Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Proceedings of the Academy of TDBP Studies: Polynesian Chicken
During the period of devastating war that saw a rapid descent of Rapa Nui civilization into famine and ritual cannibalization, some tribes would topple the moai of rival tribes as a means of psychological warfare.
Most authorities appear to agree that the original inhabitants of Easter Island arrived from Polynesia, and Thor Heyerdahl's theory of a Peruvian discovery of Easter Island seems largely discredited. Interestingly, some people believe that the chicken may hold the key to the mysteries of the spread of humans through the Pacific and into South America. Apparently, scientists have traced the genetic lineage of chickens and determined that chickens, which originated in Asia, and were carried by the Polynesians through the Pacific, arrived in southern Chile in the 12th century -- before the Spanish -- suggesting that Polynesians arrived in South America before the Spanish, and perhaps brought masonry techniques and the sweet potato back with them to Easter Island.
The TDBP is officially complete. What follows are merely postscripts and annotations on the original text. Like the mysterious Rongo Rongo texts left by the Easter Islanders, the TDBP will be an object of study and scholarship for generations to come. Our understanding of the TDBP, its meteoric rise, its sudden collapse, with meals left warm and half-eaten, projects dropped incomplete, is only at a beginning. There are important lessons to be learned by close study of the TDBP and its lasting effects on all who came into its orbit.
Also, we will have to do some investigation to determine the Evacuee's final whereabouts, as she has chosen, for reasons of her own, not to inform us of her final destination.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
The End
According to the Rand McNally trip calculator I covered somewhere in excess of 6000 miles. According to the Greyhound website, it would have cost me $970.50 to do this individual ticket by individual ticket.
When I was maybe 14 I spent a lot of time in comic book stores. I had a family member who was a collector type. I enjoyed it, and it made my acquisitive impulses kick in hard. So in the 99 cent bin I looked around. I found U.S. 1. It's a comic about a trucker driven by the tragic loss of his (trucker) brother Jeff to a villain known as the Highwayman. It features aliens, mind-controlled trucks, and a wide variety of bad puns. It's also a maxi-series; I assume the good folks at Marvel were not ready to permanently invest in a trucker comic. 12 issues; over and done. Without trying to compare Thirty Day Bus Pass to U.S. 1, because that would be ridiculous and prideful, I like to think of it as a little maxi-series of its own, with a future that now consists of Incredible She-Hulk guest appearences.
This, rather than Mission Control's previous post, is the official end of TDBP.
When I was maybe 14 I spent a lot of time in comic book stores. I had a family member who was a collector type. I enjoyed it, and it made my acquisitive impulses kick in hard. So in the 99 cent bin I looked around. I found U.S. 1. It's a comic about a trucker driven by the tragic loss of his (trucker) brother Jeff to a villain known as the Highwayman. It features aliens, mind-controlled trucks, and a wide variety of bad puns. It's also a maxi-series; I assume the good folks at Marvel were not ready to permanently invest in a trucker comic. 12 issues; over and done. Without trying to compare Thirty Day Bus Pass to U.S. 1, because that would be ridiculous and prideful, I like to think of it as a little maxi-series of its own, with a future that now consists of Incredible She-Hulk guest appearences.
This, rather than Mission Control's previous post, is the official end of TDBP.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Expirations, Exits
This is Mission Control saying a big fat ¡Hola! from Santiago, Chile, where it´s currently chilly. Hahaha. That was a joke from the famous CHANCHOW, to give credit where credit is due.
It´s winter in June here in Chile, although the weather is L.A.-like. Tomorrow, Mission Control will be leaving Santiago on a special operation to Easter Island.
The Thirty Day Bus Pass is now officially finished. The National Library here tells me that we now have one minute left on this terminal. So, this is Mission Control signing off from South America.
¿The End?
It´s winter in June here in Chile, although the weather is L.A.-like. Tomorrow, Mission Control will be leaving Santiago on a special operation to Easter Island.
The Thirty Day Bus Pass is now officially finished. The National Library here tells me that we now have one minute left on this terminal. So, this is Mission Control signing off from South America.
¿The End?
I Just Had To Pay For A Ticket
When you are not at your final destination but realize that your bus pass may (or may not) have expired the previous day, and you sneakingly do the math in your head and discover that, in fact, you have been travelling for 30 days on the bus, you have two options.
You can pretend that the possibility of expiration never crossed your mind and try to use the pass and get really pissed off when/if somebody points out that it's expired and throw a fit and try to talk them into giving you the extra day because you didn't know.
Or you can go up to the ticket window and say that "Hey, I was wondering . . . ."
The advantages of the second option are: a) you are more likely to have an amiable conversation with the person helping you, which may make them more likely to make your case for you, and b) you feel slightly less shifty. The advantages of the first option is a) they may not notice that your pass is expired and b) it puts you in a better arguing position.
I chose the second option. It didn't work out so good, although I had the single most helpful ticket person in the history of the Greyhound organization (technically, I guess, she worked for Vermont Transit). She sat on hold for a good half hour, and called something like three numbers, all the while joking with her daughter, who had dropped in, and was in a coma a couple of months ago, and is now germ-phobic.
You can pretend that the possibility of expiration never crossed your mind and try to use the pass and get really pissed off when/if somebody points out that it's expired and throw a fit and try to talk them into giving you the extra day because you didn't know.
Or you can go up to the ticket window and say that "Hey, I was wondering . . . ."
The advantages of the second option are: a) you are more likely to have an amiable conversation with the person helping you, which may make them more likely to make your case for you, and b) you feel slightly less shifty. The advantages of the first option is a) they may not notice that your pass is expired and b) it puts you in a better arguing position.
I chose the second option. It didn't work out so good, although I had the single most helpful ticket person in the history of the Greyhound organization (technically, I guess, she worked for Vermont Transit). She sat on hold for a good half hour, and called something like three numbers, all the while joking with her daughter, who had dropped in, and was in a coma a couple of months ago, and is now germ-phobic.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
A Boat Called "Agitator": An Account Of My Weekend
I woke up in Portland (ME) at 6:30 a.m. on Friday and checked out bus schedules and campgrounds. I picked, pretty much at random, Keene's Lake Family Campground in Calais (pronounced "callous"). There was a bus leaving at noon. It sounded good. I went back to sleep, and woke up at 10 a.m. I packed and found myself, for no apparent reason, a little panicked. As though there would be severe penalties for missing that bus. As though staying in Portland were a fate worse than death.
To get to Calais I took the bus from Portland to Bangor. I took Concord Trailways, because I thought it was a through bus. In fact, I had to change buses in Bangor. Concord Trailways gives you bottled water and pretzles when you ride its buses. Everybody was white on Concord Trailways.
I had an hour in Bangor. I ate a lobster roll and purchased supplies for the campground (lots of Spaghetti-Os, a couple of oranges, some wine in a box). To get to Calais, I took West Bus. The Discovery Pass doesn't work on West Bus. You have to pay cash to ride West Bus. It was a small bus. Midway through, the bus driver stopped to pick up his kid. The bus driver said that we were the quietest group of passengers he had ever had. We all appeared to be smokers.
Everybody but me got off the bus in Machias. I had no idea where I was. When we got to Calais at 7 p.m. the bus driver pointed out that Canada was right across the river. I was surprised. I had dinner at a road house (scallops) and took a taxi out to the campsite. I should say here that both taxi drivers that I used in Calais, as well as the West Bus driver, had the radio going loudly in the background. I feel there may be some sociological significance to this.
It was 8 or 9 p.m. when I got to the campground. Hard to tell, because my cellphone kept flickering to some later, Canadian, time. It was raining. But they told me I could still go swimming in the lake, and so I did. The lake was grand. I floated on my back and looked up at the sliver of moon. Later, on the phone, someone told me that it was the perfect opening to a horror movie. That made me a little uneasy.
The campground was mostly trailers. It reminded me of the vacation spots of my youth. The owners had been there for five years; the patriarch was an ex-firefighter from Mass. who had always dreamed of owning a campground. He said that a lot of people kept their trailers there year round, and would come down for weekends in the summer. He said everybody moved closer to the lake as spots opened up. Some had been coming for twenty years. Most of the regulars were Canadians, he said. We talked about Canadians a little bit. From my cabin, I could hear the couple at the next site switching back and forth from English to French. They had their fire going; I watched the father try to start it while the kids kept running around, calling his attention to things: rocks, bugs, animal imitations. I bought wood and a starter log at the store myself, and, for the first time in my life, tried to build a campfire. It didn't work out, but not in any kind of interesting madcap way. The logs smoldered a bit and I sat there and tried to arrange kindling. It was a pretty fun way to pass time, actually.
I'm back in Portland; tomorrow the bus pass comes to an end. I suspect it may not work anymore -- the pass says Expires May 25. But one way or another, I'll be heading back to Kingston (NY). I'm feeling a little at sea.
Maine, by the way, is every bit as beautiful as it is popularly supposed to be, and I highly recommend it.
To get to Calais I took the bus from Portland to Bangor. I took Concord Trailways, because I thought it was a through bus. In fact, I had to change buses in Bangor. Concord Trailways gives you bottled water and pretzles when you ride its buses. Everybody was white on Concord Trailways.
I had an hour in Bangor. I ate a lobster roll and purchased supplies for the campground (lots of Spaghetti-Os, a couple of oranges, some wine in a box). To get to Calais, I took West Bus. The Discovery Pass doesn't work on West Bus. You have to pay cash to ride West Bus. It was a small bus. Midway through, the bus driver stopped to pick up his kid. The bus driver said that we were the quietest group of passengers he had ever had. We all appeared to be smokers.
Everybody but me got off the bus in Machias. I had no idea where I was. When we got to Calais at 7 p.m. the bus driver pointed out that Canada was right across the river. I was surprised. I had dinner at a road house (scallops) and took a taxi out to the campsite. I should say here that both taxi drivers that I used in Calais, as well as the West Bus driver, had the radio going loudly in the background. I feel there may be some sociological significance to this.
It was 8 or 9 p.m. when I got to the campground. Hard to tell, because my cellphone kept flickering to some later, Canadian, time. It was raining. But they told me I could still go swimming in the lake, and so I did. The lake was grand. I floated on my back and looked up at the sliver of moon. Later, on the phone, someone told me that it was the perfect opening to a horror movie. That made me a little uneasy.
The campground was mostly trailers. It reminded me of the vacation spots of my youth. The owners had been there for five years; the patriarch was an ex-firefighter from Mass. who had always dreamed of owning a campground. He said that a lot of people kept their trailers there year round, and would come down for weekends in the summer. He said everybody moved closer to the lake as spots opened up. Some had been coming for twenty years. Most of the regulars were Canadians, he said. We talked about Canadians a little bit. From my cabin, I could hear the couple at the next site switching back and forth from English to French. They had their fire going; I watched the father try to start it while the kids kept running around, calling his attention to things: rocks, bugs, animal imitations. I bought wood and a starter log at the store myself, and, for the first time in my life, tried to build a campfire. It didn't work out, but not in any kind of interesting madcap way. The logs smoldered a bit and I sat there and tried to arrange kindling. It was a pretty fun way to pass time, actually.
I'm back in Portland; tomorrow the bus pass comes to an end. I suspect it may not work anymore -- the pass says Expires May 25. But one way or another, I'll be heading back to Kingston (NY). I'm feeling a little at sea.
Maine, by the way, is every bit as beautiful as it is popularly supposed to be, and I highly recommend it.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
TDBP: Week in Review
There's an elephant in India that robs motorists. People can now change television channels with their minds. Whales evolved from land mammals (like hippos), and that's why they have horizontal tail fins, while fish have vertical tail fins. Tonight Mission Control tried to gather a gross creepy bug scampering through the guest room in a paper towel in order to gently catch and release him outside, but we were clumsy. We saw a greenish gooey spot on the paper towel as we stood outside trying to shake the bug free. The price of corn is predicted to rise precipitously this year. And, yes, your eldest sibling is in fact smarter than you.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
My Left Foot Itches A Lot
TDBP: Now more disoriented than ever.
I spent an evening at my mother's house. The bus pass expires on Monday, and (sitting on the porch in the sunshine and my pajamas, drinking coffee, chatting) I couldn't think of any reason on earth not to just stay there, spend some time with my family, have a real bed and actual conversation. Tomorrow, after all, (today, technically) I will have been on the road for a month.
But no. Onto the bus I went, getting a lift to Albany from my mother. I don't know how that guy in Mobile guessed I was an only child. Anyway, the bus felt much stranger after time spent with my family. It seemed, in point of fact, like one of those slowish-paced Disneyland rides. Somewhere between Peter Pan and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
On the bus from Albany to Boston, I sat next to a 25 year old who was hiking the Appalachian trail. He had done half of it, from Georgia to Virginia (West Virginia?), lost 41 pounds, taken three weeks off, put on 20 pounds, and was back to finish the job. He was going to spend the winter being a ski bum. He had a large beard, and was extremely jovial. He gave me a brownie. He said I should go to Acadia National Park; he said it was the first place you could see the sun rise in the U.S. I wished that my trip was as tough-sounding as his.
In Boston I took a two hour layover and ate a bag of Watermelon-flavored Sour Patch kids. Then Portland, Maine. On the bus I contemplated how white and (relatively) wealthy the bus population seemed. I also toyed with the decision ahead: do I spend the time to take the bus as far into Maine as I can, or do I try to see something of Portland?
I feel like if I read Mission Control's most recent post closely, it would give me the wisdom I need. Or maybe a home remodeling project would do the trick. But the bus pass is due to run out, and some tough choices have to be made.
I spent an evening at my mother's house. The bus pass expires on Monday, and (sitting on the porch in the sunshine and my pajamas, drinking coffee, chatting) I couldn't think of any reason on earth not to just stay there, spend some time with my family, have a real bed and actual conversation. Tomorrow, after all, (today, technically) I will have been on the road for a month.
But no. Onto the bus I went, getting a lift to Albany from my mother. I don't know how that guy in Mobile guessed I was an only child. Anyway, the bus felt much stranger after time spent with my family. It seemed, in point of fact, like one of those slowish-paced Disneyland rides. Somewhere between Peter Pan and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
On the bus from Albany to Boston, I sat next to a 25 year old who was hiking the Appalachian trail. He had done half of it, from Georgia to Virginia (West Virginia?), lost 41 pounds, taken three weeks off, put on 20 pounds, and was back to finish the job. He was going to spend the winter being a ski bum. He had a large beard, and was extremely jovial. He gave me a brownie. He said I should go to Acadia National Park; he said it was the first place you could see the sun rise in the U.S. I wished that my trip was as tough-sounding as his.
In Boston I took a two hour layover and ate a bag of Watermelon-flavored Sour Patch kids. Then Portland, Maine. On the bus I contemplated how white and (relatively) wealthy the bus population seemed. I also toyed with the decision ahead: do I spend the time to take the bus as far into Maine as I can, or do I try to see something of Portland?
I feel like if I read Mission Control's most recent post closely, it would give me the wisdom I need. Or maybe a home remodeling project would do the trick. But the bus pass is due to run out, and some tough choices have to be made.
You can't stop Go
We once played on a soccer team with a guy from Japan named Go, who was a very talented right winger. A funny English guy on the team was fond of saying "You can't stop Go."
We wanted to share that with you.
We wanted to share that with you.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
A Guest Post
This is not actually EFD; it is a Guest Blog, produced in the beautiful Hudson Valley, where the Evacuee has briefly (think 12 hrs) touched down to a) get a computer cord b) do laundry c) scratch mosquito bites d) amuse family members. Evacuee seems in very good form, a little sunburned, full of interesting tidbits about geographic wonders and amusing sociological insights about the various characters who ride buses (including herself), and the denizens of many cities, from the NW USA to its SE, with stops in between. The delights of Gulf Coast and Atlantic beaches (not as cold as the Pacific, and without the waves that require Extremely Strong Swimming to overcome) and the superiority of a variety of eating establishments were ascertained. She had fajitas for supper, and will leave early tomorrow for Maine, except that by now we should all know to Await Developments.
A Quick Note On Greyhound Facilities
Almost every Greyhound station these days has a little shop and restaurant. I feel like this is a new development; I don't remember this. They are noteworthy primarily for the extreme slowness of the service and for the wack-o selection of books. They seem to have some kind of deal with some kind of overflow book dealer. So in every shop you see the same set of primarily sci-fi children's books for $2. Mixed with bios of tv stars, confessions of body builders, and serious novels. It may not sound that weird, but it is, especially early in the morning. You can also buy bus models there.
Last Hurrahs
After my last post, I dropped my backpack with the (exceedingly, enormously) kindly folks at the campground, and went in search of breakfast and beach.
I got knocked over by a wave or two, counted 36 mosquito bites on my legs alone, and headed back to Savannah. The taxi was waiting when I got back to the campground, so I left still in my sundress and bathing suit. The woman at the campground told me to be safe, which made me nervous. The taxi driver pointed out features of interest, and talked about his hitchhiking days. In the Greyhound station I bought my ticket and changed out of my beachwear. There's something profoundly seedy about changing in a Greyhound bathroom.
The bus to New York was packed again. In Fayetteville, N.C. a man and a woman got into a fight about who should be first in line. She kept saying "Talk to the hand, talk to the hand." I couldn't hear what he was saying, but she explained that she was 65 and he might be right but she was getting on that bus. It was dying down, when one of my fellow passengers, a large woman with a rattail, started telling the man that he was disrespecting the woman. The woman with the rattail said that the other woman might look seedy and indigent but that she was still somebody's child. The woman with the rattail told the other woman that the guy was being threatening and that she might call the police. She started ranting about how menacing men were to women they thought were vulnerable. I thought she was being excessive. All the passengers were buzzing about it; nobody could let it go.
When the other woman got off the bus, a stop later, the woman with the rattail insisted on hugging her. And talking about it more.
In Richmond, Va. I got off the bus to smoke. The woman with the rattail came up very close to me and asked me for a cigarette. I gave her one. Then she asked me for a light. I gave her one. I resented her enormously. She said, "I'm sorry, but times are hard." The Richmond stop was opposite the stadium for the Richmond Braves, my favorite Triple A franchise. The stadium features (on the outside) a seeming giant peering over the supports. There were rats running around. It was a little strange for 3 a.m.
At another stop, a guy asked my name and then said, "I have some weed. Do you want some?" I said no.
I'm at my mother's for the night. Tomorrow I head for Maine. That will be the last bit of this trip, and I feel, as usual, that sense of wasted opportunities, mixed with immense sentimentality about the whole thing so far. Right.
I got knocked over by a wave or two, counted 36 mosquito bites on my legs alone, and headed back to Savannah. The taxi was waiting when I got back to the campground, so I left still in my sundress and bathing suit. The woman at the campground told me to be safe, which made me nervous. The taxi driver pointed out features of interest, and talked about his hitchhiking days. In the Greyhound station I bought my ticket and changed out of my beachwear. There's something profoundly seedy about changing in a Greyhound bathroom.
The bus to New York was packed again. In Fayetteville, N.C. a man and a woman got into a fight about who should be first in line. She kept saying "Talk to the hand, talk to the hand." I couldn't hear what he was saying, but she explained that she was 65 and he might be right but she was getting on that bus. It was dying down, when one of my fellow passengers, a large woman with a rattail, started telling the man that he was disrespecting the woman. The woman with the rattail said that the other woman might look seedy and indigent but that she was still somebody's child. The woman with the rattail told the other woman that the guy was being threatening and that she might call the police. She started ranting about how menacing men were to women they thought were vulnerable. I thought she was being excessive. All the passengers were buzzing about it; nobody could let it go.
When the other woman got off the bus, a stop later, the woman with the rattail insisted on hugging her. And talking about it more.
In Richmond, Va. I got off the bus to smoke. The woman with the rattail came up very close to me and asked me for a cigarette. I gave her one. Then she asked me for a light. I gave her one. I resented her enormously. She said, "I'm sorry, but times are hard." The Richmond stop was opposite the stadium for the Richmond Braves, my favorite Triple A franchise. The stadium features (on the outside) a seeming giant peering over the supports. There were rats running around. It was a little strange for 3 a.m.
At another stop, a guy asked my name and then said, "I have some weed. Do you want some?" I said no.
I'm at my mother's for the night. Tomorrow I head for Maine. That will be the last bit of this trip, and I feel, as usual, that sense of wasted opportunities, mixed with immense sentimentality about the whole thing so far. Right.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Ochre Alert
Given the recent communications from the Evacuee, Mission Control is lowering the mission status from Red Alert to a very subtle and rich shade of ochre. There are six days left on the Thirty Day Bus Pass. We have entered the reentry phase. Turbulence is expected.
We'd like to make a few observations. Life is very short. Time passes more quickly as years go by. None of us really has any idea what we are doing. We try to make a place for ourselves in the world, and to be happy, and then we begin to fail, and we are gone. No one is quite sure what happens to us after that.
Soon, our job here at Mission Control will be done. Due to prior, pressing engagements, we will not be here to see the end of the TDBP. The final days of the TDBP will be on autopilot, with little to no guidance or feedback from mission headquarters here in Los Angeles. The Evacuee will be -- as she perhaps has always been -- the master of her own destiny, and her own blog.
"And Isaac Newton Was Probably Gay"
So since I've started this trip I've been thinking that I should sleep outside at least once. Partly it's just the presence of the sleeping bag, taunting me with its outdoorsiness. Partly it's because it's the sort of thing I never do, and haven't done since I was maybe 10 years old, and then only because somebody made me. The closest I've come in the intervening years was a Christmas-time trip to Death Valley in college where we slept in the car. Which was kind of spooky, but not the same.
Last night I finally bit the bullet. I was incredibly fortunate in that there was no rain. Which makes it the only day in Georgia so far without rain. As much as I admire the musical stylings of Brooks Benton I have no desire to re-live them outdoors without a tent.
On the minus side, I am now one giant mosquito bite. I killed a couple of them (when I went to brush my teeth there was a giant smear of mosquito blood on my leg), but that didn't go any way towards evening the score. Also, the ground is hard. And I got woken up by a racoon touching my (outside the sleeping bag) foot, which is a jumpy way to wake up.
But all in all, it was well worth it. I read until it got dark, brushed my teeth and sat there smoking in the dark. After a bit, I started talking to my campsite neighbor. He was a self-described blue collar guy and secular progressive. He was going back to college at age 40. His daughter was starting at his college in the fall. He was drinking beer and bourbon, both of which he offered me. He was a surveyor, and wanted to make a film about surveying in the past. He was really into Tudor England.
If I had woken up at 5 he would have made me coffee, but at 5 I was still asleep. I woke up at 8 and looked up at the tree over my head. Then I started scratching again.
Last night I finally bit the bullet. I was incredibly fortunate in that there was no rain. Which makes it the only day in Georgia so far without rain. As much as I admire the musical stylings of Brooks Benton I have no desire to re-live them outdoors without a tent.
On the minus side, I am now one giant mosquito bite. I killed a couple of them (when I went to brush my teeth there was a giant smear of mosquito blood on my leg), but that didn't go any way towards evening the score. Also, the ground is hard. And I got woken up by a racoon touching my (outside the sleeping bag) foot, which is a jumpy way to wake up.
But all in all, it was well worth it. I read until it got dark, brushed my teeth and sat there smoking in the dark. After a bit, I started talking to my campsite neighbor. He was a self-described blue collar guy and secular progressive. He was going back to college at age 40. His daughter was starting at his college in the fall. He was drinking beer and bourbon, both of which he offered me. He was a surveyor, and wanted to make a film about surveying in the past. He was really into Tudor England.
If I had woken up at 5 he would have made me coffee, but at 5 I was still asleep. I woke up at 8 and looked up at the tree over my head. Then I started scratching again.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Returns: Untriumphal
The folks at River's End Campground in Tybee Island are kinder than kind, and are letting me use their computer, despite the fact that the office is closed. So this will be quick.
My first night in Savannah, the people in the rooms on either side of my hotel room got arrested at 3:00 a.m. Between that and the loss of my power cord, I felt a little bereft and nervous. Two subsequent days of watching attractive Southerners drink and flirt did not, surprisingly, restore me. Although Savannah is very beautiful and you should go there.
This morning I got my act together and took a cab out to Tybee Island. I feel much better now. The people at the campground a) held my backpack in the office while I spent the afternoon at the beach b) unlocked the pavilion in case it rains tonight (I am tentless) and c) are letting me use their computer. The Atlantic was incredibly calm, and shallow. I wallowed and floated and no doubt have another sunburn. Then I went to a tiki bar by the beach.
The bartender was an ex-lawyer, current animator. There was a couple in formal attire who were going to get married on the beach. The groom was doing a Le Bron James thing with his nails. The bride was wearing pink. There was a pair of old lovers having a rendezvous. They seemed to be on an every six year schedule. She talked about how her past (current?) husband wanted her to be a housewife. There was a couple there for their 35th wedding anniversery. I could go on. I had 1/4 pound of shrimp and a frozen drink.
Anyway, I'm going to quit bothering these people now. But I would like to thank Mission Control for their stalwart efforts during the ongoing power cord loss. And who doesn't like kittens?
My first night in Savannah, the people in the rooms on either side of my hotel room got arrested at 3:00 a.m. Between that and the loss of my power cord, I felt a little bereft and nervous. Two subsequent days of watching attractive Southerners drink and flirt did not, surprisingly, restore me. Although Savannah is very beautiful and you should go there.
This morning I got my act together and took a cab out to Tybee Island. I feel much better now. The people at the campground a) held my backpack in the office while I spent the afternoon at the beach b) unlocked the pavilion in case it rains tonight (I am tentless) and c) are letting me use their computer. The Atlantic was incredibly calm, and shallow. I wallowed and floated and no doubt have another sunburn. Then I went to a tiki bar by the beach.
The bartender was an ex-lawyer, current animator. There was a couple in formal attire who were going to get married on the beach. The groom was doing a Le Bron James thing with his nails. The bride was wearing pink. There was a pair of old lovers having a rendezvous. They seemed to be on an every six year schedule. She talked about how her past (current?) husband wanted her to be a housewife. There was a couple there for their 35th wedding anniversery. I could go on. I had 1/4 pound of shrimp and a frozen drink.
Anyway, I'm going to quit bothering these people now. But I would like to thank Mission Control for their stalwart efforts during the ongoing power cord loss. And who doesn't like kittens?
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Killing Time With Kitties
Good news. We have received confirmation that the Evacuee is alive and well, but still without a power source (besides, of course, inner inspiration and the Krebs Cycle).
She is apparently heading for some island somewhere.
And now, by special request, kittens.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
RNA's Sad Dreams
Sometimes we begin to miss everyone. We had a long dream. We were walking through a strange city split by a river, with many concrete bridges, and comfortable rooms behind thick walls. A friend of ours from school who had died in her mid-twenties was with us. We were having tea and she whispered something to us but now we can't remember what she said. She was smiling as she whispered it. She seemed happy. It never came up that she was no longer alive. She seemed to know her way around the strange city we were in. She seemed to be in her element. We didn't look down at the river; we think we knew the water would be very black. At some point we got on a moped and drove in circles around the strange town.
We were waiting for our new lenses at the optometrist. Two older people were speaking in Tagalog. They switched to English, and the man explained to the woman he was speaking to that his mother had been the first one to "show [him] who God was" and to "teach [him] to say [his] prayers."
A small bird fell out of a tree and into our front garden. We didn't know what to do about it. A swarm of ants covered it by late morning. We hope one of the neighborhood cats comes by during the night and takes it away.
We were playing pick-up basketball again today. While we were shooting around, we started talking to a middle-aged guy who was asking us what part of India we were from. We went into a long explanation. He asked us if we thought he should have his four-year old start studying French, Hindi, or Mandarin. He said he wanted his kid to be "an intellectual" and that he wanted to make sure his kid "was ahead of the game".
Are predators our friends? The dopey Amazonian crane falls out of a tree and gets eaten by a crocodile. No more dopey bird genes being passed on. If the crocodile is too slow to get the dopey bird, no more slow crocodile genes. Where does this all end?
Friday, June 15, 2007
TDBP: Red Alert
An updated view of Mission Control's TDBP Big Board is above. The Evacuee appears to be curling north for the final leg of her trip after her swift drop through the South. The TDBP has accordingly been upgraded from "Sell" to "Hold". There are nine days left on the Thirty Day Bus Pass. We have entered the last third of the TDBP, the phase of Reflections, Realizations, Resolutions, and Regrets. And Recalls, as in Product Recalls: new studies have revealed that Marlboro Reds may be harmful to health.
The Evacuee has alluded to some factual inaccuracies on Mission Control's Big Board. We'll certainly look into these purported inaccuracies, but would like to note that we are doing the best we can on a very limited budget.
We've been putting off the bad news: All systems had been go on the TDBP Mission, but Mission Control has just learned of a catastrophic event: the Evacuee has lost her power source, and will be blacked out for an indeterminate period. We here at Mission Control are not prone to overstatement, and we like to pride ourselves on our collective sang froid in high pressure situations, but we are totally flipping out. The future of the TDBP Mission, we must all acknowledge, is in dire jeopardy. Due to this emergency, Mission Control is immediately moving the mission status to Red Alert. Mission Control is taking full control of the Mission until normal system operations are restored.
In other news, Mission Control Field Day is scheduled for tomorrow. There will be an egg toss, a crab race, a Risk tournament, tug-of-war, a three-legged race, inflatable Sumo wrestling suits, Capture the Flag, beer pong, and a silent auction for Dungeons & Dragons collectibles.
Mint Juleps
The bartender at the Savannah Hilton said they get a lot of people trying to order those. She said it was too hard to keep fresh mint in stock, so they stopped making them. She said they were nasty anyway. She said that when she had her first mint julep, she thought, "This is why we lost the war."
Savannah on a weekend night is full of tourists being educated about history. They tour around in hearses, in horse drawn carriages, and in walking tours led by colonially garbed young women holding lanterns. They are usually clutching plastic cups with beer in them.
It is a very, very beautiful city.
I seem to have lost my power cord in Pensacola. Calls are in to the hotel, but I may not be online for a couple of days minimum. Carry on.
Savannah on a weekend night is full of tourists being educated about history. They tour around in hearses, in horse drawn carriages, and in walking tours led by colonially garbed young women holding lanterns. They are usually clutching plastic cups with beer in them.
It is a very, very beautiful city.
I seem to have lost my power cord in Pensacola. Calls are in to the hotel, but I may not be online for a couple of days minimum. Carry on.
Disorientation
My Best Western in Savannah is laid out exactly like my Days Inn in Pensacola was. I was on Eastern Time in Knoxville, then I went back to Central Time in Nashville. Now I am on Eastern Time again. And just took a nap.
This is starting to confuse me.
This is starting to confuse me.
In A Greyhound Station Near You . . .
Someone is swearing loudly that they will never take Greyhound again. Not me. But someone.
Last night's Greyhound journey was not going to convert any Greyhound doubters. I had been on the fence about whether to spend one day in Pensacola or two; having had the nicest time of this trip there (excepting, obviously time spent with people I already know and love) I decided to leave the second day.
At the Greyhound station the attendant was chatty to the point of coming over and sitting by me. He had spent time in L.A.; he wanted to dispel the myth that L.A. was expensive. Also, we talked about Berlin. The bus ride was boisterous, partly due to the presence of several men identically dressed in navy blue t-shirts, khaki pants, and blue slip-on shoes. When I only noticed the matching t-shirts I thought maybe they were a religious group. They talked a lot about booze. There was a girl on the bus who kept bursting into full-voiced song; I started to feel like I was in a musical.
On the way to Tallahassee we passed through a series of beach towns. I kept thinking, I could get off the bus and stay there. But inertia had a hold of me. In Tallahassee we changed buses, headed for Jacksonville. It was late. The girl would burst into song and people would yell at her to shut up. In Jacksonville, I changed to the New York bus. They search your bags at the Greyhound station in Jacksonville, and they wave a wand over you. The bus was completely full, and we milled around for a while having our bags checked. On the bus I sat next to a mother with a small child. She was understandably aggrieved at having to share her seat. I felt bad and dazed and grubby.
I got off in Savannah at 5 a.m. A friendly taxi-driver told me I was right next to the historic district, and I went off looking for a hotel. The light was clear and blue and it was ridiculously beautiful. Somebody was walking behind me; which made me a little nervous. It was a youngish frat guy. He passed me, and asked me where I was coming from. He told me a street where I could find hotels. I was crossing the street, headed that way, when he called me back, and said I should call him if I needed anything in Savannah. He gave me his number.
I stopped in one of the squares to have a cigarette. A fountain was going in the background. I crossed to the street he had told me, and encountered the frat guy coming around again. He told me to call him.
Now I'm in a Best Western with a ladder in my room for reasons I can't quite decipher. I am going to have the continental breakfast, take a bath, and go to sleep.
Last night's Greyhound journey was not going to convert any Greyhound doubters. I had been on the fence about whether to spend one day in Pensacola or two; having had the nicest time of this trip there (excepting, obviously time spent with people I already know and love) I decided to leave the second day.
At the Greyhound station the attendant was chatty to the point of coming over and sitting by me. He had spent time in L.A.; he wanted to dispel the myth that L.A. was expensive. Also, we talked about Berlin. The bus ride was boisterous, partly due to the presence of several men identically dressed in navy blue t-shirts, khaki pants, and blue slip-on shoes. When I only noticed the matching t-shirts I thought maybe they were a religious group. They talked a lot about booze. There was a girl on the bus who kept bursting into full-voiced song; I started to feel like I was in a musical.
On the way to Tallahassee we passed through a series of beach towns. I kept thinking, I could get off the bus and stay there. But inertia had a hold of me. In Tallahassee we changed buses, headed for Jacksonville. It was late. The girl would burst into song and people would yell at her to shut up. In Jacksonville, I changed to the New York bus. They search your bags at the Greyhound station in Jacksonville, and they wave a wand over you. The bus was completely full, and we milled around for a while having our bags checked. On the bus I sat next to a mother with a small child. She was understandably aggrieved at having to share her seat. I felt bad and dazed and grubby.
I got off in Savannah at 5 a.m. A friendly taxi-driver told me I was right next to the historic district, and I went off looking for a hotel. The light was clear and blue and it was ridiculously beautiful. Somebody was walking behind me; which made me a little nervous. It was a youngish frat guy. He passed me, and asked me where I was coming from. He told me a street where I could find hotels. I was crossing the street, headed that way, when he called me back, and said I should call him if I needed anything in Savannah. He gave me his number.
I stopped in one of the squares to have a cigarette. A fountain was going in the background. I crossed to the street he had told me, and encountered the frat guy coming around again. He told me to call him.
Now I'm in a Best Western with a ladder in my room for reasons I can't quite decipher. I am going to have the continental breakfast, take a bath, and go to sleep.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Words Fail Us
The Evacuee, some of you may have noticed, is not big into images. She quite explicitly privileges text over image with an almost Talmudic (or Koranic) fervor. This is not very Greek (Greek Orthodox, Hindu, or L.A.) of the Evacuee.
Why the Evacuee has taken this stance, we are not sure -- though we have our theories. She has let it be known that she is not a fan of Mission Control's frequent video posts. Still, the Evacuee sometimes notes that "[she] wishes [she] could do a better job of describing how things look." What's wrong with a camera, we ask?
But we are not trying to be combative.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
A Note On Smoking
On every Greyhound bus the driver tells you that you can't smoke on the bus, that you will be booted off the bus if you smoke. But on one of my recent buses, somebody smoked in the bathroom. The driver didn't seem to notice. We were only five minutes away from whatever station it was we were going to.
A Night At The Dog Races
(Title courtesy of Mission Control)
I'm pretty sure I don't approve of dog racing. I think it's probably brutal, and certainly there was some pre-race yowling from the dogs as they waited for the mechanical rabbit. Not to mention the dog that pissed on the track as it was being paraded before us. A dog, in point of fact, that I had bet $2 on.
Nevertheless, I've always wanted to go to the dog races. I suspect, unfortunately, that's only because it's kind of an improbable thing to do, and so I could trot it out to fill conversational voids with some kind of fake expertise.
There weren't a lot of people at the dog races. Those that were, were the people I had seen at the beach earlier. Whole clumps of families, buying racing tickets for the little ones, with teenage daughters parading around in short shorts and tall vinyl shoes. I'm making them sound trashy, but they weren't. They were just families out to have a good time; the effect was wholesome. And I don't mean wholesome in a complicated way; I mean wholesome like a butter commercial.
The mechanical rabbit came around the track and the announcer yelled here comes Swifty and the dogs came tearing out of their gates. Some people yelled. Then we bet again and waited. I bought popcorn and a soda. The sky went dark; it seemed darker at night out here. People looked like some complicated art installation under the floodlights.
The taxi driver that picked me up asked if he could smoke. I said sure. He said I could too if I wanted to. I said I had smoked plenty at the track.
I'm pretty sure I don't approve of dog racing. I think it's probably brutal, and certainly there was some pre-race yowling from the dogs as they waited for the mechanical rabbit. Not to mention the dog that pissed on the track as it was being paraded before us. A dog, in point of fact, that I had bet $2 on.
Nevertheless, I've always wanted to go to the dog races. I suspect, unfortunately, that's only because it's kind of an improbable thing to do, and so I could trot it out to fill conversational voids with some kind of fake expertise.
There weren't a lot of people at the dog races. Those that were, were the people I had seen at the beach earlier. Whole clumps of families, buying racing tickets for the little ones, with teenage daughters parading around in short shorts and tall vinyl shoes. I'm making them sound trashy, but they weren't. They were just families out to have a good time; the effect was wholesome. And I don't mean wholesome in a complicated way; I mean wholesome like a butter commercial.
The mechanical rabbit came around the track and the announcer yelled here comes Swifty and the dogs came tearing out of their gates. Some people yelled. Then we bet again and waited. I bought popcorn and a soda. The sky went dark; it seemed darker at night out here. People looked like some complicated art installation under the floodlights.
The taxi driver that picked me up asked if he could smoke. I said sure. He said I could too if I wanted to. I said I had smoked plenty at the track.
Fighting Your Evolutionary Destiny
Today I went to the beach. I am not designed for the beach; I am too skinny, too hairy, and too pale for the beach. Now I am blotchy and tired.
But the beach was fantastic. The Pensacola beaches had been talked up, not just by Mission Control but by two guys I met at the hotel breakfast in Nashville. They were x-ray machine installers, ex-service, and they gave each other a lot of grief. But they said I should go to the Gulf Coast beaches; they said the sand was white, the water warm, and the waves gentle.
They were right. It was a beer commercial beach. It was the kind of beach that theme parks seek to replicate. The water was turquoise. I felt conspicuous; I felt like I stood out like a sore thumb. But I shook it off. I stood in the water and let the waves lift me up and I thought to myself, "This was an excellent idea." Then I went and sat at a bar and grill and had a salty dog in tribute to a stylish friend.
But the beach was fantastic. The Pensacola beaches had been talked up, not just by Mission Control but by two guys I met at the hotel breakfast in Nashville. They were x-ray machine installers, ex-service, and they gave each other a lot of grief. But they said I should go to the Gulf Coast beaches; they said the sand was white, the water warm, and the waves gentle.
They were right. It was a beer commercial beach. It was the kind of beach that theme parks seek to replicate. The water was turquoise. I felt conspicuous; I felt like I stood out like a sore thumb. But I shook it off. I stood in the water and let the waves lift me up and I thought to myself, "This was an excellent idea." Then I went and sat at a bar and grill and had a salty dog in tribute to a stylish friend.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Monuments
Right across the street from my Days Inn in Pensacola is a large-ish monument to the Confederate war dead. I forgot in planning this trip, and I continue to forget as I make my way across the country, just how strange it is to be someplace you've never been before. Things surprise you. On my way from Chicago to Knoxville my bus stopped in Indianapolis for a couple of hours early in the morning. I staggered out to get food, and found myself confronted with an enormous monument to Indiana's war dead. It was larger than I could have ever imagined. I had no idea. And unless you've seen it, you can't imagine it either.
I wish I could do a better job of describing how things look. On the way from Mobile to Pensacola we drove for a bit along the water, and it looked so strange to me. I think just because I'm not used to water being flat up against the land like that, but I couldn't quite figure out why it looked wrong.
It's raining here. The wind was pretty fierce when I went out to get dinner, then it started raining hard when I was eating, then it was calm again when I walked back to the motel, then it came down in a big whoosh again, now it's raining but not that hard. I can only pick up the wireless if I take my computer outside, so I'm skulking outside somebody else's room (with a cat in the window) under the covered walkway.
I wish I could do a better job of describing how things look. On the way from Mobile to Pensacola we drove for a bit along the water, and it looked so strange to me. I think just because I'm not used to water being flat up against the land like that, but I couldn't quite figure out why it looked wrong.
It's raining here. The wind was pretty fierce when I went out to get dinner, then it started raining hard when I was eating, then it was calm again when I walked back to the motel, then it came down in a big whoosh again, now it's raining but not that hard. I can only pick up the wireless if I take my computer outside, so I'm skulking outside somebody else's room (with a cat in the window) under the covered walkway.
The Mother of All TDBP Posts
We here at Mission Control have really outdone ourselves this time. The priceless article below comes to us, with all appropriate permissions, courtesy of the Daily Journal. The article originally appeared in print (with the photo below) in the Daily Journal's recent "New Lawyer" supplement. The Evacuee cooperated somewhat grudgingly in making this glorious moment of republication possible. We'll just stand back now and bask in the reflected glory.
Life Is a Contract
By Emma Dewald
People say law school doesn't teach you anything. Anything you can use, anyway.
Those same people tell you to forget your hours with the contract-law outline the moment the indecipherable message - "your name appears on the bar passage list" - flashes on your computer: Those people are wrong.
Contract law, as taught in law school and in the bar review course of your choosing, may not help you draft an agreement. But consideration, illusory consideration, breach - those little-used concepts can solve your dating dilemmas. Your romance rigmarole. The lunacy of love.
Let's observe this principle in action in some hypothetical (but realistic) fact patterns!
This guy said, "Maybe we should go get a cup of coffee some time." I said, "OK." He never called me. Can I be mad?
No. Offer and acceptance are required for a binding contract to exist. A real offer gives the material terms of the contract, like, say, times or places. "Maybe we should go get a cup of coffee some time" is not an offer, and you couldn't accept it. You don't have a legal leg to stand on, but you can brood quietly to yourself.
I told my boyfriend that I would buy him dinner at Patina next Thursday. Now I don't want to. Do I have to?
No, unless he went out and bought himself a suit. You didn't have a contract, because he didn't agree to do anything in return. It's a garden-variety unenforceable promise. But if he "detrimentally relied" on your promise - that is, getting his hair done, turning down other dinner options - then you might have to bite the bullet and go eat some foam.
Now you are sitting there, saying to yourself, "But my life is so complicated! Can contracts really help?" Let's look at a more intricate problem. Don't panic, we'll take it slow.
I was supposed to go to a movie with my lady friend.
Already, there are issues. What does "lady friend" mean? Are you dating? Are you dating exclusively? Precision is the essence of a contract.
At the last minute, she said she didn't want to go.
Again, it's unclear what you're trying to say. Did you have a mutual agreement to go to a movie? Had you merely discussed it? Was it implicit in this "lady friend" relationship that you would go to movies together every week? Until I know the answers to these questions, I cannot possibly know who was damaged.
So then I took this other girl.
Now it looks as though you didn't suffer at all from your lady friend's decision to stay home, whether or not you had a deal. You found a replacement. No harm, no foul is a core concept in contracts.
I went home with her, and we made out some, but we didn't sleep together or anything.
Your case for damages just got even weaker.
Now my girlfriend got mad and broke up with me.
I say, because she broke her promise to go to the movie with me, all bets are off. Who's right?
You want to know whether she can break up with you? Dating is an at-will relationship, and I don't care whether she said she would love you forever.
No damages for that. Sorry.
In any case, making out with somebody else is, generally speaking, a material breach of the relationship. If you people had one of these new-fangled "open relationships," well, you should have said that sooner.
All in all, it sounds to me like you've got some making whole to do.
So, you know, send her some candy or something. Or buy her some foam at Patina.
It isn't going to heal your heartbreak, of course. But at least you know who done wrong. Now go get a drink with your colleagues, and talk about just how outrageous opposing counsel's responses in discovery were. Or check your BlackBerry again. You know you want to.
Emma Dewald is a graduate of Columbia Law School and a former Daily Journal staff writer. She is touring the nation on a Greyhound bus and is blogging about her experiences at www.thirtydaybuspass.blogspot.com.
I Was Campaign Shouting Like A Southern Diplomat
I was checking out this morning when a guy sitting on the couch in the lobby said, "Hey, California girl." That's what they'd been calling me at the hotel since the guy checking me in saw my ID. The check-in guy was also a waiter at the hotel restaurant where I had dinner two nights in a row, so he got a lot of chance to spread that particular nickname.
The guy on the couch was a different guy, but apparently part of the hotel staff. He was wearing a Corona baseball cap. He wanted to know where I was going. I said I was looking to have breakfast, and then go to the Greyhound station. He said he would give me a ride to the station, that the taxicab drivers would rip me off. I went to the hotel restaurant. They told me they weren't serving breakfast anymore, but that they could give me eggs and bacon and grits. Which sounded fine to me. The guy who was giving me a ride passed through a couple of times, the last time looking to know if I was ready yet. So I said I was.
He was 61 years old, he said, and had lived in Los Angeles when he was in the service. He said he spent two years in Vietnam, and that it was hell. He said that people smoked a lot of pot because you weren't allowed to drink. He said that he was just a young guy then. He told me (as previously noted in the comments) that Mobile was where Mardi Gras started. He said I should go to Mobile for Mardi Gras. He said he would rather be a street light in Mobile than a millionaire in New York City, because in Mobile people looked out for each other. If you fell over on the street, he said, somebody would give you a hand up. He was from Mobile. Sometimes I had trouble understanding him through the Southern accent. We went through a list of famous athletes from Mobile; I brought it up by asking about Hank Aaron. He said he knew the parents of the Oakland Raiders' most recent draft pick. He said the kid had been an excellent athlete since 8th grade.
He guessed that I was 27 or 28, and that I was an only child. The last bit was a little unnerving. When he dropped me off he asked what my boyfriend thought about me travelling around like this. I gave him some money; I wasn't sure how much I was supposed to give him.
I was waiting in line at the ticket counter when a security guy came up to me. He wanted to know if I had just been dropped off. I said I had. He said it was dangerous not to use taxicabs, he said that some people would just take you off and rob you. He said he was just telling me for my own safety. He was an older guy with fierce blue eyes. He stared at me as if I ought to have been taken off and robbed. Given that I was now there safely, I wasn't too sure what to think about that.
It reminded me of this time on the subway in L.A. I was waiting at Union Station when this young-ish girl, super pretty and nicely turned out in a rich-hippie way, came down. She was pretty drunk. It was 5 or 6 p.m. She had a bottle of wine in her purse. She lit up a cigarette, which is, of course, verboten. I didn't say anything. An older guy next to me told her off for it, in a I'm-just-saving-you-from-getting-fined-and-from-yourself kind of way. She apologized, put out the cigarette, and took a swig of the wine. He told her off for that in the same way. She apologized. Then she put her feet up on the seat. Same thing. He told her that she should be careful, that it wasn't safe for her to be drunk like that on the subway.
Now I am not an advocate for drunkenness on the subway by any means, or even for smoking on subway platforms. I am pretty law- and rule-abiding. But there was something a little gleeful about the way that guy wanted to tell her that it was dangerous for her, something a little bit stomach-turning. I don't know.
The Greyhound station was a madhouse.
Song of the Day: Waylon Jennings, Which Way Do I Go?
The guy on the couch was a different guy, but apparently part of the hotel staff. He was wearing a Corona baseball cap. He wanted to know where I was going. I said I was looking to have breakfast, and then go to the Greyhound station. He said he would give me a ride to the station, that the taxicab drivers would rip me off. I went to the hotel restaurant. They told me they weren't serving breakfast anymore, but that they could give me eggs and bacon and grits. Which sounded fine to me. The guy who was giving me a ride passed through a couple of times, the last time looking to know if I was ready yet. So I said I was.
He was 61 years old, he said, and had lived in Los Angeles when he was in the service. He said he spent two years in Vietnam, and that it was hell. He said that people smoked a lot of pot because you weren't allowed to drink. He said that he was just a young guy then. He told me (as previously noted in the comments) that Mobile was where Mardi Gras started. He said I should go to Mobile for Mardi Gras. He said he would rather be a street light in Mobile than a millionaire in New York City, because in Mobile people looked out for each other. If you fell over on the street, he said, somebody would give you a hand up. He was from Mobile. Sometimes I had trouble understanding him through the Southern accent. We went through a list of famous athletes from Mobile; I brought it up by asking about Hank Aaron. He said he knew the parents of the Oakland Raiders' most recent draft pick. He said the kid had been an excellent athlete since 8th grade.
He guessed that I was 27 or 28, and that I was an only child. The last bit was a little unnerving. When he dropped me off he asked what my boyfriend thought about me travelling around like this. I gave him some money; I wasn't sure how much I was supposed to give him.
I was waiting in line at the ticket counter when a security guy came up to me. He wanted to know if I had just been dropped off. I said I had. He said it was dangerous not to use taxicabs, he said that some people would just take you off and rob you. He said he was just telling me for my own safety. He was an older guy with fierce blue eyes. He stared at me as if I ought to have been taken off and robbed. Given that I was now there safely, I wasn't too sure what to think about that.
It reminded me of this time on the subway in L.A. I was waiting at Union Station when this young-ish girl, super pretty and nicely turned out in a rich-hippie way, came down. She was pretty drunk. It was 5 or 6 p.m. She had a bottle of wine in her purse. She lit up a cigarette, which is, of course, verboten. I didn't say anything. An older guy next to me told her off for it, in a I'm-just-saving-you-from-getting-fined-and-from-yourself kind of way. She apologized, put out the cigarette, and took a swig of the wine. He told her off for that in the same way. She apologized. Then she put her feet up on the seat. Same thing. He told her that she should be careful, that it wasn't safe for her to be drunk like that on the subway.
Now I am not an advocate for drunkenness on the subway by any means, or even for smoking on subway platforms. I am pretty law- and rule-abiding. But there was something a little gleeful about the way that guy wanted to tell her that it was dangerous for her, something a little bit stomach-turning. I don't know.
The Greyhound station was a madhouse.
Song of the Day: Waylon Jennings, Which Way Do I Go?
Mobile
Being in Mobile is strange, because it's pretty in a way familiar to me only from Pirates of Caribbean. The ride, not the movie. And actually not the ride so much as the surrounding areas of Disneyland.
It's that fragile, seaside architecture, and every now and then a whitewashed building with swoops and so forth. It was very quiet and very hot. I had to take a taxi from my hotel to downtown. The taxi driver was the same one who had taken me from the Greyhound to the hotel. He had a woman with him in the taxi both times. They had a portable dvd player up front with them. On the trip from Greyhound to the hotel they were watching Biker Boyz.
I asked them where I should go to eat. I am, in theory, not against big box stores. There's a lot to be said for local enterprise and so forth, but I remember the pre-Borders/Barnes and Noble days, and they often weren't so great. If you have a good local bookstore, and there are plenty, that's great, but not every place does. Anyway, this is all to say that it was a little depressing to be told that the Olive Garden and Ruby Tuesday's were good places to go. I don't know.
I went to a local bar with food; it seemed to be the only place open downtown. They had a really good grilled shrimp salad. I sat outside; the waitress said I was brave. It was really hot. I walked to the laundromat, and like the people in the video so kindly posted by Mission Control, I thought I was dying.
People talk to you more further east. Actually, what I mean to say is that guys holler at you more, at least in this small portion of our great country. I sat outside the laundromat smoking. There was another woman out there, and a girl. One guy passed by and yelled, "Hey." He yelled it again. And again. I didn't know who he was yelling at. The other woman said, either to me or the girl, "You tell him that hay is for horses and you aren't a horse."
The sunset was spectacular. I swam in the hotel pool, which was incredibly warm. I watched some tv.
It's that fragile, seaside architecture, and every now and then a whitewashed building with swoops and so forth. It was very quiet and very hot. I had to take a taxi from my hotel to downtown. The taxi driver was the same one who had taken me from the Greyhound to the hotel. He had a woman with him in the taxi both times. They had a portable dvd player up front with them. On the trip from Greyhound to the hotel they were watching Biker Boyz.
I asked them where I should go to eat. I am, in theory, not against big box stores. There's a lot to be said for local enterprise and so forth, but I remember the pre-Borders/Barnes and Noble days, and they often weren't so great. If you have a good local bookstore, and there are plenty, that's great, but not every place does. Anyway, this is all to say that it was a little depressing to be told that the Olive Garden and Ruby Tuesday's were good places to go. I don't know.
I went to a local bar with food; it seemed to be the only place open downtown. They had a really good grilled shrimp salad. I sat outside; the waitress said I was brave. It was really hot. I walked to the laundromat, and like the people in the video so kindly posted by Mission Control, I thought I was dying.
People talk to you more further east. Actually, what I mean to say is that guys holler at you more, at least in this small portion of our great country. I sat outside the laundromat smoking. There was another woman out there, and a girl. One guy passed by and yelled, "Hey." He yelled it again. And again. I didn't know who he was yelling at. The other woman said, either to me or the girl, "You tell him that hay is for horses and you aren't a horse."
The sunset was spectacular. I swam in the hotel pool, which was incredibly warm. I watched some tv.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Sunday, June 10, 2007
TDBP Status Report, Reflections Upon Nearing Middle-Age
Yesterday, we were playing pick-up basketball in a public gym designed by Richard Neutra, here in Northeastern Los Angeles. We stretched very carefully before the game. We were straining to keep up with 19 and 20 year-olds. We were less explosive players than we used to be, but wilier and craftier. We grabbed rebounds and got hands in faces, rather than going for the big rejection. We were breathing hard after a couple points, feeling what we thought were heart palpitations and ominous tightenings in our hamstrings, and thinking "We are no longer young." It was a very Rabbit Angstrom moment. We came home and watered our lawns as the sun began to set.
There are fourteen days left on the TDBP. The Evacuee is currently in Mobile, Alabama, apparently en route to the lovely white sands of Pensacola. The Evacuee turns thirty in November.
Driving Under The Influence . . . Of Nitro
I thought, friends, that Nashville was going to be a bust. This despite the presence of almost 30,000 rabid country music fans in town for Fan Fair, jacking up hotel prices and ensuring the presence of squealing girls in the corridor at 2 a.m. How could it go wrong? But it looked for a while to be a bust with only my inertia to blame.
That first day I got in at 3 a.m., woke my sorry self up in time for the hot breakfast (served 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.; in Knoxville I kept missing the free continental breakfast and it pissed me off every time -- a tragic waste of danishes), and then returned to the privacy of my hotel room. Where I watched tv. Then I ate lunch. Then I napped. When I woke up I kept telling myself that I would go downtown and check out the action. I told myself that for about five hours, at which point I realized all I wanted was to stay hidden and watch more tv. More! The voices of squealing girls in the corridor that night rebuked my indolence. And I had to check out the next day.
But there are times when brute determination is necessary. I was going to see Nashville no matter what. So the next morning I planned to take a 3:30 a.m. bus, and left my junk in a locker at the station. I was disoriented, and a little melancholy. There's something weird about not having a private place to retreat to; it leaves you all screwed-up feeling. Then I hit the beating heart of Fan Fair.
The crowd skewed female, older, and white. The crowd skewed heavily white. The crowd skewed blonde. I saw more personal beer sleeves on the street than ever before in my life. I walked across the river to the Titans stadium, where you could hear a band warming up. I went and got lunch. A band was in the restaurant. I heard Dixieland Delight played every two minutes. I bought a t-shirt that said "In Willie We Trust." I went to Tootsies, because I had heard a woman at the hot breakfast tell her daughter that that was the bar. That same woman asked her daughter if she (the daughter) had ridden the mechanical bull last night. The daughter had. At Tootsies there was a group of people in matching fluorescent green t-shirts. The t-shirts detailed the costs of attending Fan Fair from some town in Illinois that I had never heard of, and ended with the phrase: Family Time, priceless.
I talked to one of the kids in the group. He said they did this every year. He said that his grandma made them wear the t-shirts. He asked if I wanted his. A shaved-head guy built like a mack truck danced while balancing his beer on his head. People applauded him. He tipped the band $20. It was incredibly hot outside. Some of the people in the fluorescent green t-shirts were not in fact members of the family. They were just friends. Or co-workers.
At about 6 p.m. I walked back to my hotel to see if I had left my sweater there. No success, but I decided to get dinner at a restaurant nearby. The restaurant looked nice. I was grubby and sweaty; I thought they might not let me in the door. In the restaurant people asked each other whether the festival was still going on, and said that they thought it had ended yesterday. People asked where the piano player was. I got one of the best half-chickens I have ever had in my life and a chilled glass of white wine. The wine glasses hung from the top of the bar, along with the brandy snifters, champagne flutes, etc. etc. The waitress said that the glasses got dirty from the smoking at the bar.
Inside the steakhouse the women were wearing sequins and dramatic makeup. When the piano player started up, people started dancing. The owner mingled. He patted me on the back and introduced me to a Swiss-educated doctor from Liberia. We talked for a bit. The doctor looked at me soulfully and asked when my bus was leaving. He suggested that we get out of there and do something. He offered to pay for my dinner. A friend of the doctor's came up and asked where the doctor's wife was. The friend said he was amusing himself tonight, and hopefully into tomorrow morning and he looked meaningfully at the women in his party. Then he winked. "Les femmes," he said. He was from Quebec City, originally.
I went to see the Parthenon replica. It was eerie, lit up in the dark. It was still warm out. I was a little disoriented by everything. In the park by the Parthenon was a bandstand, lit up with colored lanterns and a big band was playing. People were dancing in the pavilion. Other people were practicing outside of the bandstand, kids dancing with their parents. Other things happened -- example: a guy at the Greyhound station asking me for $12 then offering to buy me a beer at the corner store -- but those people dancing in the park under the colored lanterns with the Parthenon not far away were probably the best, somewhere in between the sequins and the beer sleeves.
At the Greyhound station I took a 10:30 bus instead; it just meant a longer wait in Montgomery, but I wanted to sleep. I'm in Mobile now.
That first day I got in at 3 a.m., woke my sorry self up in time for the hot breakfast (served 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.; in Knoxville I kept missing the free continental breakfast and it pissed me off every time -- a tragic waste of danishes), and then returned to the privacy of my hotel room. Where I watched tv. Then I ate lunch. Then I napped. When I woke up I kept telling myself that I would go downtown and check out the action. I told myself that for about five hours, at which point I realized all I wanted was to stay hidden and watch more tv. More! The voices of squealing girls in the corridor that night rebuked my indolence. And I had to check out the next day.
But there are times when brute determination is necessary. I was going to see Nashville no matter what. So the next morning I planned to take a 3:30 a.m. bus, and left my junk in a locker at the station. I was disoriented, and a little melancholy. There's something weird about not having a private place to retreat to; it leaves you all screwed-up feeling. Then I hit the beating heart of Fan Fair.
The crowd skewed female, older, and white. The crowd skewed heavily white. The crowd skewed blonde. I saw more personal beer sleeves on the street than ever before in my life. I walked across the river to the Titans stadium, where you could hear a band warming up. I went and got lunch. A band was in the restaurant. I heard Dixieland Delight played every two minutes. I bought a t-shirt that said "In Willie We Trust." I went to Tootsies, because I had heard a woman at the hot breakfast tell her daughter that that was the bar. That same woman asked her daughter if she (the daughter) had ridden the mechanical bull last night. The daughter had. At Tootsies there was a group of people in matching fluorescent green t-shirts. The t-shirts detailed the costs of attending Fan Fair from some town in Illinois that I had never heard of, and ended with the phrase: Family Time, priceless.
I talked to one of the kids in the group. He said they did this every year. He said that his grandma made them wear the t-shirts. He asked if I wanted his. A shaved-head guy built like a mack truck danced while balancing his beer on his head. People applauded him. He tipped the band $20. It was incredibly hot outside. Some of the people in the fluorescent green t-shirts were not in fact members of the family. They were just friends. Or co-workers.
At about 6 p.m. I walked back to my hotel to see if I had left my sweater there. No success, but I decided to get dinner at a restaurant nearby. The restaurant looked nice. I was grubby and sweaty; I thought they might not let me in the door. In the restaurant people asked each other whether the festival was still going on, and said that they thought it had ended yesterday. People asked where the piano player was. I got one of the best half-chickens I have ever had in my life and a chilled glass of white wine. The wine glasses hung from the top of the bar, along with the brandy snifters, champagne flutes, etc. etc. The waitress said that the glasses got dirty from the smoking at the bar.
Inside the steakhouse the women were wearing sequins and dramatic makeup. When the piano player started up, people started dancing. The owner mingled. He patted me on the back and introduced me to a Swiss-educated doctor from Liberia. We talked for a bit. The doctor looked at me soulfully and asked when my bus was leaving. He suggested that we get out of there and do something. He offered to pay for my dinner. A friend of the doctor's came up and asked where the doctor's wife was. The friend said he was amusing himself tonight, and hopefully into tomorrow morning and he looked meaningfully at the women in his party. Then he winked. "Les femmes," he said. He was from Quebec City, originally.
I went to see the Parthenon replica. It was eerie, lit up in the dark. It was still warm out. I was a little disoriented by everything. In the park by the Parthenon was a bandstand, lit up with colored lanterns and a big band was playing. People were dancing in the pavilion. Other people were practicing outside of the bandstand, kids dancing with their parents. Other things happened -- example: a guy at the Greyhound station asking me for $12 then offering to buy me a beer at the corner store -- but those people dancing in the park under the colored lanterns with the Parthenon not far away were probably the best, somewhere in between the sequins and the beer sleeves.
At the Greyhound station I took a 10:30 bus instead; it just meant a longer wait in Montgomery, but I wanted to sleep. I'm in Mobile now.
Saturday, June 9, 2007
A Message of Reassurance
A message from Mission Control to EFD: the recent lack of activity here may suggest that no one is paying attention, but rest assured, that silence is a massive, speechless awe.
Friday, June 8, 2007
Another Post About Being Female
So I was rude to a guy last night, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it.
There were a few of us that didn't get seats on the 6:00 bus. When I went back to the bus station, the guy who had been in front of me in line came over and sat down next to me. Not quite next to, because I had my bag up on the next seat. Anyway, we did some head shaking about the whole thing. His English wasn't great, but we expressed our hopes that we would get onto the midnight bus and so forth.
Then he reeled off a kind of ominous stream of questions: how old are you, are you married, do you have a boyfriend? I got a lot quieter, kept peering at my puzzle. He asked for my name, and then was using it in every other sentence. He did a little bit of leaning over. He asked me if I liked to dance. He said, "You don't smoke anything, do you?" He said, "You don't drink beer, do you?" He had lived in Atlanta, he said. Atlanta, he said, was hard. He said that a couple of times.
I went outside to smoke. Sat down someplace else. Then it came time to line up, and he lined up behind me. We got on the bus, and I got into an empty row of seats and he asked if he could sit next to me. I was wrestling my stuff into the seats, and my backpack went flying off into the aisle. And I said, "Not if you're going to talk all night."
I felt like a jerk -- for not shutting down the conversation sooner, for being so reluctant to put up with a little bit of leaning and talking, which it's not like he could have done anything to me, really, and maybe a little bit for not wanting to talk to him in the first place. Instead I wound up sitting next to a 21 year old kid who, on the phone before the bus took off, explained to someone that bus trips always made him nervous, and I stared out the window and listened to my music.
Song of the Day: Genesis, Land of Confusion
There were a few of us that didn't get seats on the 6:00 bus. When I went back to the bus station, the guy who had been in front of me in line came over and sat down next to me. Not quite next to, because I had my bag up on the next seat. Anyway, we did some head shaking about the whole thing. His English wasn't great, but we expressed our hopes that we would get onto the midnight bus and so forth.
Then he reeled off a kind of ominous stream of questions: how old are you, are you married, do you have a boyfriend? I got a lot quieter, kept peering at my puzzle. He asked for my name, and then was using it in every other sentence. He did a little bit of leaning over. He asked me if I liked to dance. He said, "You don't smoke anything, do you?" He said, "You don't drink beer, do you?" He had lived in Atlanta, he said. Atlanta, he said, was hard. He said that a couple of times.
I went outside to smoke. Sat down someplace else. Then it came time to line up, and he lined up behind me. We got on the bus, and I got into an empty row of seats and he asked if he could sit next to me. I was wrestling my stuff into the seats, and my backpack went flying off into the aisle. And I said, "Not if you're going to talk all night."
I felt like a jerk -- for not shutting down the conversation sooner, for being so reluctant to put up with a little bit of leaning and talking, which it's not like he could have done anything to me, really, and maybe a little bit for not wanting to talk to him in the first place. Instead I wound up sitting next to a 21 year old kid who, on the phone before the bus took off, explained to someone that bus trips always made him nervous, and I stared out the window and listened to my music.
Song of the Day: Genesis, Land of Confusion
Savings/Value?
Having been reminded by Mission Control that my days on the bus were numbered, I finally sat down to figure out if the thirty day pass was doing me any good, money-wise. Understanding, of course, that you can't put a price on the freedom offered by the thirty day pass. So far my tickets would have cost me $419.50. The thirty day pass costs $522. A couple more long bus rides should put me over the top.
I think we all feel better knowing that.
Last night on the bus, the bus driver kept calling the bus the "schedule." "Don't leave your dvd players, cell phones, or computers on the schedule during the break," he would say. Each bus driver has their own patter; some are more vocal than others. One bus driver had a scent allergy and implored us not to apply any scented products. One bus driver kept saying sternly that there was no reason for anybody to be taking off their shoes on the bus. A lot of them, when explaining that there's a bathroom on the bus, use a lot of jokey synonyms in a row -- the can, the honeyput, the whatever. I don't know why.
I think we all feel better knowing that.
Last night on the bus, the bus driver kept calling the bus the "schedule." "Don't leave your dvd players, cell phones, or computers on the schedule during the break," he would say. Each bus driver has their own patter; some are more vocal than others. One bus driver had a scent allergy and implored us not to apply any scented products. One bus driver kept saying sternly that there was no reason for anybody to be taking off their shoes on the bus. A lot of them, when explaining that there's a bathroom on the bus, use a lot of jokey synonyms in a row -- the can, the honeyput, the whatever. I don't know why.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Punches: Rolling With Part II
Otherwise known as "I am still a passive aggressive person who just wants things to run smoothly."
So there are three buses that go from Knoxville to Nashville. One leaves at 6:40 in the morning, one leaves at 6:05 in the evening, and one leaves at midnight. I had to go to Nashville, because I am a self-proclaimed country music fan, and I felt that my identity as such would be called into question if I bypassed Nashville. Also I wanted to.
The 6:40 a.m. bus was the one I should have taken, but I didn't want to get up that early. I didn't buy a goddamn thirty day bus pass to wake up at 5 a.m., I said to myself. So this morning I woke up late and hung around the IHOP out in the hinterlands by my under-construction Days Inn.
After a bit, the manager started telling me about his three kids. Well, really there were four, but he didn't know about the fourth (which was, technically, the first) until a couple of years ago. It sounded like a good story, but he kept being distracted by his managerial duties. Then I waited for the revolving bus. I sat on the sidewalk and fixed the drawstring on the bag holding the sleeping bag with my tweezers and felt like a freak. A small child waved at me. I think her parents told her to stop. I think I made them nervous. It was really hot.
I decided this time to take the bus in the opposite direction. I went by the not-to-scale map on the bus schedule, rather than looking at the time it would take to complete this route. It took a really, really long time.
But I got to the bus station ten minutes before the bus to Nashville left. I was leaving Knoxville. I was excited.
Then there were delays. More delays. People kept getting called out of the line and sent out to buses. I asked the Greyhound guy what was going on. He said he was just checking tickets. I got that nervous, itchy, I'm-getting-screwed feeling.
At 6:30 there were only five of us left in line. And the Greyhound guy said that the bus was full. My back hurt from my backpack and I had a hotel reservation in Nashville and I was rolling my eyes and telling him that it would have been nice to know what was going on sooner.
I'm a jerk. There was no reason on earth that I was more deserving of a seat on that bus than anybody else. In fact, given my lack of a schedule, I'm the last person that should get a seat. Just, I was ready to get out of Knoxville.
So I left the Greyhound station and walked for five minutes in each direction and didn't see any place to eat and I wanted to cry and it was all so unfair and my back hurt.
Then I ran across a Knoxville person and asked him where I could eat and he directed me to this street not five minutes from the Greyhound station chock-a-block full of bars and restaurants and such, not to mention wireless access, and so I sit here, with a glass of water and the promise of good chicken pot pie when I want it, and a guy is playing the accordion in the corner. And a guy and a girl just came in and requested a shot of the cheapest whiskey in the place. But all in a college-town-bike-everywhere kind of way. It's not bad; it's kind of nice, actually.
Maybe I shouldn't complain so much.
So there are three buses that go from Knoxville to Nashville. One leaves at 6:40 in the morning, one leaves at 6:05 in the evening, and one leaves at midnight. I had to go to Nashville, because I am a self-proclaimed country music fan, and I felt that my identity as such would be called into question if I bypassed Nashville. Also I wanted to.
The 6:40 a.m. bus was the one I should have taken, but I didn't want to get up that early. I didn't buy a goddamn thirty day bus pass to wake up at 5 a.m., I said to myself. So this morning I woke up late and hung around the IHOP out in the hinterlands by my under-construction Days Inn.
After a bit, the manager started telling me about his three kids. Well, really there were four, but he didn't know about the fourth (which was, technically, the first) until a couple of years ago. It sounded like a good story, but he kept being distracted by his managerial duties. Then I waited for the revolving bus. I sat on the sidewalk and fixed the drawstring on the bag holding the sleeping bag with my tweezers and felt like a freak. A small child waved at me. I think her parents told her to stop. I think I made them nervous. It was really hot.
I decided this time to take the bus in the opposite direction. I went by the not-to-scale map on the bus schedule, rather than looking at the time it would take to complete this route. It took a really, really long time.
But I got to the bus station ten minutes before the bus to Nashville left. I was leaving Knoxville. I was excited.
Then there were delays. More delays. People kept getting called out of the line and sent out to buses. I asked the Greyhound guy what was going on. He said he was just checking tickets. I got that nervous, itchy, I'm-getting-screwed feeling.
At 6:30 there were only five of us left in line. And the Greyhound guy said that the bus was full. My back hurt from my backpack and I had a hotel reservation in Nashville and I was rolling my eyes and telling him that it would have been nice to know what was going on sooner.
I'm a jerk. There was no reason on earth that I was more deserving of a seat on that bus than anybody else. In fact, given my lack of a schedule, I'm the last person that should get a seat. Just, I was ready to get out of Knoxville.
So I left the Greyhound station and walked for five minutes in each direction and didn't see any place to eat and I wanted to cry and it was all so unfair and my back hurt.
Then I ran across a Knoxville person and asked him where I could eat and he directed me to this street not five minutes from the Greyhound station chock-a-block full of bars and restaurants and such, not to mention wireless access, and so I sit here, with a glass of water and the promise of good chicken pot pie when I want it, and a guy is playing the accordion in the corner. And a guy and a girl just came in and requested a shot of the cheapest whiskey in the place. But all in a college-town-bike-everywhere kind of way. It's not bad; it's kind of nice, actually.
Maybe I shouldn't complain so much.
TDBP: Letters To The Editor
In the spirit of Mission Control's countdown, the following is reader feedback. It has been edited for length, and was received from a source who asked to be identified only as a senior administration official.
I think, though, that you need to take the travelogue's pretentiousness to the next level. Step it up a notch, so to speak. You could be interspersing quotes from other famous travel journalists (Chaucer, de Tocqueville, Paris Hilton) with meditations on the larger questions of life. I mean, that's just Travelogging 101, right?
The other way to achieve this end is to interact with lots of ordinary citizens and get their thoughts on the issues of the day, like American Idol, day laborers stealing jobs from real Americans, and effective weight loss strategies. Perhaps take advantage of the ongoing presidential campaign to really get to the nub of what this country is all about. Perhaps stake out Peoria, Illinois.
You can then head off obvious critiques of said pretentiousness by including myriad anecdotes of personal haplessness.
If all else fails, I think massaging in some (or more, as the case may be) fake blog entries is definitely called for.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
TDBP Countdown and Status Report
Mission Control shares with you its view of the Thirty Day Bus Pass Big Board. The TDBP mission, which began on May 22, 2007, is now entering its seventeenth day. The Thirty Day Bus Pass expires on June 25, 2007. There are eighteen days left on the Thirty Day Bus Pass. All systems remain functional. The TDBP is approaching its Brennschluss moment. We are preparing for reentry.
Olde Tyme Kotton Kandy
Knoxville, to be perfectly honest, is giving me the creeps.
I mean no disrespect when I say that. It is a pretty city; tree-lined to the nth degree, with a lovely historic downtown and some good kitschy artifacts, like the stratosphere or sun tower built for the 1982 World's Fair, the kind of thing that you can laugh at and simultaneously feel like you now have a better grip on the American landscape. The stratosphere is not very tall, but is impressive in a kind of East German Palace of the Republic way, i.e. it looks like pieces of the large reflective sphere are about to topple off.
It has a free East Tennessee historic museum, with a life-size model of an old-time drugstore and a streetcar, and a temporary exhibit about the 1982 World's Fair, which includes several models of pavilions, and a wall where people could put post-its with their memories of the event. Apparently, a large automated Rubik's cube was part of the Hungarian display, while the Japanese pavilion featured painting robots. This sort of thing is good fun, and here I am trotting it out for you as evidence that I am doing my job of travelling the country well. I am seeing America. It also has a good alternative weekly, and a letterpress shop that was the sort of place that you could describe as combining a wry sensibility with old-fashioned craftsmanship. If you were so inclined.
Knoxville smells nice, and it's warm in a lovely warm-bath kind of way right now. The cigarette tax is 20 cents a pack.
Still.
There is something unnerving about a city where one bus route consists of two buses looping the same loop, only in opposite directions. And that bus runs once an hour, and mostly shuts off at 6:15. I can't get it out of my head, those two buses going around and around in opposite directions. And the hotel clerk couldn't suggest a single place that would still be serving breakfast after 10:30 a.m. These are not complaints about Knoxville; they aren't bad things. They're just the only things I can hit on to explain my distinct sense of unease in this city, a sense that I could live in this place for ten years and never once have a really good time. Have no doubt, the fault would be mine and not Knoxville's. And probably I'm wrong about that anyway.
I mean no disrespect when I say that. It is a pretty city; tree-lined to the nth degree, with a lovely historic downtown and some good kitschy artifacts, like the stratosphere or sun tower built for the 1982 World's Fair, the kind of thing that you can laugh at and simultaneously feel like you now have a better grip on the American landscape. The stratosphere is not very tall, but is impressive in a kind of East German Palace of the Republic way, i.e. it looks like pieces of the large reflective sphere are about to topple off.
It has a free East Tennessee historic museum, with a life-size model of an old-time drugstore and a streetcar, and a temporary exhibit about the 1982 World's Fair, which includes several models of pavilions, and a wall where people could put post-its with their memories of the event. Apparently, a large automated Rubik's cube was part of the Hungarian display, while the Japanese pavilion featured painting robots. This sort of thing is good fun, and here I am trotting it out for you as evidence that I am doing my job of travelling the country well. I am seeing America. It also has a good alternative weekly, and a letterpress shop that was the sort of place that you could describe as combining a wry sensibility with old-fashioned craftsmanship. If you were so inclined.
Knoxville smells nice, and it's warm in a lovely warm-bath kind of way right now. The cigarette tax is 20 cents a pack.
Still.
There is something unnerving about a city where one bus route consists of two buses looping the same loop, only in opposite directions. And that bus runs once an hour, and mostly shuts off at 6:15. I can't get it out of my head, those two buses going around and around in opposite directions. And the hotel clerk couldn't suggest a single place that would still be serving breakfast after 10:30 a.m. These are not complaints about Knoxville; they aren't bad things. They're just the only things I can hit on to explain my distinct sense of unease in this city, a sense that I could live in this place for ten years and never once have a really good time. Have no doubt, the fault would be mine and not Knoxville's. And probably I'm wrong about that anyway.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Punches: Rolling With
Mission Control's last post did, in point of fact, blow my mind.
It's made more mind-blowing to me by my total absence from Duluth. I am not in Duluth.
I am in Knoxville, Tenn. (This is all discounting the possibility that I am creating my share of this blog from the safety and security of the Frances Howard Goldwyn Branch of the Los Angeles public library system -- a possibility raised, I should note, by Mission Control. Credit where credit is due. Although Mission Control suggested I was in Burbank.)
So I said I was zigging, and then I zagged. I didn't do it on purpose. I was dropped off at the Chicago Greyhound station shortly before midnight for the 12:30 bus that would take me back to Minneapolis, and from there to Duluth. It was a mob scene. Mayhem. The Minneapolis bus was sold out. I don't know why that many people wanted to go to Minneapolis at 12:30 a.m. on a Monday (Tuesday, really). I was told that I could get a ticket for the 7 a.m. bus. I thought about doing that, and taking a taxi back to my friend's place.
But nicotine cleared my head. What, I asked myself, was the point of having a thirty day bus pass if I was going to wait for a bus to take me where I planned to go?
So I took the 3 a.m. bus to Cincinnati. Mid-way through, I decided to proceed to Knoxville. Now I'm here.
It's a little scary, being east of Chicago. There are so many cities, and so many people. It all seems much more real. My taxi driver in Knoxville was from West Africa. He came to D.C. for a year, and then played Division 2 basketball at Knoxville College. He was a point guard. I did not ask him if he was a pure point guard. We discussed the future of the Lakers, and whether they would pick up Jermaine O'Neal or Kevin Garnett. We agreed that Jermaine O'Neal was potentially soft, and this concerned us.
It's made more mind-blowing to me by my total absence from Duluth. I am not in Duluth.
I am in Knoxville, Tenn. (This is all discounting the possibility that I am creating my share of this blog from the safety and security of the Frances Howard Goldwyn Branch of the Los Angeles public library system -- a possibility raised, I should note, by Mission Control. Credit where credit is due. Although Mission Control suggested I was in Burbank.)
So I said I was zigging, and then I zagged. I didn't do it on purpose. I was dropped off at the Chicago Greyhound station shortly before midnight for the 12:30 bus that would take me back to Minneapolis, and from there to Duluth. It was a mob scene. Mayhem. The Minneapolis bus was sold out. I don't know why that many people wanted to go to Minneapolis at 12:30 a.m. on a Monday (Tuesday, really). I was told that I could get a ticket for the 7 a.m. bus. I thought about doing that, and taking a taxi back to my friend's place.
But nicotine cleared my head. What, I asked myself, was the point of having a thirty day bus pass if I was going to wait for a bus to take me where I planned to go?
So I took the 3 a.m. bus to Cincinnati. Mid-way through, I decided to proceed to Knoxville. Now I'm here.
It's a little scary, being east of Chicago. There are so many cities, and so many people. It all seems much more real. My taxi driver in Knoxville was from West Africa. He came to D.C. for a year, and then played Division 2 basketball at Knoxville College. He was a point guard. I did not ask him if he was a pure point guard. We discussed the future of the Lakers, and whether they would pick up Jermaine O'Neal or Kevin Garnett. We agreed that Jermaine O'Neal was potentially soft, and this concerned us.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Back to the Future
I returned to the Holiday Inn — where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms — to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.This is Mission Control sending our greetings from Los Angeles, where the weather is quite pleasant, and where we are twiddling our thumbs and playing table hockey with quarters while we wait for our trajectory analysts to divine the logic and/or intent behind the Evacuee's latest, and somewhat inscrutable change of course.
--Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979).
Of course, we can already hear the Evacuee asking the inevitable question: "Like, what's the big hang-up about forward progress or continuity anyway?". Nothing, nothing, of course she's right. What's "forward"? Why must journeys have a "purpose" or "destination"? Do we not, instead of moving into the forbidding blank of the future, always simply move sideways? Is the TDBP not a powerful refutation of the false concept of the linear narrative arc? What if the TDBP has already left its destination?? And, yes, why can't we all just get along?
Okay, we apologize for blowing your minds. We can't help it: we're scientists. We realized long ago, in our youth, that time probably didn't exist. Time, we saw, was a form of tautology. We build a clock or hourglass, the materials move, and we call that time. We measure the rate of atomic decay, and see a more perfect way to measure something we believed in from the get go. Putting aside the Evacuee's willingness to adopt a fashionable intellectual position when it's expedient, the TDBP and the Evacuee help to show us the illusory nature of linear time, and of eschatologies of all brands.
We do think a visit to Maine would be nice.
Greyhound: Behind The Myths
This has been nagging at me since I hit the Greyhound part of this trip.
Namely, before I left L.A. somebody told me that the way those in-the-know slept on Greyhound was to kneel backwards on the seat, with your ass in the air and your face on the headrest. This seemed more than a little bit unlikely to me, but there are a lot of things I know nothing about, so I accepted this statement. I have been keeping my eyes open (in the intervals between my deep sleep sitting normally on my chair, feet in the sleeping bag) and I have not seen one single person doing this.
This is disappointing.
There is actually something very soothing about sleeping on Greyhound. The perpetual motion is nice. Also, it has been suggested to me, the lack of oxygen on the bus. In the trip through North Dakota, I watched wide-awake people get on the bus at 10 a.m., and watched those same people sprawl asleep 15 minutes later.
The other issue I would like to address is the not infrequent comment that Greyhound passengers tend to be a more potentially dangerous bunch than train riders. The waitress at the bowling alley in Missoula, with whom I discussed my plans, said that she would like to take a train trip, but Greyhound . . . . Anyway, I haven't done an in-depth analysis of the issue, but I would respectfully submit that the presence of booze on the train more than makes up for any starting difference in quietness and decorum between the two groups. I have yet to hear people screaming on the bus.
On the other hand, the limited leg-room on Greyhound does make for some tension. In Seattle I watched a woman and the man in front of her get into a war of words about whether or not he should be able to recline his seat backwards. Muttered curses and sighs were the order of the day. This was more striking because the bus was not at all full, and they could have simply relocated themselves.
I'm still in Chicago; I'm taking a 12:30 a.m. bus to Duluth, because that was the most recent suggestion I got, and I am susceptible. Yesterday I went to the park and watched amateur baseball. One team was getting slaughtered; I'm told the final score was 15-1. Before their final inning, the coach was telling the losing team that they had to get some runs, they had to show they were there. They had to get some runs for the fans, if they couldn't get any for themselves, because they couldn't do anything for themselves. He said this a couple of times. I had a pork taco and a sno-cone. A red sno-cone.
Namely, before I left L.A. somebody told me that the way those in-the-know slept on Greyhound was to kneel backwards on the seat, with your ass in the air and your face on the headrest. This seemed more than a little bit unlikely to me, but there are a lot of things I know nothing about, so I accepted this statement. I have been keeping my eyes open (in the intervals between my deep sleep sitting normally on my chair, feet in the sleeping bag) and I have not seen one single person doing this.
This is disappointing.
There is actually something very soothing about sleeping on Greyhound. The perpetual motion is nice. Also, it has been suggested to me, the lack of oxygen on the bus. In the trip through North Dakota, I watched wide-awake people get on the bus at 10 a.m., and watched those same people sprawl asleep 15 minutes later.
The other issue I would like to address is the not infrequent comment that Greyhound passengers tend to be a more potentially dangerous bunch than train riders. The waitress at the bowling alley in Missoula, with whom I discussed my plans, said that she would like to take a train trip, but Greyhound . . . . Anyway, I haven't done an in-depth analysis of the issue, but I would respectfully submit that the presence of booze on the train more than makes up for any starting difference in quietness and decorum between the two groups. I have yet to hear people screaming on the bus.
On the other hand, the limited leg-room on Greyhound does make for some tension. In Seattle I watched a woman and the man in front of her get into a war of words about whether or not he should be able to recline his seat backwards. Muttered curses and sighs were the order of the day. This was more striking because the bus was not at all full, and they could have simply relocated themselves.
I'm still in Chicago; I'm taking a 12:30 a.m. bus to Duluth, because that was the most recent suggestion I got, and I am susceptible. Yesterday I went to the park and watched amateur baseball. One team was getting slaughtered; I'm told the final score was 15-1. Before their final inning, the coach was telling the losing team that they had to get some runs, they had to show they were there. They had to get some runs for the fans, if they couldn't get any for themselves, because they couldn't do anything for themselves. He said this a couple of times. I had a pork taco and a sno-cone. A red sno-cone.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Confessions, Limitations, And The Big Beating Heart Of The Midwest
All right, all right. I'm soft. I freely concede it. Mission Control hinted as much in its last post, and I am pleased to verify this.
As I staggered into the Midwest, I found myself calling old friends, hitting people up for rides, laundry facilities, places to stay. I went from St. Paul to Chicago. Why Chicago? I have friends there. It's shameful. I had hit my limit of being a ghost passing through; I wanted to see people. People I knew who had to like me. That kind of thing.
In St. Paul, I found myself explaining again to someone that I don't drive. It's a funny thing to explain. The damage you can do with a car unnerves me. That kind of power fills me with fear; the fear, in turn, makes me a worse driver. And at a certain point I stopped trying to fight that. I figured driving's not great for the environment anyway, so why not just take buses, walk, arrange my life around my own limitations. It's worked out ok -- someone did once cite my non-driver status as a reason for not wanting to date me, but that wasn't too big of a deal.
Those two thoughts are related because they both pertain to my softness. Which in turn allows me to note just how much I've enjoyed the hospitality I've received.
In Milwaukee a group of transvestites got on the bus, headed for Chicago. This caused a certain amount of fear among some of my fellow passengers.
As I staggered into the Midwest, I found myself calling old friends, hitting people up for rides, laundry facilities, places to stay. I went from St. Paul to Chicago. Why Chicago? I have friends there. It's shameful. I had hit my limit of being a ghost passing through; I wanted to see people. People I knew who had to like me. That kind of thing.
In St. Paul, I found myself explaining again to someone that I don't drive. It's a funny thing to explain. The damage you can do with a car unnerves me. That kind of power fills me with fear; the fear, in turn, makes me a worse driver. And at a certain point I stopped trying to fight that. I figured driving's not great for the environment anyway, so why not just take buses, walk, arrange my life around my own limitations. It's worked out ok -- someone did once cite my non-driver status as a reason for not wanting to date me, but that wasn't too big of a deal.
Those two thoughts are related because they both pertain to my softness. Which in turn allows me to note just how much I've enjoyed the hospitality I've received.
In Milwaukee a group of transvestites got on the bus, headed for Chicago. This caused a certain amount of fear among some of my fellow passengers.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
We Are All Witnesses
The TDBP extends its congratulations to the Cleveland Cavaliers and the great city of Cleveland. We will be rooting for you against the evil San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals.
We are wondering if Mission Control can suggest a course change? It sounds like Minneapolis is nice and everything, but maybe it's time to make use of that Thirty Day Bus Pass that the Evacuee has purchased? It's not really doing you much good sitting around the Days Inn pool? Maybe time to hit the road again, since this is a travel blog? Just a suggestion. Maybe Cleveland? Maybe the Evacuee could score tickets to the Finals?
We're feeling sorry for Chris Webber.
Friday, June 1, 2007
Hotel Pools Are The Best
Usually because they're deserted. But tonight there was the family camped out there, with two pre-teen girls. The younger one fully occupied in diving for the penny which her dad had tossed in. The older mostly talking to her parents, stationed by the hot tub, but called in periodically to consult by the younger one on the penny-diving operation. Then, helpfully, offering to be a horse. I love that: the little kid in-the-pool-solely-to-do-tricks-and-prune-up-mode.
In regard to the luxury of the Days Inn: every single resident of the Twin Cities that I've talked to has a) identified it by referencing the downstairs bar (called Tracks and in full swing at this particular moment) and b) by trying to remember whether it was this motel or the (now-defunct) motel across the street that was home to the prostitution ring.
In regard to the luxury of the Days Inn: every single resident of the Twin Cities that I've talked to has a) identified it by referencing the downstairs bar (called Tracks and in full swing at this particular moment) and b) by trying to remember whether it was this motel or the (now-defunct) motel across the street that was home to the prostitution ring.
TDBP Week in Review
First of all, we would like to remind the Evacuee to consistently choose titles for her posts. Untitled posts lack a certain zing or pop. This is a blog, not a secret personal journal. There are certain production standards that must be maintained. (Labels are also encouraged.)
Also, we here at Mission Control are proud to announce that the Thirty Day Bus Pass is now officially a smoke-free blog. Valued visitors, please feel free to breathe normally again.
Our next item of business is the announcement of the official deity of the Thirty Day Bus Pass. There was some debate among us (i.e., the unruly bunch in tapered Wranglers and white Reeboks frolicking in our smoke-free Mission Control headquarters), but in the end it was really no contest, with Hermes handily winning out over Ganesh. It's really quite a natural fit.
Hermes . . . , in Greek mythology, is the Olympian god of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, of invention, of commerce in general, and of the cunning of thieves and liars. The Homeric hymn to Hermes invokes him as the oneWikipedia."of many shifts (polutropos), blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a thief at the gates, one who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods."As a translator, Hermes is a messenger from the gods to humans, sharing this with Iris. An interpreter who bridges the boundaries with strangers is a hermeneus. Hermes gives us our word "hermeneutics" for the art of interpreting hidden meaning. . . .
Among the Hellenes, as the related word herma ("a boundary stone, crossing point") would suggest, Hermes embodied the spirit of crossing-over: He was seen to be manifest in any kind of interchange, transfer, transgressions, transcendence, transition, transit or traversal, all of which involve some form of crossing in some sense. This explains his connection with transitions in one’s fortune -- with the interchanges of goods, words and information involved in trade, interpretion, oration, writing -- with the way in which the wind may transfer objects from one place to another, and with the transition to the afterlife.
God knows there's plenty of "interchange, transfer, transgressions, transcendence, transition, transit or traversal" going on here at TDBP. And we've already touched upon the relation of TDBP to the "transition to the afterlife." Also, both Hermes and Ganesh are, in certain ways, gods of commerce, and we are all well aware that TDBP is nothing if not a blatant attempt to wrangle a juicy book deal, or at least a syndicated column.
There are many many nice things about touring around like this, with no real destination and no purpose. One of the nicest though, is that all you really need from your fellow man is basic decency and kindness. You don't need people to like you, you don't need them to entertain you, you just need them not to threaten you and to give you directions to a good breakfast place. Which, by and large, they are ready, willing, and able to do.
I got into Minneapolis around 6, 6:30 Wed. night. I had made friends on the bus with the blonde girl who had been talking to the Mormons. She had a fantastic hat, and had been working at a ranch up in Kalispell for a couple months. She was heading for North Carolina, she wanted to see what it was like. She was 21. There's something terrifying about talking to someone younger when you don't feel any sense of your own superior wisdom; it gives you vertigo. We started talking after we had stayed together through something like three consecutive bus changes. The people that change buses with you, they're your platoon. You're all in this together.
Anyway, we went to a downtown bar. I asked the waiter if he knew where I should stay if I wanted easy access to food and places to walk around. He started making suggestions. Then he started calling the hotels for me. There was some kind of massive convention going on, and every place was booked. He dragged the other waiter into it. They worked the phones for about twenty minutes, and at the end I had a hotel room. That's probably a little above basic decency and kindness; either way, it was great. I saw the blonde girl back to her bus change; we hugged and traded phone numbers.
Now I'm staying at a Day's Inn, which feels like the height of modern luxury. And there's something really comforting about being back in a city.
Song of the Day: Willie Nelson, Pancho and Lefty
I got into Minneapolis around 6, 6:30 Wed. night. I had made friends on the bus with the blonde girl who had been talking to the Mormons. She had a fantastic hat, and had been working at a ranch up in Kalispell for a couple months. She was heading for North Carolina, she wanted to see what it was like. She was 21. There's something terrifying about talking to someone younger when you don't feel any sense of your own superior wisdom; it gives you vertigo. We started talking after we had stayed together through something like three consecutive bus changes. The people that change buses with you, they're your platoon. You're all in this together.
Anyway, we went to a downtown bar. I asked the waiter if he knew where I should stay if I wanted easy access to food and places to walk around. He started making suggestions. Then he started calling the hotels for me. There was some kind of massive convention going on, and every place was booked. He dragged the other waiter into it. They worked the phones for about twenty minutes, and at the end I had a hotel room. That's probably a little above basic decency and kindness; either way, it was great. I saw the blonde girl back to her bus change; we hugged and traded phone numbers.
Now I'm staying at a Day's Inn, which feels like the height of modern luxury. And there's something really comforting about being back in a city.
Song of the Day: Willie Nelson, Pancho and Lefty
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Choose Your Own Adventure Bus Trip
You're on the bus, somewhere past Butte but before Billings. The lights are dim, but not all turned off yet. Behind you, a blonde girl is talking to one of the Mormon missionaries. All the Mormon missionaries in Montana are on the move tonight, going from Livingston to Whitefish, from Missoula to Drummond. At each bus stop some of them get off, others get on. All in suits, with nametags. They talk like college students on their junior year abroad, about how cool the res is, have you met Sister X, Elder Y? They do a little trash-talking, rolling their eyes about one sister who was a pain in the bee-hind. You've been asleep; it's somewhere around 10 p.m. You look up, suddenly, at the windshield of the bus, and it's covered in rain drops. You didn't know it was raining. All of a sudden, the bus feels very large, and very safe.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Should I Feel Bad?
So I wound up staying in Missoula for two days. Not because I was so entranced by Missoula (although it is very lovely with the hills and the rivers and you can see people standing knee-deep in Clark's Fork fishing), but out of sheer unholy inertia.
The bus I was supposed to take at Kalispell left at 8 a.m. I wanted to go to Kalispell because it would bring me near to Glacier National Park, which seemed like a good thing to see. But yesterday morning at 8 a.m. I refused to move. Instead, I lay in bed and watched tv. I suppose it's one way to celebrate Memorial Day. At 6 I staggered out into the streets and went and got dinner. The only conversation I had all day was with the guy who asked what I was eating. I said the meatloaf sandwich; he said, "It looks good."
It started to rain again, so I walked back in the light drizzle and stopped at Safeway to buy an orange. It was slightly, but only slightly too cold, even in my motel room. Which is cheap, and not unsafe, but, frankly, not very nice.
This morning again I overslept, missing the one bus to Kalispell. But I'm ready to move. There's a 3:30 bus that will take me through North Dakota and all the way in to Minneapolis. I don't know where I'll get off, but probably not before North Dakota. I will look out the window and wish that I was stopped in all the places we pass through, knowing perfectly well that in those places I would feel lost and bewildered and weighed down with my stuff.
Until then I will be in the Liberty Lanes bowling alley.
The bus I was supposed to take at Kalispell left at 8 a.m. I wanted to go to Kalispell because it would bring me near to Glacier National Park, which seemed like a good thing to see. But yesterday morning at 8 a.m. I refused to move. Instead, I lay in bed and watched tv. I suppose it's one way to celebrate Memorial Day. At 6 I staggered out into the streets and went and got dinner. The only conversation I had all day was with the guy who asked what I was eating. I said the meatloaf sandwich; he said, "It looks good."
It started to rain again, so I walked back in the light drizzle and stopped at Safeway to buy an orange. It was slightly, but only slightly too cold, even in my motel room. Which is cheap, and not unsafe, but, frankly, not very nice.
This morning again I overslept, missing the one bus to Kalispell. But I'm ready to move. There's a 3:30 bus that will take me through North Dakota and all the way in to Minneapolis. I don't know where I'll get off, but probably not before North Dakota. I will look out the window and wish that I was stopped in all the places we pass through, knowing perfectly well that in those places I would feel lost and bewildered and weighed down with my stuff.
Until then I will be in the Liberty Lanes bowling alley.
The Long American Night
We have returned after a brief absence.
We were wondering -- the old guy at the laundromat? In the wheelchair? Do you think maybe that was William Gibson?
Just wondering.
Also, now that summer has officially begun, the TDBP has begun to feel vaguely like a Gordon Korman story. Not that we're complaining.
We were wondering -- the old guy at the laundromat? In the wheelchair? Do you think maybe that was William Gibson?
Just wondering.
Also, now that summer has officially begun, the TDBP has begun to feel vaguely like a Gordon Korman story. Not that we're complaining.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Current location . . .
So I didn't go to Spokane after all. I got off the bus in Spokane, sleepy-eyed and having destroyed the zipper on my sleeping bag, as well as added a new layer of drool to it. There I was told that I could take the bus I was planning to take to somewhere in Montana (I forget the name, but it starts with a Ka) but that would involve a layover in Missoula from 10:40 p.m. to 8 a.m. And I did not feel like arriving in Missoula and choosing between spending the night in the Greyhound station and trying to find a hotel room at 11.
So I just got back on the bus I had gotten off, and in so doing confused the busdriver, and went back to sleep. Let us all be impressed by my ability to sleep at will. Now I've walked around Missoula in the rain and am currently in my pajamas with a fine selection of Safeway products to feed me and motel cable. There's glory for you.
At the breakfast stop in St. Regis, this punk kid said he was going to Osh Kosh, Wisconsin. He was going to start a business; his grandfather had just died -- he was a Marriot (the Marriot? the kid mumbled and I didn't like to ask) -- leaving half the money to the kid and half to the grandmother, but that until then the kid was flat broke.
He asked me where I was from. When I said L.A., he said he had spent some time there, mostly being homeless. He said it was hard to meet good people there, the good people were mostly the upper and middle class people "like you." But even the people of our class, he said, half were fake, they just wanted to use you.
He said he left home when he was 13 to bicycle through every state of the union, and he got done when he was 19. He seemed like a nice kid.
So I just got back on the bus I had gotten off, and in so doing confused the busdriver, and went back to sleep. Let us all be impressed by my ability to sleep at will. Now I've walked around Missoula in the rain and am currently in my pajamas with a fine selection of Safeway products to feed me and motel cable. There's glory for you.
At the breakfast stop in St. Regis, this punk kid said he was going to Osh Kosh, Wisconsin. He was going to start a business; his grandfather had just died -- he was a Marriot (the Marriot? the kid mumbled and I didn't like to ask) -- leaving half the money to the kid and half to the grandmother, but that until then the kid was flat broke.
He asked me where I was from. When I said L.A., he said he had spent some time there, mostly being homeless. He said it was hard to meet good people there, the good people were mostly the upper and middle class people "like you." But even the people of our class, he said, half were fake, they just wanted to use you.
He said he left home when he was 13 to bicycle through every state of the union, and he got done when he was 19. He seemed like a nice kid.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Today I decided, pre-departure, to do my laundry. Which, as an impulse, has its girl-like sides to it. I wasn't out of clean clothes, and I hadn't worn most of those shirts more than once.
Anyway, I found myself a laundromat. Attached to a bar, right across from the statue of Chief Seattle. I put my stuff in, and went outside to smoke and try to do that day's Sudoku. These two guys were talking in front of me. They looked like they had done some hard living in their time. They were trading stories of guns that got pulled on them, petty theft, etc. One guy said, "Chicago is a bad town to be a junky." He said that in Seattle you could panhandle but in Chicago you'd be a second story guy, "you'd be a criminal."
I went back inside and put my clothes in the drier. This guy in a wheelchair rolled over. He was an old guy, the kind of old guy who looks like he reads a lot of William Gibson. His glasses were held together by a rubber band and he had a very large beard. He said he was bored, and asked me to propose a subject. I asked him where he was from.
He took a look at the funny pages, taking my Sudoku away from me. I thought about saying, it's one thing to distract me from my puzzle, but another to take the paper away from me.
He asked me what I did. I said, as I mostly do in situations where I don't really know how much I want to talk to someone, that I was a lawyer. Which is true -- I'm a member of the State Bar of California -- but also tends to buy you a little more space. He took his clothes out of the washer, and asked for my help folding a sheet. I asked him if he didn't want to dry it first. He said, "Oh, yes," and that he didn't do the laundry that often. He mumbled about being a single guy. He had already asked me if I was married.
Let me make something clear: I had no doubt about my ability (or my eventual decision) to get out of this conversation, and he wasn't hitting on me, really. It just made me think about being female.
Because there is this series of ingrained impulses to keep yourself out of ambiguous situations. They're probably not dangerous, but there's always the possibility, and why play the odds? It's true for everybody, of course, but I think more true for girls -- the risks are (seem?) greater, and therefore it's more dramatic to take them and more shameful if you do take them and something fucked up happens. A girl who goes to a strange guy's house is acting more recklessly, is demonstrating a greater disregard for social convention, than a guy who does the same thing. It strikes me.
That's a bad thing; it shouldn't be that way. And one of the reasons it's a bad thing is that it makes it harder to tell the difference between situations you don't want to enter because they're dangerous and situations you don't want to enter because they're boring as all hell.
If a situation sets those vague, subliminal danger signals off flashing in your head, it's harder to see that it's boring. It creates a difficulty in discrimination which is bad.
The guy who had said it was hard to be a junky in Chicago came back in and he and the guy in a wheelchair started a desulatory conversation about Tom Robbins and Charles Bukowski.
I finished my laundry and left.
Anyway, I found myself a laundromat. Attached to a bar, right across from the statue of Chief Seattle. I put my stuff in, and went outside to smoke and try to do that day's Sudoku. These two guys were talking in front of me. They looked like they had done some hard living in their time. They were trading stories of guns that got pulled on them, petty theft, etc. One guy said, "Chicago is a bad town to be a junky." He said that in Seattle you could panhandle but in Chicago you'd be a second story guy, "you'd be a criminal."
I went back inside and put my clothes in the drier. This guy in a wheelchair rolled over. He was an old guy, the kind of old guy who looks like he reads a lot of William Gibson. His glasses were held together by a rubber band and he had a very large beard. He said he was bored, and asked me to propose a subject. I asked him where he was from.
He took a look at the funny pages, taking my Sudoku away from me. I thought about saying, it's one thing to distract me from my puzzle, but another to take the paper away from me.
He asked me what I did. I said, as I mostly do in situations where I don't really know how much I want to talk to someone, that I was a lawyer. Which is true -- I'm a member of the State Bar of California -- but also tends to buy you a little more space. He took his clothes out of the washer, and asked for my help folding a sheet. I asked him if he didn't want to dry it first. He said, "Oh, yes," and that he didn't do the laundry that often. He mumbled about being a single guy. He had already asked me if I was married.
Let me make something clear: I had no doubt about my ability (or my eventual decision) to get out of this conversation, and he wasn't hitting on me, really. It just made me think about being female.
Because there is this series of ingrained impulses to keep yourself out of ambiguous situations. They're probably not dangerous, but there's always the possibility, and why play the odds? It's true for everybody, of course, but I think more true for girls -- the risks are (seem?) greater, and therefore it's more dramatic to take them and more shameful if you do take them and something fucked up happens. A girl who goes to a strange guy's house is acting more recklessly, is demonstrating a greater disregard for social convention, than a guy who does the same thing. It strikes me.
That's a bad thing; it shouldn't be that way. And one of the reasons it's a bad thing is that it makes it harder to tell the difference between situations you don't want to enter because they're dangerous and situations you don't want to enter because they're boring as all hell.
If a situation sets those vague, subliminal danger signals off flashing in your head, it's harder to see that it's boring. It creates a difficulty in discrimination which is bad.
The guy who had said it was hard to be a junky in Chicago came back in and he and the guy in a wheelchair started a desulatory conversation about Tom Robbins and Charles Bukowski.
I finished my laundry and left.
Friday, May 25, 2007
I Saw A Young Hawk Flying
The thirty day bus pass that gives this blog its name kicks in today. And I have even less of a clue of what I'm doing than when I started.
Seattle's been a good jumping off point. It's a city, and it's an easy to navigate city. A nice city. Yesterday for lunch I had a dozen oysters. When I arrived alone the waiter offered me a newspaper if I wanted. Then he told me that oyster happy hour -- a dollar an oyster -- was about to begin. Then he told me which oysters to get. One set of oysters, he said, had arrived less than an hour earlier. They were phenomenal. At the end, there was a complimentary chocolate desert thing.
Seattle, by the way, is the first place I ever had oysters. With my grandmother. They were awesome then too. And with these oysters, I felt half-convinced that I had only been eating oysters all along only for the memory of those orignal ur-oysters, and now, but only now, oysters were finally living up to their original promise. They were really good.
The whole thing made me feel safe. I picked the right place for lunch, and was treated kindly, and therefore everything was right. I was right, the world was right, good choices had been made and it remained only to reap the benefits in tasty oyster form.
Right. I could walk around and I could come back to my hotel room and look at the internet, and I had the half-promise of my train friend to call, and yet I was away, with that kind of weird distance that comes from travel. I looked at myself in the mirror yesterday and thought, "Who the hell are you?"
I don't know what the rest of the trip will be like. The plan is: bus to Mt. Vernon, WA at 3:15. Bus from Mt. Vernon, WA to Spokane at 9:25 p.m.
I don't really have a death wish, by the way.
Seattle's been a good jumping off point. It's a city, and it's an easy to navigate city. A nice city. Yesterday for lunch I had a dozen oysters. When I arrived alone the waiter offered me a newspaper if I wanted. Then he told me that oyster happy hour -- a dollar an oyster -- was about to begin. Then he told me which oysters to get. One set of oysters, he said, had arrived less than an hour earlier. They were phenomenal. At the end, there was a complimentary chocolate desert thing.
Seattle, by the way, is the first place I ever had oysters. With my grandmother. They were awesome then too. And with these oysters, I felt half-convinced that I had only been eating oysters all along only for the memory of those orignal ur-oysters, and now, but only now, oysters were finally living up to their original promise. They were really good.
The whole thing made me feel safe. I picked the right place for lunch, and was treated kindly, and therefore everything was right. I was right, the world was right, good choices had been made and it remained only to reap the benefits in tasty oyster form.
Right. I could walk around and I could come back to my hotel room and look at the internet, and I had the half-promise of my train friend to call, and yet I was away, with that kind of weird distance that comes from travel. I looked at myself in the mirror yesterday and thought, "Who the hell are you?"
I don't know what the rest of the trip will be like. The plan is: bus to Mt. Vernon, WA at 3:15. Bus from Mt. Vernon, WA to Spokane at 9:25 p.m.
I don't really have a death wish, by the way.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Sleep is the brother of death.
The Evacuee has often spoken of the mysteries of Thanatos. Her last post, which found the Evacuee "dead on her feet" after a visit to the cemetery, brought to mind this passage from Adam Phillips (in which Phillips is reflecting, as always, on Freud):
Life is a tension which seeks to extinguish itself, to 'cancel itself out'. The first instict arises, paradoxically, to rid itself of the instinct. Something sufficiently vague -- 'a force of whose nature we can form no conception' stirred up some life; and the first response of this new life was to return to its origins, to inanimate matter. . . . There is something unbearable about life -- and perhaps by (Freud's) implication, consciousness -- some 'tension' that only death can release us from. . . . Every living creature, Freud speculates, is hungry, indeed ravenous, for death. But -- and this is where the plot thickens, no for any old death. If what Freud calls 'living substance' is prepared to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death, then it is not any old death it is after. 'We have no longer to reckon,' Freud writes, 'with the organism's puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion' (my italics). There is a death, as it were, that is integral to, of a piece with, one's life: a self-fashioned, self-created death.Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms p. 76-77.
And what, we ask, is the Thirty Day Bus Pass, if not a series of "ever more complicated detours"?
And on that note, Mission Control transmits our wishes to all for a restful Memorial Day Weekend.
Korean TV Is On In The Background
It couldn't have been a more beautiful day. I took the ferry out to Bainbridge Island, where my grandparents lived and are interred.
Half way across I started wondering about the propriety of wearing jeans and flip flops to their grave. It seemed, actually, like the kind of thing my grandmother might have had strong feelings about. But I went anyway.
I walked and I walked and I walked. I got to St. Barnabas church pretty easily. Then I decided to keep going to their old house. The sun was shining, and as I say, it could not have been a more beautiful day. It's probably a five mile walk from the ferry terminal to their old house. By the time I got there I was dead on my feet. I saw it, recognized it, although there's always, in my mind, the possibility that I may have misremembered, may be wasting my gooey sentimentality on the wrong object.
Then I started the walk back. It's a funny thing. Walking is grand for a certain distance -- your brain clears and your feelings even out. But after a certain point it's all crabbiness. On the way back I walked a duck and her (his?) ducklings. A dog, two dogs, started chasing the mother duck. She fled, then returned, quacking all the time.
I don't know. I saw some things and got tired and talked to the people I talk to on the cellphone. I felt hungry and adrift. In the next motel room over one guy said to the other, "This is fucking disgusting."
Half way across I started wondering about the propriety of wearing jeans and flip flops to their grave. It seemed, actually, like the kind of thing my grandmother might have had strong feelings about. But I went anyway.
I walked and I walked and I walked. I got to St. Barnabas church pretty easily. Then I decided to keep going to their old house. The sun was shining, and as I say, it could not have been a more beautiful day. It's probably a five mile walk from the ferry terminal to their old house. By the time I got there I was dead on my feet. I saw it, recognized it, although there's always, in my mind, the possibility that I may have misremembered, may be wasting my gooey sentimentality on the wrong object.
Then I started the walk back. It's a funny thing. Walking is grand for a certain distance -- your brain clears and your feelings even out. But after a certain point it's all crabbiness. On the way back I walked a duck and her (his?) ducklings. A dog, two dogs, started chasing the mother duck. She fled, then returned, quacking all the time.
I don't know. I saw some things and got tired and talked to the people I talk to on the cellphone. I felt hungry and adrift. In the next motel room over one guy said to the other, "This is fucking disgusting."
A Physiological Note
At 11:30 last night, when I finally took a shower, I could still feel some kind of phantom swaying from the train.
We Are Clearly In Control
Isn't it nice to hear from the Evacuee, and to be entertained with her cute observations? We're glad she's having so much fun and meeting people from around the world. We hope she remembers to bring us back a rubber stamp from that great rubber stamp store in Seattle. Also, we remain firmly in control of the situation as it continues to develop.
We threw a black widow spider into the garbage can and now every time we take out the trash we are afraid we are going to die. (We're not sure if we mentioned it, but it would be much more tragic if we died.)
We're sorry we forgot to carry out the Evacuee's request to detail that episode about running into her old high school classmate, her footwear at the time, and how it all prompted her to feel as if she was staring into the abyss. It slipped our mind. But we would ask this question: who is more likely to be on the path to self-fulfillment and self-discovery (and immortal fame)? The high school classmate en route to his law firm in Century City in his purring late-model coupe and his snug Banana Republic boxer briefs or the Evacuee, in her nearly fresh tank top, putting Reception Theory into practice with Serbians and Lebanese temporarily admitted into the country? Who, I ask you?
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
A Little Bit Shady
So. I've gotten somewhere, Seattle, to be exact.
I got off the train at 8:30 p.m. Disorienting in itself. The train, taken for 35 hours, becomes a little ecosystem to itself. In front of me were two mothers, each with two children. They got off in Oregon (Eugene and Portland, respectively). By the time they left I felt like I knew their small children better than I had known any small children, ever. I watched the kids go from beamingly ecstatic ("Hello? Hello? Hi!" over the top of the seat in front of me) to sobbing maybe four hundred times. It's the tragedy of the small child: no control and the endless possibilty of pissing people off for reasons only imperfectly understood.
The other key element of the train ecosystem is the group of rowdy guys. There is always a group of rowdy guys on the train. Back when trains still had smoking cars you could find them there. Now they're the guys clustered at the door waiting to spring off the train for a cigarette. I watched one guy, the drunkest and the strangest, recruit others into the group, giving them pot at the train stops, careening his way around. He watched each new arrival for potential, would get into confidential conversations. By the end he was wearing his sunglasses full-time, and had switched to the tank top from the tie-dye he initially sported.
I'm only scratching the surface. I had two older women who were a little lunatic and loud explain their personalities to me in terms of astrology ("I'm bipolar and I'm a Gemini and I'm going through the change of life; what do you expect?"). There was the guy who was assigned the seat next to me who was reading through a book of facts about cannabis and who told me that he had heard that the spirits go to sleep between 2 and 4 in the morning, but he thought that was bullshit because spirits don't sleep. My drooling sleep (in the sleeping bag) was surprisingly restful.
Most important of all, there was the rhythm of the travel. The first 2 hours were hell: no smoking, the anxiety of leaving my assigned seat (will the car conductor yell at me? but I don't want to sit next to this guy all night. maybe I'm just a jerk - I couldn't get over it and I couldn't leave it alone). The next 7 hours pensive. You admire the scenery, you listen to music, you start to feel like you're seeing things, learning things. Then sleep. The next morning you start to make friends. You make fun of the other people on the train. You watch the scenery, but not in the same obsessive way. You notice your own smell. Do you change your shirt? Is it even worth it at this point? And the last hour you twitch uncontrollably, ready to be somewhere.
In Seattle I veered between the expensive respectable hotels, partly to prove that I was reputable and bourgeois, partly for the pleasure of the nice hotel, and the shady hotels which seemed more fitting. I walked and walked and wished I had asked the cab driver to drop me at the nearest Best Western. In the end, I opted for the shady. Which is where I am now. The morning I left, I ran into a friend from high school on his way to his job. He was in a car, I was in flip flops. In that moment I felt my own immaturity ramming into my belly.
But, still in my unchanged shirt and flip flops, I had dinner at the bar of a restaurant near me, where I ran into a group of internationalites chosen by my government to tour our country. A Lebanese human resources consultant told me that he had been assured by a worker for Lyndon LaRouche that Dick Cheney was behind the wave of bombings in Lebanon. A Serbian journalist told me that ours was a shitty country.
I got off the train at 8:30 p.m. Disorienting in itself. The train, taken for 35 hours, becomes a little ecosystem to itself. In front of me were two mothers, each with two children. They got off in Oregon (Eugene and Portland, respectively). By the time they left I felt like I knew their small children better than I had known any small children, ever. I watched the kids go from beamingly ecstatic ("Hello? Hello? Hi!" over the top of the seat in front of me) to sobbing maybe four hundred times. It's the tragedy of the small child: no control and the endless possibilty of pissing people off for reasons only imperfectly understood.
The other key element of the train ecosystem is the group of rowdy guys. There is always a group of rowdy guys on the train. Back when trains still had smoking cars you could find them there. Now they're the guys clustered at the door waiting to spring off the train for a cigarette. I watched one guy, the drunkest and the strangest, recruit others into the group, giving them pot at the train stops, careening his way around. He watched each new arrival for potential, would get into confidential conversations. By the end he was wearing his sunglasses full-time, and had switched to the tank top from the tie-dye he initially sported.
I'm only scratching the surface. I had two older women who were a little lunatic and loud explain their personalities to me in terms of astrology ("I'm bipolar and I'm a Gemini and I'm going through the change of life; what do you expect?"). There was the guy who was assigned the seat next to me who was reading through a book of facts about cannabis and who told me that he had heard that the spirits go to sleep between 2 and 4 in the morning, but he thought that was bullshit because spirits don't sleep. My drooling sleep (in the sleeping bag) was surprisingly restful.
Most important of all, there was the rhythm of the travel. The first 2 hours were hell: no smoking, the anxiety of leaving my assigned seat (will the car conductor yell at me? but I don't want to sit next to this guy all night. maybe I'm just a jerk - I couldn't get over it and I couldn't leave it alone). The next 7 hours pensive. You admire the scenery, you listen to music, you start to feel like you're seeing things, learning things. Then sleep. The next morning you start to make friends. You make fun of the other people on the train. You watch the scenery, but not in the same obsessive way. You notice your own smell. Do you change your shirt? Is it even worth it at this point? And the last hour you twitch uncontrollably, ready to be somewhere.
In Seattle I veered between the expensive respectable hotels, partly to prove that I was reputable and bourgeois, partly for the pleasure of the nice hotel, and the shady hotels which seemed more fitting. I walked and walked and wished I had asked the cab driver to drop me at the nearest Best Western. In the end, I opted for the shady. Which is where I am now. The morning I left, I ran into a friend from high school on his way to his job. He was in a car, I was in flip flops. In that moment I felt my own immaturity ramming into my belly.
But, still in my unchanged shirt and flip flops, I had dinner at the bar of a restaurant near me, where I ran into a group of internationalites chosen by my government to tour our country. A Lebanese human resources consultant told me that he had been assured by a worker for Lyndon LaRouche that Dick Cheney was behind the wave of bombings in Lebanon. A Serbian journalist told me that ours was a shitty country.
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