I woke up in a car

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

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...

The middle of nowhere

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!

City on a hill

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!

Days like this, part 3

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.

Tremors

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.

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!

Aphrodisiax

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

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

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

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

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

The minor fall, the major lift

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

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

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

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

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

Love is not enough

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

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

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

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