Stop Smoking Today

It's easy with hypnosis.

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.

The Way of All Flesh

It always surprises us that the Evacuee eats meat.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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?

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.

Mission Control: This is only a test.

This is Thirty Day Bus Pass Mission Control in Los Angeles. Our last report from EFD (the "Evacuee") was from just outside San Luis Obispo. We can only assume that the Evacuee is, at this moment, continuing on her 35-hour trip to Seattle on the magical Coast Starlight.

The Thirty Day Bus Pass, from this point on, will be managed and directed from the confines of Thirty Day Bus Pass Mission Control and Headquarters here in Northeastern Los Angeles. We expect to begin receiving and posting physical correspondence from the Evacuee -- dispatches from the front lines of the Evacuee's stormful mind -- shortly.

Like you, we here at Mission Control are unclear as to the Evacuee's planned trajectory or the ultimate destination -- or purpose -- of the Thirty Day Bus Pass. We know only that this was, for reasons that cannot be satisfactorily explained, a necessary trip, and that we will do our best to ensure a comfortable ride for all involved.

Luckily for you, before leaving, the Evacuee instructed Mission Control staff in Reception Theory, which she apparently studied in Germany (in German). She also reminded us that she had taken a class with George Lakoff in college and gave us a brief overview on Professor Lakoff's theories of the metaphor. The Evacuee also managed to remind us that her mother was (and remains) a classicist.

We, in turn, reminded the Evacuee to eat, and to maybe try and quit smoking. And to have fun, of course.

And more ...

Yesterday I bought a backpack and a sleeping bag. The sleeping bag is because a) it makes me feel self-sufficient and tough and b) it gets cold on the bus at night.

Last time I took a cross-country train trip I wound up buying a $27 Amtrak blanket. The blanket was white and by the end of the trip it looked like hell. It also wasn't all that warm.

But I'm nervous about sleeping bags. I have a checkered history with them. In high school I was always the kid with the enormous puffy sleeping bag that could not easily be attached to anything or even contained. It was always coming undone in the middle of some walk, and by the end I was cradling it in my arms. After that, I pretty much gave up on the whole sleeping bag concept.

Progress

Today I got a haircut and bought my train ticket to Seattle. May 22, 10:15 a.m. I would prefer to leave in the dead of night, with Union Station quiet and ghostly and a couple of glasses of wine under my belt, but the line for ticket buying was long (lots of French people trying to cut; general mayhem) so I took what I was given.

The haircut cost $15, and forced me to spend 20 minutes looking at myself in the mirror. I looked old, and a little dissolute. Bags under my eyes. The effect of too much pizza hut and too many mystery stories in my post-employment mode.

But on the subway the mother with four children flirting with a stranger cheered me up. He told her she had a positive vibe. She nodded along, and told a story about a woman she didn't know giving her forty dollars. The children squirmed and stared at each other across the aisles.

Think I'll Just Sit Here . . .

I stopped working on May 4. I had a plan: I would buy a 30 day Greyhound pass and travel around. It would be a voyage of self-discovery. I would learn things. I would become better and stronger.

That is still the plan. What I forgot was that I had jury duty this week. It is the sort of jury duty where you call in every night and they tell you that you don't have to come in. It's a little anti-climactic. So this week has been a voyage of self-discovery of another sort. I have plunged deep into my own inertia and laziness. I have not cleaned my apartment or organized my papers or alphabetized my books. I have not learned to roller skate. I did sleep 17 hours yesterday, and enjoyed every minute of it.

But there is still a plan. May 22, next Tuesday, I will depart. I will send postcards from the road, which may or may not be scanned into and posted on this very blog.

They will probably be illegible, and they will probably be boring. I do not know how much ground I will cover. It is entirely possible that I will get to Arizona (I'm in Los Angeles now) stop, have a milkshake, and turn around and go home. It is not impossible that I will stay in my apartment the whole time and lie to people about my location. Past experience (I have taken Greyhound from Oakland to Eugene and Amtrak from Los Angeles to New York) suggests that most of my experiences will revolve around physical discomfort and irritation with my fellow passengers.