Endings and transitions

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Late light

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...

Tough row Tahoe

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

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. :)

Every exit an entrance

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!

Slow down -- you move too fast

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

"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."

I have to have Kentucky

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.

The things that divide us

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.

Semper probe in extremum

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 My 1040 had been sitting in a pile on the floor for about two months, getting covered up with and superseded by other mail and paperwork, and it wasn't until I realized I no longer knew where it was that I decided it was time to sit down with it.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

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

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

Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance

...Or, I could go by train.

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

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

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

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

Day's anatomy

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

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

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

March forth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paging Dr. House

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

Invisible stories

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

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

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

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

The urge to go on a journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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