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.