evening, it will have its permanent tags.)

Cutting a swath

2009-06-04T13:28:00.004-04:00

My itinerary is coming along nicely. Leg One of the trip is Fort Myers to San Francisco. I need to make this trip in at most twelve days in order to attend wedding festivities on the 27th, and in case of unexpected developments along the way I've planned it so that I'm crossing most of the continent in half that time.

June 13: Set out from Fort Myers, FL. Stay the night in Eustis, FL, just north of Orlando, with Alexandra/moroschino from IRG. Totally gives me a reason to leave the house in the first place! Meals: with Alex; attractions: at Alex's discretion.

June 14: Stay the night near Atlanta, GA, exact location TBA but hopefully with a friend of Alexis, a friend from anime club. Meals and attractions TBA.

June 15: Stay the night near Paducah, KY, at a hotel. Meals and attractions TBA.

June 16: Stay the night in Merriam, KS, just outside Kansas City, with Jacob/Stormcrow from IRG. Another day to look forward to! Meals: Korma Sutra (Indian) or Free State Brewing Co. Attractions: Independence Church, the site of the Second Coming of Christ according to the Latter-Day Saints.

June 17: My birthday! Have lunch with Jacob at Andre's Confiserie. Stay the night near either Hays, KS or Stockton, KS, depending on whether I take the interstate or local roads; it'll be a hotel either way. Dinner and attractions TBA.

June 18: Stay the night in Denver, CO, hopefully with Wiley, a friend from the U of C. Need to get in touch with her. Meals and attractions TBA but plentiful.

From there the itinerary is still very much under construction. The two major choices are whether to get on I-80, taking me through Cheyenne and Salt Lake City en route to the West Coast, or whether to stay on I-70 into southern Utah and take local roads across Nevada. If I really do arrive in Denver on schedule on the 18th, though, I'll have oodles of time to get to San Francisco, so I may do something more radical like cut south through Albuquerque and take the by-all-accounts-gorgeous drive up the California coast. Will make contingency plans.

Conceived with passion by unknown artists

2009-05-30T19:31:00.007-04:00

And here she is. These wheels will take me to Seattle and back, beginning June 13 and ending whenever I feel like coming home. The car is a 2009 Mazda3 i Touring, as yet unnamed. The process of laying my hands on her was everything car shopping is supposed to be: stressful, time-consuming, probing, a little sketchy. But in the end, thanks to Edmunds.com and a little help from my dad, I found the right car for Lover's Lanes and beyond. She is lovely inside and out, with excellent handling, comfortable seats, and the ability to drive four hundred miles on the interstate without stopping (which is more endurance than I've got!) The two of us will be making a beeline across America for San Francisco using I-70, arriving after about twelve days' travel. There I'll attend a friend's wedding celebration, then drive up the coast to Seattle, and thence meander home, perhaps hitting New York on the way. It's really happening, and it's really awesome.

Slow down -- you move too fast

2009-04-21T22:39:00.003-04:00

So as Athena suggested yesterday, Lover's Lanes needs to change. As originally conceived it's a fantastic idea for someone other than me, but I can't pull it off. I'm too introverted, too anxious, too prone to harsh self-criticism. But rather than abandon the project, I'm rewriting the rules. Rather than "ask for love stories," the new rule is "ask for love stories when I'm reasonably comfortable doing so." That might mean twice a week, once a week, or never.

I'm viewing this not as a surrender but as a necessary evolution. Making a cross-country road trip will be challenge enough without also imposing pressure on myself to invent and become a factitious persona. With this concession to reality I'll be able to enjoy myself more and worry less about interviews and itineraries. Maybe someday, when I've grown, I'll be able to take the journey I initially conceived. But that's not going to happen by June.

The change in plans is bittersweet for me. Sweet because the new journey will be more liberating and self-authentic than the one I'd planned; bitter because the new journey will not be breathtakingly original. It'll be "only" an extended road trip, with an option on love stories. Which itself is totally new for me, and I hope to grow through it -- but it's not new for you. You've done it yourself or you know someone who has. As anyone who's sat through a family slide show knows, travel is sorta boring when you're not the one traveling. So I reluctantly conclude that the daily-blogging phase of Lover's Lanes is at an end, at least for now. I'll pop back in as interesting developments (like cars or laptop computers) happen to the project, and when the trip starts I'll post whatever interesting anecdotes or ideas the scenery affords me. More dialogues with goddesses, maybe. And when there's a love story to be had -- well, I'll likely post that too.

Good trails!

A different sort of love story

2009-04-20T22:16:00.002-04:00

"Do you want to hear a love story, Brian?" asked the aged but attractive woman with gray eyes.

"Sure!"

"When my mom was pregnant with me, my dad learned from an oracle that if Mom had a son, that son would overthrow his kingdom. He didn't want that to happen, so he ate my mom. Seriously, swallowed her whole. Mom was made of tougher stuff, though, and actually lived inside my dad for years. She gave birth to me there and nurtured me as I grew up. It was a little cramped, though, so when I got old enough I made myself a suit of armor and a spear. I used the spear to smash through my dad's skull and emerged into the world fully formed."

"Is this story about your dad and mom's screwed-up relationship?"

"No, it's about my dad's and mine. He ate me when I was in the womb, and I split his skull open. When I came out I thought he'd be angry, but instead he was overjoyed. I think partly he was relieved I wasn't a boy. After that I was his favorite daughter. Do you know he lets me throw his thunderbolts? I'm the only one in the world besides Dad who can send thunder. Sometimes he even lends me his aegis, which is impenetrable to any weapon. I could ask any favor from him and get it. I don't, because I'm more prudent than that, but I could."

"This isn't really the kind of love story I had in mind."

"I'm a virgin goddess -- what do you want from me? My point is that I sprang from my dad's head and as a result he lets me demand anything. Some combination of pride and relief, I guess. That worked out okay in his case because I was well conceived. But you can't cave in to just any demand that anything makes that springs from your head, no matter how much you love it."

"You're talking about Lover's Lanes, aren't you."

"As for example."

"So I should stuff it back in my skull?"

"Hell no, that's the worst thing you could do. But realize that a mortal idea doesn't emerge fully formed like a god does. It needs perfecting, especially if you're going to be living closely with it for a long time. If nothing else, at least check to see if it's a boy or a girl. Don't give your thunder to an idea until you're sure it's not going to overthrow you. That's all I'm saying."

"Thanks."

"Always happy to help. You just have to ask."

Move along

2009-04-17T23:11:00.000-04:00

It's hard to know what to write about a journey you're worried about not taking. At this point I'm pretty sure I will make a trip and it will be in a car. That takes care of the "Lanes" aspect. The "Lover's" aspect is just... infuriatingly difficult for me. It would be nice if I could take someone else who would keep me company on the drive and ask for interviews on my behalf. Someone, you know, socially adept. "Hey, dude, how's it going? Terrible about the Sox, huh? Hey listen, I'm on a road trip with my friend over there, he's collecting..." But even if that were possible it would be hiding and I know it. Maybe worse than not talking to anyone. Anyway, I don't have much to say today that isn't just griping and fearing, so I won't subject you to any more of it.

Heisenberg for Dummies

2009-04-16T22:28:00.002-04:00

I've been continuing my perusal of "Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes" (WEF) with great interest. The book's writing style is a little dry and sometimes unhelpfully general, but it's been helping me clarify assumptions about what I'm doing when I write -- as well as when I "conduct my research."

The scare quotes are there because what I'm doing is not really ethnography. I'm not going native; I'm not embedding myself in a foreign culture for long enough to understand the culture from the inside out. I certainly don't agree with Kino that three days is long enough to understand any culture. As a result, when my culture is different from my subject's -- which in one way or another it will be most of the time -- I will lack a certain amount of context. Fortunately, WEF reassures me on every page that the activities and perceptions of an ethnographer are inseparable from the behavior of his subjects anyway, and stresses: don't worry about it, just record it. If you're somewhere in Africa studying an indigenous clan that eats goat colons and they notice the food they're offering you grosses you out, record how you reacted and what they did about it. Their response to you is a source of insight into their culture. (And your reaction is itself a source of insight into you, which is of little concern for an ethnographer but of quite a bit of concern for me, since Lover's Lanes is about me as well as my interlocutors.) This is profoundly relevant to Lover's Lanes; if I commit some kind of faux pas or make an assumption that turns out wrong, it reveals a way my subject's culture is different from mine, which may become a natural angle from which to approach their love story. And if it doesn't, it may at least reveal another way that I'm sheltered, presumptuous, or an asshole, which is painful for me but still makes a good story.

On a related note, WEF makes a big deal about "inscription versus transcription." There is no way, it insists, to transcribe an experience in the field. Even if I copied down all my audio recordings word for word, the record would still lack description of movements and gestures; even if I took a video, the record wouldn't capture my internal state or my subject's. There is no way to show everything. Therefore, the process of writing field notes is a process of inscribing: it's a subjective and skillful act in which I implicitly decide which parts are important, which parts to de-emphasize, and which parts to leave out. I decide how to construct the narrative. (Sometimes a real ethnographer's field notes are not even a narrative, but for my purposes they need to be because I'm telling a story.) This is not really news to me, since I've quite consciously gone through this process twice now, but it's useful to be reminded that there are many ways to spin the same tale. So just as my actions and questions shape my subject's narrative, so my perceptions and choices will shape mine.

Didn't I say antihero?

2009-04-15T22:07:00.002-04:00

I had the day off from work today, and mostly spent it worrying about when I'd have Internet access again. The Net went down as we were trying to upgrade our wireless network, in accordance with one of Munroe's Laws. I wasn't any help in fixing the problem, so I was told to sod off for a while and do something else. Unfortunately, I am so codependent on the Internet that when it goes away I am paralyzed until it comes back again. I can try to read or write but it doesn't really work. Knowing that I couldn't use the Internet if I wanted to, even if I don't want to, keeps me from focusing on anything else. As I write this the Internet is "up," but moving so slowly I'm pretty sure I can actually see the ones and zeroes, making just about any website that contains, say, a jpeg, unusable. As I write this it's down again. And as I write this, a couple of hours later, it's up and seems to be working okay, but we're still tinkering. Tinkering is dangerous.

I often wonder if there's some grand unifying principle behind all my little neuroses, about people and Internet outages and the future. Uncertainty has a lot to do with it. If I had a working Magic 8 Ball, one that actually told the future, I would abuse the hell out of it. I'd ask questions like "will things be all right if I go out to dinner?" and "if I stay in bed till two will I regret it later?" Eventually it would get so fed up with me it would just answer "better not tell you now" to every question. For the record, I didn't want to upgrade our network. Something like this always happens. I'm so frustration-averse that I would rather have a working network now and forever than a likely-better network after a few hours (or maybe days) of stewing. My frustration intolerance is the biggest threat to Lover's Lanes, and sadly that's all I have to say about the project tonight.

I have to have Kentucky

2009-04-14T23:23:00.001-04:00

My new reading project is "Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes," a neat book about writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Ethnography, as I understand it, has to do with understanding a society in terms of the experiences of the people who live in it. It is a little like anthropology, only with more emphasis on culture; it is a little like sociology, only with more field work; but it's different from either of them in that it's not so much an area of study as a technique of study. You can study a lot of things using ethnography. The key feature is that you go out and talk to the people you're interested in, maybe embed yourself with them a while, and then come back and write about what you learned. In that sense, Lover's Lanes is an ethnographic project -- though its scope, abstract like love and broad like the United States, is less focused than most ethnographies. And if Lover's Lanes is an ethnography then these love stories are field notes. Since Lover's Lanes will not go beyond the field note stage -- a real ethnographer does not merely anthologize his field notes, but writes a book about his theory using his field notes as source material -- it is especially important that I write my field notes well.

I've gleaned most of this from the first five pages of the aforementioned book -- that's all I've read so far -- which makes me optimistic that reading more of it will be useful.

Another thing I've gleaned from the first five pages of "Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes" is that there's some difference of opinion about who gets to do field work. Some people think you have to be a natural-born genius to talk to people and get coherent data from them. Other people think "any literate, adventurous person" can go do field work. The authors disagree with both schools of thought, believing that conducting and writing up field work is a skill that can and must be taught, which I presume is why they bothered to write a book about it. What caught my attention about this is that they referred to the second of those theories, the idea that anyone can do field work, as the "sink or swim" approach: you learn the skills you need on the job or you don't. That is very stark, but it precisely describes what I've been planning. I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself to learn from scratch a new skill, namely making friends on purpose, in an environment where if I don't learn the skill I'll judge the whole project a failure.

Maybe it takes a natural-born genius to make friends on purpose. I never have. There have been rather few times in my life when I've set out to make friends; I don't even remember those people's names, so you can tell how well that went. It may be related to the way other people seem to be able to choose what they believe or feel, while I experience beliefs and feelings mostly as things that happen to me. In the same way, I haven't picked my friends; my friends have happened to me, thank God, and I treasure you.

So that's one variation on Lover's Lanes I could pursue. Make the trip, but don't try to make friends on purpose. Don't approach a single person for an interview. In the course of the journey there will be conversations. Trust that friends, or at least acquaintances, will happen to me. When they happen, ask them for their stories. That's a nice vision that plays to my strengths. But it relies a lot on luck. Luck is good to have around but you can't count on it. What's the saying? "Believe in God but keep the powder dry," or something like that? Me, I'm still working on figuring out which end you point at the bad guy.

A bad country for gods

2009-04-13T23:22:00.000-04:00

I just finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods. There's something in there that's relevant to Lover's Lanes, but I'm not sure what yet. I doubt I'll meet any gods on the road, and if I do I'll have to change their names anyway so you'll never know. If I figure out what the relevant part is I'll post it.

I wish I could figure it out, because tonight I'm having trouble thinking of what to put in this space. Since my trip to the New Age place last weekend I've been worried I am just not extroverted enough for this trip -- or perhaps not open enough? not agreeable enough? too neurotic? -- worried, in any case, that I'm temperamentally out of my depth. I'm terrified about how I'll come across to the other person. I guess that's because I'm working without a mask. This isn't tutoring or shopping. I'm doing something I actually want to be doing and making no pretense about it, which means I'm showing a part of myself to strangers that I usually show only to friends, and sometimes maybe not even to them. That's fair, because of course that's what I'm asking my subjects to do for me in telling me their stories. But I guess like all guys I'm worried that if I expose myself I'll be laughed at. Or lectured... or pranked... or ignored. Being politely brushed off like a panhandler -- even that would hurt. I'm not the salesman type who deals with rejection by just trying again with a smile as bright as ever. It's not totally impossible I could adopt that attitude as a mask, but then the journey would be work, like the other things I do with masks on, wouldn't it?...

And yet there's a conflict here in that my wiser self doesn't believe in masks. I don't mean he disapproves of them, I mean he literally doesn't think they exist. He thinks we have a lot of different faces and all of them are real. He agrees that some are less comfortable than the others, but says that usually the discomfort comes from unfamiliarity. He also thinks that when a face is really needed it will be there.

I'm not sure where that leaves me. It's much easier to be wise than to act wise.

The things that divide us

2009-04-10T21:48:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I finished telling Erica's story. I think the writing went pretty well, though the end felt a little rushed for some reason. I need to write to Erica and find out what she thought. (I'm pleased to say Alice liked her story.) It's difficult to write stories from other people's lives, because even fifty minutes is not a tenth of the time it would take to really understand everything in full context, and I don't have my interviewee here to correct me as I write -- "oh, it didn't really happen like that, though." As I wrote I thought of many questions that went unasked during my interview with Erica, interesting tensions I could have teased out. I realized that there is no such thing as a biographical vignette. A life is like a wiki, everything linked to everything else, and to understand one thing really you need to understand everything. So in the end any vignette is only a sketch, incomplete, suggesting the reality, hinting at it, maybe caricaturing it, but not really encapsulating it. For that you would need a book. No, a book is not enough. You'd need to live it. And even then.

This is actually a fairly substantial obstacle for me. My two subjects so far have been my age, my race, and approximately my culture, not to mention that they're my friends. If I'm worried that I don't have the proper context for telling their stories right, what the hell am I going to do when I interview a fifty-year-old black Baptist in Memphis or an Orthodox Jewish Holocaust survivor in Brooklyn? I talked a while ago about how love transcends such barriers, but its circumstances don't. The greater the divide between my background and the other person's, the more I will take for granted that I shouldn't, and the more they'll assume I can take for granted that I won't.

What's more, it's hard to approach a person you expect will be dissimilar from you. Tonight I visited a local New Age shop I probably end up in on some afternoon once every couple months to buy incense or admire the pewter figurines. I'm on their mailing list, and tonight they had a party for their owner's birthday, so I stopped by. In the best case, I hoped to do an interview; in the worst, at least I'd get some experience managing crowds. Well, I didn't get my interview. Partly that's because it was noisy, but really it was that the people there were mostly hardcore New Agers and at least fifteen years older than me. I did have a couple conversations, but for one reason or another I didn't feel like asking either of the people I talked to for an interview. I was intimidated and I wasn't really sure I wanted to hear their stories. This is a problem. I have a couple solutions I'm turning over in my head, but I think I'll avail myself of the weekend to think more about them before talking them out here.

Erica's story, conclusion

2009-04-09T21:19:00.000-04:00

"We stayed up talking for two or three hours, just laying there, and we got to talking about how, he's like, 'it's nice that you can just lay here with me and expect that I'm not going to take advantage of you,' probably alluding to how I hated men for a while and they all use you."

"Was that amazing to you, that you could trust him that much?"

"No, it wasn't amazing, it's natural. It was normal to me. Out of anybody I would feel most comfortable doing that with him. Even as just friends, even when we were just friends. And he's like, why do you think that is? And I go: Oh, well, it's 'cuz I love you. And I rolled over."

Less than a year after finally breaking it off forever with Jorge, Erica found herself in bed with Leonard again. Here's how it happened.

The February after Erica's October breakup, Leonard, still Erica's friend, sent her a Valentine's card. ("He said he sent Valentine's cards out to everybody, but he especially picked one for me.") Soon afterward, while visiting from Orlando, he tried to kiss her as they sat on her couch watching TV. Erica reacted with abhorrence; remember, this was when she hated guys. "I saw that as another guy trying to use me," she explains. She browbeat him for it, apologized the next day, and that was the last she saw of Leonard during that visit.

I'm a little surprised when Erica tells me that when she next saw Leonard, in May, she had started dating again. "That was a rebound," she explains. "That was what I needed to get me out of --" "Out of Jorge mode?" I helpfully suggest. "Out of guys-are-jerks mode," she answers. Apparently it worked. On the night that Erica finally saw Leonard again, she greeted him like "a breath of fresh air" and immediately realized that "I think I love him, like for real this time... and that I probably should do something about it." That very night, Erica found in her email inbox what under the circumstances seemed a "miracle:" a breakup note from her then-boyfriend. She was nice, he said, but they didn't click. She wrote back to agree, adding, "...and next time you break up with somebody, I would suggest doing it in person, or at least over the phone." (It later turned out that he felt he had to write down these feelings to make them clear and make sure they got expressed, which Erica says is good as far as it goes, "but then at least read it to me!" The medium of communication matters to Erica; I think of her annoyance at Jorge's texting earlier and the ambiguities that grew out of chain emails with Leonard before that.)

Erica wasted no time in taking advantage of her good luck, cajoling Leonard into a dinner date the very next night. There she dropped the hint: "So I think, like, I'm over Jorge and feeling much better about men again. . . . He's like, oh, that's good. He didn't know exactly where I was going with what I was saying --" "He didn't want to assume too much, I guess," I say, remembering the episode about expectations from earlier. "I guess so, yeah," Erica agrees. Dinner with Leonard gave way to a party at a mutual friend's house, which turned into heavy drinking, which led to Erica throwing up in the toilet as Leonard stood beside her -- "which was amazing to me" -- and at last, their host suggested that Erica, tired and intoxicated, should stay the night. "Also trying to push me and Leonard together," she smiles. They slept in the same bed, which brings us to where we started tonight's installment. No sex, no cuddling, just two longtime friends sharing a night together. Not without some tension, though. Erica said I love you. Leonard said I love you back -- "I don't know if he meant it at that time, but he said it. And I think we went to sleep. We didn't talk about it."

"What needed to be said got said, I guess."

"Yes. Finally. Took all night. Liquid courage."

Leonard kissed her the next morning, under the pretext that he "wanted to test something." He never explained what; probably it doesn't need explaining. He called her the next day, as he was leaving Fort Myers. He said "he's not going to particularly ask me out or anything like that, but just know that he does care about me and blah blah blah, and that," Erica explains, "was him asking me out. That was the beginning of a relationship."

I profess surprise. After all, Leonard had broken the relationship off in the first place because he was moving to Orlando, and he still lived there. I ask when he changed his mind. Erica giggles sincerely, "When he realized that I'm awesome? More awesomer than any other girl?" She continues more seriously: "I think that was one of the requirements when he called me that Sunday and 'asked me out,' we talked about conditions, and --" "Expectations?" I ask, putting words in people's mouths like usual. "Expectations, yeah," Erica nods. "The reason he broke up the first time was that he didn't want to break my heart and have all the complications that a long-distance relationship could have, and that he knows that it's hard more on girls than on guys, and he didn't want to hurt me in that way, but if I could handle it then he would be okay with it too."

"I see, so this time instead of deciding himself to break it off he left it up to you."

"He did!"

And that's how Erica and Leonard started dating again. Both approached the second relationship differently from the first, bringing with them new experiences and perhaps new communication styles. Erica doesn't even remember the conversation that kicked off the first relationship, but the second began with two I love yous and a dialogue about conditions and expectations. There is change here, perhaps growth, and that growth is what makes this part of the story -- even with all the vomiting and negotiations -- more romantic in some ways than the first part. Mr. Darcy's second proposal to Elizabeth was romantic because of how it was different from his first proposal to Elizabeth. Erica's story is broadly similar.

I ask Erica what her expectations of Leonard are going forward. She growls that she expects him "to propose pretty soon," though he wants to wait until they're out of school. (They're each now in their sixth year of college.) She expects to have his kids; he says he wants fifty. And she expects to be able to move around with him. "I like change," she explains. It's a good thing.

Erica's story, part 2

2009-04-08T18:49:00.002-04:00

"I think I did say, okay, now we're agreeing we're just using each other. And we did talk about just agreeing on that. But then I would expect more. I would expect... something else."

"So it was hard for you to keep your expectations under control?"

"Yeah. That's always been my problem."

There's a striking symmetry between the tail end of Erica's relationships with Leonard and Jorge: both the guys went off to college in other parts of the state. The difference is that Leonard, bound for Orlando, left his romance in Fort Myers; Jorge, headed for West Palm Beach, took his relationship with him. Erica and Jorge did the long-distance thing for nearly two months, seeing each other every couple weekends. "And because he had no money it was me going over there and sometimes getting him, driving back here [to Fort Myers] for the weekend, and then driving him back. It was kind of dumb," Erica says. I observe that she must have liked him okay to go to all that trouble, and Erica cops to that, but adds, "Not enough, though."

After that acknowledgment one might think Erica would have been eager to break up with Jorge, but in fact it was Jorge who finally cut the thread. It's not working out, he said over the phone. "I said I agree," Erica recalls. "I said I agree that we should totally break up, and I continued to be hung up on that relationship for at least three months afterwards."

One of the challenges of doing an interview is that you never know what it's okay to assume. When Erica says she was hung up on Jorge, I assume she just means she was pining for him. It's not for several minutes that the conversation returns to Jorge and Erica says thoughtfully, "Two times after Jorge and I broke up, I begged for him to come back because I missed sex. Two times he drove over from West Palm Beach just for that." I'm taken by surprise and bust out with "Oh my gosh, really?" -- which if Erica had been a stranger might have been off-putting at just that moment. I wince listening to it on the tape. Fortunately, Erica takes it in stride and continues, saying that her encounters with Jorge "even more so made me hate him, because I would tell him, oh, I love you, blah blah blah, and he would stone-cold not say anything back. Like refuse to." Erica told herself he was just holding back, that really he still loved her, even though they'd already agreed they were only using each other. Sadly, if he did, he never gave any indication of it. This episode makes me feel a little better about my gaffe earlier. Erica and I are partners in being confused about what to expect.

As if on cue, Erica muses about a relevant conversation she had the other day with a girl she says she doesn't know that well -- "an amazing, amazing girl, she's a Christian and everything, she speaks in a country accent, and to me she's a perfect Christian, she should be a saint. . . . She was telling me that it's a really good idea to communicate expectations with whoever you're with. Like in the morning or at night before you start the next day, say 'What are your expectations for tomorrow?'" Erica's face lights up as she talks about this chat; she's hit on something important and she knows it. I observe that this only works if both people are honest about what they expect. Erica nods emphatically. "That was a major thing, too. I don't think Jorge was totally honest. And Leonard was."

But this epiphany about expectations would come later. When I ask Erica what lesson she learned from her time with Jorge, she gives two answers: "How [not] to treat people in a relationship, and that men are jerks."

Erica's (full) story, part 1

2009-04-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

If you're reading this, I assume you've read yesterday's "short version," the fifteen-minute incarnation of Erica's story that is about hesitation. I'm not going to retell the story from the beginning as I delve into the full version. There's too much that's relevant to both versions, and I won't ask you to read the same story twice. I will, however, ask you to reconstrue it. You see, the fifty-minute version of Erica's story is only indirectly about hesitation. When one person hesitates to ask another on a date, it's not just a missed opportunity; it's a failure of communication. And it's a story about communication and its breakdowns that Erica unfolds to me now.

"He needed to think of it as a short-term relationship?"

"Yeah."

"How about you, were you thinking of it as a short-term relationship?"

"I thought I could change his mind!"

Erica's talking to me about her breakup with Leonard. They argued about it more than once. I ask if they yelled, and Erica shakes her head. "Just heated debate. And then it would end up with me being all quiet and sensitive." They'd gone into the romance with different expectations, a word we'll be seeing again. Erica's expectation, even when she understood that Leonard planned to end things, was that she should be able to change his mind.

But Leonard was firm, and Erica left the relationship mad. "I was really angry at him," she says. "Angry that he didn't change his mind. Angry that it [the breakup] happened at all." And that anger helped lead her into her next relationship. She shares this new story with remarkable frankness, as you'll see, in every detail but one: "I don't like to say his name." This second relationship left a bad taste in her mouth. I suggest she could give him a fake name, like I do in these stories. She chooses Jorge. "Totally a made-up name. It's a comical name. He's not even Hispanic."

Jorge shared an apartment with Erica and her friend. He first asked her out by text message, which seemed just about as classless to Erica as it did to me. She texted him back to tell him to wait until she got home, "and he got all whiny and pouty, and didn't want to talk to me, like offended." Whiny is another word we'll be seeing again. But in his defense, she adds, "it's probably because I led him on." I ask her about that, and she expands: "I led him on because I was mad at Leonard and I felt like having fun, I guess. So I did. We would like lay on the couch together and watch TV, stuff like that." In the interest of science, I ask how much of this came from anger at Leonard and how much from attraction to Jorge. Erica considers. "Well, it was fifty-fifty. I'm repulsed by him now, but I was attracted to him."

Attracted to him or not, Erica says she was guilted into being Jorge's girlfriend. Not so much because she'd led him on, but "because he was being ridiculous." He wouldn't listen to her when she said she wasn't over Leonard yet. She says she agreed in order to get him to stop whining. Their relationship lasted for just over three months and was full of arguments. I ask what they argued about. "Anything," says Erica. "He was a baby." What's more, in contrast to Erica's few arguments with Leonard, when she argued with Jorge "we would yell."

Still, if Erica hadn't found Jorge especially compelling at the outset, she grew to feel that way quickly. "I was telling him I loved him and all this stuff 'cuz eventually I did become so attached that I thought I loved him." Erica adds, reflectively, that this is a mistake she's made in all her past relationships. Is that the most important lesson the relationship with Jorge taught her? "There was another," she answers, feeling her way carefully. "He taught me how a relationship should be. How this guy was completely one-sided and selfish, pretty much. And showed me how good my relationship with Leonard had been, because Leonard was so practical." She means that Leonard didn't let silly things upset him, in contrast to Jorge, who snapped at Erica because she grabbed his white undershirt during what she describes as a play fight.

I wouldn't envy a person whose job it was to sit in judgment over this relationship. Maybe Erica sent mixed messages; maybe Jorge took her too much for granted. Maybe Erica didn't make her needs and expectations clear; maybe Jorge was "just plain jerk" (as Erica describes him) for being unreasonable in what he wanted and expected. Fortunately, Erica eventually came across an idea that helped her understand what was going wrong. But it would be a little while, and by that time her relationship with Jorge was over.

Erica's story in 15 minutes

2009-04-06T01:02:00.002-04:00

I had an interview Sunday evening with another friend of mine, whom I'll call Erica. Like my interview with Alice, this one turned out to be long, about fifty minutes. This time, though, I tried to sculpt the conversation in a way that made sure to outline something interesting within the first fifteen minutes. I'm going to see how well I did by telling Erica's story two different ways. Today I'll pretend that Erica had to leave after fifteen minutes; I'll write her story based on only that part of the interview. Starting tomorrow I'll tell all fifty minutes of her story, reorganizing the first fifteen to fit the broader narrative. First, though, a technical issue. I've heard now from two of my readers that you've had trouble logging in to comment on the blog. I've now switched to a form of commenting that won't require you to log in. The disadvantage of this system is that the comments section might get spammed; if that becomes a problem I'll have to switch back, but for now commenting should be easy. You can also always write to me at the email address on my business card. Now, without further ado, the short version of Erica's story...

"The whole semester I got the feeling, okay, I really like him, is there something I need to do about this or what, and I waited the whole semester . . . and it never went away, so at the end of the semester I finally told him that that's how I had been feeling."

"So you were thinking maybe there's something there, and you want to explore that?"

"Yeah. I guess I put it in his hands, or something like that."

Erica and I are sitting on a bench outside a hair salon. We talk against a backdrop of traffic noise and chattering pedestrians. Everyone in the shopping center is going somewhere except us. Our travel takes place through memory.

Erica first met her boyfriend, Leonard, in middle school but didn't begin dating him until her fourth year of college. "We dated twice," she explains; the fourth year of college was the first time. I wonder out loud when, in that interval of about nine years, Erica and Leonard realized they had feelings for each other. Erica recalls an email she got in high school -- "it was one of those stupid chain forwards. And one of the questions was, Do you like the person who sent this to you? They were so dumb, but I remember writing something like... I plead the Fifth. 'Cuz Leonard sent it to me and I didn't want to say I like him."

What brings me to attention here is that Erica was given an opportunity to say how she felt, but instead said "maybe, maybe not." We could write this off as typical for high schoolers, but of course adults do it too. It's hard to take action. We pass the buck instead. Erica passed the buck back to Leonard. Leonard wrote something similarly vague back to her. And that is how two teenagers knew and liked each other for nine years before they started dating -- by which time they weren't teenagers anymore.

Erica says affectionately that Leonard "was always a wuss. He wasn't man enough to ever do anything about any girls." He didn't do anything when the two exchanged chain emails; he didn't do anything when he found Erica making out with her then-boyfriend at a Christmas party at Leonard's house. Not that the two were in constant contact. "There were some times when a year or maybe even more went by without us talking," says Erica, "but we could always pick up the phone and talk like no time had gone by."

At last something happened that does not always happen in true stories: someone made the first move. It was Erica. To earn their degrees, Erica and Leonard both needed to take statistics, a subject that was Erica's bane. Erica called him to remind him to sign up for classes -- "cuz he'd always wait till the last minute" -- and suggested that they take the course together. During that semester Erica felt her feelings strengthen, and at the end she told Leonard how she felt about him. "And what did he say?" I ask. "I don't even remember exactly how it happened," she answers. "Basically we both decided, okay, we'll start going out."

There was still more buck-passing to come. Leonard was studying to earn an associate's degree so he could transfer to a college three hours away. He didn't plan on pursuing a long-distance relationship, and he dropped hints about it to Erica but nothing more. The relationship was as full of false ends as it had once been of false starts. It took the intervention of Erica's best friend to force Leonard's hand: "She said, if you're planning on breaking up with her you'd better do it soon, because it's not good of you to string her on like that." Soon afterward, Leonard made the last move, where Erica had made the first. The romance had lasted just three months.

The cliche vision of romance is love at first sight, a chance encounter that leads almost instantly to one person leaping into the other's arms and both whispering "forever." But in real life the first kiss, at least in a potentially serious relationship, is so often a pearl years in the making, its story full of hesitations and ambivalences. So is the last kiss. And that's Erica's story.

At 11:38 PM, Brian glanced at his bookmarks.

2009-04-03T23:39:00.005-04:00

Urgh, I forgot all about blogging today. Too many other things on my mind, I guess. I've been feeling lonelier than usual. Happily, I've got some stuff set up this weekend: a ball game with my dad tomorrow, and with any luck an interview on Sunday. But for today I have twenty minutes to write a blog entry, which means either I take a pass or I write something half-assed about something I happen to be thinking about, like Go or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. And frankly either there's a blog entry in those topics or there isn't, and if there is I'd prefer to wait until I have time to write something full-assed about them like usual. So I'll take the pass.

There is a topic I've been meaning to write about that I can say something about in the remaining thirteen minutes, though, and it's not something I feel is especially expandable. It's my tendency to begin sentences with coordinating conjunctions. The last three sentences of my previous paragraph all began with conjunctions, and I didn't do it on purpose. My AP English teacher always jumped all over me for that. He said it subordinated the sentence to the previous sentence and turned it into a fragment. Syntactically he's probably right if these conjunctions are treated as the same words as the ones that are used with commas to tie sentences together. But that's just how I think. Each thought is tied to the previous one with a statement about how they're related. Do they contradict each other? Does the second expand on the first? Am I drawing a conclusion? There are no better words than the conjunctions for invisibly guiding you as you try to reconstruct my thoughts from these symbols on a computer screen. I could say "however" and "furthermore" and "consequently," and sometimes I do that too. But those are big words that connote big ideas. Some days my ideas are small, and on those days my words should be too.

This, obviously, is one of those days. So that's today's post. And you see, I did end up talking a little about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after all.

Two kinds of card

2009-04-02T17:10:00.003-04:00

These came about a week ago, when I was in the middle of Alice's story. Five hundred of them plus a shiny business card holder for $7.99 plus shipping. Take out the gray interior border and this is exactly what the cards look like. Simple, pretty, informal rather than professional. I think they send the message I want to send, which is a friendly "this is a real thing and here's how to get in touch with me." If I ask someone for a story and they want to know whether I'm for real, I can say "sure, here's my card." Having a card means you're for real. I guess it's reasonable for someone who's been asked a personal question to want something tangible to guarantee that this isn't a scam and that if it is they know who to sue. Part of what I have to do is reassure people and encourage them to visit the blog, and this card accomplishes both those things. No cell phone number, though. I hate telephones, especially cells, and I'm going to be doing enough talking to strangers without also finding them on the other end of the phone line.

For the record, I got the cards from an Internet company called VistaPrint in what I think was a first-time special; if you need a bunch of business cards cheap I recommend them. (Just be willing to wade through a few pages of marketing -- no, I don't want the same image on a coffee mug or postcard -- before they let you actually place your order.)

I also visited Verizon today to find out if their nationwide-Internet deal is any better than AT&T's. Nope. The same bandwidth at the same price with the same minimum two-year commitment if you want the rebate on the same very expensive card. There might as well just be one company offering this service. It may just turn out to be necessary to pay full price for the card, because I'm not sure what percentage of budget inns offer wireless networking.

Disappearing railroad blues

2009-04-01T20:35:00.002-04:00

Happy April! I don't have any pranks for you today, though I'm tempted to announce that I'll make my trip using BMW's new Magnetic Tow Technology, advertised today here. If this were real it would be a sweet way to ride.

And speaking of riding, I need to figure out soon whether I'm going to go by car or train. I was leaning towards going by train, but then it occurred to me that because I'd be riding in short hops, each leg would be no more than a day trip. I'd still be overnighting more or less entirely at hotels, so the train fare doesn't replace a hotel stay. No money saved on food, either, because the dining car charges unless you've made an exorbitantly upgraded reservation, which is only worth doing on long rides. I don't have to make car payments, but I do have to pay for rentals if I want to get anywhere within the cities I visit. The train looked appealing when I thought it was going to be more convenient and less expensive; I'm not sure how I feel now that it looks more convenient and more expensive.

The two biggest advantages of trains remain what they were: not having to focus on moving for long stretches at a time, and having a ready-made place to look for interviewees where we're all on equal terms. These should not be essential but are really tempting. I'm unfortunately aware that the higher the bar I set for myself, the greater the probability that I'm going to lose my nerve and abandon the whole project, consigning myself to spending June through August tutoring the odd few students who want tutoring during the summer, like I did last year and the year before that. I'd rather not do that again. But what price am I willing to pay, in dollars and romance, to lower the bar?

Northwest can do it in seven hours

2009-03-31T22:02:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-30T21:53:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-27T21:20:00.002-04:00

"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

2009-03-26T22:34:00.003-04:00

"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

2009-03-25T22:16:00.003-04:00

"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

2009-03-24T20:48:00.003-04:00

"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

2009-03-23T03:12:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-20T22:44:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-19T21:25:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-18T22:45:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-17T20:09:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-16T21:11:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-13T22:08:00.003-04:00

...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

2009-03-12T21:21:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-11T16:09:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-10T22:10:00.005-04:00

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

2009-03-09T22:47:00.005-04:00

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

2009-03-06T22:37:00.003-05:00

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

2009-03-05T02:33:00.005-05:00

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

2009-03-04T02:55:00.003-05:00

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

2009-03-03T01:19:00.007-05:00

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

2009-03-02T01:11:00.006-05:00

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.

The world is not beautiful; therefore it is

2009-02-27T16:50:00.001-05:00

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?

2009-02-26T19:29:00.005-05:00

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

2009-02-25T14:37:00.006-05:00

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

2009-02-24T19:27:00.003-05:00

"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

2009-02-22T03:08:00.011-05:00

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

2009-02-19T23:53:00.005-05:00

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

2009-02-19T02:27:00.005-05:00

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

2009-02-18T17:34:00.004-05:00

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

2009-02-17T14:33:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-16T20:47:00.004-05:00

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!

2009-02-14T17:03:00.005-05:00

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!

2009-02-13T20:02:00.005-05:00

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

2009-02-12T13:10:00.005-05:00

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

2009-02-11T02:09:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-10T21:28:00.001-05:00

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.