Promiscuously reading

The best of insults sting for their accuracy. As evidence I submit the following.

"Are you a handyman?" she asked.

"In what sense?" I said.

"Can you do anything or do you just talk about books?"

I'm sure that I can. I will tally my talents. Let's see:
- I can sing while playing the ukulele, guitar, and if the wind is right, on flute as well
- I can tell a joke twice to the same person and get them to laugh both times
- I consider San Francisco and New York to be within walking distance of each other
- I can say 'yes', 'no', 'please', 'thank you', and 'very large beer' in no less than five languages

I possess, in short, nearly all those talents that make one appear incomparably magnificent to an eleven-year old, and exasperatingly directionless to an employer.

I've never been to the left bank of the 1920s, but I imagine it was probably full of such types as myself. Despondent wanderers, swishing their drinks, talking Art and God and all the other celebrities whose parties we're never invited to. Criticising the bourgeousie because we envy their mental and financial stability. Lamenting that all the good stuff has already happened and there will never again be anything as thumpingly good as Moby Dick, much less the Bible.

In other words, moaners. The sorts of people I can't stand precisely because I resemble them too much. I don't mean to compare myself to the likes of Steinbeck and Hemmingway - the moaner I like the moaner I don't - merely to their company, which must have been rife with scribblers of mediocrity. The lesser moaners, whose wretched stuff exists mostly to justify the less-wretched works of others. The ones such as myself, who failed even as they believed so fervently that literature could deliver them they consider writing as prayer.

Yes, I talk about books, as priests do God, as old men their vanished youth - obsessively, longingly, enviously.

So I fled for Portland and Powell's, that mighty cathedral of literature, before Seattle and its biting accuracy could get me down any further.

On my first trip to Portland, some 6 years ago, I visited for a week, 6 days of which I spent in Powell's. If I go to Portland and I don't visit Powell's I might as well have never left the rail station, or airport, or however I came to arrive. If it weren't for that bookstore, the city would have very limited appeal to me.

I feel safe, secure within it. A maggot buried in the apple. Wandering the aisles, reading promiscuously from the various titles of which I've never heard, bringing the older copies to my nose and smelling the different odors of paper and binding.

I wish I were a book myself, sometimes. A treasured thing, observed and appreciated, contributed to -  as I write in the margins so might others write in me -  argued with, despised, dog-eared, quoted, re-shelved, and re-read, appreciating and depreciating, placed amongst other titles with our pages whispering stories, then misplaced, misunderstood, burned or pulped.

Which, in sum, I suppose is not much different than the lives of the aged. In which case I might get there yet, if I can find other things to do to fill my years than just talk about books.




En-route to Minneapolis. More-or-less because it is there, and for no greater reason than that.

The 60s Psychedelic Trip

Supposedly, good writing does not begin with quotation. The author should first posit a stance, then later defend it through his own experience and the experiences of others. Otherwise it's robbery, making the author appear non-comittal, evasive, mysterious, hiding behind others thoughts so he can avoid having his own. ("I despise quotations! Tell me what you know." Good old Emerson. So quotable even when incensed.)

Personally, I enjoy quotations. They make me seem smarter than I am. I don't see what really makes a piece less good for starting with someone else's words. I think of it as a way to honor their wit. Afterall, no one makes words, they are borrowed. Writing is just arranging language. When a phrase is particularly well-knit it should not just be dropped because someone else said it before you could. What a tragic waste of language that so many sparkling aphorisms, biting cynicisms, redoubtful boasts, and moving praises could be heard but once.

So I'm going to use someone else's words to begin. The herbalist and traveler Juliette de Bairacli Levy had written she preferred 'to travel as a winged seed.' The image has stuck with me as someone who literally allows herself to drift with the wind, clutching an umbrella or a starched whimple, or else paper-thin in a stiff breeze. During her life she preferred to never travel a distance further than her feet could have carried her in a day. I like that creed well, but my morals are more flexible. Seeds can travel so many ways, even hitching rides on airplanes and cargo ships. Afterall, dandelions didn't blow across the Atlantic against the Jet Stream, and burdock didn't catch a lift from an obliging whale. The wind is such a fickle thing, dropping one wherever. I'd rather be a seed with barbs, one that doesn't wait for circumstances to change but releases itself at just the right moment.

For the next stage of travel, I had consulted craigslist rideshare to see if anyone might be driving cross-country. Now that I've flown, taken the train, and walked it, I have yet to drive the distance. A long car trip might be nice. So I found a 12-passenger van driving east to Minneapolis, charging $100 for the way. Estimated arrival time 4 days. Scenic route guaranteed.

It sounded good enough to me. I called the number, explained what I was looking for, heard what they were looking for, and we agreed it sounded a match. From the conversations, I knew exactly the type they would be: butter-fed Mormon types, fresh out of Bedford Falls, listening to Up with People all the way.

Mark, their liason, met me up in Capitol Hill, up from Pike's Place. He matched, very much, the idea of a suburban father from a movie about childhood roadtrips in the 1960s. Bermuda shorts, socks and sandals, bucket hat, polo shirt, middling and middle-aged, sunk with years and paunch. He carried a messenger bag over his shoulder. The side pocket was stuffed with maps of various American cities: Albuquerque, Santa Monica, Santa Fe. I liked him.

We waited for the remainder of the group at Cal Anderson Park. It was a warm day so the lawn was full of folk who carry their lives in hand bags and backpacks and wrapped up in blankets.

"Does anyone have a cigarette I could buy?" a woman said.

"Cigarette?" I said.

"I shouldn't have said buy," she said, rushing over. "I meant bum."

I passed her the pack.

"I don't know where they are," said Mark. "I told my friend in Spokane we would be there by 7. So long as they show up in the next half hour we should be on time."

They arrived 40 minutes later, tattooed, pierced, and grey of face. Hardly a jolly looking bunch. All save one, the driver, who did resemble a Mormon with his incurable smile, albeit a Jack Mormon with his bandana, slight beard, and glass pendants strung about his neck. A flop-eared dog trailed from a leash he held.

"Leif," he said.

"Like the navigator?" I said.

"Exactly. Is it OK to have the dog in the back with you?"

She seemed quiet, and there would be plenty of space with 12 seats and only 6 passengers. "I don't mind," I said. This is part of the vagaries of travel.

After some ten minutes of impatient pleasantries and route discussion - the barbed seed cannot steer the beast to which  it's burred - we got to the van. It was a chevrolet 12-passenger, spray painted purple with some artistic graffitoed flourishes above the tail-lights. The side door was a bright green sheet of plywood, bungie corded in place.

"Now this is something like a 60s psychedelic trip," said Mark as he opened up the front passenger door to load up. Angling for nostalgia, I thought. The man ought to work in real-estate. I got in, grappling around the bucket seats to find mine, on the floor.

The back was all open floor-space, strewn with food wrappers and bags piled up around. Silly me for thinking a 12-passenger van meant a van with 12 seats. I looked for a way to secure myself. There was none. So I leaned against the stack of baggage and stretched out my legs.

"Don't lean against the door," said Leif, noticing my proximity to the plywood. "It's not easy to put back on when it comes off."

Two of the other passengers pulled out a tin of green leaves and a device legally sold for tobacco use only. They began the preparations of their ceremony.

"Are you planning on smoking?" I asked.

"Not cigarettes," they said, wide-eyed and offended.

We pulled into a gas station. "Gas money," said Mark, reaching back. I handed him $15, then thought better of it and got out of the van. He gave me my money back and pulled out my bag. I had made it a block with the 60s psychedelic roadtrip.

"Good luck," he said. "Safe travels."

Via Seattle

Every voyage has at its beginning a terse fatalism, a thought that this time it's for keeps. This time you're not coming back. The bags are packed, the appliances unplugged, the changes of clothes washed and pressed. You're getting aboard and you're going to vanish. 


The comfortable sights of home flash past as you come to the next town. This too is fairly well-known but from this point on it will become less-so, diminishing the bank of the familiar until it is run down and every sight is a new one. New cities, new faces, new weather. A mountain for which you have no name comes into sight. Perhaps you come from a place that does not have mountains, and now, emerging as terrible as biblical reckoning, as unbelievable as storybook, here is a shape, a form, whose every contour shouts out MOUNTAIN. You breathe in, satisfied that this is why you have left home.

Now you have to think, did you do everything? Are you really prepared for uncertainty and your life previous for abandonment? Check your pockets. Pat your bag. Didn't you have a hat? And what about that friend whom you owe $10? Then there's that charity you said you'd give your time to in October. And that shirt, the one which you got at the thrift store for a song and whose tag is written all in Italian. The one that makes you look like you've come to ask a favor of Don Corleone. You leant it to a friend who needed to make an impression on a job interview. Or was it a date? He must have had it by now. You will have to find out how it went. He may have your hat. You will be going back afterall. What a relief.

The train goes on carrying me northward, snug as a tapeworm in the gut of my host. I love the shaking chassis, the muffled sound of the whistle from inside the carriage, the stream of urban lighting flickering past the window, the smells of antiseptic and perfume and marijuana and body. I love taking off my boots of going about the cars in my socks, despite the irritation of the attendants. I love bringing my own provisions aboard - ryevita, almond butter, goat cheese, strawberries, hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, granola, a mango, 70% dark chocolate, beer. I love most everything about this magic conveyence that bears me away through the night. Even those things that I wouldn't love elsewhere - the malfunctioning toilets, the lack of timeliness, the re-circulated air - I forgive. Afterall, for long distance travel trains are a sentiment.

Here on the Coast Starlight - Amtrak's West Coast Service - I can read, or talk to other passengers, play ukulele, or just look at a landscape which rises and fades at a stately pace. Klamath Lake, Cascades, Willamette Valley, Eugene, Portland, Olympia, Seattle, near cultivation and distant wilderness. Occasionally the train parallels the highway, but mercifully these miles are few and so I am given a view that is largely natural if not purely wild. Thoreau hated trains, but he didn't know what was coming. There are few modes of travel which still allow for such comfort. Ferries may be the only other comparable transportation now that dirigibles are gone from fashion. Cruises don't count since they lack even a pretense of practicality.

I've come onto this train because I had a yen to head up to Seattle to see some friends and to get some film developed at a favored processor. Really though, I was obeying an imperative migratory urge. I was feeling as Steinbeck had when he wrote Travels with Charlie, a need "to be somewhere, anywhere, away from any here." Seattle was just a happy pretext. I needed to go more than to be someplace, and to that end I could have chosen Wichita, or Calgary, or Istanbul. Too, I went because I love coming back as much as going out. I needed to leave so I could return.

This particular route offers what for many is the vision of a train ride across North America: long, hollow stretches of railway cut through a corridor of towering evergreens. The scenery is magnificent. When a valley drops to one side of the tracks, one can look out on mountains that were they east of the plains would have been appropriated as national icons during the formative years of the Republic. But since the incoming populations came largely from the east, passing more grandiose monoliths en route that well-matched the growing nationanalism, these modest pinnacles are not much noted save by logging companies. A middling 7,000-9,000 feet, barely keeping their snows through the year. Some mountains.

At Portland a duo of volunteers get on to give the history of the Northwest in the cafe car. Their commentary goes from diverting to tolerable to escapable and I creep back to my seat to read. However, there's further interruption. The landscape becomes familiar, but then with enough travel every place takes on a shade of home. Look - there's the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. There's Mount Rainier and there's Puget Sound, mirror-flat in the sunset. (Thought: how far could one go in a rowboat from Olympia? To Victoria? To Alaska?) There's Seattle rising up from its nest of shipping containers. The clock tower looks the same. King Station is under renovation. Is that cafe still open in the University District? The one with the exceptionally attractive staff?

The train comes to stop, and I exit with my bag onto the street.

The Word

I have a new acquisition. A new enhancement to my retinue of a packable life: a keyboard.

 I had gotten myself a tablet a month ago for the purpose of being able to always stay one step ahead of my debts. The typing could be slow on it - hunt-and-peck, using just the index fingers, with frequent mis-spellings and incomprehensible auto-corrections. Then, I got myself an auxiliary keyboard. The words can fly out from under my fingers again, almost as quicky as I think them. I find myself typing words for the joy of having the keys clack and the feeling of speed in my hands.

"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party,"

 "We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieble rights..."

 "Whan that Abrille with the showrs soote, the drouthe of Mars hath perced to the roote..."

 Why the Hell can't I play anything more complicated than Frere Jacques on the piano but can type out, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," with fluency?

Regardless, I like it. No concert hall seats are going to be sold to watch me type out a daring improvisation, but for personal satisfaction it shall do nicely. It makes me feel more akin to the old writers, like Jack London prowling San Francisco with his Underwood under his arm. But several degrees better.

Lest the reader think me boastful and vainglorious, I don''t mean to imply I've written the great American novel and laugh at all preceding writers as but preludes to myself. What I mean is, compared to the processes the old boys used - typewriters, pen and paper - I'm much better off. I can write up a novella in an hour if I felt so inspired and then have it published in multiple languages within the same day.

 I like that my arrangement of tablet and keyboard makes me feel like some starving artist on the Left Bank of some river in whatever city the poets gather to self-congratulate. Typewriters are still pleasing to me, and not just because of my affection for the obsolete. But because of the swish-clack of the keys and the cranking sheets of paper. It's an audio as well as visual experience. The stacks of dirtied paper, however, has always troubled me and kept me from making anything serious on a typewriter, historical precedent be damned. Not to mention the difficulty of finding replacement parts for busted machines. I'd rather be a writer than a technician.

 But I love words, I love language, and I love machines that make the verbal into the visible, especially when they go swish-clack. I have never felt so powerful holding a gun as I have sitting at a keyboard. Lucky for me, it is much more socially acceptable to sit down at a table in a cafe and pull out my sidearm of choice. Call it excersizing my constitutional right.

 So my embracing of new technology has only come as I view it as a return to the classic. Everything old is new again, no?

Fellowship of Travel

One of the things I appreciate about travel is the commonality of the travelers. Of whatever background, age, education, or income, we are all, at least for awhile, of the same kind. We are uprooted drifters, en route, in the same boat, so to speak, or bus, or train.

We form a fellowship of the displaced. A great joy of going is not only in seeing what I have never seen before, but experiencing it with others, and finding their stories along the way. The professor of German from the university of Chicago, the Indiana Mennonite showing his son the country, the classical violinist, the Oklahoman, the runaway, the drunk. I prefer their stories to my own. I know mine. Theirs are novel, unknown but knowable, and no matter where I may be or what I am up to, another's adventures are always the more fascinating.

 I imagine that a large part of this has to do with my chosen modes of travel. So much as I can, I like to keep as little separation between my feet and the earth as possible. I like to see the land i'm passing over, to make out the leaves on the trees and how the grass bends with the wind and how the people i pass squint their eyes in the sun. I remain skeptical of the reliance of air travel. To sail the skies in a fire retardant aluminum envelope still sounds to me like the work of fiction, though it is now more than a century since Kitty Hawk. I've taken flights, I know their economy and efficiency, but still, 35,000 feet is many more than I am comfortable with and I have rarely had a worthwhile conversation on a plane. 


Trains, buses, boats, and bicycles have always lent themselves - within my lifetime at least - to a slower-paced crowd, one that does not mind delay. Here one is more likely to find people like myself, wanderers following a planktonic existence, going where currents allow. These are the people with whom i may find support for my decisions, or at least commiseration for the many drawbacks. They help me see my decisions as a daring affront to societal expectations regarding lifestyle, and not as an emotional incapacity to deal with the responsibilities of maturity. My few possessions represent a liberation from property, my meager bank account sufficient for 8 months of living like a vagabond prince.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for congratulation, something I find hard to self-manufacture, that I need the approval of others. It can be so wearing, constantly piecing together one's life. The parts that went right can never be lived over to give some space to breath. So I keep moving, sinking into the crowd, a quiet member of the parish of the traveling church as the earth rolls on beneath.

The Settled Life of Toasters

Hostels are a way station for the just-arrived and the about-to-depart. I had a few days between my last gig and my next one, so i booked a bed in San Francisco and picked up the guitar and played till someone felt like talking. Someone did. She was maybe 25, touring California. But being English, she was 'on holiday' and not vacation.

"When does the trip end?" I asked.

 "Thursday in San Diego."

"Then back home?"

She groans.

"That's not a good thing? I would think it would be nice."

"There are plenty of nice things about home. There's nothing nice about the real world," she says. "The real world sucks and everyone knows it, that's why there are so many books written by people who gave it up and went back to it then wrote about how terrible it is so they could have the money to give it all up again."

"You mean like Elizabeth Gilbert?" I say. "Or Byron?"

"Not just western literature but all literature," she says. She pronounces it lit-ra-ture. "Everyone makes stories about better worlds and transcending the ordinary because the real world sucks."

To be contrary, I try to offer evidence to counter this opinion but come up lacking. There doesn't seem much i can say for the defense of standard living. The real world she describes is the standard one of maturity, the settled life of toasters and gardeners, postman and picket fences, umbrellas and telephone directories. Bills and baggage. Insurance. Age. 401k.

I'm deeply troubled by what she has said, mostly because I want everything she is railing against.

I want that green lawn, that white fence, that mailbox with my name on it, the closet crammed with the aerosol smell of plastic off-gassing from the Payless shoes, the refrigerator that makes both ice and water, the store-bought spouse, the couple of vacuous kids bathed in the blue glow of television screen.

There will be two children: the boy we planned and wanted, and then the surprise girl 15 months later, for whom we did neither, but who, by the time she's three, I will love the most. The boy will be bland but serviceable so far as sons go, doing sll the things he thinks boys are supposed to do - baseball, getting dirty, being cruel to his sister - until he comes to enjoy them.

He becomes talented at sports, which I find dull but which because he is mine I will encourage, though I will never come to like it and always harbor suspicions that had she wanted to his sister could have been the better athlete. I will be proud of him when he gets accepted to college, but not as much as I am of his sister when at the age of 14 she outs herself as a lesbian.

At the age of 38, I will contemplate an affair, but hold back for outdated ressons of integrity and honor. I will tell this to my spouse when we divorce 5 years later. In the separation I learn I was the only one to hold back on temptation for the past 10 years. I'm deserted for someone whose children have grown since they are "done wiping noses." I counter with some choice words which leave me feeling empty and failed. I keep the house, and since the kids live there, them too.

 I keep my nose to the grindstone, trim hedges, grade papers, update my glasses prescription, get cavities filled, start wearing cardigans and yelling at the thirty-something neighbors who move in with their toddler and cocktail-sized dog.

The boy will move out first, claiming he's had enough of my iron fist. In panic I will call his mother, who tells me my laissez-faire ways were bound to backfire. I scream obscenities and hang up. He joins the marines because he knows this is one of the worst things he could do to me. His sister says that he did it because he wanted to and when am I going to let them be their own people and not who I want them to be?

She goes to school to be a dental hygienist where she meets a nice girl. Four years later they give me my first grandchild and I breathe a sigh of relief that I get to try over, then get my heart broken when they move overseas. I still love her the most.

Then the boy comes back for a time. Years have mellowed us both that we actually come to enjoy each other's opinions. But he realizes he's outgrown this old town and moves away. I get christmas cards from him that slowly increase in the number of signatures at the bottom of the card from one to four as the years go by.

Then, in October of my 72nd year, while burning leaves on the curb, the exertion and smoke inhalation triggers a heart attack. The neighbor girl finds me face down, with part of my clothing smoldering and my eyebrows singed off. I wave away the ambulance, but since my response was not articulate or verbal, I'm carted away. As they whisk me to the hospital, I close my eyes, not regretting my mistakes, nor taking any pride in the victories, as I wait, flickering, fading, and finally, going out.

Of course, that's just the rough outline. It might happen differently. Most of those elements I begin to find distasteful even as I write, but even though I may not want these things in a month, or a year, or twenty, I do want them now. Or at least some of them. I'm left unsettled by this.

When did i stop wanting to be Peter Pan and began envying Mr. Darling?

Down and out in Ontario

Maybe I like going to Canada because it's the one country in the world where it's OK to feel snobbish about being an American. Anywhere else one is reminded of the millennia of art and tradition that have preceded and led up to the grand cultural accomplishments of modern Belgium, or Korea, or Peru. That doesn't happen in Canada. Well, perhaps in Montreal, but I was leaving it for Ontario purposefully and not just because I got a ride there.

I wanted to be somewhere bigger, noisier, more chokingly polluted and comfortable with its own squalor. That pretty much just meant Toronto, unless I headed back south of the border. Being in a city large enough to assure anonymity is a comfort to me. I like walking the pavements, feeling concrete under my shoes, inhaling new odors with each square of the sidewalk. The greatest draw for me, in any city, is the people watching. Walt Whitman had it right in his poem, To a Stranger:

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
 You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
[...] I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

I love riding public transportation, and sitting close enough to other people in cafes to smell what they've ordered, and imagining what their arms, faces, and jackets would feel like. When our eyes meet I do my best to break into them and make myself into that object which they will recall and wonder when they "sit alone or wake at night alone." In return, I'm just as conscious of how I dress, how I walk, how my wrists show while I drink from that cup of tea and where I must go to be noticed. I am, in this way, a public figure, though one deluded and ignorant of his own obscurity.

Four days I wandered the city, lingering in Kensington market, walking the haunts of the graffiti artists, riding the metro, finding those Asian restaurants Asians actually go to, and getting baked out of my mind at a pot bar and wandering the internal passageways of the underground like digestion navigating the gut. I thought of all the cities I had been to in the past year. Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Chicago, Boston, the other Portland, Montreal, Toronto. They blended in my mind, the sidewalks all connected. It was disorienting, and disheartening.

I was experiencing the traveler's sickness. Not quite homesickness, more like a lack of will and purpose. The great question of "What am I doing here?" Some people I know experience this before they even leave. Why go drink tea in China when you could drink tea at home? Usually I would have answered, "Because it is not home." But the answer had reversed on me. "Because it is home." I was tired of traveling. Home was calling, which was no individual place, but having gone down to a few hundred dollars and wanting a roof, a radiator, a bed that stayed put, that pretty much meant heading back to the US. Being poor is fine, but it's much harder to be poor in a country that's not yours, however much it might resemble it.

 I searched Craigslist for the next available ride to anywhere in the US. There was a ride to Buffalo offered and I took it. So, Buffalo would be home.