DMR's Road Trip!

It's All A Waste Of Time Again

2008-08-26T04:19:00.000-07:00

I’m back home in Brockton, Massachusetts now, sleeping on my parents' couch until I move into my new apartment in Boston. After visiting my friend Sarah in New York I zipped through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine just to be able to say I visited 48 states in one trip (see map at bottom of this page). I’ve been to those three states a hundred times and wasn’t too worried about spending a few days in any of them. I spent the last night of my trip in the Odyssey at a rest stop, the way I spent my first night (when my computer was stolen).

In a couple weeks I’ll be starting my master’s program at UMass Boston. I’ll be doing DNA research. Until then I’m working at the farm in Brockton where I’ve worked summers since high school.

It’s very nice to be home—I was getting pretty tired, but I think I could’ve continued traveling forever if funding wasn’t an issue. For the first few weeks of my trip I really regretted the decision to spend nearly the entire summer on the road, but I got accustomed to camping and driving and being a constant tourist. I got used to visiting a new place every day and answering questions about the fanny pack. I got used to meeting new people and dealing with new situations every day.

At this point I’m very glad I made the trip so long. I met some amazing and generous and odd people, and I saw a couple cool things.

I was planning on summing up the trip and my thoughts about this country in the last blog entry, but I’m not going to do that. It’s impossible to sum up this trip in a few paragraphs, and I’m finding it very difficult to describe it to people.

I think I’m going to try and complete a book about the trip. It will be nonfiction, although I don’t really believe in nonfiction. I already have a pretty good start on it.

Thank you to everyone who’s been reading this blog. And thank you to everyone who let me stay at their place or bought me food or helped me arrange a reading or came to visit me along the way. I’m sending out notes and will try to remember all of you.

And thank you to everyone who bought a copy of the book. If you haven’t yet, please let me know what you think (and please tell other people about it if you liked it).

I’m currently working on a screenplay for my friend to consider for a short thingy (but I have no idea what I’m doing). And in addition to the book about DMR’s Road Trip I’m working on a weird two-story-line novel that I began before traveling cross country. It was actually part of the reason I decided to do a cross-country road trip. I needed to do some traveling research for the writing. The trip has definitely influenced the path the book is taking, but in different ways than I’d planned.

If This Town Is Just An Apple

2008-08-19T22:59:00.001-07:00

A couple hours after dropping Greg off at the Detroit airport my friend Eliza from UMass called to ask if I wanted to sleep at her place. She’d just bought a new house and had plenty of extra room. Up until that point I had no idea where I was going to be sleeping, so I drove to her house in a suburb just outside of Detroit.

I pulled into her driveway and her dog Manson ran out to greet me. Eliza was busy hauling bags of stuff out of the back of her pickup truck.

After emptying the back of her truck we drove into town with Manson running around the flatbed to watch a movie projected onto an inflatable screen in the park. We drank Pabst while watching Enchanted with the locals. It was a pretty good movie to watch in a park, but Manson was very irritable. He’s not fixed and there were a number of female dogs strutting their stuff around the park. He made whining sounds throughout the second half of the movie and wasn’t even interested in the gummy worms we tried to quiet him with.

The next day Eliza made French toast (because she’d had a dream about it) and we took a walk with Manson through the woods behind her house. Eliza never leashes him.

We said goodbye and wished each other nice lives because we probably won’t ever see each other again (this has been true with lots of the friends I’ve visited).

I drove east for a few hours. At some point, I realized it might be possible for me to make it to New Haven for my mother’s cousin’s funeral which was scheduled for the next morning at 11.

700 miles later, at 3 in the morning, I arrived in New Haven and got a room. It was the first familiar location I’d seen in over three months.

The next day I made it to the funeral on time and was very glad I went. I got to hear my dad read a poem he’d written for the occasion, a poem the rest of my family heard him read to Paul two days before he died.

After the funeral I drove to New York City to meet my Western MA friends Otie, Trevor, and Meg for dinner. We went to a Mexican place near Williamsburg, wandered around Brooklyn a bit, and then went home to sit on the roof of Meg’s apartment building. Later on we met a few people at a bar near Meg’s house. We left after some girl accused me of intentionally annoying people I know I’m never going to meet again (I think she was kidding), and ended up going to bed relatively early. I love New York and staying up absurdly late when I’m there, but I was still very worn out from all the driving the day before.

The next morning I drove to Hudson, NY to meet up with my friend Sarah. She took me out to lunch, then to her hometown of Kinderhook, NY where I met her parents, dog, and birds.

She also introduced me to the owner of a junk shop and a very old man who sold things out of his SUV on the side of the road. The only thing he said both times we walked by was, “Everything’s cheap.”

Every Little Thing That You Say Or Do

2008-08-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

I picked up my friend Greg in Chicago at 8am or so. After leaving the airport and parking the Odyssey we went on a search for some breakfast. I saw a couple wearing Red Sox apparel and flagged them down. I asked if they knew where we could get brunch and the dude yelled at me that they were also on a hunt for brunch. Before parting ways he threw in a few expletives about how stupid Chicago is. This made me miss Boston.

Greg and I finally found a brunch buffet and ate until we could eat no more. From there we made our way to the waterfront. We considered renting Seqways, but they cost $50 an hour. We then considered tandem bicycles, but Greg looks really bad in spandex so we decided to ride the ferris wheel and take some pictures of the whole city from up high.

Three or four Dramamine later, Greg called his friend Yasi. Although we had no plans, we tried to convince her to meet us near the water. She wasn’t interested in wandering aimlessly around the city with us, so we continued on, alone.

Hours later we made our way to Yasi’s apartment in a very nice residential section of Chicago. She and her roommate JRay had made chocolate chip cookies with orange zest. I’d never had cookies with orange zest, but I feel they suit me.

The walls of their apartment were covered with JRay’s huge framed pictures detailing where garbage goes at night. I enjoyed staring at them very much. I also enjoyed imagining her slinking around and photographing garbage in dangerous neighborhoods after curfew.

Greg went to bed about four minutes after we arrived. Yasi and JRay made eggs. I watched them cook and then ate the eggs. I was very glad to learn that there are many spices in addition to salt and pepper.

After a few hours of talking, making prank calls, and listening to a David Sedaris audio story we woke Greg and he looked like this:

I’m including this picture because I’m a terrible friend and I know how gassy Greg gets when he’s not in control of his appearance.

The next day Yasi and Greg and I went to the Art Institute of Chicago (where they go in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off!). We discussed Corey and Topanga’s views on art. Surprisingly, Greg’s take on Starry Night is very similar to Corey’s.

One of the security guards told me her favorite section of the museum is the impressionist’s section. I agreed that it was one of the nicer places (though I don’t really know anything about this stuff). Another security guard was pissed that her daughter isn’t allowed to go home from school early when she has menstrual cramps. I was unable to be of any assistance in this matter.

Apparently when you tell a security guard that you used to be a security guard they open right the frig up.

That night we went to the White Sox Red Sox game. Beckett pitched and Boston won. It was Yasi’s first baseball game and she wasn’t impressed. The game started out kinda slow, and the presence of the third base coach really dismayed her. To her, baseball was more of a debate on free will than a sport or pastime.

The next day was my reading in Lansing. Greg and I were both sad to leave Yasi and JRay, even though Yasi did kinda ruin baseball for me forever. We arrived at the library twenty minutes late because we didn’t realize the time zones switch from Chicago to Michigan, but it still went well and a very good sized crowd showed up.

That night while trying to find a campground I backed the van into a pole and tore the bumper right off. Greg taped it back on (he’s very good with tape).

The next day we drove around Detroit and took pictures of all the skyscrapers. We also snuck into a couple and took pictures from the upper floors. In one building the head security guard escorted us to an abandoned floor to take some pictures out the windows.

Out of all the cities I’ve visited, Detroit seems to be in the most financial trouble. I guess this isn't a big secret, but I was shocked at how visibly depressed it is. I’ve never seen groups of abandoned skyscrapers.

Despite Detroit's current situation, I wouldn’t mind living there someday. A lot of care went into the construction of that city, and all the elevator doors and hallways have really neat metal and marble fixtures.

On the way to take Greg to the Detroit airport I drove over a bungee cord and we got a flat tire. Greg took the tire off and a very nice older man with super veiny arms gave us a ride to a garage. He didn't want us to leave Detroit thinking no one nice lived in the city. After getting the tire plugged Greg rolled it back to the van and I put it back on. Greg was really revved up about working on the car and wanted to do the whole operation himself, but I didn’t want to look like too much of a wuss in the blog.

Some Pains Just Ain’t Meant To Be Soothed

2008-08-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

A few days before arriving in Minneapolis my friend Ali offered to let me stay at her aunt’s house in St. Paul. The whole family, including Ali, would be at Cape Cod in Massachusetts so I was supposed to have the house to myself. I agreed this sounded like a good idea; I had a lot of laundry to do.

On my way to the house Ali called to say two of her neighbors would also be in the house. Apparently their neighbor was violating several restraining orders they had against him. He’d also recently tried to burn down their garage. This worried me and I regretted agreeing to stay in the house, but after a quick visit to MALL OF AMERICA!, I made my way to the house in St. Paul.

The house is on a hill and has a plaque near the back door with the date the house was built. Apparently it’s some sort of historic landmark even though it’s only 200 years old. In New England a house that’s 200 hundred years old is practically brand new.

I knocked on the door and a small woman answered the door. I immediately got the impression that I was making her nervous, so I took off my American flag bandanna and sunglasses. She said hello and told me there was beer and wine in the fridge—I’m not sure why she thought it necessary to inform me of the house alcohol in the second sentence of our conversation.

After telling me I could do whatever I wanted she retreated to the living room and busied herself with books and crossword puzzles. I took a shower because I hadn’t had one in nearly three days.

Her S.O. (she said this instead of significant other) came home a few hours later. We both had beards and understood each other very well. I think this put his S.O. at ease.

My friend’s aunt arranged two coffee dates with bookish people for me. I met Jim Rogers at Coffee Bella. I wasn’t sure why we were meeting, but I always like to meet new people, especially people with any connections in the publishing and writing world. He asked me about my book and took a look at it. He assured me he’d tell some writing groups to use DMR and then he handed me the journal that he’s responsible for as the head of the Irish Studies Department at The University of St. Thomas. After talking for a while we realized was friends with a professor at the community college where my dad teaches. Jim was very encouraging and we discussed fact vs. fiction in writing.

That night I went to a book reading hosted by my friend’s aunt’s other St. Paul connection. The coffee date fell through mostly because of my lack of internet in the days leading up to my visit. The reading was good and well attended and I got to speak to the bookstore owner for a few minutes about my trip.

The next morning I met my friend Leah. I hadn’t seen her in years, not since we both lived in western, MA. And when we thought back to the last time we saw each other we both remembered an awkward encounter when I waved to her in the street in front of Woodstar Café. At the time she only limply waved at me, but she explained at breakfast (we ate at the Seward Café) that she’d found out her grandfather died a few hours before I waved to her. It was nice to see her and realize she’d been hiding her Wisconsin accent with its fluted Os the entire time she lived in Massachusetts.

A few hours after leaving Leah I got a call from my dad. My mother’s cousin, who I think of as more of an uncle or something, had died that morning. This is the man who met me for dinner on the second night of this trip, the night of my New Haven reading, the day after my laptop was stolen. He had glioblastoma multiforme and lived years longer than anyone predicted he would. I’m going to miss the funeral because of this trip. Paul was always very supportive of my writing and after finishing my first book he sent me a very nice note with a poem by Olav H. Hauge, a Norwegian.

On Friday night I had my Milwaukee reading at Darling Hall where everyone talks like the mom in Bobby’s World. It was a great experience and I met like ten awesome people. The reading didn’t start until about 10:30 p.m. but we got a good little group together. When I finished reading Jon Burks played guitar and sang ten or so really great songs. I got three of his CDs for friends.

I stayed in the apartment above the hall that night and met Kati, the funniest girl I’ve ever met (except for maybe Tunch), and her roommate (also Kati but I’m not sure of the spelling), a freegan. Kati O. showed me through her cupboard and told me which dumpsters she’s pulled various food items out of, and she offered me pot butter for my toast.

Outside their building they’ve built a pretty impressive garden with about a dozen varieties of vegetables crammed into a small space. Despite the small amount of light that makes it into the small yard/alley they have corn that looks like it’s doing pretty well. They water everything with water that’s reclaimed from their shower (they have to use natural soaps). And all the piping has been removed from under the sink and replaced with a bucket that they use to flush the toilet when it gets full enough of handwashing and toothbrushing water.

If I ever publish another book I’d definitely love to go back to Darling Hall. I think I’m probably a little less revolutionary than the people they usually have for concerts and readings, but hopefully they’ll allow me to read again.

From Milwaukee I drove to Kenosha, Wisconsin. My cousin had gotten married the night before and they were having a barbecue to celebrate. They insisted I come over even though I worried I was intruding. I appreciated this immensely; I had no plans of where to sleep that night.

As soon as I got there my cousin made me a frozen Phil’s hard lemonade. Then my uncle Bob grilled me a smoked turkey leg. I ate pretty much the whole thing and proceeded to eat a couple hot dogs and a burger.

After dinner we played touch football with the four or five little kids at the party. My cousin Rory quarterbacked for one team and I for the other. In eight minutes of play we both managed to make a ten-year old cry. I accidentally nailed some kid in the chest with the ball and Rory accidentally grabbed one of their ears. The final score was tied 7-7, and this didn’t sit well with either Rory or me.

Rory and I discussed our last foot race, when he was about 12 and I was 22 or something. I’m not the nice kind of cousin who lets other cousins (no matter how young) win, and Rory still had some pent up rage about this incident. I suggested we race again and Rory agreed. Phil would be the official and we were to run about 60 meters. Rory was wearing basketball sneakers but I was in jeans, so we figured we were pretty even.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m 26 and Rory is 16. He’s just about as tall as me and much more athletic and strong than I was at his age.

We got set and started when Phil dropped his arms at the finish line. I got out much quicker than Rory and extended my lead through the first 30 meters or so. I kind of let up at this point and began striding (I get tired quickly these days and don’t like to work any harder than I have to), but as we neared the 45 meter mark I heard Rory’s turnover quicken—he was saving stuff for the end, trying to make me look like a fool! The fact that Rory thought he could outstrategize me in a 60 meter race enraged me. Suddenly the race became much more serious and I felt as if I was running against old age.

I woke up and transitioned back into sprinting mode (not an easy thing for a 26 year old to do) just in time to keep him safely behind me. I won by about 6 inches (maybe less). Most of the people there were shocked because Rory is known to be a good athlete and I look like a hairy dump truck at this point in my trip.

Although he tried to hide it, Rory was very unhappy with the outcome of the race. He asked for a rematch and I just laughed. In less than two years Rory will be my superior in every way—stronger, smarter, faster, and about six inches taller. I can’t believe he thought I’d be willing to risk the glory of what will probably be the last great physical victory of my life as a young man.

But if it’s any consolation to him, the race (and the turkey and Phil’s hard lemonade) did give me a pretty nasty case of hypodtodenarunnit (I had to press my face against the cool stones of the patio for twenty minutes to keep from booting). And in the end, I guess Rory did pretty good . . . for a boy.

Buy A Yacht With A Flag Sayin' Chillin' The Most

2008-08-08T15:36:00.000-07:00

Danielle and I left the Badlands and headed to Mt. Rushmore. The mountain itself and the faces on it are smaller than we thought they would be. What impressed us more than the landmark was the number of Harley Davidsons in the area. Every parking spot in the town was taken up by bikes and the roads were congested with them.

Through reading t-shirts and asking questions we realized we had accidentally arrived at the beginning of the Sturgis bike rally (the second biggest bike rally in the country). We’d only planned on staying in Keystone (the town Rushmore is in) for an hour or so, but we changed our plans and decided to spend the night in town. After checking out four or five motels we found a room for $100. All the prices were jacked up for the rally.

I bought an American flag bandanna and we went out to experience bikers after dark. Things weren’t as raucous as we’d hoped and we went back to our room relatively early.

The next day we went horseback riding in the Black Hills. It was my first time on a horse, which made our guide kinda nervous, but things went well. Cory the Cowboy told me the horse would sense I didn’t know what I was doing, and Cory was right. My horse wandered off the path to eat grass every chance he got. Felon, my horse, was trained by prisoners—I didn’t really feel comfortable kicking him.

Cory told us all about Sturgis. He’d only been once, but he knew all about it. Celebrities like Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, the OC chopper guys, and Hue Heffner often show up. Cory also told us that women like to ride their bikes topless at Sturgis.

We didn’t realize it initially, but the Sturgis rally is actually in a town called Sturgis. The excess bikes end up in Keystone and Deadwood and the surrounding area. After talking with Cory, Danielle and I decided we had to go to the epicenter of Sturgis.

On the way to Sturgis we gambled a few bucks in Deadwood and visited the grave of Wild Bill Hickock.

That night (still wearing my American flag bandanna) we headed to Sturgis to see what 250,000 bikers are like after dark. Danielle bought a shirt with skulls on it and we fit right in with everyone else. My minivan looked a little funny parked amongst a sea of bikes, but no one said anything. And we actually saw a good number of bikers wearing fanny packs, but most of them were Harley Davidson brand fanny packs and didn’t have twin water bottles tucked into them.

We went to a concert where Rachael Stacy (an E.G. Dailey Better Off Dead lookalike) was performing. People danced in the sand in front of the stage. Most of the dancers were middle-aged women wearing leather chaps with thongs underneath. I couldn’t help wondering how many kids each of them had at home.

We only saw one topless woman riding a bike. Thanks a lot, Cory.

The next day we drove to my reading in Bismarck. Ann Mayher, the head of the friends of the library, set everything up. She and her husband took us to a reproduction of Colonel Custer’s house before the reading. The tour guide (who was in character for the Custer era) asked if any of us played the piano. Danielle nudged me and I raised my hand. He asked me to play something. I banged out the first few measures of Norwegian Concerto, but the piano was incredibly out of tune and it sounded like garbage. The guide then picked up a well-tuned violin and played a few tunes. It was a rotten trick.

The reading went well. 15 people showed up and I sold nine books—not a huge crowd, but I think it’s the best ratio of people to sales that I’ve had all tour (other than the release party composed of friends and family).

I have a reading at Darling Hall in Milwaukee tonight and I have to go help set up so I’m gonna cut this kinda short.

Don’t Call It A Comeback!/Sweet Southern Woman Sit On My Lap

2008-08-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve done a lot of sightseeing in the last few days.

From Grand Teton I drove to Salt Lake City. I spent most of my time wandering around the Mormon center. It wasn’t as weird and creepy as I’d thought it would be. My friend Ben is from Salt Lake City and he doesn’t speak highly of the area; in fact, I’m pretty sure he hates Salt Lake City and the entire state of Utah. I think it satisfied him to hear I didn’t have the time of my life there.

It wasn’t a bad city, and like I said, the Mormon church headquarters wasn’t as weird as I’d thought it would be, but nothing really happened there. Many of the Mormons watched me closely as I took pictures of their church and the surrounding buildings, but none of them talked to me, not even the ones in clothing from the 19^th century (orthodox Mormons?) who’d obviously been strategically placed to help visitors.

I swam in the Great Salt Lake. The area surrounding it smells of really stank methane, but your toes stick out of the water when you float on your back.

From there I drove to southern Wyoming.

I camped just outside of Cheyenne in a KOA campground (despite their unsettling practice of spelling every C word with a K—Kampgrounds of America). All the sites surrounding mine were taken up by bikers. A couple of them sat at their picnic tables reading novels until dark.

I cooked my dinner at the communal stove (KOAs are a little less rustic than state parks) next to a French speaking family who were laughing about the fact that the mother had forgotten to bring lots of things they needed on their United States trip. I made tuna and rice and they sat their watching me cook and eat with bemused expressions on their faces.

The next day I drove to the Rocky Mountain National Park and camped in a private campground pretty high up in the Mountains. The park ranger told me to watch out for bears. They’ve been particularly active in the area this year. The ranger said he’s seen bear 12 times this summer.

I had no phone service in the park and left the next morning in time to meet Danielle’s plane. I arrived in a small town at the foot of the mountains and saw that I had a few phone messages. Danielle’s flight had been changed, but her Expedia tickets hadn’t been updated. By the time the problem got fixed it was too late and she had to buy new tickets from JetBlue. She’s pretty sure she’ll be reimbursed for the second set of tickets.

When she finally arrived we went out to eat and explored Denver a little bit. We camped in the Rockies again, in a different site, and received the same warning about bears. The ranger didn’t remember me.

We slept without the rain fly and saw more stars than either of us has seen in a while, including four or five shooting stars.

The next morning we ate at Waffle House and washed up in the bathroom there (there were no showers at our Rockies campsite.

For lunch we ate at a Sonic. I’d never eaten there before and Danielle had promised to show me how it’s done. About a month ago I drove into a Sonic, determined to add yet another new fast food joint to my growing list, but I got freaked out by the ordering stations and intercom system and sped off in the Odyssey before actually ordering any food. I feel kind of silly about this after seeing how easy it is to get Sonic food, but I still don’t understand why a person would prefer to eat in the car.

From there we drove to Cheyenne where we talked to a woman wearing an eye patch. She complained about not being able to walk very well and about having poor vision in one eye, the eye not covered by the eye patch. She gave us a map and told us all about the various free museums in Cheyenne (we told her we were pretty strapped for cash). I told her about my trip and she seemed pretty amazed at the amount of gas I’m using.

Walking through Cheyenne felt like taking a few steps backwards, at least as far as this trip goes. The city feels rather southern. All the restaurants and stores play country music and there are many boot and cowboy hat stores, in addition to a huge Wrangler outlet. We browsed through some thrift stores and flea markets. I’d love to go back sometime when I have more money.

From there we went to Wounded Knee in South Dakota. I didn’t know much about the story of the massacre at Wounded Knee, but Danielle insisted we go.

The town is within a reservation, as is the Badlands where we camped that night. Most of the Indians we saw lived in trailer homes and the land surrounding them doesn’t seem good for much. It’s dry earth with parched grass and odd outcroppings of sandstone that look as though they’ve been punched up through the surface of the earth.

The hand painted sign off to the side of the road tells the story of The Massacre at Wounded Knee. The word Massacre is painted on a separate piece of wood that’s been nailed over whatever word is underneath, and both of us wondered what the old word is.

Across the street from the sign a dirt road curls past a gift shop (with a sign that says Open, although it doesn’t look like it’s been open in years) and up to the cemetery on a hill.

A female dog who’d just had pups was guarding the cemetery. Except for her, no one else was within sight. She sniffed us and let us scratch her for a minute (her skin was very bumpy and her fur very coarse), then she showed us around the graves and led us up to the church at the far end. In addition to the mass grave from the massacre, there are other more recent tombstones (and wooden cross markers) on the hill.

The place doesn’t look as though it receives many visitors, and aside from a few flowers placed on some of the graves (one of them a young man who died in the early 1900s), everything appears neglected and forgotten.

Before leaving, Danielle insisted we give the dog some water. So we put out a bowl for her and gave her a hot dog. She swallowed it without chewing.

We camped in the badlands that night, in the first free campground I’ve stayed at. The campground was full of grasshoppers and prairie dogs and not many other people stayed there.

Danielle got very sick, either from bad food (bison jerky), a lot of heat and sun, or both. She vomited on several prairie dogs and had a rough night in the Badlands.

We took a hike through the Notch trail, and despite taking a wrong turn and climbing halfway up a semi-treacherous slope, we finished in less than the time it was supposed to take. The hills there are made of something that feels as though it’s halfway between sand and rock.

We Don't Have To Talk At All.

2008-07-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

From Montana I drove to Yellowstone, the part in Wyoming. My campground was horribly overcrowded, but I didn’t spend much time there on the first night. I arrived kind of late and spent more time wandering around the park than I did sitting near my tent. I saw some deer, some bighorn sheep, a moose, some bison, and a bunch of weird small animals.

In the middle of the first night, after I’d fallen asleep, the group in the site closest to mine got back home after a day of fishing. They were a father and two sons and a few friends. They were all drunk (even though I’m pretty sure some of them were only 14 or 15), and the father was one of these guys who has to tell everyone exactly how to do everything. So for about an hour, I listened to him telling these kids how to set up their stuff and pack away their fish and brush their teeth, etc.

At one point a wolf howled and silenced them (and everyone else in the park) for about three seconds. It was a nice three seconds.

I eventually fell back asleep after listening to them arguing for 20 minutes about how to start a fire. When I woke up, they were gone, and I saw that they never did get the fire going.

That day I drove the hour and a half to Old Faithful. I got there just as one eruption was finishing up and decided to wait the hour and 45 minutes for the next one.

It was lunch time so I walked over to the gift shop/cafeteria to get some food, but there were like 600 families in line, each with 15 or 16 screaming 4-year old children.

I grabbed a can of refried beans from the back of my van and ate it with a sleeve of saltines in the parking lot (I’ve run out of quick snack foods to eat).

After eating I went into the store and asked the dude working there if there were any WiFi spots in the park. Before I finished asking he said, all rude-like, “no.” Then he said, all contemptuous-like, something about how people come to Yellowstone to escape that stuff.

As it turns out, there are wireless spots in both Yellowstone and the Tetons; you just have to sneak into one of the weird, huge hotels in the middle of the parks to access it.

I grabbed a spot in front of Old Faithful about twenty minutes before it was scheduled to erupt again. It was very hot and the children in the family next to me were complaining endlessly. Every time Old Faithful steamed or shot out a little bit of water (which it often does) the children would scream that it was over and they wanted to go. Their father joked, 13 or 28 times, that Old Faithful was nothing more than a man waiting underground with a fire hose. His 76 children thought this was a riot and it was the only thing that got them through the ordeal that is Old Faithful. Every time they started to complain he would tell this fire hose joke and they would roll in a great sweaty pile, laughing hysterically and repeating the joke over and over until they remembered they were very hot and bored.

The eruption was twenty-five or so minutes late. At the ten-minute-late mark the joke switched from firehoses to, “Old Faithful isn’t very faithful is it?” The children laughed even harder at this one, perhaps because it was only told 11 or 12 times and never got stale.

The family got fed up and left about two minutes before Old Faithful erupted.

When I got back to my campsite a new family had taken the vacant spot left by the fishermen. This family was from Utah and they had only one child, a kid named Marky.

I sat near my tent and opened up The Naked and the Dead, a book I’ve been reading since before my onslaught of visitors.

I didn’t get very far. Although Marky was a child of few words and sounds, his parents felt the need to be constantly talking at him.

Get off the coolers, Marky.

No!

Mommy doesn’t like it when you say no to her, Marky.

No!

If you say no to your mother one more time you’re getting a time out.

(pause)

Why?

Stop hanging on that tree, Marky.

No!

If you say no to her one more time . . .

Why?

Stop kicking the SUV, Marky.

No!

Stop touching the grill, Marky.

No!

Get off the coolers, Marky . . . You can’t climb on that cooler either, Marky . . . No, not that one either.

Why?

No, Marky.

No!

Get out of that tent, Marky. We like to be able to see you.

Why?

Do you want to take a nap, Marky?

(comes running out of tent) No!

No rocks on your plate, Marky. Don’t touch that.

You have to get down, Marky . . . Get down, Marky . . . Marky! Get down now! Do you want a time out?

Why?

Did you check Marky’s diaper, honey?

You check Marky’s diaper, dear.

I did it last.

Do it again! He won’t stand still long enough for me to check it.

This went on for about an hour, until it was dark out. After getting into his pajamas Marky came out of the tent and asked his father why the fire wasn’t burning yet. His father told him the fire pit wasn’t a very good one (though it was the same exact fire pit that’s in every single park ever). Disgusted, Marky through a stick into the fire pit (it barely missed his dad’s head, unfortunately) and went back into the tent.

Getting him to go to bed was another ordeal, but I won’t list all of that. By midnight the kid complied and went to bed despite being angry about the lack of a campfire.

The father’s snoring and gassiness (and like three car alarms) kept me up for a good part of the night. The snoring wasn’t that loud, but our tents were that close.

The next day, while packing up my own site, they piled into their truck to go exploring for the day. Although the exit was clearly marked, it took the father three loops around the campground to get out.

I will never camp in the Disneyworld of wilderness that is Yellowstone again.

My campground in Grand Teton was awesome. A friend from my writing group suggested it. I had to get up at five on Sunday to get a spot, but it was worth it. The only bad thing about it was that the other campers were all way awesomer than me. They had incredible equipment and clothing and could set wood on fire just by looking at it. There were even sites reserved for people on bicycles. The people in that part of the campground had biked hundreds and thousands of miles to be there.

I’m picking up my friend Danielle in Denver tomorrow, and my next reading is in Bismarck on August 5^th.

Self-Publishing Stuff #5—Writing!

Lots of people ask about my writing habits at my readings, so I will talk about them here for those of you who are interested. Many people also ask what my parents do and what economic class I am. I’m not sure why they ask this, but I will answer that first.

My mother is a nurse at the VA and my dad is an English professor at a community college. I think this makes me middle class.

When writing, I write a thousand words a day. While writing DMR I generally wrote more than this without trying to. The first draft of the book was 176,000 words (close to 700 pages double spaced Times New Roman). The final book is about 73,000 words I think. I do sometimes skip days, but I keep track of these and make up for them later. I try to write in the morning, and whenever possible, I get up to make sure it’s the first thing I do in the day.

I started off by saying “when writing” because I’m not always writing. After finishing DMR I took a couple months off. I didn’t write at all, I just read.

This summer I have been keeping up with the thousand words a day thing for the most part. And yes, I do count the blog entries in this.

Joining The World Of Missing Persons

2008-07-27T10:48:00.000-07:00

Liz’s luggage was returned to her four days after it was lost. It ended up in Alaska somehow.

The night after Liz left I drove as far as I could and found a cheap motel (I couldn’t bear making the transition directly from 5 star to tent.

This motel (where I had to wake up the proprietor to get a room) had beds that vibrate for a quarter. I didn’t try it out because I didn’t want to shake up all the bed bugs and other grime caked into the unwashed sheets and tired mattress, but I’m glad I finally saw a vibrating bed—I was beginning to think they didn’t really exist outside of those motels with hourly rates, the kind with beds you can get pregnant from sleeping in.

The next day I drove through the upper, rectangular part of Idaho and stopped in Wallace, the silver mining capital of the world. Aside from the neon beer lights in the windows of the saloons, the main drag through town looks as though it hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years.

I went into one of the bars and got a barbecue brisket sandwich made in the barbecue on wheels out in the street.. As I was finishing up, an older couple wandered in and began chatting up the middle-aged bartender. The couple ordered beers and continued asking the bartender about the town and her own family. The bartender started talking about her husband the miner. The old woman was kind of shocked to hear that her husband was a minor, but she tried to hide her disapproval, kinda. This went on for two or three minutes before they realized they were having two different conversations.

“Oh, I thought you were saying minOR,” the old woman yelled while laughing.

After finishing my meal I drove through Montana. I passed through Missoula and over the Blackfoot River. It’s an incredibly beautiful state and the landscape varies quite a bit as you drive through—from glacier, to mountain, to grassy plain, to lake, to crops. That night I stopped at a random state park just before dark. I pulled into a camping site and was about to set up my tent when I noticed the top of a tipi sticking out over the tree tops. I wandered over to investigate and found there was a tipi available for nightly rental. It was ten bucks more than the tent sites, but I figured I’d never get the chance to sleep in a tipi again, so I rented it and threw all my stuff inside. The tipis in Montana parks are big enough for a dozen people, so I spread out all my stuff in an attempt to make the thing feel less eerily cavernous.

Despite the hole in the top, the teepee wasn’t buggy. It rained a little, but I was close enough to the edge that the water didn’t bother me or my spread out stuff.

The next day was my Helena reading. I searched the state park I was in and found there were no showers, so I drove to Helena and decided to get a room at a Motel 6 that night. I still had some internet catching up to do (from all the time I spent with visitors in the last three weeks) and I had to take a shower before the reading—I was covered in bug spray and driving grime and my hair was sticking straight out in all possible directions.

For a few hours before the reading I caught up on e-mails (almost), did some writing and facebooking and scrabulousing, and took a shower. After dressing, I had a lunch of sardines and crackers (since I feel weird cooking on my propane stove outside of motels). Eating the sardines after the shower was a very bad idea, especially with the beard. I could smell them for the rest of the night, and the fact that I could smell them is a very bad thing. I felt like one of The Twits.

At the library I introduced myself to the librarian who’d arranged the reading. She shook my hand and stared at me for a few seconds before finally saying, “Nice beard.”

The reading went very well. All the audience members were there because they were interested in DMR or the trip. Sometimes my audiences are primarily made up of potential self-publishers—this is great, but self-publishers often don’t buy each other’s books (which is of course very stupid).

Everyone had good questions and suggestions as to what I should do while in Montana.

After the reading the librarian and her roommate took me out for dinner at a small bar across the street. I tried a Blackfoot River beer and got an Indian taco. They told me bits and pieces of Helena history, mostly about the gold mining. There are still millions and millions of dollars worth of gold under the capital city, but no one can get to it now that the city has been built.

They said some things about Montana being a good place to hide, about lots of people ending up there because they were running and hiding from something in their lives or past. The Unabomber and a number of other famous criminals were mentioned. I didn’t think much about it then, but while driving through Montana the next day, I found myself imagining scenarios in which I’d have to run to Montana to hide from my life—not the most unsavory proposition in the world.

I asked about the small casinos on every Helena corner and the slot machines in every Helena bar. Apparently the taxes from these places pay teachers’ pensions. I investigated two of the casinos next to rest stops on the highway. They were both very depressing and only about the size of a large dining room. Most of the gamblers were retired people. Seeing a casino every hundred feet was very odd to me. We don’t have any in Massachusetts, and the ones in neighboring states are huge resorts.

They asked me about my trip and I described some of the more interesting moments. I also told them of my masseuse dilemmas. Their solution for the bumble bee breath girl was to think of grandmothers playing baseball naked. I will definitely try this next time I get a full-body massage in Portland, OR.

After dinner they offered to let me sleep at their place. I told them I couldn’t because I’d already gotten a room and my notes and clothes were spread all over the place.

They offered to plant cockroaches in my room so I wouldn’t have to pay for it, but again I said no.

Just before we parted in the library parking lot they asked one more time if I’d like to stay with them—there was a misunderstanding about suggesting I sleep with the dogs, which transitioned into a misunderstanding about suggesting I sleep with them, which transitioned into a misunderstanding about all of us (dogs included) sleeping in a big bed together. I was very confused, but again said no.

In retrospect, I wish I’d cleaned up my stuff at the Motel 6, planted bugs in strategic locations, and hung out with them that night.

The next morning they took me out for breakfast at a place where you’re kicked out for talking on a cell phone. The place sometimes kicks you out just for not putting your phone on silent.

It was a great breakfast and they did their best to explain the misunderstanding about suggesting I sleep with the dogs. At the very least, they said, it would be a good addition to my blog. I appreciate people who don’t mind being embarrassed in the blog.

I told them about the rest of my trip and that I’d be staying in Yellowstone next. They asked if I had bear spray and I was so excited to finally have a legitimate reason for carrying that nasty stuff everywhere I go.

When I got to the North entrance of Yellowstone, the one with the Roosevelt arch, the woman at the gate told me I was an hour and a half away from my camp site. Apparently it’s a very large park. While driving to where I’d be sleeping, some bison crossed the road right in front of me. I got out and took a few pictures while waiting for them. They can run 30 miles per hour, but they walk very slowly.

All The Girls Standing In The Line For The Bathroom/Someone Left The Cake Out In The Rain Part Two

2008-07-23T10:08:00.001-07:00

Just a couple quick updates:

Liz's luggage was lost.

I have a reading in Helena on Thursday.

In case you didn't notice or recognize it, that's the Fresh Prince's house in front of the Odyssey.

All The Girls Standing In The Line For The Bathroom/Someone Left The Cake Out In the Rain

2008-07-22T17:47:00.000-07:00

I met my friend Liz at LAX. After having a quick lunch we drove to our extremely posh hotel. At the hotel we ate fancy foods and got massages. There were a few instances when my male masseuse touched me inappropriately (after telling me that first time clients were his favorite), but it seemed like a pretty good massage.

And just in case you haven’t been following this blog from day one, in the first blog entry I mentioned my mechanic who checked out the Odyssey. That mechanic is Liz’s husband. I was in their wedding a few months back (this information will come in handy in a few).

It was decided months ago, when Liz first planned her trip to visit me, that this portion of my trip would be the most luxurious. We booked only four star and up hotels, and although I was nervous about them we planned a number of spa treatments.

Our first night in LA we went to and had a remarkably good dinner. I’d never eaten in a restaurant even close to that expensive.

The next day I got some electroshock therapy thing at the spa that is supposedly equal to 300 workouts. I wish they’d included the fact that people must wear disposable underpants in the description of the treatment. The underpants didn’t cover very much.

The woman who gave me this treatment was very beautiful in an LA way. She wore way too much makeup, I’m pretty sure she’d had breast implants, and she worried out loud about the troublesome fatty zones on her body although there really wasn’t much fat on her.

She started me out at a very low level of electric shock and asked if I wanted to go higher. I told her I did not, that the electricity was already kind of uncomfortable. She kind of scoffed at this, telling me that most of her female patients went higher, but my arms felt like they were going to explode from the very forceful involuntary contractions.

She asked me to explain why the tan/burn on my shoulders was so weird. I told her that it was a suntan lotion mishap (thank you Gina).

I asked her where she was from and she said LA. She asked me a little about myself. I told her I was from Boston and that I was on a road trip. I also mentioned that I wasn’t accustomed to the spa lifestyle.

She told me she’d never been to Boston, but that she had been to New York City on business the week before. She complained that it was too congested. I thought this was very odd. I can understand a person from the Midwest complaining that New York is too congested, but for a person from LA to suggest it is kind of ridiculous. I do think that New York is more congested than LA, but not to the point where a person from LA would be uncomfortable. But then she went on to tell me how terrified of terrorist attacks she was while in New York. She talked about how the subway system is a great terrorist target and how claustrophobic she’d felt down there, and suddenly I understood why a person from LA would describe New York as congested.

I wanted to tell her she was being silly, but I didn’t.

The next day Liz and I drove to San Francisco. A few hours into the trip, in the desert, the air conditioning in the van broke (sorry Danielle and Greg). We pulled into a gas station in Huron, California. There they told us we had a major Freon leak (which I already knew from the white mist that intermittently comes out of my vents). I asked if there was anything they could do about it and they asked me to give them a minute.

While wandering around the garage, the owner gave Liz and I cups of iced tea. We also heard what sounded like a squeeking rat. I asked Liz what she thought it was and she said, rather flatly and assuredly, a rat.

We wandered into the bay where the squeeking was coming from and found a man feeding nuts or bread or something into a box. He was laughing and yelling something in Spanish to all the other Mexican dudes working in the place. I asked Liz what they were saying (since she’s fluent in both Spanish and German), but she didn’t answer.

Liz guessed it was 105 degrees, but I told her it was only 90 or so. Then a man from the garage told us it was 107 degrees.

A few minutes after that, they told me my AC compressor was busted. When I informed them that I’d had it replaced about three months ago (Liz’s husband did this), they looked quite perplexed.

I grabbed the keys and left. We bought a bag of ice and Liz rested it on her chest and stomach as we drove. We both made sure to drink lots of water.

While driving I asked Liz about the rat. She was cooler and told me what the Mexicans had been saying.

While repairing a car, one of them had heard a weird sound. When he opened the trunk he saw a rat. The men working there weren’t sure if it was a pet or just a rat that’d wandered into the trunk, so they kept it in a box and were feeding it until the owner of the car returned.

We drove to San Francisco from LA with no air conditioning for the majority of the trip. I don’t mind the heat, but I felt very bad about this because Liz had gone to the trouble of planning a pretty fancy four nights—but she handled it like a trooper.

When we got to San Francisco we had to go straight to dinner to meet some friends for a reservation. We’d been planning on showering and changing first, but the ac fiasco caused us to arrive so late that we had were forced to go straight to dinner.

We met my friend Ronak and her boyfriend Uchenna at Ruth’s Chris (the only chain we’re eating at I think). Ronak and I grew up one town apart but didn’t meet each other until we were nearly done with college. She’s an incredibly nice and interesting person and meeting up with people like her and random family I barely remember and friends of friends has been one of the high points of this entire trip.

When we got to the hotel we were told we’d been given a crazy upgrade. Liz and I were both excited about this and saw it as redemption for a very tough and hot day. When we got upstairs we were dazzled by the room. There was a fourteen seat conference table, a nice bathroom, a kitchen, and a huge tv. But after a little investigating, we realized there were no beds. (Thank you, William Shatner.)

When we called downstairs to ask about the beds, the woman was shocked that we’d been put in a room reserved for conferences. And after about 75 minutes wait and four phone calls we discovered there were no more foldaway beds left. There was some sort of big conference in town and they’d taken all the beds.

One of the Spanish speaking dudes working for housekeeping found Liz a renegade foldaway bed that staff usually used (it was really old and weird looking), and I slept on the floor.

The room was free and we were given a coupon for a free night at any Westin in the country, so everything kinda worked out.
The next day, after a shitty night sleep (our room stuff wasn’t worked out until 1 a.m.), we embarked on our air-condition-free 11 hour journey to Portland. I drove the entire way, and I think this is the second longest distance I’ve driven in one day—but this day was much easier because I had a friend to talk to. The other time I drove this far I slipped into a dream and my van drove itself off the road and into the desert. I’m very lucky this happened in Texas and not somewhere in a more populated region. The only thing I hit was a low bush, and there wasn’t a person around to see me do it (that was the first thing I checked for). I can’t remember what the dream was about.

The hotel in Portland wasn’t as nice as we’d thought it would be (though still much nicer than the motel 6s I’ve been staying in during thunder storms). But we weren’t staying Portland for the hotel, we were staying there for the spa.

After sleeping kinda late (due to the long drive) we went to the spa. Liz was scheduled for a facial and I had a massage. I requested a girl this time.

Liz’s appointment was a few minutes after mine, so I went into the waiting area without her and met the girl who was going to give me my massage. She was probably the cutest girl I’ve ever seen, and I think about my age. She was around 5’6” with dark hair and lots of freckles, and she was incredibly nice (although it was a non-gratuity spa).

She gave me a foot bath before the massage. I apologized for my gross feet (and they are really gross at this point), but she didn’t seem too worried. I explained that I’d been camping for a couple months, and for every detail of my trip that I told her, she responded with an enigmatic smile and the words, “right on.” It’s possible that she was stoned. Liz thought every single person we met in Portland was stoned (including an older woman we met at a gas station who clamed she waits at the gas station for authors from all over the world to show up).

For the massage she told me to place a very small towel over my butt while she stepped outside. I did this, but the towel did not cover as much of my rear as I would’ve liked.

This massage was very different from the first one I got. Although her hands didn’t’ graze my privates, it was a pretty sexual experience. The massage was good, much better than the first guy, but I think if I ever get a massage in the future I’ll ask for a dude.

She massaged my butt, which was kind of shocking to me. She also massaged my beard, which I thought was kind of hilariously awesome. But at one point her lips were less than a centimeter away from mine and she was breathing right into my nose.

Don’t get me wrong—it was awesome, and her breath smelled like bumble bees, but the whole situation made me kind of nervous and uncomfortable.

From there Liz and I drove to Seattle. Our hotel room was nice and we ate at the top of the Space Needle. The view is beautiful, but the spinning is a tad nauseating.

After all my worrying about it, Liz didn’t even mind my beard. In fact, she didn’t even mind when I had a chicken wing caught in it for two days.

Be Sure You Try To Climb Before You Get Too Scared

2008-07-16T22:49:00.000-07:00

Gina and I went to Hollywood on her last full day here. I took pictures of the stars of Patrick Stewart (for a friend), Pee-Wee Herman (for my sister), and Edison (because he has some Brockton connections). We saw the Chinese theater and visited that cemetery with all the famous dead people.

That night we went to the Griffith Observatory. It’s named after a man named Griffith J. Griffith who may or may not have shot his wife in the face (we overheard someone who works on General Hospital telling his friend about this dark Hollywood secret). We stayed until dark, and from up there, it really is like looking down on the stars (I’m a flibbertygibbit).

In the last ten days or so I’ve done a lot of touristy things. It’s fun to see landmarks like the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam and all the famous spots in the LA area, but I’ve met more foreigners than Americans at these places. At the Grand Canyon, three groups of French people were camping within 20 feet of me and Allie. And on our trip to San Francisco, Gina and I sat near more Germans than Americans. On the ride home (and I left this out of my last blog entry because it was still too fresh) I actually woke up in the middle of the night, yelled something about the bus going too fast, and grabbed and squeezed the head of the dude, a German, sitting in front of me. I don’t remember any of this since I was still half asleep, but Gina gleefully filled me in when we arrived back in LA. Luckily he wasn’t a violent German; he was more of a terrified German.

Before she left, Gina complimented my bad driving. Apparently she thought it was an intentional marketing tactic (since I have One Tiny Pizza Publishing’s web site printed on the back of my van). But if bad driving was a good marketing tactic, then I’d be a millionaire by now.

She also left me with the following advice:

Trust no man, though he may be your brother

Whose hair is one color, and beard is another.

I’ve been getting a lot of flak about my beard lately. I’m picking up my friend Liz at the LAX airport tomorrow. She called earlier tonight to tell me my beard better be shaved by the time she gets here. She also scheduled some spa treatments for me in the four star hotels we’re staying in (that I will never be able to pay her back for). I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these treatments is a facial wax or something—if they even do that.

It’s going to be tough to go back to camping and sleeping in the van after all this hoteling and moteling.

Self-Publishing Stuff #4—Map Day!

About seven months ago, my friend Dennis helped me plan the route for this trip. He’s driven cross-country a few times, spent years as a professional bus driver, is the most incredible parker I know, and seems to have an innate sense of direction.

We set aside a Saturday (I took off the day from Walnut Hill security guarding), gathered all the atlases, maps, and star wars monopoly figures we had, and prepared to plan a 62-stop, 16,000-mile trip (it’s actually going to be about 20,000 miles).

We spread my huge US map across his dining room table and placed game pieces (we had to use Trouble pieces and a couple other game pieces in addition to the Star Wars Monopoly pieces) on all of the 62 cities I planned to visit.

One of Dennis’s roommates noticed what we were doing and decided to join in. He’d been to many more parts of the country than me (a common trend in my life up until a few weeks ago) and had lots of suggestions regarding places to stop, things to see, and routes to take.

A straight-from-Italy Italian friend of Dennis’s roommate showed up a little later on in the day. The two of them were supposed to go see Rocky Balboa (I think), but they got so caught up in planning the trip that they skipped the movie.

Seven months before this thing even began, people were telling me they wanted to tag along or that they wished they could do something similar. And just about every day someone tells me they wish they could abandon their lives (at least for a little while) and join me.

I’m glad that all my friends have jobs and school, because I can’t think of a single one I’d want to spend 14 weeks with in a van. But I’m also glad so many of them are willing to spend money and time to join me for a short portion of the trip.

This isn’t one of those self-publishing tidbits that prospective self-publishers can really use, but I decided to include it because Map Day is one of those days that has really made this whole process worthwhile. I enjoy hanging out with friends more when we get something done or when we go on a small mission (like Institution Day), and these days are part of the reason I like doing this stuff on my own—and of course, I use the phrase on my own very loosely.

Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good

2008-07-15T09:50:00.000-07:00

My friend Gina (a rampant Cure fan who wore lipstick around her eyes until c. 2002) arrived at LAX about two hours after Allie left. She brought only one small bag of stuff for her entire six-day visit.

The first day we wandered around LA and went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I worried when I read their first plaque about antediluvian man (and thought maybe I’d wandered back into the bible belt), but my worries were unfounded and it was actually a very cool place. I think I enjoyed it more than Gina, though she was the one who suggested we go there.

We ate at a Mexican outdoor restaurant (like Corpus Christi Texas, the vast majority of restaurants near our motel in Inglewood are Mexican). Gina’s vegetarian enchiladas came packed with beef, so she went hungry because she wouldn’t let me bring the error to the attention of the woman who’d taken our order. My burrito tasted like dog food, but I finished it. We’re not going back to that restaurant.

The next day we drove down to San Diego to visit the zoo. It’s a pretty incredible place. We didn’t wait in line for the celebrity panda, but we snuck up to a fence and watched him (or her) do nothing through the cracks in the wood.

The next day we went to a party at my friend Derek’s house. I hadn’t seen him in years, and I haven’t really spoken to him since high school. We were in the same program for smart kids in fifth and sixth grade and it was there that we created the comic Spanky and Slim Jim. I think I mostly just peed my pants laughing while Derek wrote and drew all the stories—tales such as: Spanky and Slim Jim and the Great Glass Eye, Spanky and Slim Jim and the Pulsating Pelvis, Spanky and Slim Jim and Beaver Giardia, and Spanky and Slim Jim and E. Coli the Little Guy (this one was my favorite). The whole series was a complete rip-off of Ren and Stimpy, but we had a good time making them. And with the help the television studio at Massasoit Community College, we made a movie in Jr. High called How To Become a Super Spy in Three Easy Steps. It was a great success and featured some very innovative camera work. The funniest part about watching it these days is the fact that Derek’s voice had changed but mine hadn’t. If you close your eyes and watch the movie it sounds like a young man with a chipmunk sidekick. Derek is still mad that the studio wouldn't let him include the super-spy tip: being black is a plus.

In high school Derek got mono and I took over his role in the December drama production, You Can’t Take It With You. Derek quit drama after that play and I got the majority of the funny roles from that point on. I was always very thankful that Derek got mono.

Derek currently does some graphic design stuff, but he was working in the movies, doing makeup until just before the writer’s strike. We talked about all our old friends while eating some undercooked, E. Coli ridden chicken wings.

That night, Gina and I boarded a midnight bus for San Francisco (we wanted to find Danny Tanner’s house because he was a second daddy to both of us). The bus was surprisingly full and I didn’t think we were going to get a seat together for the eight hour bus ride, but then a bearded man in shabby clothes who didn’t get the memo about the sixties being over offered to move and give us his seat. He grabbed his sticker-covered hurdy gurdy (at least we think that’s what it was) and sat down next to a biker dude across the aisle. Later on, in the middle of the night and ride, the bearded man started moaning loudly and the biker dude had to get up to find a new seat.

We arrived in San Francisco at 6:30 in the morning and nothing was open, so we walked toward a big bridge. Although it was grey and not red I began taking pictures. Gina stopped me and said it wasn’t the Golden Gate, but I insisted that it must be and they were probably in the middle of repainting it. I asked a trash man picking up bags in the park we were in and he told us the Golden Gate was actually miles away. We were looking at the Bay Bridge.

We took a trolley up the road a ways and walked to the Golden Gate. The day was overcast, but the bridge is still very cool to look at. I’ll be driving over it in a few days when I take the Odyssey up the West Coast.

We didn't find Danny Tanner's house, but I'm pretty sure I saw Comet running through the Golden Gate park.

Yesterday we went to Malibu and I jumped into the Pacific for the first time. I don’t deal with chilly water very well so I didn’t stay in long, but I’m glad I can say I’ve been submerged in it. When I got out of the water, I discovered a seagull had pooped on my fanny pack and I was pretty pissed off.

Last night we had dinner with my friend Ezra, a guy who’s been very good friends with my older sister since high school. He had a book published in the fall, Cinescopes (which was featured in Parade magazine and the Early Show), and worked in Hollywood for years before that. He’s out of Hollywood now, working with Autistic kids, and hoping to get a series of children’s books published. It was nice for me to pick his brain about publishing and promotion. Although I haven't tried it yet, I am interested in learning as much as I can about traditional publishing. He said to write lots of query letters. He and his co-author wrote over a hundred before they got a response from an agent.

Gina talked a little about her own efforts in 16 millimeter animation. Ezra seemed surprised when we told him about our network of hugely unsuccessful artists (our failed gallery). He had to go to Hollywood to find a network of creative people.

BTW, Gina and I watched Be Kind Rewind on a night when we were too tired to do any more sightseeing. It is now officially the best movie ever . . . except for Ghostbusters.

Sat On Their Park Bench Like Bookends

2008-07-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

Many of my friends told me I HAD to go to Austin, TX. As I was driving into the city a couple weeks ago, a friend called and told me she’d recently read that Austin is the number one city in the country for singles. I had no idea what this meant, but it sounded promising.

In my opinion, some cities are great to visit whether or not you’re with other people, like Philadelphia and DC. Other cities are best seen with friends. Austin is one of these cities, along with Kansas City and New Orleans.

I didn’t have much fun in Austin. Being single is very different from being alone. I wouldn’t mind going back with friends sometime in the future, but if I ever take another solo road trip, I’m all set with Austin.

On my way to New Mexico, I drove to Carlsbad and did some non-metaphorical caving. It’s a very impressive place and I ate my lunch 700 feet under the earth.

After surfacing, I drove through Roswell (during the week of Alien fest), watched a July 4^th parade that featured slightly fewer ride-on lawnmowers than the July 4^th parades in Maine, and drove to meet my cousin Katahdin in Santa Fe.

Katahdin is a student at St. John’s, a college where all they do is read books, from Euclid’s Geometry up through some Faulkner and other modernish writers (only one of the author’s they read is still alive). Hopefully Katahdin can get DMR added to the list.

The first night we hung out on the campus where about 400 students attend classes during the regular year. Katahdin has a job that sometimes forces him to be on-call and on-campus. It’s been a few years since I’ve spent much time with him. In that period Katahdin has spent a year in Africa (where he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro), gone through two years of college, and learned way too many Borat quotes and bawdy limericks.

The next day I drove to the Albuquerque airport to pick up my friend Allie. She didn’t recognize me as she walked into the terminal (I was wearing my straw hat and fanny pack and sporting more facial hair than she’s ever seen on me).

Allie and I explored Santa Fe without Katahdin; he was still on duty. When I asked Katahdin to give us recommendations, he said he’d never really spent much time in town since he’s always reading books. This seemed like an indicator that he’s chosen a good school, but I hope he never reads Walden in the woods.

Santa Fe is a great little city, either with a friend or without. If you have money, there’s lots of art to buy, and if you don’t have money, there are plenty of nude statues and nude paintings to take pictures of yourself in front of. We visited the Georgia O’Keefe museum and saw some Ansel Adams prints. And although she’s a vegetarian, Allie bought a pair of leather cowboy boots.

That night, at Katahdin’s insistence, we watched Borat. I realized how many parallels there are between his journey and my own. My moustache isn’t nearly as full as his, but I feel a real kinship with the man. After Borat, at Allie’s insistence, we watched Two Weeks Notice. This film gave Katahdin severe diarrhea.

Towards the end of the film, a St. John’s student walked into the common room where we were watching the film (because Katahdin doesn’t have a television) and asked Allie if there was any part of her body she wouldn’t let Hugh Grant kiss. Allie told him to keep his eyes on the television. I think he’s been reading some extracurricular books.

On Monday I gave my reading at the Albuquerque public library and it was nice to have Allie and Katahdin there with me. It was also nice to have an old lady in the audience (who seemed to be tripping on cough syrup) ask me question after metaphysical question that I was unable to answer.

I don’t have another reading for a couple weeks. During this period I’ll be spending time with friends in California, Oregon, and Washington. It’ll be a nice change of pace, and I’m very grateful they're willing to spend the money to come out and join me in my rather stinky Odyssey.

Allie and I drove from Albuquerque to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. We toured much of it and camped in the park that night. The next day while driving to the Hoover Dam, a red minivan going like 90 miles per hour cut us off. Two minutes later the minivan got pulled over and Allie and I both cheered. I like cops once in a while.

From the Hoover Dam we drove to Vegas where the temp was over 110 degrees. We took some pictures and lost two dollars in a slot machine—it was thrilling.

That night we drove to LA (lots of driving that day and Allie and I were forced to eat peanuts off the floor of the van since there weren’t many places to grab snacks). We drove straight to the ocean where Allie jumped in the Pacific. I just waded because I’ll be here for a few days and have opportunities to go swimming during the day when it’s much hotter.

I think the Grand Canyon and the Pacific are both best seen with friends.

I’ll be spending the next few days in LA and the surrounding area with my friend Gina, then I’m driving up Route 1 with my friend Liz.

(Added after original post was published)
John Thorndike (author of Another Way Home and other books) and I met for coffee in Santa Fe after discovering we were both spending a couple days there. He'd read my book on the bank of the Cheyenne river during a canoe trip. I had to wipe off the mud before signing his copy. He said he liked the book very much, especially the fact that the ending offers no redemption. We discussed the self-publishing process. I think I convinced him it's a legitimate method, but maybe he was just being nice.

That’s What Keeps Your Daddy Up There So High (Including Self-Publishing Stuff #3)

2008-07-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

Let me preface this by saying that the man I’m writing about in this blog entry told me he’d fly to Boston and kick my ass if he found himself in my third book (the book I said I might write about this trip).

The man I’m writing about is a large man, from Texas, a Vietnam veteran, with a large (at least to me) collection of guns.

He didn’t say anything about blogs, so I’m hoping he won’t buy a ticket to Boston on account of what I write here. He is, however, tentatively planning a visit to Boston in October, so if this blog entry really makes him angry, I guess he won’t even have to buy an extra ticket.

That being said—here goes.

My father e-mailed to say his friend from an online Vietnam War discussion list was interested in meeting me. I didn’t know until well into my visit with this man, but he’d been reading my blog entries.

I’d heard of him before. Despite the fact that he and my father have VERY different views on a great many things, they seem to share a mutual respect for each other. While visiting T, the man from Texas, he told me a number of times that he respected my father too much to argue with him. He described my dad as a lucid writer, a perceptive man. He also said he didn’t argue with my dad because he’s sure he’d lose.

In my father’s e-mail about T, he told me that T wanted to meet me so I could spend some time with a real Texas redneck. My father assured me that, whatever T might think about himself, he is not a redneck, but a very well-read and thoughtful man.

Neither of them was for invading Iraq. And I’m not sure about my father, but I think T might be very surprised at how similar some of their views are.

T warned me that driving from Dallas to San Antonio would be very difficult, that the traffic is bad and the drivers make it worse. I prepared for the worst as I exited Dallas (pulled my straw hat down on my forehead, put Sunrise (the fatboy slim sampling of some Jim Morrison poetry or singing or something) on repeat on my mp3 player, and stowed my fanny pack safely in the rear of the Odyssey (I don’t wear it when I drive because it pinches my paunch)).

T has never driven in Boston or New York, and I think he’d probably find that both those areas of the country are much worse than the Dallas to San Antonio stretch, but then again, maybe I just got lucky and the traffic was light on the day I was there. I did have to cut off one dude in a MASSIVE pickup truck who wouldn’t let me into his lane when an exit I needed to get over for was just a couple hundred meters ahead. I’m not sure if he saw my MA license plates, or if the words “America or Burst” painted on the back of the Odyssey pissed him off, but he was bent on not letting me into his lane.

When I finally did cut in front of him, he had to slam on his breaks and turn slightly into the breakdown lane. After this, he pulled alongside to yell obscenities (he wasn’t even turning off where I was). He didn’t bother to open his window and ended up resembling a dog frothing behind a screen door. I gave him the finger and smiled and continued slowly forward (there was a fair amount of traffic) to my turnoff. Of course, the smiling made him even madder and his window started to steam up, but nothing came of it (thank god since he was huge, his truck was huge, and he had several US Marine stickers on the thing).

In San Antonio, I met my mother’s cousin and his wife for lunch at a Mexican place. We prayed before we ate. I talked to them about the graduate program I’ll be beginning in the fall and it was very nice—I hadn’t seen them in years.

After lunch I went to the Alamo. It’s a weird place, right in the middle of the downtown across from the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Guinness World Records museums. I’d always thought it was in the desert.

I only went to see it because T had told me, over the phone, that visiting Texas without seeing the Alamo is a sacrilege. I’m glad I went. Watching the reactions of various types of visitors to the inscriptions and plaques is quite an experience. And the Alamo is a great story, with a great monument. When viewing that stuff, being surrounded by it, it’s hard to avoid wishing your own life didn’t have some sort of great purpose (or at least end) the way those men’s did.

In addition to telling me that not visiting the Alamo was a sacrilege, T told me he had a story about a relative of mine whose demise was intertwined with the struggle that took place at the Alamo.

I arrived at Corpus Christi in the early evening. T opened the front door of his house and invited me in before I had a chance to knock. I met his wife and their small dog (a new addition) and they took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant.

Back at the house that night we discussed all sorts of things about the upcoming election, about the Iraq war and the Vietnam war, things about my father, and border issues. The border stuff really interested me since I hadn’t discussed these things with anyone yet on my journey. I’ve heard about the border problems on the news, but it’s not one of the issues I pay very much attention to. Of course, people in Corpus Christi pay lots of attention to this issue.

Our discussion on politics and Vietnam was kind of disjointed and I didn’t press too much for details. T was an infantry officer whose platoon suffered the sort of casualties that I can’t even imagine on more than one occasion; he was injured three times and the third time sent him home for good.

I found the border conversation very interesting. T seemed to have a great deal of respect for Mexicans, a people who he described as extremely patriotic. I was told one story (which I guess made national news though I wasn’t aware of it—not surprisingly since I don’t watch nearly as much news as I should) about an anti-abortion group that began a campaign of protesting at the funerals of fallen soldiers. Although neither of them knew for sure, both T and his wife suspected they chose this particular venue for their protests for the sole reason of drawing attention to themselves. But anyway, some biker gangs began showing up at these protests to protest the protesters. They’d rev their engines to drown out the chants and cries of the anti-abortionists.

This anti-abortion group showed up in Corpus Christi, and so did the bikers, but both were pretty ineffectual because of the Mexicans who showed up at funerals, in the thousands, to prevent any sort of protest at soldiers’ funerals. As T described it, they were there to kill anyone who disrespected a dead soldier.

T told me that Hispanics have suffered an inordinate number of casualties compared to other groups of people in Iraq. As a group, they sign up more frequently than other groups for the combat positions, the jobs and situations where they’re more likely to be injured and killed.

The next morning we went to breakfast at a Mexican restaurant. I asked if there was any Texas cuisine left down where we were. T’s wife quickly said no before kind of amending her statement and listing a few non-Mexican, more barbecue type places.

T asked if I had a gun with me for the trip, and I told him I had bear spray. He and his wife seemed to think this was a suitable alternative. Then he told me that he carries a gun with him whenever he drives south. His wife was quick to add, “But don’t worry, not all Texans drive with guns.”

And then T said, “Yeah, it’s probably only about 50 percent.”

I was about to laugh, but then his wife said, with complete seriousness, “Yeah, probably about 50 percent.”

I thought back to the man I’d flipped off.

While taking me out to eat and entertaining me in his home (with the help of his wife), T told me the story of my distant relative in Texas.

Olwyn Trask went down to Texas looking for his sister Frances (kind of a bold hussy, I guess). Somehow he got involved with the Texas military and ended up being killed in the battle of San Jacinto, a decisive battle of the Texas Revolution in which General Houston’s men defeated General Santa Anna’s men. This battle is where the phrase “Remember the Alamo” came from.

Olwyn was injured by some sort of cannon fire in the beginning of the battle and died about three weeks later.

T went on to tell me that I had another distant relative who fought for the confederates. His name was Harry Trask.

When I asked my father about all this stuff he told me he was aware of Harry (because of T). He also informed me of another one of our ancestors who fought for the confederates, W.L. Trask. I also learned from my father that my great-great-great grandfather, Charles Augustus Trask, fought in a Maine regiment for the Union in the Civil War.

One other thing T said to me that I thought was interesting—he’s pissed that the KKK ruined the image of the confederate flag, a symbol that he’s not ashamed of.

When he said this, I told him the confederate flag symbolized some bad stuff to me (and I think pretty much everyone from MA). T just nodded. I wasn’t informing him of everything new, and that’s probably true of the entire time I spent with him, other than when I described bean-hole-beans and duck-boat tours to him and his wife.

I think it’s kind of funny that I had to go to Corpus Christi to learn all this stuff about my family from especially hospitable Texans who I’d never met before—and this isn’t because my dad has neglected to tell me, I just haven’t been listening.

Another genealogical note: While doing some research in San Antonio, I learned that I’m also related to Gallowspole Trask, the man who was put in charge of digging the basement of the Alamo. For some reason, he’s largely forgotten by history.

I have a reading in Albuquerque on Monday.

Self-Publishing Stuff # 3 – Formatting and Printing!

Just some quick stuff. Feel free to e-mail if you have questions.

For My Dog The Meat Eater we originally tried Print On Demand (through Booksurge, the company now linked with Amazon). Donald Davidson of Peninsula Press helped us with the formatting (it would've cost more to have Booksurge do the formatting). But we were unhappy with the customer service and the quality of the book, so for Harry's War, after formatting the book with Cutepdf Writer, we brought the files to a short-run printer and skipped working with the On-Demand company. The results with the short run printer were far superior, so we pulled My Dog from Booksurge, and brought the files to the short run printer. The books from the second printing are much nicer and more durable.

For DMR we formatted the book with Quark. It was difficult to use, but I think the end result was much better than either of the first two books. It’s a much longer book and costs a little more to print (hence the higher price) but it’s still very affordable to print only a few hundred books at a time.

We print the books at Country Press in Massachusetts and save a lot of money on shipping by picking the books up ourselves. If you're wondering about a particular printer's quality, ask them to send you some samples.

And Saran Wrap All you Can

2008-06-28T16:32:00.000-07:00

The campground in Kansas was depressing. About 75 RVs surrounded me, and when I investigated the entire place I realized I was the only tenter. This always makes me a little nervous for some reason.

After setting up my tent, I walked to the electrical hookup (some parks have electricity, some don’t) to charge my phone. The low battery alarm had been going off for an hour and I hate having to go the whole night without a working phone. This also makes me nervous.

I lifted the lid to electrical box 13 and heard an odd noise. It was dusk, but relatively dark amongst the trees and hulking RVs. I was wearing my head lamp rather than using my handheld flashlight (it’s much easier when setting up tents and things). The noise got louder as I ducked down to look up and in—it sounded mechanical, like a small motor powering up or something. I got my face right inside and looked up, aiming my forehead at the sound. A few yellow jackets flew at me. I’d disturbed their nest. I slammed the cover, ran away, and hid behind my van for a few minutes (making sure to shut out the head lamp).

After making sure the coast was clear, I found another electrical box, plugged in my extension chord, and charged my phone that way.

The next morning, after packing up all my stuff, I met the director of the place in the parking lot out in front of his office. He had the worst farmer’s tan I’ve ever seen. He bent to put his pipe down on the gravel as I talked. “You’ve got a nest of yellow jackets in electrical box 13,” I told him.

“Did you get stung?” he asked.

I told him I didn’t, that I’d run away in time.

“Did you kill them?” he asked.

I shook my head no and kind of laughed thinking he was probably joking.

“Why not?!?!” he yelled.

I told him I didn’t have any wasp spray. He shook his head, picked up his pipe, and walked away.

CAMPING IN AMERICA!!!

At most parks, whether they’re private, state, or federal, the plates on 90% of the vehicles are in-state. This might be because of gas prices this year. I have no idea. I’ve never traveled like this before.

I haven’t seen a Massachusetts plate in a campground in many many days.

Very few people camp in tents, at least, this is the case in the parks (mostly state) that I’ve been staying in. And the people in RVs seem to spend the majority of their time in the RV. For the most part, they stay in there all day, then they come out at night to make dinner and sit around a fire, and then they go back into the camper where the lights stay on inside until pretty late. And they don’t get up that early. This is odd to me, first of all, because many of them are old or retired, and second of all, I think camping tends to make a person wake up early even if you are tired or hung over or something. The sun heats the inside of my tent to a thousand degrees by about 7:30 a.m.

RV people read A LOT! The ones who do sit outside their RVs read for like 8-11 hours a day. I’m filing this information away for future exploitation. (I’m planning out a murder/mystery set in an RV park and then I’m going to do this same exact trip again and just sell the book to campers in RV parks rather than to library patrons.)

And really, I don’t have a problem with RVs. If I had the money, I would’ve gotten one for this trip. I’m not really doing primitive camping. I have a tent, I use newspapers and a lighter (and sometimes bug spray) to start my fires, I use the campground showers, I wear clothes, and I have a propane stove that I’ve used three or four times to cook my food when I’ve been too tired to start a fire. I’ve also slept in my van on three different nights, either because of lightning or because I was too tired to set up my tent.

I don’t feel the need to camp like I’m living in the 1600s to prove to myself that I’m a man—my gender is reaffirmed every time I pee standing up.

Aside from visits with friends and family, I’ve stayed in a motel on four nights. Twice it was because of rain and twice I just felt crummy and tired and it was getting late.

I have not been sleeping that well in the tent. I admit that sleeping inside the tent does make me feel safer than if I was just sleeping under the stars (plus it keeps out bugs), but when I start thinking about it, I realize the tent offers nothing more than psychological protection. I feel safer simply because it prevents me from seeing what’s out there. I’d actually be safer sleeping in the van, but I feel more vulnerable in there because of the windows.

While slowly falling asleep every night, I keep one hand on my baseball bat and one hand on my bear spray while listening for the sound of footsteps, followed by the sound of my tent’s zipper being opened. There’s no way to lock a tent! If I was sleeping in my house in Brockton with the knowledge that the doors were unlocked, I’d be nervous. This thought is much worse when you’re alone in a tent. Even if I could lock the tent, any criminal with a dull spoon could cut right through the nylon.

In Tennessee, while camping in some really small town, I went to a local burger joint in some wooden, barn-type building. It was a Friday night and I think every person in that town was out riding in their truck, just doing circles around the center of town (which consisted of the burger joint and a gas station).

The burger took like 45 minutes to cook for some reason, and while I sat a picnic table waiting, I realized the same people were driving past me over and over again, and they were looking at me every time they passed.

This made me nervous so I decided to eat in my tent rather than in town. I got in my van and drove towards the park. A truck from town, one of the ones that that had been doing loops, followed me. This made me really nervous so I took a turn onto some little dark street to see if it would follow me. It didn’t. I made my way back to my tent, happy they wouldn’t know where I was staying.

Later that night, some animals were running around and killing each other and screaming loudly right near my tent. There was only one other camper there that night (because this park didn’t have any RV hookups). When I went outside to scare the animals off there were like a million fireflies everywhere and I kept thinking they were eyes.

I’m aware that I was overreacting. I was aware at the time, but camping alone in a deserted park in a small town where everyone has taken notice of your Massachusetts license plates can be scary.

I arrived at my campsite in Indiana after ten o’clock. I set up my tent in the dark (which is no problem now that I’ve done it so many times) at an empty site. I had no idea if it was the one I’d reserved and I didn’t care.

When I woke in the morning I crawled out of my tent and saw that I was about ten feet from a huge silent river. If I’d taken five steps in the wrong direction I would’ve fallen right in.

While camping in Alabama, I tried to start a conversation with a cute young woman who was camping with a group of people near my site. I asked her if she’d ever been camping. She gave me this crazy look and slowly said, “Yeaaaah.”

And I said, “I hear it’s in-tents.

She didn’t get it. She was staying in an RV. I might as well have made a joke about churning butter.

That night, it was so windy near the Alabama shores that I kept waking up thinking someone was trying to roll me over. It was just the wind under my tent, lifting it up. If I hadn’t been inside it, I think it would’ve blown away.

Later that night, I heard what I thought was a very young girl screaming. It sounded like someone was being murdered—I’ve never heard anyone scream like that. I grabbed my baseball bat, popped out of my tent, and kind of walk/jogged in the direction of the screaming. It continued for a few seconds after I exited the tent, so I’m pretty sure I wasn’t dreaming, but then the sound stopped and I couldn’t tell which RV it had been coming from. Hopefully it was just a little girl who'd had a bad dream. No one else came out to investigate. They probably couldn’t hear it—everyone within 50 meters of me was in an RV.

I quickly made my way back to the tent. I realized it wouldn’t look good if anyone saw me standing in my underwear in the middle of a field holding a baseball bat at midnight.

I wonder what happens inside those RVs, to the little kids who live in the ones that seem to be more permanent mobile home than recreational vehicle.

I stayed in Oklahoma last night and it was beautiful. The state park I stayed in was huge and I swam until dark. I didn't bother to put the rain fly on my tent. No one else in the park had their rain fly on, and I usually try and copy the other campers—if they're not swimming then I don't swim, if they're not drinking the water then I don't drink it, etc. I've never slept without a rain fly. You can watch the stars from inside your tent.

That A Friend Of Mine Would Get 99 Years

2008-06-27T07:55:00.000-07:00

A few bookselling notes:

I’ve stopped putting the book up for sale on consignment in independent bookstores. It’s been selling well on Amazon and I don’t want to run out of copies while I’m on the road. Some of you may have noticed that the book has been listed as out of stock on Amazon for three weeks or so. This isn’t really true. Every week they order books and we send them in, but for a few weeks their orders have not been keeping up with the sales. This is a good thing.

Response to DMR so far:

Before my readings, I usually make a point to differentiate between myself and John, the narrator of DMR. As I’ve said before in this blog, I don’t think John is a very good person, and although he’s obviously very much based on me, there are important differences between us—or at least, I hope there are.

For the most part, people who’ve heard me make this disclaimer disagree with me—they don’t think John is that bad.

And for the most part, people who’ve written to me about the book seem to really like it. Of course, I understand that people who don’t like it are probably less likely to contact me, unless they really hate the book and feel the need to be very vocal about their feelings (this hasn’t happened . . . yet); but it’s very nice that people have been so positive so far.

I’ve heard from friends, strangers, other writers, from people with relatives who have some form of disability (or whatever it’s called), and I’ve heard from people who care for people within DMR or similar organizations. I appreciate every single one of these responses, and I’m flattered that people I’ve never met take the time to read a book I’ve written.

On the night of the release party for DMR, I arrived early with a friend to Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton. We helped with the setup of food and chairs and books and such. When we were all done, there was still a substantial amount of time before the party was scheduled to begin.

I wandered around the museum and sat down in front of a looping video about a glass artist, Josh Simpson, who works in Western, MA (in the barn where my friend’s grandfather was born, though I didn’t know this at the time).

While I sat there, four people from DMR walked (or were wheeled) into the museum and passed me. Two were caregivers and two were Individuals. I panicked for a moment and then followed them around a corner. I tapped one of the caregivers, who’d stopped to look at some piece of art, on the shoulder, and asked her if she was there for the reading. She replied, “What reading?” I said never mind, and walked back to the looping video, relieved.

For a moment, before tapping the caregiver, I thought some DMR employees had seen the ad for my reading in the local newspaper and decided to attend with a couple Individuals from some nearby group home.

I didn’t realize until then, but I was terrified of what the Individuals would think of DMR.

So anyway, at this point, I’ve gotten over this particular fear, and I’m interested in what someone who’s been labeled with mental retardation thinks of DMR. I’m interested in what this person will think of John. And I’m interested in what this person will think of how John thinks of THEM. I capitalize “them” because, to him, to John, they are a class, a group, a type of people who are separate from himself—at least, that’s my take on John.

I’m certain that at least one of the guys who I cared for while working for DMR, would be interested in having DMR read to him (and I say having DMR read to him because no one ever bothered to teach him how to read, though I have no doubt he would’ve learned rapidly), but it will be difficult for most people to understand his response. He has grievous physical disabilities and has never spoken a word.

Note: While writing this I got a call from an old DMR co-worker. He reiterated that the DMR administration is not happy about the book, but assured me that the staff will be very supportive of it. And he said that “anyone who writes from their conscience is writing from a powerful place.” I thought this was a very nice thing to say.

So I Remember Every Face Of Every Man Who Put Me Here

2008-06-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve been through a lot of states in the last few days. I’m in Lincoln, Nebraska right now, and as soon as I finish this blog entry I’ll be heading south to Kansas where I’m camping tonight.

So far, because of this trip, I’ve been to the following states:

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

Connecticut

New Jersey

Pennsylvania

Delaware

Maryland

*(Washington D.C.)

Virginia

*North Carolina

*South Carolina

*Georgia

Florida

*Alabama

*Mississippi

*Louisiana

*Arkansas

*Tennessee

*Kentucky

*Indiana

*Illinois (just to drive through, I’ll be stopping in Chicago in August)

*Missouri (the Garmin pronounces this misery and it’s really unsettling)

*Iowa

*Nebraska

And in a few hours, *Kansas

. . . I think that’s all of them.

* I’ve never been here before

I’ve gotten used to the driving, the nightly (seriously) thunderstorms, cooking on a fire, and never not being lost in big cities where everyone stares at my fanny pack. I’m keeping lots of notes, but there are so many things I don’t have time to cram into this blog.

I’m having an incredible time and have no regrets about this trip or its length. Pretty soon I’ll be meeting up with three friends in a row in California—after that, there won’t be much trip left.

On Monday, I headed into Kansas City early in the day. I walked around, took pictures, and talked to some locals in stores.

At a Christmas party for my old job, I won a $40 gift certificate to the Cheesecake Factory in a Texas Hold ’Em tournament. My supervisor (who smokes cigars in her office) suggested I use it at the Cheesecake Factory in Kansas City.

It was very difficult to save the card for so long, but I’m glad I did. I got artichoke wrap appetizer things, and steak and shrimp for the entrée. I didn’t wrap up the leftovers (and I’ve NEVER done that) since I had nowhere to put them, and this made me feel like a really important or wealthy guy. I like this feeling.

The reading at the Kansas City Public Library (which has the coolest children’s section that I’ve seen, complete with a climbing cow) went very well. And I’d like to thank Henry Fortunato (2^nd coolest name ever behind Hank Scorpio) for setting it all up and helping out with the promotion. Before I began, a woman came up to me and introduced herself as someone who’d worked for a private company similar to the Department of Mental Retardation. She also told me that she rides her bike everywhere, and after talking with me, she filled up her two bike water bottles with the water that had been set out for audience members. Then she grabbed a bunch of the free bags of peanuts and almonds and put them into her bag. This pissed me off because I’d been planning on taking them.

I talked about the book and then read a short section that I’d never read to an audience before—it was a little racier than the stuff I usually read at libraries. As I finished reading, the bike lady got up and walked out. It threw me off and I kind of stuttered in the middle of what I was saying. I’d never had anyone get that mad at something I read. But ten minutes later she came back, sat down, and later bought a book. I guess she just went to the bathroom.

After the reading, Lorenzo, the pr guy at the library offered to take me out to dinner. We went to the coolest (though kind of artificial) bar and restaurant area I’ve seen in any city so far—the Kansas City Live! Pavilion in the middle of the Power and Light District. It’s an outdoor pavilion in the middle of two stories of restaurants and bars, under a huge plastic awning, with a giant television at one end for Royals and Chiefs (and other) games. For a Monday night, there were a lot of girls wearing foam domes.

We got a beer and dinner and sat outside (you can carry your drinks around the whole outdoor pavilion). He said he’d really enjoyed the program and we talked about my trip while watching the Royals game. He’s a young black man from Orlando who went to College in Texas. He told me he almost threw up when Bush was voted in the first time.

We talked about sports teams (he’s been able to tolerate the Red Sox ever since they swept the Cardinals in the playoffs). He was a sports writer before he began working for the library, so he knew much more than me about sports, even stuff regarding Boston teams.

We talked a little about the promotion for the reading. He told me he’d called the Missouri equivalent to the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation. Apparently they did not respond in a friendly manner to the idea of my book. Perhaps they’re afraid that one of their employees will be inspired to do the same thing.

Again, this stuff worries me a little bit, and I don’t really understand it. At my training for DMR, they kept stressing how things have improved since the dark ages of institutions and sterilization, yet (if the information I’ve received about the MA DMR’s reaction to my book is correct) they act like the state employees of that era—they’re unwilling to question anything about, or even discuss, the current conditions of the people they care for. But perhaps I’m jumping the gun here, and perhaps the DMR higher-ups haven’t reacted in the way my former coworker says they have. Maybe they’ll even like the book.

I’m not naïve enough to think that my book will change things in the department, nor did I even attempt to recommend how things should change in DMR, but I do think the issues raised in the book should at least be talked about.

On Monday, in the middle of the night, I was again driven from my tent by lightning. A friend of mine got struck by lightning in Brockton, Massachusetts last week, so I’m now even more wary of it. She’s ok, other than some numbness in her fingers and burns on her feet, but still, that’s pretty frigging crazy—and now I’m heading into tornado town.

Ah well. Ah Kansas.

I LOVE driving through the cornfields of Iowa and Nebraska. So far, the fields have been smaller than I thought they would be. They’re also lumpier than I’d been led to believe, but it’s beautiful here and not boring at all, as I’d also been led to believe by some friends who’ve driven cross country. Everyone in Iowa waved like Stanley as I drove by, and every stop sign is preceded by three sets of rumble strips.

And, unlike the bible belt, there aren’t billboards on the edges of every farm. Down there, there’s a huge-floating-Jesus-face or anti-abortion billboard for every ten acres of crop. Since when is Jesus so impotent that he needs a million billboards in his own backyard? And who thinks it’s appropriate to blow up photos of human fetuses and plaster them on billboards? I can’t wait until digital billboards get more popular and they can loop film of fetuses getting vacuumed out of the womb.

But perhaps I should let these things slide. After all, one church came up with this really inspiring piece of advice that I now live by:

“Aspire to inspire before you expire.”

Not even pop star Jewel could write with more casualty.

Something in the Air

2008-06-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

I'm very happy to announce that the first chapter of DMR has been featured as one of the monthly pdf chapbooks produced by Publishing Genius in Baltimore. You can view the book, print the book, or buy the book (very cheap).

Click here to check it out:
http://www.publishinggenius.com/tpc.html

And while you're there, check out their other publications, including Dave Daniel's Six off 66.

In other news, an interesting review has been posted on DMR's Amazon.com page. The woman who wrote it, Yvonne Mason, is an author who has a mentally challenged brother. I'm not sure yet, but I'm guessing most people will disagree with her take on the Rose and Ralph relationship.

I'm looking forward to reading her book, Stan's Story as soon as my mail is delivered from Massachusetts to Albuquerque.

(And just so you know, I met Yvonne through a writer's group blog about two weeks ago.)

Discard My Friends To Change The Scenery

2008-06-21T18:57:00.000-07:00

A friend from my college years unexpectedly showed up at my Indianapolis reading. Until then, we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in nearly two years. We worked at the Hess station in south Amherst together while I was at UMass and she was at Hampshire. She’s from Kentucky (her mother’s from the Appalachia region of Kentucky), got a perfect score on her SATs, and did better than Elle Woods on her LSATs.

After the reading we went out to dinner in Indianapolis. She poured about half a bottle of Tabasco sauce on her chili.

I asked her how she found out about my reading (since she doesn’t have an e-mail address and wouldn’t have gotten my OTPPUB newsletter). She told me she randomly Googled me a couple months ago to check on whether I’d actually followed through with my idea to write a book about the Department of Mental Retardation and do a cross-country road trip (I used to talk about this all the time). When she saw I had a reading within five hours of her (she lives in Michigan now), she decided to attend and try to recreate the episode of Sex and the City where Big flies to LA to see Carrie give a talk on her book or something. I haven’t seen this episode, so please forgive me if I’ve gotten some of the details wrong.

The reading was relatively late and my campground was only an hour away, so I asked Andrea if she’d like to camp out with me for the night, and she said yes.

In the site next to mine was a camper with a bumper sticker that read, “Monica Lewinsky’s Ex-Boyfriend’s Wife For President.” Does it get any clevererer?

Andrea volunteered to make the fire, though she was nervous about making a fire in front of an Eagle Scout (she’d been reading my blog). I said I’d put up the tent.

She had the fire going before the tent was up.

I asked if she wanted to try some of my campfire food, and she said yes.

I made a pot of macaroni and canned ham and added a lot of pepper because I didn’t have any Tabasco. After trying one bite, Andrea added much more pepper. She finished her half before I finished mine.

I asked her if my beard made me look like Spencer from The Hills (I never had any facial hair when I knew her because a person has to be clean shaven to work at Hess). She assured me the beard didn’t make me look like Spencer.

[I met Lisa Love from Teen Vogue and The Hills when I was a security guard at Walnut Hill high school in Natick, Massachusetts last year. I said hello and told her that I recognized her.

She said, “How do you recognize me?”

I said, “From The Hills,” thinking that this was kind of obvious.

And she said, “Oh does your little sister watch it?”

At this point I realized she’d think I was weird if I told her I was an avid follower of Lauren Conrad and the whole Laguna Beach gang. So I said, “Yes, my little sister watches it and I’ve seen you in passing.”

And then she asked, “How old is your sister? Is she in junior high or something?”

At this point I realized she’d think my sister, a twenty-one year old who currently interns at the State House, was weird if I admitted her real age. So I said, “Yes, she’s in seventh grade.”

Lisa Love smiled and said that was nice. Then she asked me to carry a soggy bag of garbage from her daughter’s dorm room to the dumpster.]

Andrea and I discussed my DMR job and decided that I should give one of those digital picture frames with photos from my trip to each of the two group homes I worked in. Taking the Individuals across state lines requires an act of congress—whatever that means.

In the morning I asked Andrea if she needed to get back to Michigan soon, and she said no.

She currently works for her cousin and her job basically consists of doing his errands on a four wheeler. He’s a machinist of some sort.

I asked if she wanted to go hiking, and she said yes.

We drove to a trail and walked into the woods. After about a mile of walking down the trail, we came across a cave.

I asked her if she wanted to explore the cave, and she said yes.

The opening was wide and we walked in standing up, but pretty soon the passage became very narrow. I had to take off my straw hat and rotate the fanny pack to my backside just to be able to squeeze forward. I used the little LED light on my pocket knife to light our way.

After ten minutes or so, we came to a very very narrow pass. The sticks under our feet were all small; none of the larger ones made it in this far during rainstorms and flooding.

I asked Andrea if she wanted to keep going, and she said yes.

We started talking about flash floods and earthquakes and got each other kind of nervous. Then we started wondering if the cave even had two openings. This was a possibility neither of us had considered when we entered.

We traded choice lines from Deliverance as we walked. She told me her cousin, her employer (also from Kentucky), could squeal just like a pig.

While crawling along through three or four inches of dark cave water (we were both wearing jeans) I again asked if she wanted to turn around, and she said no.

We crawled on and I noticed that we’d passed the point where graffiti covered the walls. I really started to worry that there wouldn’t be an exit and that the cave would be too narrow for us to turn around, or that the battery in my pocket knife light would die.

I’m not sure why, since the settings are pretty different, but I started thinking about that scene in Never Cry Wolf where the dude falls through the ice and can’t find the hole he fell in through. He ends up busting his way out of the ice in another section of the lake or river he’s in.

Then the cave opened up a bit and I noticed the sticks at our feet were getting larger, so I knew there was an exit.

After a while we saw light up ahead that wasn’t generated from my knife. At the exit, we decided to sit on a ledge for a moment before exiting. From where we sat, we could only see the outside world from the reflection of the trees in the water under our feet—everything else was obscured by a hanging wall of rock that we’d have to crawl (swim) under to get out.

Andrea asked me if I would’ve made it all the way through the cave if I was by myself, and I told her no, I would’ve stopped as soon as it started getting really narrow.

Just as I was about to say something about how most people probably don’t make it all the way through the cave, we both heard the sounds of other people’s voices from behind us, back in the cave.

We sat and waited for whoever was approaching. I don’t know why she wanted to sit there and wait (she actually suggested it), but I wanted to see how far away the voices really were, whether they’d make it all the way through, as we had.

About two minutes after we first heard the voices, 15 adolescent girls poured out of the cave—a high school soccer team. Andrea and I exited the cave ahead of them and watched as they all crawled out and decided they wanted to do it again. One girl came up to us and exclaimed that she was five foot nine but parts of the cave were only three feet tall! Andrea and I just looked at her and said nothing—both of us were a few inches taller than her.

Andrea and I hung out back at the camp site for a while towards the middle of the day. Every time I went to the bathroom or walked more than ten feet away from Andrea this older man would swoop into our site from the one adjacent and begin talking to her. His dog followed him wherever he went, but the dog always arrived a few seconds after the owner—he was a very old German Shepard Golden Retriever mix and had very bad hips.

The old man was never not smoking a cigar, and as it turned out, he taught at Andrea’s high school in Louisville, Kentucky about 15 years before she attended.

The man told us about coaching high school basketball (and about how high school basketball is superior to pro-basketball because high schoolers aren’t allowed to break the rules). He told us how he’d had some really good boys—how one of the boys had once returned to visit him after graduation and slipped a hundred dollar bill into his hand.

“Now that was a REALLY good boy,” the man said.

Then he asked me where I was from. After I told him, he said, “Oh, you’re a Yankee!”

And Andrea said, “And he ain’t a good boy either, so don’t expect him to hand you a hundred dollars.”

And the man said, “Oh, so that’s why you like him—’cause he’s ARMORY!” (He actually said ornery but I didn’t understand this until Andrea explained it after he’d gone back to his own site).

Andrea commented on how much she like the word ornery. I told her I’d heard three different people use the word cantankerous in Tennessee. All three times the word was used to describe a horse.

Andrea and I talked for a few hours. She told me about various jobs she’d had, including a furniture moving job in Northampton, MA where the guy she’d worked for had hidden water bottles under various city monuments because he didn’t trust tap water.

She told me that Bourbon is the only American liquor (that she knows of) that is defined by a region (Kentucky) the way that champagne is.

I asked Andrea if she'd attend my reading in Michigan, and she said yes.

Diesel—Truckers-Truckers-Truckers . . .

2008-06-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

(Posted a day after it was written.)

I have a reading at the Indianapolis library on East St. Clair Street tonight. I’m sitting in this library right now and it is by far the nicest library I’ve seen during my travels so far. It’s a nice mix of old and new. An ultra modern glass and metal addition is attached to the back of the original stone library.

This library even has robots that little kids can play with—the future is here TODAY!

Driving for long hours has somehow become very gratifying. When my Garmin tells me I don’t have to turn for over a couple hundred miles, I sit back, sip my coffee, and feel as though I’m really doing work, son. I don’t know why I feel this way. In reality, all I’m doing is driving a ridiculous and expensive route through a ridiculously long and lengthy trip, but somehow, driving is rewarding—like the longer the leg, the more I feel I’m actually accomplishing and experiencing. I can’t really explain this phenomenon more than this at the moment. I can, however, say that I would probably feel differently if it weren’t for my mp3 player. I listen to the radio as I’m approaching cities, just to get a feel for the places I’m entering, but for the most part I don’t bother searching through stations. Driving as far as I am, the radio stations come into and go out of range rapidly. Besides, I’m pretty picky about what I listen to.

I also have some books on mp3. I’ve been listening to Roots on and off throughout the trip. It’s thirty hours long and it’s one of those books that I’ve always been interested in but probably never would’ve gotten around to reading. I’m about a third of the way through it at this point.

When I pull into truck stops (like Pilot for ten different varieties of hot dogs on rollers) I almost feel like I’m one of the guys—but I never make eye contact with the truckers. Before the end of this trip I’ll work up the courage to take a shower at one of these places—just so I can say I did it. I might postpone this until I get to Whately, MA, though. The diner there is pretty superb and there are at least twenty songs I really like in the jukebox.

I camped in Kentucky for the second night last night. The campground itself was very beautiful and had herds of bison on the grounds. I would’ve used one of their pictures for the heading of this blog entry but none of them got close enough for me to take a very good picture. When I walked up the trail to see them, no other humans were around. I sat behind a fence watching them from a distance for about twenty minutes. I’m not sure that any of them even noticed me. I think I went at a bad time of day. The sun was directly overhead and none of the bison seemed interested in moving or acknowledging my presence.

At around 8:30 p.m. I drove to the nearest sports bar. I left my fanny pack in the van and walked inside to find the bar completely empty except for the bartender.

The place was dimly lit, with a pool table, four dart boards, and a bunch of televisions. After scanning all of the televisions, I went up to the bar and asked the bartender if she’d be putting on the Celtics game at nine. She looked up the channel in the paper and put it on the main large screen behind the bar.

She asked, “Celtics—that’s basketball, right?”

I nodded.

Then she asked where they were from.

I told her they were from the same place as me, Boston (I've given up saying that I come from a city 20 minutes south of Boston). Then I asked her why she worked in a sports bar if she didn’t like sports, and she said, “Oh, I like sports.”

As the players took the floor she asked me what was at stake. I told her if the Celtics won the game then they won the whole thing.

She asked me where I was staying in the area. I told her Big Bone Lick State Park and she asked, “Isn’t that the funniest name for a park ever?” I told her yes, so far, and then I told her about my trip and handed her one of the DMR postcards that I generally carry with me.

Then she said, “You know how the park is on Beaver Road?”

I told her I did know this.

And she said, “The convenience store on that road used to be called Beaver Lick, but it’s got a different name now.”

At this point two couples came in together. One of the men ordered four drinks and four shots for the group of them. After taking the shots he ordered some “pigskins.” The bartender didn’t know what this was, so the man explained that pork rinds are called pigskins in Indiana.

Five minutes later the cook brought out the order of fried pork rinds. I’d never seen them freshly prepared; I’ve only seen them in the bag.

Another man walked in and sat down next to me at the bar. He told me about his son who has done two tours in Iraq and is now back in the states. The son recently made Major, so, according to the father, it’s unlikely he’ll have to do another tour in Iraq unless he wants to. The bar we were sitting in sponsored his son’s unit. Pictures of him and his men covered one of the walls near the entrance.

The man told me how he’d visited the Wall in Washington D.C. (even though he was stationed in Germany during Vietnam) and asked if I’d ever been. I told him a little about my trip, but said, no, I hadn’t seen the Wall. He urged me to go and said it would change my life. When I mentioned my father he told me I should bring my father if I ever have the money. I told him we’d gone to see the Moving Wall years earlier, but the man kind of dismissed this as insignificant. He went into great detail describing how the wall begins short then gets taller and then tapers off again at the other end. This represents the early years when the casualties were low, the middle years when the casualties reached their peak, and the last years of the war when the American casualties began declining to zero.

He went on to tell me more about his son’s experiences. The man told me that his son didn’t like to talk about the things he’d seen and done over there. But at one point, after his first tour, his son told him that he’d seen too many body parts for one lifetime.

The man blamed the fact that soldiers were doing so many tours on President Clinton’s decision to downsize the army. He told me that his son had changed as a result of Iraq. He was different when he came back from his first tour. I told him that my mother is a nurse at the VA.

We got off the war topics and talked about the basketball game for a while. He bought me a beer.

After four or five beers, the man left and two other people sat next to me at the bar. They were soon joined by two more. All four men were from the area.

We watched the game while they all complained about the carrying, dunking, and traveling that referees allow in pro-basketball (another man said these same things to me at my campground this morning, and I think it’s odd how often I’ve heard these same sentiments during my trip).

The bartender told the others at the bar that she was going to leave the game on the big screen because I’d been there first. I would’ve been just as happy watching it on a smaller screen but I didn’t say anything.

The men asked me where I was from. I told them I was from Boston and went to UMass, Amherst. One of them mentioned that he went to Xavier (a rival Atlantic 10 school). I asked if he’d played any sports. He said no. I told him I was on the track team and that I wasn’t very good compared to the other athletes.

Then they started talking about the Olympics.

All the men belonged to a gun club that was open 24 hours and had beer machines like soda machines instead of bars and bartenders.

One of them told me they were writing a letter to the Olympic people to complain about how they never show the rifle events on television. “Why do they show the track events?” one of the men asked me. “Why don’t they show the rifle events?”

I answered that it was the same reason they allowed the dunk in the NBA, because that’s what viewers want to see.

He asked, “Who wants to watch sprinters?” I told him that I wanted to watch sprinters.

Then I made the mistake of saying something that revealed my assumptions regarding the four men sitting next to me. “You know, a white man won the 400 meters in the last Olympics. He was the first white American man to win a sprint since the sixties I think.”

This was a very stupid and ignorant thing to say—and I’m not talking about the fact that it could’ve gotten me in some trouble in a dark Kentucky bar located in the middle of nowhere.

The man who’d been badmouthing track just stared at me.

The two guys sitting next to me began talking about their business plans. The guy two seats from mine started saying things like, “I just got this inspiration, you know? I don’t know where it came from. And yeah, I’d be happy earning $100,000 a year, but why not make more?”

He proceeded to detail his idea to the guy sitting in between us. He drew a picture on a napkin to illustrate what he was talking about. When he pushed the napkin over I snuck a peak at it. It was a picture of a shirt, a sports jersey, with the words Cleveland Steamers written across the chest. Then he said, “Who wouldn’t buy a shirt like that? It’s hilarious. And I’ve got other ideas; that’s just one.

At this point, his friend, the man sitting in between us kind of lost interest in the business proposal. I guess he wasn’t impressed with his friend’s crude t-shirt designs.

Later on, when it became clear that the Celtics were going to win the championship, the man behind the t-shirt business plan started ranting about how much he hated Boston. He went on and on about how this was going to give people from Boston another excuse to be jerks (he used another word that I won't write here), how he hated all Boston teams, and how he hated Boston in general. The man in between us told him to shut up a couple times (after all, he’d never even been to Boston), but this didn’t stop him.

I sipped my O’Doul’s and kept my eyes glued on the screen as the game came to an end. I wouldn’t have taken my eyes off that screen if the t-shirt guy had flicked the tip of my nose. Every single man in that bar was born less than twenty miles from where we sat.

The guy next to me told me he was from Indiana and was rooting for Boston. He knew Larry Bird’s family. His father pitched on a softball team with Larry Bird’s brother, who was also a pitcher. Larry Bird’s brother was so tall and his arms were so long that when he released the ball his pitching hand was almost brushing the batter’s elbow.

Just before Pierce was named MVP, the two guys next to me left. A woman down the bar from me got my attention and told me that the man who knew Larry Bird had once been on Jerry Springer. His wife had asked him to be on the show without telling him beforehand what she was going to reveal. Before the taping, the show’s producers got him all drunk on free, expensive booze and he ended up making an ass of himself on television. I guess since then he isn’t so interested in petty squabbles and fights.

I left to go back to my tent after all the interviews and awards were over, happy that the Celtics had won, but kind of sad that they and the fans began their celebration (Gatorade pouring, hugging, “Hey hey hey, goodbye”) with three minutes left in the game.

Dog Will Hunt (including Self-Publishing Stuff #2)

2008-06-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

As I headed back to my campsite from the coffee shop near the religious college, I heard a thunderstorm advisory on the radio for the county next to the one I was camping in. I figured I’d probably be safe and went right to sleep as soon as I crawled into my tent.

Two or so hours later the storm hit. I thought my entire tent was going to blow right off the small cliff it was perched on. I grabbed all my stuff and ran through the rain to my van.

From an elementary school visit to the electrical room in the Boston Museum of Science I knew I’d be safe in the Odyssey. (But not because of the tires! It’s because the electricity stays on the outside of the van or something. All us elementary school kids were blown away by that fact.). I didn’t bother packing up the tent and stowing it. It’s only a fifteen dollar K-Mart job. I’m not going to get soaked and risk my life in an electrical storm for it.

After two hours of crappy, sitting-up sleep in my van (I hadn’t cleared a section in

the back because the rain was coming in sideways and opening the door would’ve gotten all my books wet) the storm cleared. I dragged all my stuff back to the tent (which had stayed relatively dry on the inside) and went back to sleep.

Half an hour later the storm was back, but it didn’t seem quite so strong and I decided to wait it out in the tent. I counted Mississippis between lightning strikes and thunder crashes. When I got down to one Mississi- I ran to my van with all my stuff on my back and under my arms.

I spent most of the remainder of the night in the van. The rain got much worse, and by morning, the inside of my tent was soaked and the outside was covered in disgusting reddish, clayish mud.

After eating sardines and crackers for breakfast (Don’t worry, Kristen. I come from Vikings.) I cleaned up all my stuff as best I could, packed it all into the back of the van, and headed for Nashville.

Nashville is a fun city. I went into 46 different boot stores but bought no boots. I ate dinner at some bar where a country band was playing. The waitress called me darlin‘—that kind of made my millennium. She asked me where I was from and hung out with me for a while, so I gave her a 21% tip.

The band was very good and I enjoyed the music, but I didn’t recognize a single song in half an hour of listening. As I finished my pulled pork with spicy bbq sauce sandwich, they took a break. In the near silence that followed I heard the sounds of something familiar coming from a ceiling speaker in the corner of the room. I climbed off of my stool and walked over to hear better. I stood under the speaker and realized what it was—Take My Breath Away by Berlin was playing on the radio. The volume had been turned down very low for the live band, but I could hear just enough of the timeless classic to make me feel a little less out of place.

At the age of five I got punched in the arm for admitting to my best friend that Take My Breath Away was my favorite song. Apparently he thought it was a song for girls. His favorite song at the time was Thriller.

After Nashville, I hopped in my van and headed for some relatives of friends. This situation made me nervous, but I’d had enough of thunderstorms and the people I was meeting up with were rumored to be the funnest people on the planet.

I pulled into their driveway in the early evening and two dogs ran out to greet me. The fact that there were dogs involved made me feel better. I found out later that one of their names is Lucky because he was hit by a car when he was a puppy and barely survived. One of his legs is shorter than the other three. He runs a little funny because of this.

I met the uncle of my sister’s friend (she’s my friend, too, but not so much so), his partner, and their aunt and mother. The mother lives with them and the aunt was visiting from Connecticut.

The partner and I drove to Bubba’s to get some beer. We took his fully restored 1967 mustang. When I sat down in the car I automatically reached over my right shoulder for the seatbelt. He informed me that the car had no over the shoulder strap seatbelts. “Dude, it’s a 1967.” He also advised me not to wear the lap belt since they’re more dangerous than no seat belt at all.

I was instructed to say that the beer in the cup holder was mine if we were pulled over. Passengers are allowed to have open containers in Tennessee. He told me this particular law is referred to as the hillbilly law. And then he said, “Don’t worry about saying it in front of hillbillys—they call it the hillbilly law, too!”

We grabbed the beer and got back in the car. Again, I reached over my shoulder for the seatbelt, and again, I was told there was no such seatbelt. “Dude, it’s still a 1967.”

The first night we just drank Natty Ice and watched movies while getting to know each other.

The next day all the neighbors came over (the house I was staying in is the biggest house on the street complete with stables, horses, and an inground pool). The partner, a local girl, and I went four-wheeling.

I’d never been on one before, but mine was an automatic and it was easy enough to learn quickly. When I asked if I should wear a helmet I was told it was too hot for helmets. This was fine with me.

We tooled around on those things for hours and hours. Across the street from their house, three neighbors with about 100 acres of land each agreed to build interconnecting trails for four wheelers. The girl who rode with us wore a t-shirt that read, “Party Like A Southern Girl.” The country dogs (brother and sister who came with the house and refuse to go inside and hunt rabbits and birds and herd horses) who’d greeted me when I pulled in followed us every mile of the way (usually taking short cuts through the woods and meeting up with us at impasses). We rode through a creek and past a lake, saw two deer, a tobacco field, and a hay field, and the girl we were with peed in the woods. It was probably the best day of my life.

Back at the house, after taking the four wheelers over a homemade ramp a few times, we swam and had drinks by the pool with all the neighbors. That night we watched movies until we fell asleep.

If I ever get the chance, I’m visiting them again. I’m also buying a four wheeler as soon as I get home.

The fact that one of them read my entire book on the night I left and wrote me a very complimentary letter about it makes me like them even more.

Fanny pack updates:

While in Nashville, a guy in pretty dumpy clothes (but not obviously homeless) came up to me, pointed at my fanny pack, and said, “Hey, that’s one of those pouches everyone’s talking about it.” I asked him if he wanted change. He said yes, I handed him about a dollar in quarters and dimes and continued on my way. No one compliments the fanny pack unless they either want something or they’ve forgotten to take their Thorazine.

And the other day, I walked into a small town library wearing my fanny pack and a very unfortunate looking girl pointed and laughed at me. She was probably about fifteen, grossly overweight, wearing a belly shirt and daisy dukes, and sporting a chocolate milk moustache.

I don’t care what anyone says about the fanny pack. If my wearing it makes a girl like that feel like she’s not the lamest person in the room, well then that’s doing the lord’s work—like the time I wore a sweatshirt with an embroidered heart floating above two embroidered kissing brontosauruses to school in sixth grade—but with less bloody embroidery.

The other day, I got an e-mail from an old DMR coworker, another direct caregiver. She’d heard about the book and ordered a copy and seemed very enthusiastic to read it. I really hope she likes it. But at the end of her e-mail, she informed me that DMR headquarters is very worried about the book and doesn’t know what to do about it. I’m not sure exactly what to write about this at the moment, but it does worry me a little bit and I thought I should mention it here. I guess I just have to wait and see at this point. Probably nothing much will come of this.

Self-Publishing Stuff #2 – Other Self-Publishers!

Before I get into other aspects of my own method (upcoming topics such as writing, formatting, printing, getting library readings), I figured it would be fun to compile a list of other, more famous authors who’ve self-published.

This list was put together with the help of my writing group, a group that meets in upstate New York every summer to read to each other and critique.

Please keep in mind that many of these authors did not self-publish their first works, and I understand that this is a very different phenomenon from self-publishing a first work and then somehow making it into the main stream. But some of these authors did self-publish their first works, and either way, I think this list kind of helps to cast self-publishing in a more respectable and legitimate light.

Please also keep in mind that I am not comparing myself to these people.

Feel free to add other authors or information if you’re aware of it. I’m sure many people will appreciate this.

(I didn’t write much of this and a Google search was involved for some of it. My father, an English professor and member of the writing group, was also very helpful.)

Margaret Atwood, William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, E.E. Cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, E. Lynn Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, Spencer Johnson, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L'Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Rod McKuen, Marlo Morgan, John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.

Percy Bysshe Shelley self published his Gothic Romances and "The
Necessity of Atheism."
William Blake self published "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of
Experience."

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, was originally self-published for his students. One of his students was E. B. White. It was pretty amusing before White added his touch and brought it into the 20th century.

Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was published by Ticknor & Fields, but they would publish it only if he paid for it, which he did. Later, they shipped him about 700 (out of 1000) unsold books, most of them still unbound, which he stored in his family attic until the book was re-published when he died.

Whitman did everything from setting the type to writing reviews of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. He also sent it to prominent literary people, among them Emerson, who wrote the famous letter that Whitman promptly affixed to the back cover of the next edition, probably to Emerson's chagrin (a traditionally published author quoted parts of this letter to me at the release party for DMR).

Ben Franklin was even more of a one-man show, since he owned one of two printing presses in Philadelphia. Old Ben's list of accomplishments with this printing press are staggering. He even printed money (the original Benjamins). Thomas Paine met Ben in London, and Ben told this young man who had failed at everything he'd ever tried to go to America and gave him letters of introduction. Paine got on a ship, went to Philly, and got a job writing for a magazine. He wrote essays against slavery, for women's rights, and then, not much more than a year after he arrived, wrote Common Sense, anonymously, which called for a Declaration of "Independance." It was an immediate best-seller and went through many reprintings in its first few months.

Take Me To Another Place

2008-06-14T12:31:00.001-07:00

This morning, after a quick survey of the campgrounds, I pulled the tent’s stakes out of the ground, picked the whole tent up (complete with poles and rain fly), and moved it to a site overlooking the lake. I arrived at Chickasaw State Park in Tennessee late last night and wasn’t able to make an accurate assessment of the various tent sites. The spot my tent is now on is awesome (like a hot dog). It overlooks a lake (the sun will set on the other side of it tonight) and a wooden pedestrian bridge which spans the width of the lake and leads to a swimming area and beach on the other side.

After getting all my stuff resettled, I built a fire and read while the wood turned into coals. When the coals were low enough so that the bricks I’d placed in the fire were resting above them, I placed a pot full of rice and a couple kinds of beans on the bricks to cook.

I finished eating my first bowl as it started to pour. I sealed up the pot, placed it back on the fire (I always put in extra water so it can simmer all day if need be), and headed to a local coffee shop with a WI-FI connection.

After ordering a coffee and setting up my computer and notes, I began checking my e-mail. In three hours I didn’t get through even one e-mail.

Henderson, where the coffee shop is located, is a Christian college town. During the regular school year it’s home to 2,000 students, but during the summer, there are only a few hundred students in town. Consequently, the coffee shop I was sitting in gets almost no business in the summer. Consequently, the man who works at the coffee shop seems to be itching for conversation. This is something I can relate to. So, although I had some work to do, I talked to him for hours and hours, until the battery in my computer died from boredom.

So, instead of writing a blog about what I was going to write about (I’ll get back to it later) I’m going to write about my conversation with the coffee shop guy (I came back a few hours after his shift ended and sat near an outlet). He was actually a very nice guy and I’m glad we got the chance to talk.

He asked me if I had any siblings. I told him I had two sisters, one younger and one older. I told him about my road trip, but I didn’t mention the book. I showed him the online map of the trip (at the bottom of this blog).

He told me about his family and his relatively new child. He has a few siblings and his family farms land that’s mostly rented. They grow winter wheat and soy beans. The soy beans go toward animal feed, but he’s hoping there will be opportunities to raise soy beans for fuel in this area soon. He’s not happy about gas prices and doesn’t understand why diesel is so much more. I told him I didn’t understand this either. In fact, no one I’ve met on my trip (and I’ve discussed gas prices with maybe 35 people since I left) understands why diesel is so much more.

I told him about some of my own experiences working on a farm.

After we’d talked for a while, he commented on my lack of a northern accent. This struck me as very odd since, to me, he had a very strong southern accent. I’d always thought there was a kind of inverse relationship regarding perception of accents—like if I think you have an accent, then you must think I have an accent, too. Right?

Since leaving the New England area I have been making an effort not to drop my Rs. People seem to understand me better when I don’t talk all Boston thuggish at them.

He asked if my family had any connection to the Civil War. I told him I didn’t think so, although in truth, I suspect we do have some connections. My father’s side of the family has been in Maine for hundreds of years and I know an inordinate number of Mainers went to the Civil War in search of something more exciting than Maine—at least, an old Mainer once said something along these lines to me when we were looking at his small town’s Civil War monument. For such a small town, it had a lot of names on it. And if I recall correctly, a few of them were much younger than 18 when they enlisted.

The coffee shop farmer guy talked a little about his family’s links to the war. I told him about the reenactor I’d met while camping. I also told him that my father fought in Vietnam and my grandfather fought in World War II. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of these facts. I whip them out whenever I’m confronted by someone who’s talking about war in a pro-war way—as if these facts somehow reflect on or speak to my own views, courage, and patriotism.

We talked about the election. I asked him who he was voting for. He said he honestly didn’t know yet. He’d been pulling for Hillary just because she already has eight years White House experience. I told him I was probably voting for Obama, though as far as republicans go, McCain doesn’t seem too bad. I generally keep my opinions about this stuff to myself since I don’t really know anything about anything when it comes to politics, but we were being pretty honest about our views, and I was the one who originally asked the question.

We both agreed that no matter who won, there were probably going to be some big changes. We both agreed that this was probably for the best.

Then we started talking about the war in Iraq.

We’re both against it, though neither of us out and said that we were against it.

He told me about people he knew who’d been over there several times. None of them had nice stories to tell, and none of them had really known what they were in for when they signed up.

Then he said, “And the price of oil isn’t even cheaper. It’s gone up!”

I really appreciated him saying this—in my experience, most people don’t have the courage.

Most pro-war people I’ve encountered only talk about the need to stop terrorists, about the need to force democracy on people, about how it’s good that we got Saddam out of there regardless of the means (“So you’re telling me you think it would be good to have Saddam back in power over there?!?!?!?”). And most anti-war people either can’t or won’t talk about the equation regarding the worth of a human life versus the worth of oil to this country. And there is such an equation. Right?

I like the coffee shop farmer guy’s views. If it’s not going to make life better for us, if it’s in fact going to make life worse for many of us (and many more of them), why do it?

I like coffee shop farmer guy calling things what they are (or at least what he perceives they are), but what I like more, is coffee shop farmer guy’s willingness to attempt equating the cost of human lives with the cost of oil. If oil prices had gone down would coffee shop farmer guy agree with this war? Maybe not, but at least he’s not afraid to talk about things in those terms.

I don’t know if any type of war is moral, but I prefer talking about wars that are fought over commodities and land. Wars fought over ideals frighten me and I have no idea how to discuss them.

When we were done talking about all this, we discussed how I swear more and speak faster than him. He’s glad to have grown up in the Bible belt where he’s learned that it’s wrong to cuss. I tried to explain that the way I swear isn’t really cussing at all—it’s more like garnish.

Coffee shop farmer guy wants nothing to do with garnish.

I told him that my grandfather is a minister. I’ve gotten a lot of miles out of this. I whip it out whenever I’m confronted with very Christian people—as if this fact somehow speaks to my own beliefs.

When we were done talking about all the things we could think of to talk about, he read me prices from the Piggly Wiggly circular in case I needed to do any shopping while in town.

He asked me if I liked veiny (this is what it sounded like to me) sausages. After having him twice repeat the food in question, I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. He brought the circular over and pointed to a picture.

I said, “Oh, Vienna sausages. I didn’t know what the hell you were talking about.”

He said, “Oh, that’s how you guys say it? Well, I don’t care what you call ’em—three cans for a dollar is a pretty good price.”

Letting the Days Go By (including Self-Publishing Stuff #1)

2008-06-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

For whatever reason, I woke up feeling great this morning. Suddenly this trip seems like the best idea ever, and all the days I’ve spent before it seem crazy in retrospect. We’ll see how long this lasts. The water I filled my five-gallon jug with yesterday was probably tainted.

The Baton Rouge reading was on Monday. In the audience were two people, a man and a woman, who’ve worked in departments similar to DMR. I was happy to listen to their experiences working with “Individuals.” The woman told all of us the first line of the book she’s been struggling to write: “On the day I found out my daughter had spinal bifida, I got a standing ovation.”

We all told her that it was a very interesting beginning. Then I asked her how much she had completed. She said, “That’s it. I only have the first sentence.”

The next day, at Tickfaw State Park (the name did not fill me with confidence and the people working there were not nice), I cleaned out my van, packed up my stuff, and got ready to hit the road, Amelia Bedelia style. I’ve got a lot of traveling to do in the next week. I’ll be attempting to get DMR into lots of bookstores and doing a lot of writing (since I don’t have a reading until next week). I’ll also be sporadically including information about my own self-publishing experiences in some of the upcoming blogs. I know this won’t be of interest to everyone, but hopefully it helps some people.

I woke up early this morning, took some pictures of my Jackson, Mississippi campsite, and started reading Going To Extremes, a book about a man’s travels through Alaska just before the pipeline really started to affect the area. It’s very good so far and I’m glad to be reading about one of the two states I won’t be visiting.

I met a man at my Florida campsite who told me he’s driven to Alaska three times. I told him about my trip but its details didn’t impress him much. He did, however, bring me a plate of fresh fruit to share with me. I don’t think he was impressed with the six scrambled egg dinner I prepared over the fire either.

At around 8 this morning, while I was still reading, my phone rang. I looked at the number and saw that it was an unfamiliar Louisiana number. I picked up, said hello, and recognized the voice at the other end of the line almost immediately. It was Marty from the bar in New Orleans, the man who single-handedly protected an entire neighborhood from looters during Katrina. He has a pretty unique sounding voice.

It took me a while to figure out how he got my phone number, but then I remembered. I originally gave him a postcard for DMR, the last one I had on me that night, but then this cute med-student from Nicaragua asked me for one. When Marty went out for a cigarette I leaned over the bar and reached for the card I’d given him. An hour later, after she’d gone, Marty asked what’d happened to the postcard. I told him that I’d stolen it back to give to the girl from Nicaragua. He smiled and asked no questions. I handed him a business card instead. Unlike the postcards, my personal number is listed on the business cards.

He was just calling to see if I was ok. Unlike him, I don’t have an arsenal. Lots of people I meet ask if I brought a gun with me. I didn’t. I’m not even sure I’d be allowed to carry a gun across all these state lines. I don’t really know anything about that kind of stuff and I’ve never fired a handgun. I have fired a musket, though. That was kinda cool.

In the last couple weeks, I’ve encountered or been involved in a few incidents involving race. For the most part, after the first few, I’ve chosen not to write about them here. This blog isn’t meant to be an exposé (neither is DMR, though many would disagree with that) and it isn’t meant to be a holy, liberal northerner’s journey into the land of Baptist churches (it’s too bad Christian book stores won’t carry my book), awful radio DJs (even worse than MA), strip clubs, and racism.

Maybe I'm just noticing all this race stuff because I came here expecting it. It’s not like these things don’t happen in Massachusetts. I have friends who defend their attitudes by saying things like, “I don’t hate black people. I love black people. I just hate n*****s.” It’s also common to hear things like, “Gay people are hilarious.” And before DMR, I used to throw the word retard around a lot.

That being said, something bad happened in a Waffle House the other day, but I’m going to concentrate on the awesomeness of the place rather than write about the jackassiness of one of its employees.

For me, Waffle House was a revelation.

The moment I walked into Waffle House, my sense of smell came back. And thank god it did come back. Waffle House smells frigging awesome. I could feel myself gaining weight just by breathing the sweet, cholesterol-saturated air in there. Also, all the waitresses looked like the lunch ladies from my elementary school, so I immediately felt right at home. The food was cheap, it was delicious, it was cooked right in front of me, and Waffle Houses are on every corner here. They’re like the Starbucks of the South! And they are so much better than Starbucks. I don’t know why we don’t have them in the Northeast. I had my press manager look up the location of the closest Waffle House to Brockton, MA. It’s in Pennsylvania! All the employees of One Tiny Pizza Publishing are taking a road trip there as soon as I get back. I’ll post some photos of us pouring syrup on each other.

There’s also something called Huddle House down here. Aside from using Hudd in place of Waff, and the fact that the colors of the signs are different, the places look exactly alike. Huddle House serves more dinnery type foods, I guess. I haven’t been in one yet—and I don’t plan on visiting one either. My allegiance to Waffle House is very strong even though I suspect both restaurants are owned by the same people.

Self Publishing Stuff #1 – Blurbs!

In these little sections I’m going to write about my experiences with some random aspect of self-publishing. (Here’s the name dropping I was talking about a couple blog entries ago.)

For those of you who haven’t actually seen a copy of the novel, or visited the Amazon page or otppub.com (shame on you), there are two blurbs on the back cover of DMR:

Daniel Trask reveals a world hidden from most of us, telling a story of individuals that most of society has chosen to forget. DMR tells a story about one man’s journey into the world of mental institutions for the severely disabled, but it is mostly a novel of human dignity, with all of its frustrations, joys, heartbreaks, and hilarity. In a media-saturated world, obsessed with banal images of self-improvement and skin-deep perfection, Trask’s novel strips away our pretensions and shows us the beauty of our imperfections.

− Harry Bruinius, author of Better for All The World

DMR is a compelling read that portrays not only the daily lives of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, but also the joys and frustrations of the people who provide their assistance. At times funny, at times earthy, the novel suggests that ability and disability may intertwine among care-receivers and caregivers. DMR is a must read for people interested in services and policies in the field of developmental disabilities. I recommend it highly.

– James W. Trent, Jr., author of Inventing the Feeble Mind

I’m very proud of them. Most self-published books do not have blurbs on them—at least not blurbs by respected, traditionally published authors.

Both Harry Bruinius and James W. Trent are professors and experts in fields related to the Department of Mental Retardation.

In addition to getting blurbs, it’s been nice corresponding with them and I hope to meet up with both soon after this trip is completed.

I wrote to ten people I thought would be interested in DMR. The letters I sent complimented their work before getting into what I wanted from them. I got eight responses, which I thought was pretty phenomenal. The people who wrote back included Fred Wiseman (Titticut Follies) and Philip Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Experiment).

Of the eight who responded, four asked for a copy of the manuscript. In addition to Trent and Bruinius, Ted Conover and Thomas Szasz requested copies of DMR.

Thomas Szasz wrote The Myth of Mental Illness. It’s an incredible book and many many people read it in the sixties and seventies, so I’m flattered that he even read (and finished) my book. In the end he said he couldn’t blurb DMR because it was too far outside of his own area of research. He’s right, it is very outside of his field, but his book definitely influenced me (and millions of other people).

Ted Conover wrote Newjack (it won the National Book Critics Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and lots of other really great books. Ultimately, he also decided he couldn’t give me a blurb. But I’m very happy that he read and really seemed to like DMR (especially after he told me to send him the manuscript ONLY if I didn’t mind the fact that he’d probably never get a chance to look at it).

We discussed making the book nonfiction, but I decided I couldn’t do that. We corresponded about DMR quite a bit and it was pretty thrilling for me. I admire his work a great deal. And I’m hopefully going to meet up with him in New York either during this trip or after.

Conover also introduced me (via telephone) to his friend John Thorndike who wrote Another Way Home. His book isn’t similar to mine at all, but I enjoyed it a lot and we chatted about book-promotion road trips. Thorndike did something similar to what I’m doing, but he did it in the age before GPS and modern cell phones. Like me, he spent the majority of his trip in the woods.

Advice for other self-publishers? Write to more than ten people. Do it many months (at least eight) before the publication date.

Me and My Arrow -- Part Deux!

2008-06-09T19:18:00.000-07:00

First, a comment on my YouTube videos.

Many people have expressed sadness that the videos are not longer (better). Just so everyone knows, I am aware of exactly how much my YouTube Vlogs suck. The problem is that I’m uploading them at cafes using WIFI. A fifteen second video takes about an hour to upload. I can’t sit in Starbucks that long. So I’m sorry. I’ll continue doing them for friends and family, but please don’t judge me too harshly.

Now the real reason for Part Deux.

I realized I forgot to include a few important things in my last entry.

A commenter asked if people treat me differently because of the “beard.” When I arrived at the Mobile Public Library, I went to the information desk and said, “Hi, I’m Daniel Trask and I’m giving a reading tonight. Do you know where I’m supposed to be?”

The very pretty and young librarian said she wasn’t aware of a reading. I asked her to please look it up on the web site. I’d checked the site earlier and knew that all the information about the reading had been posted there along with a photo of me (the one on the right hand side of this blog). She quickly found the listing for my event and scowled at me.

“You look different,” she said.

I explained to her that I’d been living out of my van. I also told her I’d been walking around downtown Mobile all day and it was like a million degrees out (I was pretty sweaty).

She just kept scowling so I asked her where the reading would be and where the bathroom was. I figured I’d better wash up.

My sister and I went to Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop (a piano bar). We sat at the piano and spoke with the player—a poor man’s Johnny Depp. There was no one else sitting near him. After guessing that I was Australian, he asked why we were in town. I told him about my book tour and that my sister had been nice enough to visit me. He asked me more about DMR so I told him the basic story. After expressing his disgust with the sexual aspects of the novel he congratulated me on fighting evil and exposing Massachusetts (a state that he’d previously thought was beyond reproach). He went on to tell us that he’d once seen a ghost in the bar, and that he was raised Catholic but now believed in VooDoo. He played one more song (and he was very good despite being very tipsy) and then suggested we all go sit at the other bar and drink and talk. He left pretty soon after that. The bartender yelled, “The piano player got drunk again!”

I got in a fender bender after the poorly attended New Orleans reading. I was driving up the ramp in the hotel’s parking garage and my sister was in the passenger seat. Suddenly the huge SUV in front of us went into reverse and backed up into us.

I got out of the car and met the two men in front of me. They were huge but looked at me kind of sheepishly. They knew it was there fault.

I asked, “Where were you going?”

The driver said, “I didn’t think I’d make it around the next corner at the angle I was at.”

I looked ahead of the SUV and kind of raised my eyebrow. It wasn’t a particularly difficult corner to take.

The driver pointed out that the damage to my bumper was less than the damage to his. As he talked I realized he’d been hitting the Early Times pretty hard (it was only like 1:00 in the afternoon). He was right, though. There was only a small puncture in my bumper. So I just said forget about it and watched as they successfully made the turn and aimed the monster toward an empty parking spot. It took the guy a long time to actually get his vehicle in between the two white lines. He must’ve reversed and then pulled back out about 15 times.

And last of all, I’d like to apologize that my New Orleans blog entry is so lackluster. It really is a crazy city and a lot of crazy stuff happened, but I leave many things out of these blogs. My mom reads them, man.

Me and My Arrow.

2008-06-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

I’m gonna do the name dropping stuff about the blurbs I was able to get for DMR in the next blog entry.

I camped on the Alabama gulf shores on Wednesday night, and it was a beautiful area. The sand was white and the water was warm, at least compared to the New England Atlantic. I don’t think I even knew Alabama had a gulf shore until I actually visited there. It was a very nice surprise.

On Thursday I gave a reading at the Mobile public library. Nancy Anlage coordinated the whole thing and it went very well (despite the fact that I had the wrong library address posted on www.otppub.com). Many members of the Mobile Writer’s Guild, headed by Joyce Scarbrough, attended and had a lot of great questions. They also taught me some things about online promotion and networking. I’m jealous of their group and wish there was something like it in Brockton (if there is something like it for prose then I’m not aware of it).

After the reading, I drove straight to New Orleans. My older sister was there to visit me. I was thrilled to see her for two reasons: solo road trips can get kind of lonely, and she had a hotel room with two beds.

After watching the end of the first NBA finals game (Celtics won), we went out on Bourbon Street. (And I’m sorry to mention the Celtics so much. Mike Bibby was kind of right about me, but I’ve been having a great time watching the Cs this year.)

The rumors you’ve heard are true; the French quarter is pretty fun. We got a couple beers and walked around with them (everyone else was doing it), just kind of getting a feel for the place.

A short man from India or Pakistan tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a ticket from a book that looked like the books meter maids carry. I noticed that his uniform was kind of odd looking, but I immediately began apologizing for walking down the street with a drink in my hand. I explained that a sign in the bar where we got the beers had said this was legal in New Orleans.

The man, with a very thick accent and in a very serious tone, said, “You are getting this ticket for not partying hard enough, sir.”

I looked down at the ticket. He had circled the party pooper infraction. I explained that I’d only gotten in town an hour ago and that I was tired. He explained that he didn’t really care, he was just trying to get a few bucks for a charity.

At another bar the next night we met a very entertaining bartender who loved to talk about himself. I love to listen to (and write about) interesting people, so we stayed for quite a while. The man’s name is Marty and he was featured in a 2005 New York Times article. He handed me a tattered photocopy of the article which detailed how he was one of the only residents to stay in the area and defend his home. Apparently he has a small personal arsenal in his apartment.

Marty talked to me for a very long time. He told me he’s voting for Obama, he alluded to some past drug problems, he showed me the ankle bracelet he has to wear 24 hours a day, and then he went out to smoke a cigarette. I asked the bar owner, a man who was born in Greece, if Marty was full of crap, and he looked at me like I was insane.

“That man saved this entire neighborhood,” he said. “He saved this bar.” He went on to curse the people who took advantage of New Orleans after Katrina.

When Marty came back in, he told me how he’d been offered many thousands of dollars to tell his story, but he turned all the offers down. I asked him why. He said only, “Money would kill me.”

On Saturday I had my reading at the main branch of the New Orleans library. It was not well attended. This happens sometimes and I’m pretty used to it from the My Dog the Meat Eater readings—at one library in Western, MA, only one woman came to hear me read. But there was an important Red Sox game on that night. Even I didn’t really want to be there.

The New Orleans library did everything they possibly could to promote the event. It was mentioned in two newspapers and the place was full of posters and flyers for the event. After the reading, one of the librarians said they’d been having a hard time getting people to attend readings since Katrina.

After the reading my sister and I went to Napoleon House for some muffuletta, and then to the bar where Al Carson plays. For the first part of the night my sister and I were the only people in the audience, but the lead singer acted as though the place was full, screaming THANK YOU with his arms in the air. I wished I’d done the same thing after my very cozy library reading.

Of course, after a while the place filled up. It was Saturday night in New Orleans. But in my defense, the libraries won’t let me serve beer and liquor at my readings (that’s why I had the book opening at an art museum).

I got my first oil change of the trip last week. I’m probably going to have to get four more, depending on how closely I stick to my original route. The head mechanic came over to me and said in his deep southern accent, “You’re a long way from home, son.” For a moment I swear I heard banjo music, but then I realized the guy was just being sociable. I told him about my trip and he gave me a 10% discount. He’d never heard of a 48-state road trip. He thought it was very cool and seemed a little jealous.

I’ve met a lot of people who say they wish they could come with me or do something like this trip someday. I usually tell them that I wish I hadn’t made the trip quite so long. One of the first things my sister said to me when we met up on Thursday was, “You’ve been away from other people for too long.”

Big Baby Jesus I Can't Wait.

2008-06-04T13:22:00.001-07:00

Some random notes about various stuffs. I’m in between campgrounds, haven’t had much access to internet, and just so you know, my next blog will include lots of Bob Dylan-style name dropping.

I am now in a different time zone and I have seen my first dead armadillo on the side of the road! Both of these things are very exciting to me (hence the exclamation point).

The first place I went to in Tallahassee was the public library. I had some things I needed to print out there. I parked my car, made sure I had all my valuables in my fanny pack and backpack, and walked towards the library. A homeless woman flagged me down from across the street. She was drinking something that looked like Kaopectate from a Gatorade bottle.

“Did you just drive all the way from Massachusetts?” she asked. She only looked about fifty years old, but she had a lot of white facial hair, especially on the area under her chin.

I told her I hadn’t driven the whole way in one straight shot. I’d been doing book readings at libraries along the way and camping out at night.

She said, “Oh, ok. That explains the facial hair then.” I nodded, and she said, “Let me guess, you’ve been on the road for a week.”

I told her no, I’d actually been on the road for over two weeks. I considered explaining to her that I was a late bloomer, that I hadn’t even started shaving until I was in college, that I couldn’t attend pool parties between the ages of 13 and 18 because I had no hair in my armpits, but I decided not to. I was worried that too much talk of facial hair would lead to us discussing her own crop of robust chin whiskers. But maybe she was proud of the facial hair. Maybe she took secret pleasure in the fact that her own beard was more impressive than mine.

In Baltimore, a friend of mine predicted that all my interactions with humans would become very memorable for me. He made a joke that I’d probably start including the people who ask me for the time in my blogs. He was pretty much right. Whenever someone talks to me, I find myself asking them questions about things I have no interest in just to keep the conversation going.

I also find myself leaving many things out of my blog in favor of including small incidents with strangers. For example, I’ve been hanging out in the woods a lot, cooking on fires, hiking trails, going to beaches, and exploring caves. But I don’t really feel the need to write about these things. I don’t know what to write about them. I sat alone in the woods yesterday for four hours reading Valley of the Dolls . . . that’s all I have to say about that.

Bugs are bigger in Florida and animals are noisier and everyone is always talking about how hot it is. It’s been in the upper nineties the last couple days. I don’t mind this kind of heat at all, but everyone who lives in Florida seems to hate it. I wonder why they don’t move.

Late a couple nights ago, there was some sort of animal waiting for me at my tent when I got back from going to the bathroom. Even with my headlamp, all I could see were its eyes. I yelled at it and told it to go away, but it just sat there next to my tent, watching me with its reflective eyes. I hissed and made kind of barking noises but the thing didn’t budge. Finally I picked up a small rock and chucked it at the thing. It ran away into woods. I hurried into my tent and rushed to zip up the door as soon as I was inside. There are alligator signs all over the park, but the thing wasn’t an alligator. Thinking about it the next morning, I decided it was probably a lonely housecat or something.

There are more churches in Georgia and this part of Florida than there are people it seems. And the churches are these huge expensive things while very often the homes are depressing, slapped together affairs.

Speaking of god, the other day I was almost killed by a metal cylinder that came flying off the back of a truck in front of me. Luckily the Odyssey is nimble and I was paying attention (I had just finished texting my bffff about Hannah Montana’s new line of edible cosmetics for fussy housecats. LMAO!) It was then that he carried me.

When I woke up the other day, I had a voicemail from a friend in Brockton. In the message he instructed me to call him as soon as I could. He sounded kind of frantic. When I called he told me that he’d dreamed I was killed. I’ve been getting a lot of these types of calls lately. It’s nice that people worry about me, but I’m really ok I think. As far as camping goes, I am an Eagle Scout and have done a fair amount of it. I can’t, however, really defend my city skills. I still get lost in Boston and I have to admit that I’ve let my street fighting skills decline in the last few years. But who’s gonna hit a guy with a fanny pack?

Speaking of the fanny pack and my general ability to defend myself, I have yet another fanny pack-related thought (sorry).

While most segments of society laugh at the fanny pack, I think old ladies get some comfort from seeing a young man wearing a fanny pack. They look at the fanny pack and then they smile at me and I get this feeling that if a tidal wave suddenly came and flooded the city, those old ladies would reach for my fanny . . . pack. They think I’m safe because of the fanny pack. They think no one dangerous would wear a fanny pack. So, for all the old ladies out there who read random travel blogs by unknown novelists, don’t think I’m a nice guy just ’cause I wear a fanny pack. I might be obsequious, but I assure you, when provoked, I can be very dangerous, ma’ams.

Your Cup Runneth Over Again.

2008-06-01T14:15:00.001-07:00

The Atlanta library reading on Thursday went much better than I expected (although I forgot to wear a belt and my jeans were saggier than is appropriate for a serious author). James Taylor (the librarian who did a great job marketing and who once scrimmaged with Dr. J at UMass Amherst) and I were both surprised to see about 20 people in the audience. Twenty might not seem like a huge number, but 20 people at 1:00 p.m. on a Thursday is pretty huge. It was also the most entertaining crowd I’ve ever read to. They all talked to the characters and to me while I was reading, kind of reaffirming what the narrator was saying. It was jarring at first, but I got used to it after the first couple pages. It made me feel like a preacher. I also appreciated that they weren’t afraid to laugh out loud at the funny parts. Most people at my readings are reluctant to laugh at the first chapter of DMR for fear of being viewed as politically incorrect (I’m sure it’s not because they don’t think it’s funny).

Among the folks who showed up were Joe Byrd (a guy from my upstate New York writing group who drove 40 miles to be in Atlanta) and his wife. After the reading, they took me out for lunch at a diner around the corner. They insisted on paying and on ordering me grits with my eggs and steak-like meat.

After eating and saying my goodbyes to Joe and his wife, I walked around Atlanta for about an hour. I would’ve liked to spend more time there (Atlanta is huge!) but the van was in a parking garage and if I’d left it there for more than four hours I would’ve had to pay like $1,000.

As I’ve stressed before, I don’t really know any of these cities, and after a few turns, I found myself in what appeared to be a slightly rough section of Atlanta. While snapping pictures, I walked directly through a group of about 20 thuggish looking individuals. There wasn’t really any way I could’ve walked around them without stepping out into traffic. I overheard some unkind comments about my fanny pack, but decided against defending it.

When I returned to my campsite in Cartersville, GA, a new person had set up a camper in the site next to mine. The camper was small and looked homemade. Hand painted Yankee logos covered all four walls of the contraption. As I got out of my van, the owner popped out from behind the camper where he was busy setting up. I asked him if he was from New York (his diesel, dually truck had no front license plate). As soon as he opened his mouth I realized he wasn’t from New York. His accent was very southern.

He told me he was from North Carolina. I went over and shook his hand. I didn’t realize how small he was until I got up right next to him. He couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall. He told me his favorite player growing up was Mickey Mantle. He said he went to a Yankee game in NYC when he was very young, a game in which Mantle played, and had been a Yankees fan ever since. He told me he was sixty-five and that his son was there camping with him, but his son was off at the moment and wouldn’t be back until later that night. He also told me that his daddy (he talked about his daddy a lot) had played minor league baseball years ago and that his favorite team is the Braves. The man (whose name I never caught, let’s call him M) told me he can tolerate the Braves because he’d never disrespect his daddy, but he really only likes the Yankees. M also hates basketball because he can’t dunk. And he thinks he should get his haircuts for only half price because he only has half his hair left. During all this being talked at, I managed to squeeze in the fact that I was on a cross-country road trip. After some more being talked at I told M that I had to set up my tent and build a fire before dark. As I was walking to my site, I said kind of casually that I was a Red Sox fan. At this, he said, “Oh, so that’s why you don’t wanna stay and talk with me.”

Was the man insane? I’d just talked with him for nearly a half-hour.

In M’s defense, when I first went up to talk to him, he warned me that he’d talk my ear off.

After setting everything up, I read a new book by my friend Dave Daniel until it was too dark to read. By that time M had gone to bed. I never did see his son arrive.

In the starlight I examined his camper from where I sat. The sides were made of plywood, and two of the sides were panels that could be propped up. One propped up side revealed a kitchen (with the words Kountry Kitchen stenciled onto the front) and the other side revealed a window into a small sleeping area. The sleeping area didn’t seem big enough for more than one small person, but I didn’t think much of it. The kitchen area was very awesome. Everything in it was miniature and it was pretty fully equipped. It had a small sink that had been hooked up to the campgrounds water supply. Above the sink was a paper towel dispenser and next to it were a tiny microwave and a tiny fridge. Crammed in there were a couple cabinets where he kept his diet, caffeine-free Pepsi and canned goods. I was pretty envious of his setup. His sleeping area even had a tiny air conditioner and a television (I could hear it) with a UHF antenna.

The next morning I was woken by my other neighbors—two families camping together. Between the two couples there must’ve been about a dozen kids, all between the ages of three and nine. All morning, all I heard, were mothers yelling things like: “Take that frog out of your mouth, Joel! Do not push your sister in the fire, Brad! Stop throwing rocks at that park ranger’s jeep! Stop eating that bush, Sue! Pull your pants up and stop waving that thing at those nice people over there!” I didn’t get much reading done that day.

After going out to check my e-mail and write some postcards, I arrived back at the campsite. M was sitting under the awning of his camper, just kind of enjoying the day. There was an empty chair next to him so I went over and sat in it. I was itching to talk with another human, and he still seemed to be short one son.

He told me all about his son, a 34-year old man. M’s son is a Civil War reenactor, a historian. He only wears authentic Civil War buttons on his wool uniform, never the reproductions, and if he’s recreating a battle in which the soldiers didn’t get to eat, then he doesn’t eat (although the other guys often sneak in candy bars, his daddy told me).

After a while of listening to various details of Civil War reenactment, I went back over to my site and tried to read over the noise of those mothers yelling things like, “We’re going home, Sean! I swear we are going home unless you stop peeing in the fire every five minutes!”

The next day, after eating some breakfast, I went back over to the small man’s campsite, where, again, there was an empty chair set up next to him.

I told him I’d been thinking about the reenactors and had some questions. I asked him why he wasn’t there watching his son. M told me that his son didn’t want his daddy following him around—he was too old for that. Then I asked why I hadn’t seen his son and he told me that he’d dropped his son off at the battlefield, where he would camp until the end of the battle, the weekend. I didn’t point out that this was contrary to what he’d told me on the first day I met him.

Then I asked, what’s the point? Why reenact an old war?

The man smiled and, for the first time in our interactions, took his time formulating an answer. He started by saying that his son was interested in history and that the history books didn’t tell the story of the Civil War correctly. He said that black people thought it was about slavery, but it was really about economics. I told him that history books had improved some since he or even his son was in school. Then I said something about how all war histories are skewed. They’re written by the winners. His eyes widened when I said this. He agreed completely. He told me that, if he was a little younger, he’d be out there on the battlefield with his son.

He went on to tell me how the South, despite lower numbers, won most of the battles in the Civil War. After saying this he thought silently for a moment with a confused look on his face. I was waiting for him to say something relating to the sum of the parts, but he didn’t.

All he said was, “I wonder what things would be like today if we had won.” Then he looked around at the forest surrounding us, as though he was imagining what our location would look like if the Confederates had won. His use of the term we kind of made me nervous.

I steered the conversation back to baseball. It was another area where we were on opposing sides, but I felt more comfortable discussing it. Of course, in reality, we weren’t Civil War soldiers any more than we were professional baseball players.

He told me he once went to a game that Jackie Robinson played in. M said he didn’t realize the significance of what he was seeing at the time. All he really remembered from it was the black man sitting next to him who was huge (at least to him) and dressed better than anyone else in their area of the stands. M could still remember the white pants and yellow jacket the black man wore.

Then M said, “I was less than ten years old then, and I spilled my orange drink all over that man’s white pants—ruined ’em. That man didn’t say a word about it. He just sat there with that orange drink soaking into those white pants.”

Later on that night I built a fire to cook on. I’ve been cooking some weird mixes of things lately, just because I have a kind of weird and limited assortment of foods with me. That night I made some macaroni and cheese with tuna and canned corn mixed in. The man walked over as I was finishing up my first bowl of the rather sloppy stuff, looked down into the pot where another bowl’s worth remained, and said, “Just once in my life, before I die, I’d like to have a real gourmet meal.”

It was then that I realized my initial suspicion was correct—he was insane. I started to wonder if he even had a son.

Animals Don't Wear Underpants.

2008-05-29T14:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, on my relatives’ suggestion, I visited Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery O’Connor is buried. There’s a large institution named Central State Hospital there, and they thought it would be an interesting photographic opportunity for me.

I spent about two hours walking around, taking pictures of the old brick buildings (posted on my Facebook page soon). Most of the buildings are abandoned now, and in many, almost every single window has been smashed or cracked. I would’ve loved to get inside some of the buildings and take pictures, but there were hundreds of No Trespassing signs which indicated that the buildings were no longer safe. Normally these sings wouldn’t stop me, as evidenced from my Massachusetts institution road trip (photos posted on Flickr and Facebook), but the last thing I need is to get arrested in Georgia for trespassing. I’m not even sure I was allowed to take pictures of the exteriors. At the Monson Developmental Center in Massachusetts we were nearly kicked off for walking through the campus. The security guard on duty told us we couldn’t take any pictures, not even of the “foilage.” But we managed to snap a few when she wasn’t looking.

Satisfied that I’d snapped enough Milledgeville photos, I made my way back to the van and arrived at it just as the sky opened up and started pouring.

I pulled in to the Red Top Mountain campgrounds at about 7:30 p.m. and set up my tent. I’m staying there the entire weekend and plan on doing some hiking when I’m not exploring Georgia’s cities. From the quick look around I took, the area near the camp site looks beautiful. Hopefully the weather clears up a bit. It poured for much of my first night Georgia—it has rained every single night of this road trip except for the nights I’ve spent in the houses and apartments of friends and family.

One good thing about last night, my friend called to give me the play-by-play of the last few minutes of the Celtics game. Her commentating needs some work (At one point in the last 30 seconds or so, she exclaimed, “Oh my God! He’s taking foul things!” And she also went on a short rant about how attractive Rajon Rondo is, something most sportscasters don’t do.), but she conveyed the crucial information and the Celtics won, so I was happy.

My thoughts on the East Coast (kinda)—because I know you’ve been dying to hear them.

First of all, the tiny woman inside my Garmin adopted a very slight southern accent as soon as we crossed into Georgia. She says, “Georgia 22” with a whimsical lilt. And due to the large amount of alone time we spend together, I’ve developed a slight crush on the tiny woman who lives inside my Garmin.

Second of all (and the rest of the alls), I’d like to make a note about my picture taking thus far. Those of you who’ve been checking the photos I’ve posted on Facebook or Flickr (and the Facebook pictures are much more numerous because Flickr imposes a limit on how many photos a person can post at any one time) might be noticing a sort of trend. Although the vast majority of the traveling I’ve done has been through more rural and bucolic settings, the vast majority of my photos are of urban landscapes and the downtowns of big cities. This is intentional. I don’t really feel the need to photograph the woods or the farms. I can’t defend this position well, but I can say that it’s partially due to the fact that woods and farms are harder to photograph. With no man-made structures around, my photographs of woods just look kind of green and boring. I’m not sure if this is due to my camera or my lack of skill with taking pictures (and I have almost no picture taking skill, I know), but either way, I’m not too sad about it. Contrasted with wilderness and farms, cities seem somehow much more ephemeral or mercurial to me.

On my way to the campground, I repeatedly took wrong turns (according to my Garmin) in favor of traveling roads that seemed more scenic. I have to say (and please keep in mind that my experiences in each state are very quick and limited) that Georgia has been the most pleasurable and scenic state to drive through so far. The soil is actually the color of peaches here, and I wonder if this is why peaches grow so well in Georgia. The soil is much browner in South Carolina, and maybe that’s why tobacco grows so well there. Not a day goes by that I don’t put my biology degree to good use.

I do have to mention that I passed by some real photographic gems in the rural parts of Georgia. I passed by a little store with a sign that read “Cuntry Store.” Then there was another sign for Tax Attorney/BBQ. I didn’t stop to photograph them. They’re too funny to be real. They must be traps for liberal arts boys from the North who are either trying to find themselves or rekindle the spirit of the sixties on the open road.

I’d also like to say that the East Coast, despite its population and the misleading night pictures from space, is so covered in trees that one gets a sense of encroaching and almost suffocating wilderness while driving down it.

I believe in global warming, but I just can’t seem to get myself worried about it . . . and I’ve tried. Animals and plants will continue coming up with ways of adapting to catastrophic global events (both those caused by us and the other varieties that’ve been happening forever) long after we’ve run out of fossil fuels. I believe in nature, that’s why I studied it.

And by the way, when did we stop being part of nature? Why is everything we create unnatural? Last time I checked, we do like the mammal do—or at least, those of us who were smart enough to bring a girl along on our road trips do.

Believe you me, if a magnolia had the ability to bite off and swallow your nose when you stuck your ugly face in to smell it, IT WOULD!

I drove past two dead dogs on the side of a Georgia highway yesterday. One of them, a Beagle, might’ve been hit by a car, but the other, a St. Bernard, was obviously dumped. That section of the road was flanked by Jersey barriers.

The Good Times Are Killing Me

2008-05-28T08:07:00.000-07:00

I’m in Columbia, South Carolina. This is the farthest south I have ever been. Well, it’s the farthest south I’ve ever been if you don’t count Disney World—and you really shouldn’t count Disney World.

On Saturday morning, I woke up very early (especially considering how late we stayed out in Baltimore on Friday night going to plays and experimental films) and drove to Raleigh, North Carolina for my reading at the Cameron Village Regional Library.

A good size crowd showed up to the reading and it went very well. The librarian seemed pleasantly surprised that anyone showed up. It was Memorial Day weekend after all.

After the reading I drove to Charlotte. So it was a lot of driving on very little sleep in the previous two days. I arrived at my friend Heide’s house at about 7:30 p.m. After five minutes of hellos and things (Heide and I hadn’t seen each other in over a year) we left for a party her husband’s coworkers were having. We brought her Great Dane and Bassett Hound with us. The Great Dane wasn’t happy about my presence in the car. He kept staring at me and growling in my ear from where he sat in the backseat.

On the way we stopped at a grocery store to get a case of beer. While waiting in line to pay, I told the old man in front of us that he’d forgotten to take the sticker off the back of his pants. He wore 34x34 pants.

He bent down to check and was pretty pissed when he saw that I was correct, he did indeed have a sticker on his pants.

“Damn!” he said. “I’ve been walking around with this sticker on my pants for two weeks and no one told me?”

After peeling it off and looking at the sticker more closely, he kind of half-yelled, “Maybe my goddamn daughters will buy me the right size pants for Christmas this year. Every year I have to return the pants they buy for me. They ought to know my size now—I’m sure they’ve all been laughing about this sticker for the last two weeks.”

At the party, Heide suggested we play beer pong. I hadn’t played since college, but thought it might be a good way to get to know people. We set up the table and divided into teams. Heide and I were on the same team. We won the first few games and people began referring to us as the Yankees (Heide is also from Massachusetts). I wasn’t really happy about being placed in this group, but went along with it.

Before long, jokes that I don’t feel comfortable repeating were being slung back and forth between various northerners and southerners at the party. Among the more mild jokes, there were threats to draw a Mason-Dixon line across the center of the table and I was accused of voting for Barack Obama.

After a while of this, people got tired of the kind of jokes that I consider dangerous and moved into the territory of good-natured stereotyping. This was an area in which I felt comfortable slinging a few barbs.

As the girl across the table cocked her arm to throw, I asked if I could pinch a pinch of her Skoal when she was done missing. This joke was poor judgment on my part.

Suddenly there was a bottle cocked in her arm instead of a ping pong ball. And I found myself wondering, if she did throw it, whether I should duck or try and catch it to save the sliding glass door behind me. I decided I’d duck. It was getting pretty dark.

She never did throw the bottle, and she finally did accept my apology, but that was the first and last joke I made that night.

On Sunday, after saying my goodbyes to Heide, I set up camp at Sesquicentennial State park in South Carolina. I went to sleep at 5:30 in the afternoon. I was tired and my throat was pretty sore. Heide and I hadn’t had much to drink the night before, but we’d stayed up ‘til 4:00 a.m., talking and watching Roseanne.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a very bad sore throat and decided to see a doctor in the morning as soon as the park gates opened at 7:00. I drank some NyQuil and went back to bed.

At 7:10 I left the park and headed to the doctor. I was erring on the side of caution. I haven’t seen a doctor since college for my annual track physicals, and I haven’t been sick in even more years. If I was at home, I would’ve waited to see how the sore throat developed, but being on the road, I didn’t want to get stuck in some campground with strep throat.

The doctor gave me a prescription for an antibiotic and told me I should’ve brought an antibiotic with me on such a crazy trip. I told him I didn’t know that a person who’s not a doctor could easily obtain a pre-illness antibiotic. He just nodded, signed the form, and left.

That afternoon, I met up with some family I have in Columbia, a married couple. We toured the downtown area and the state house and many monuments, most of which are related to the Civil War. The woman, originally from South Carolina, explained all these things with what I thought was a good mix of humor, skepticism, and thoughtfulness. We saw where Sherman’s cannon balls hit the state house, leaving cracks and broken chunks of granite. Each place that was struck is designated with a star.

That night we went to Maurice’s BBQ, where racially charged literature is sold alongside mustard based sauce. I was surprised to see black people working there. The husband, a teacher, explained that his students think Maurice is an asshole, but they also recognize that Maurice’s pays some of the best wages around.

I ended up staying over at their house for two nights and had a great time discussing South Carolina and Georgia issues (including local politicians, race issues, Gullah Gullah Island, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) while watching their dog catch Cheerios.

On my second day there, I did all the laundry I had and mailed a bunch of packages I’d been meaning to take care of for a long time.

That night at dinner, we discussed Stephen King’s writing and a number of random films, from The World According to Garp (I just saw John Irving speak a couple months ago) to John Cassavetes and A Child is Waiting. We also talked about school children and standardized testing, something I’ve become much more interested in lately.

Of particular interest to me, was the issue of whether children tend to stay in the academic groups they are placed in during first grade because the teachers are so good at putting kids into groups or because people have a tendency not to break out of the group into which they’ve been placed. We came to no definitive conclusion.

I was sad to leave, but it was time to get back on the road.

Tambourines and Elephants . . .

2008-05-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

The Baltimore reading at the 1818 gallery went ridiculously well. Tons of people showed up, tons of beers were drunk, and tons of books were sold. Thank you Adam for setting it up.

I was the last of eight authors to read. Here’s the list with links to their stuff:

It was one of those nights that can trick a person into thinking the things they do actually matter.

Baltimore was such a good time that I decided to stay in town through Friday night. I wandered around the city all day on Friday, repeatedly getting lost and finding myself again.

On Friday night a group of us went to see two really sexy plays by Theresa Columbus.

The only bad part of Baltimore was the paintings in the lobby outside the theater. They were good, but all the men’s penises were huge. Adam and I stood staring at them for a few minutes while waiting for the rest of our group to exit the theater. The sense of inadequacy we both felt was palpable.

I had a reading in Raleigh on Saturday. I’ll be posting a post about that Tuesday evening because I’ve recently learned that blog traffic goes way down on the weekends when people aren’t looking for things to distract them from their office jobs.

Way to go, America’s workforce . . . way to go. Keep that productivity low.

It's Like at the Circus . . .

2008-05-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

(I didn't have internet access when this was written, so it's a day late.)

First off I’d like to discuss a reprioritization issue. This will probably only be of interest to those of you who are curious about self-publishing. For the rest of you, sorry if this is super boring. You can skip to the next break in paragraphs if you want.

A few blog entries ago, I stated that one of my goals was to get DMR into one bookstore in every city on my itinerary. I’ve decided to change this goal somewhat.

I spent most of yesterday (Wednesday) driving around DC looking for bookstores that sell on consignment. After going to the five or six on my list (which took hours and put many rough miles on my old van), I discovered that none of them sell books on consignment. Two of them said they used to sell books on consignment, but no longer. And all the bookstores I went to seemed very weary of independent publishing. I haven’t encountered this in any of the other cities thus far, and I’m not sure what it means that Washington DC is tired of independent publishing.

You might be thinking that I could call ahead or e-mail, but I’ve had no luck with this in the past. I’ve made appointments with bookstore managers in far-off towns and cities only to get there and be told the manager went home early that day. Also, sometimes the person on the phone says they sell books on consignment, but then when I get there, another person informs me that they don’t. Or sometimes they want to see the book first, and then when I get there, for whatever reason, they don’t like the book (for example, one time a dude skimmed through the book and found too many swears for his store). I’ve had the best luck wandering around and making random inquiries at all variety of bookstore. So I’ll stick with this method for now—wrong or not.

When I see a store, I’ll ask and hope for the best, but I’m not going to let it eat up my whole day again. This trip isn’t just about getting DMR into stores—it’s not even mainly about that. This trip is about doing some book promotion, seeing the country, and doing research for a third book.

I will miss some aspects of wandering from store to store. It’s a good way to get a sense of the entire city, including the more run-down sections. I’ve been to a lot of these sections as a result of my getting lost while searching for bookstores, but I haven’t gotten out of my van to take any pictures.

That being said, I just got the book into a terribly awesome store in Baltimore, Clayton Fine Books.

Cities on the East Coast are too close together. I hop in my van, preparing for a long drive full of new sights and weird isolated thoughts, and I arrive in the next city 30 minutes later. The van seems to do better with long highway driving. It shimmies and acts grumpy after a day full of downtown driving (another reason for my reprioritizing bookstores).

DC was interesting.

I wrote yesterday’s blog entry from a Starbucks in the Northwest section of the city (I think). Although my computer’s battery wasn’t full, I had to sit outside. Starbucks really is on every corner in DC, and all of them are full of bloggers.

The woman sitting at the table next to me, who was reading a magazine and absent-mindedly petting her dog, sneezed. She gave me a dirty look when I told god to bless her. Later on, her dog wandered over and put his head on my knee. I stroked his ear until she noticed what was taking place. The woman jerked her dog’s leash so hard that he nearly fell over, and then she got up to leave. I felt bad for the dog. He was very old. His golden retriever hair had gone white all around his face.

I should say that my characterizations of places are not to be taken too seriously. I’m only in most places for less than a day and any judgments I make or qualities I notice are sure to be wrong—but I think this kind of goes without saying, and the fact that I’m probably wrong or missing 99% of the picture will not stop me from making such judgments or listing such qualities.

Aside from the tourists, and there were lots of them, people seem to smoke and drink more in DC. I felt as though I had stumbled onto the set of The Secret of My Success (I WISH!). The bars I walked past were full, even at two in the afternoon. And all the people I saw smoking were wearing business suits. None of them seemed ashamed to be smoking in public. In other cities, the people in business suits who haven’t caught on to the whole frighteningly popular anti-smoking campaign, seem ashamed to be smoking and kind of huddle next to the base of their respective skyscrapers. In DC, large men and women in powerful suits strut about while they smoke. Even in Pennsylvania, where it’s still legal to smoke inside bars (gasp!), the people in suits seem ashamed of their inability to quit cigarettes.

I wandered around for a while, looking at the buildings and monuments. But this sort of thing gets tiresome very quickly. I’m on a 14-week vacation, and just like a normal vacation, I find myself getting tired early in the day. The having to worry about what to eat, where to sleep, how to get places, how much to spend, and where I parked, really wears me out.

At some point in the afternoon I wandered into Harry’s Bar where tons of dudes of all ages and styles of dress, each with their own pitchers, were watching European soccer—Manchester United versus Chelsea (I think).

I sat at the bar and ordered a Yuengling (America’s oldest brewery I guess) and a burger. I sat there for a while after finishing the massive, kinda bloody burger and started getting into the soccer match. I happened to be sitting next to the only other guy in the bar who was flying solo. The man had a Spanish accent (I think he was Puerto Rican) and was wearing a very nice business suit. He was drinking Cape Codders at a furious rate, but looked sort of nervous and out of place despite this.

We watched as the ball was crossed in front of the net and a shot just barely sailed over the crossbar. I threw up my arms and groaned loudly. The Puerto Rican guy turned to me with a smile and asked which team was which. I suddenly understood why he looked out of place. He was the only guy, besides me, who wasn’t there for the soccer match.

I smiled back and opened my mouth to answer. It was then that I realized I had no idea which team was which. Why had I reacted so strongly to the missed shot? What the hell did I care?

My smile faded as I admitted that I didn’t know which team was which. He kind of half smiled and returned to his drinks. He was at least a tad disgusted with me. I’d been faking to fit in, something he could’ve done just as easily.

I filmed myself in front of the Washington Memorial and made my way back to the campsite.

I got up pretty late this morning and drove to Baltimore. I met my friend Adam outside of his building, the tallest in Baltimore, and we had lunch at the world famous Lexington Market. I had a pulled pork sandwich dripping with barbecue sauce and sides of collard greens and macaroni. While sitting there talking about our publishing efforts (Adam’s site: www.publishinggenius.com), a friend of Adam’s walked by. After hearing about my road trip, he told me he once walked from Baltimore to St. Louis. I had no response to this.

I’m currently sitting in a bar across the street from the bookstore that accepted DMR. As soon as I got here I went to the bathroom. I put my backpack and computer bag down next to the urinal, swung my fanny pack around to my hip, and stepped up to do what I’d come in to do. Another guy came in and stood right next to me. He looked down at my fanny pack (I hope that’s what he was looking at) and asked if I was backpacking across county. I said that I was, kinda, and began filling him in on the exact details. After washing his hands he reached out to shake mine. I looked at the sink to hint that I hadn’t washed my hands yet, but he left his hand hanging out there, so I shook it. I couldn’t leave him hanging.

I think bathroom handshakes mean more.

Don't Look Down!

2008-05-21T09:35:00.001-07:00

I’m going to try and catch up here.

On Sunday night, after the Celtics game, I took a shower in the camp latrine. The latrine there is open air, and it was a pretty chilly night (my breath was showing) so I did a lot of hopping in and out of the stream of water while lathering.

On Monday I went back into Philly to hit up bookstores and make the first YouTube broadcast. I got up early and filmed myself on top of the steps of the Philadelphia art museum. It’s a very stiff and useless little video clip, but they’ll get better. I had to get the first one out of the way. The fact that there were spandex covered joggers stretching and putting themselves in really disgusting positions right next to me didn’t help. They were all staring at me while they contorted themselves.

The University of Pennsylvania (I think) was having some sort of graduation thing and traffic was incredibly awful all morning. Traveling from bookstore to bookstore was very difficult. The first two bookstores I went to didn’t sell on consignment, but the third, Robin’s Books, did. So the book is now available in Philly.

Monday was a little less exciting than Sunday. I didn’t find any festivals and there were no children’s book characters to wipe mustard on, but I did get to see some more residential parts of Philly, and they really reminded me of parts of Boston. The streets are ridiculously narrow and seem more suited for horses than SUVs.

On Monday night I drove to my campsite in Maryland, about 40 minutes outside of DC. I’ll be staying there for three nights while I visit Delaware, Maryland, and Washington DC.

It started pouring at about 3 a.m. on Monday night. At four I decided to vacate the tent. It was still dry, but I knew it was going to start getting wet soon since my tent sat at the bottom of a hill (no other option). I’d brought my computer and all my other electronic stuff into the tent with me and I didn’t want to risk them getting wet. So I packed all my stuff in the van and drove to the nearest coffee shop I could find, which was about 25 minutes away.

Still in my pajamas and slippers, I ordered a medium coffee and sat down to answer some e-mails (I think I’ve secured a Milwaukee reading which is very good).

When the rain let up, I went back to the campground to assess the damage to my tent. It was damp inside, but nothing that a couple hours of airing out wouldn’t fix.

I stripped down to my shorts and made my way to the showers. Before getting in, I entered one of the bathroom stalls. My right hand brushed up against the stall wall and smeared through something sticky. Without looking down, I knew what it was. Someone had left a long smeared streak of crap on the wall. This trip is living up to its name more and more as the days pass.

I decided to skip going to the bathroom and hopped in the shower. The water was warm, so I stayed in there a long time. I hadn’t had a good shower in a few days.

I drove to Dover and Lewes Delaware. Dover is incredibly small. None of the buildings are over a few stories tall and it felt like I was visiting a Historic Deerfield rather than a state capital.

In Lewes I had lunch at a bookstore/coffeeshop. I was the youngest person in there by about 20 years. They gave me a number for my table, so they’d know where to bring the food. And although there were only about eight tables in there, my number was somewhere in the thirties.

I was going to ask if they’d consider selling DMR, but their featured title, the one that they displayed most prominently in the middle of the tallest shelf, was a Kathie Lee Gifford Christmas book, so I decided not to ask about mine.

From there I went to Annapolis on a whim. I liked it a lot and wished I’d gone there earlier in the day. I didn’t feel self-conscious about my fanny pack at all in Annapolis. Everyone there is dressed for a Village People Video.

Last night I slept in the same campsite. My tent was relatively dry and it hasn’t rained at all since yesterday.

I’m in DC right now, about to go to some bookstores and inquire as to whether they sell books on consignment. Tonight I’ll be spending my last night in the Maryland campsite. Tomorrow I’ll be heading into Baltimore for a reading at the 1818 gallery.

You Don't Need No Wax Job, You're Smooth Enough for Me.

2008-05-20T05:44:00.000-07:00

Count so far: 4 live deer, 3 dead deer, 1 dead fox, 674 dead snipes. I saw all three dead deer before I saw the first live one.

I woke up late on Sunday and headed into Philadelphia thinking the city would be relatively quiet and parking easy to find. My plan was to spend most of the day in the art museum and wait until Monday to hit up the bookstores.

I got into Philly at about 10:30 and couldn’t find parking within like 20 blocks of the museum. I found a spot in some residential neighborhood near an elementary school, and after leaving the van and walking towards the museum, I realized I’d neglected to make mental note of the van’s location (more on this later).

The library was having a book fair and the streets all around it were congested with children, performers, and book vendors (the pic of me with toot from the last blog came from this festival).

In addition to the book fair, there was a pro-Israel festival and parade going on in the area directly in front of the museum. A large section of the downtown was blocked off because of this, and all the parking spots on those streets were unavailable.

So the city was very busy, which was a good thing.

I walked through both festival crowds, making sure to grab food in both places (I think I got hot dog mustard on Toot’s back), and stopped at the bottom of the steps leading up to the museum. I was considering doing the whole Rocky thing, but as I stood there deliberating, three coach buses behind me unloaded about 250 elementary school kids. Every single one of those kids blew past me, ran up the steps to the top, and jumped up and down with their arms held high in the air. When I saw how stupid they looked I decided not to follow suit, even though (despite the extra weight of my fanny pack) I coulda smoked all those ten year olds (except maybe for one sporting a Kahloesque moustache who looked like he’d been held back a couple times).

I walked up the steps like an adult and got in line for the museum. After waiting for about 30 seconds I decided against visiting the museum. The place was swarming with thousands of children, and the line, if stretched out, was about a football field long. I wandered back out into the streets and took some more pictures of the parade and festivals and downtown area. Much of Philadelphia is very similar to Boston—by design I’ve been told.

The Philadelphia library is pretty incredible. The inside is beautiful, their author lineup is packed with huge talents, and the outer doors are automatic . . . just like Wal-Mart!

After hours and hours of wandering around Philly, trying my best to avoid dwelling on the fact that I didn’t know where my wheels were, it was time to go. My feet weren’t accustomed to the work boots I was wearing. I hadn’t worn them since last summer at the farm and all the Philadelphia walking had given me a couple sizeable blisters.

I trudged up a hill in the general direction of my car, knowing I might be in for a very long search. I tried as best I could to retrace my steps, but there weren’t many landmarks in the area I’d parked. As I reached the top of the hill, I took a right to begin zigzagging my way back down, but as I neared the end of the side street, the sunshine reflecting off the lettering on the rear windshield of my Odyssey caught my eye. I’ve never been so happy to see that ugly white beast.

I took off my fanny pack and climbed in, determined to find a bar in which to watch the second half of the Celtics game—game seven of their series with Cleveland. The three or four bars I found in Philly were playing a Philadelphia hockey game on one television and a Philadelphia baseball game on the other (if they even had two televisions), so I gave up and decided to head back to the campsite. I’d have to read about the Celtics game the next day.

Just outside of Philadelphia I saw a large bar and decided to give the Celtics game one more shot. I parked the van, strapped on my fanny pack, and walked in. The place had about eight televisions. The Celtics weren’t playing on any of them.

The guy greeting people at the door noticed me surveying the televisions and asked me what I wanted to see. I told him the Celtics and he changed the channel on the television right over the bar. Then he turned down the volume on the other televisions and turned up the volume on the Celtics game. The fourth quarter had already started, Celtics up. I thanked the man profusely and told him about my arduous search for the game.

The bartender, a cute youngish woman, approached me as I sat down.

“I’m sorry in advance,” I said. “I know this is pointless, and I always make fun of people who order them, but what kinds of non-alcoholic beer do you have? I have a bit of a drive ahead of me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said with a kind smile. “You’re being responsible. I admire that.”

She listed off three varieties of non-alcoholic beer. I’d never heard of any of them.

“Have you tried them?” I asked.

“FUCK NO!” She said, laughing. “There’s a reason I work here, honey. I’m an alcoholic. Why waste the calories?”

I picked a beer at random and she brought it over.

“I like every kind of alcohol,” she said, “except for gin. That’s how I know I’m not a true alcoholic.”

She hung around my end of the bar while I watched the Celtics and drank my big boy soda. While I watched Pierce drain a number of difficult shots, she told me about the boyfriend who’d just dumped her. She told me about the unbelievable love letters he’d written her, and how they didn’t matter since they were nothing but lies.

“He just called me up one day and said that everything he’d ever told me was a lie. As you can probably tell, I don’t handle breakups too well.”

“You handle it better than some,” I said, as I watched Lebron screw up a jump-ball play.

I liked talking to her. I hadn’t really spoken more than three words to anyone all day. And although I wasn’t that interested in her ex-boyfriend, and she wasn’t that interested in the Celtics, we got along well.

As the Celtics won, she told me how she’d once mistakenly referred to the Clemson basketball team as the Clementines.

I told her it was an understandable mistake because they’re both orange.

When There's No Destination . . .

2008-05-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

Early Saturday morning I left for Newark, New Jersey with my new computer and a few other things I’d forgotten to bring with the first time around.

A note: My choice of cities might seem ludicrous to some (e.g. Newark), but I picked these cities by looking at a map and choosing the largest dots that weren’t too far out of the way of my general route. I know nothing about any cities besides a few in the Northeast, hence this trip.

I wandered around Newark for a while, but leaving my van unattended didn’t seem like the best idea in the world and all the bookstores I went to were either closed or weirdly religious and full of incense, so I didn’t stay long. I did get a bunch of pictures of the buildings and parks in the downtown area, and I was there long enough to get made fun of for wearing a fanny pack.

Another note: I’m developing Fanny Pack Wearer’s Rage (yeah, it’s real, look it up). So what if I wear a fanny pack? Does every single person I walk by have to snicker at it? And just so you know, it’s the kind of fanny pack with two Nalgene bottles attached on either side, so, extra cool. You should also know that I wear my fanny pack in the front, just to prevent against fanny theft. Fanny packs are great inventions, and the fact that they’re made fun of really bothers me. How else am I supposed to drag around all the stuff I have to carry? That’s all for now, kinda.

I left Newark and headed toward Pennsylvania. At the midway point I stopped at a Starbucks off the highway to check my e-mail and things. As I walked in, I noticed the barista staring at my fanny (fronty) pack and smirking. As I approached, I caught his eyes with mine, and nodded down towards my fanny pack, as if to ask, “Do you have a problem with my fanny pack?” He got my meaning immediately and tried to play it off as though he had been admiring my fanny pack.

“Going hiking?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going hiking.” My mood carried over into my tone. It was the tone of someone willing to jump over the counter and defend the honor of his fanny pack.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” I said, with the same level of hostility.

It was obvious that he was getting nervous now. “That’s the way to do it,” he stammered. “Just kinda head out in some direction.”

From there I drove toward my campsite in French Creek State Park in Elverson, PA. Twenty minutes before the campsite, I stopped at a restaurant labeled: Diner. It was only about 3:30 so the place was pretty deserted. Despite the emptiness of the place, there were about seven waitresses on, each more buxom than the last. All of them served me and I couldn’t figure out which one was my waitress. I must’ve had about ten cups of coffee. Every time I took a sip, one of the young women would come over and top it off. It was very difficult to regulate the amount of cream to add. The cold meatloaf sandwich was very good, and the conversation I had with one of the waitresses about whether or not the Brady Bunch theme song belongs on the radio was very entertaining.

After eating and tipping heavily, I drove to the campsite and set up my tent for the first time. It’s a small simple tent and only took a couple minutes to assemble. I built a small cooking fire, heated some soup, read the second half of Travels With Charley, and slept well despite the rain pounding on my tent.

I wish I had a dog with me—not some uppity French gentleman dog, though.

BTW, no one in the campsite looked twice at my fanny pack. They all wear the same exact thing. It’s really hard not to snicker at them.

Is it the "whip appeal," or my Babyface?

2008-05-15T08:02:00.001-07:00

While waiting for the state police to show up on Tuesday, I read the first half of Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck. I attempted to read it one year in college, but didn’t like it much at the time. This time around I’m finding a lot more to like about it. This passage at the beginning of Section One struck me as particularly relevant.

“In this a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.”

I woke up at 5 a.m. on Tuesday, in the back of my van, in a parking lot of a McDonald’s on the side of 95S in Connecticut. I didn’t sleep well, but not because the van was uncomfortable. After I figured out that I had to sleep with my head rather than my feet elevated (I woke up in the middle of the night with a stuffy nose and swollen throat), I was quite cozy. The constant sounds of shutting doors, footsteps, and the shadows of men lurking near the van, however, made my sleep rather erratic and fitful. I had anticipated this. Rest stops aren’t known for their safety or privacy late at night. But I really wanted to try it out on the first night, just in case there are other nights along this trip when it’s my only option. I really hope I don’t have to resort to this, though, and have since reserved tent sites for the entire length of the east coast.

For breakfast, I lived every ten-year old’s dream and had Chef Boyardee Ravioli with a side of cookies. After rearranging the back of my van and cleaning myself up a little in the bathroom, I headed for New Haven. I arrived in downtown New Haven a half hour later and was suddenly overcome with a sinking feeling. I knew I’d forgotten something. I turned my head to look over the back of the van and realized what it was. My computer bag was missing. I turned the van around and headed back to the rest area. As I drove, I reconstructed the events of the night in my head. After using my computer inside the McDonald’s, I walked outside at around 10:30 p.m. I opened the back door to the van and placed my computer on the pavement. I moved all the boxes over to make room for me to sleep, shut the door, and never picked the computer off the ground. I’m a very absent-minded person, but this was a dumb move, even for me. On the bright side, I'd backed up the entire hard drive the day before, so I knew I didn't lose any important information.

When I got back to the rest stop, I went into the McDonald’s and gas station to ask if anyone had turned in a computer. No one had. I called the state police and told them everything that had happened. The operator said he’d send someone over to talk to me. They would call when someone arrived.

I went inside to call all my credit card and bank people. I cancelled all the cards just to be safe and called my dad to change all my internet passwords. And then I started reading Steinbeck, where the first few pages made me feel better to some extent.

After waiting three or four hours for the police, I left and drove to New Haven. They never called, so I assume they never showed up. I don’t know why they had to meet me in person anyway. It wasn’t a very important crime (I practically thrust the computer upon the thief) and I gave the police all the description they’d need over the phone.

I talked to my sister on the ride, on my Bluetooth, since hand-held phones are illegal while driving in Connecticut. I asked her if she was surprised and she said no, not at all. In fact, she expected something like this to happen. I am, after all, the person who had to sift through the kitchen trash every couple weeks while I was in high school, every time my parents found a paper plate in the sink. A paper plate in the sink indicated that I’d mixed up my hands again—the silverware had been thrown into the trash and the paper plate had been thrown into the sink.

A few of my friends called to check in on me and I told them the news. They all laughed, with good reason, but they also expressed their concern and pity. A friend who was working at the farm where I’ve worked for years told our boss. Without my knowing, he set up a Trasky fund to help me pay for a new computer—embarrassing, but nice.

My dad and I discussed getting a new computer. There’s no way I can do this trip without one. While we discussed the bare minimum features I’d be needing, I got word from the supervisor at my previous job in Boston (they’d heard about my dilemma from my sister) that the company was going to give me one of their old laptops.

When I called to inform my friend at the farm she told me about the Trasky fund. I told her there was no need to collect any more money. With the 40 dollars they’d collected, they bought me a pair of new jeans that they gave to me yesterday. Apparently they were horrified when they read in one of my previous blogs that I had only one pair with me.

My mother’s cousin and his wife, who’ve been battling Glioblastoma Mulitiforme since he was diagnosed in ~2004, called to say they’d take me out to dinner after the reading. They also felt sorry for me. I had been planning on staying at their house for the night but decided I had to go back to Brockton a day early to begin taking care of the mess I’d gotten myself into.

After successfully getting DMR into Labyrinth Books near Yale, and taking pictures all over New Haven, I took a nap in the sun, on the green in front of the library. When I woke up in the shade of a tree that was now blocking the sun, I saw a man who looked to be about forty years old bent over, clutching at his chest. I got up and jogged over to ask if he was ok. He slowly stood up and said that he was ok. Then he said, “I have a couple slipped discs or something and I have to stop whatever I’m doing once in a while. But thanks for asking, most people don’t give a shit.”

All I said was, “Yeah, I know.” And before the words were even out of my mouth I regretted not speaking up and correcting him.

The reading at the New Haven library went well. The audience was both encouraging and insightful.

After having dinner, I drove back to Brockton.

Last night I went to Dave Daniel’s reading at the Weymouth Public Library for Reunion, his latest novel. The audience really enjoyed the reading and he ran out of books to sell.

I’ll be in Brockton until Saturday when I’ll leave very early in the morning and head to Pennsylvania. I have to wait for a few replacement cables to be delivered on Friday.

There is a road, no simple highway . . .

2008-05-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

Today is day one of the road trip – Providence, Rhode Island.

I’m sitting in Blue State Coffee on Thayer Street, charging my ipod, phone, camera, and computer. I’ll be stealing power and internet often in the next few months.

When I last spent some time in Providence, I caught scabies while trying on overpriced retro jeans at a used clothing store on this same street—and that wasn’t even the worst part of the visit.

As far as I can tell, not much seems to have changed on Thayer street. The RISD girls’ pants are a little tighter, to the point of looking painted on, but that’s about the only difference I can see.

In the last couple weeks I’ve been trying to hang out with all my friends, and get copies of the book into stores around Brockton. DMR is now being sold in a few stores south of Boston. There’s a full list of them on One Tiny Pizza Publishing’s Web site. My Web designer (my little sister) will be updating the list every few days.

I didn’t get a chance to see all my friends and I’m not quite as prepared for this trip as I wish I was, but hopefully things will work out and I don’t catch scabies. It was nice to see the friends I was able to meet up with, and all of them were pretty positive about the road trip (one even baked me cookies!). Everyone is full of advice, and I’ve been trying to follow some of the better-sounding recommendations, but for the most part, I think I have to kinda figure this thing out on my own.

This morning, after buying a few last minute necessities, we began packing the van and didn’t finish until well into the afternoon. I left my house a few hours later than I’d planned, but it’s very difficult to pack a minivan (it seems important to stress the mini here) even if your press manager (my friend Allie) is like the best vehicle packer in the world. In addition to helping me pack, she repaired two holes in the ass of my jeans (the only jeans I’m bringing), and she agreed to send out a bunch of packages for me. I told her to make sure and take the packages, with copies of DMR inside, to the post office because they weigh over 13 ounces and can’t just be dropped into a mailbox even though they’re prepaid. It’s really gratifying to write a book that’s heavy enough to be considered a bomb threat.

After arriving here in Providence, the first bookstore I went to, Ada Books on Dean St., agreed to carry DMR. I’m happy to have the book in such a cozy and friendly store.

My goal is to get one bookstore in every city to carry the book, so my work was done early despite my late arrival. Since then, I’ve just been wandering around, checking out stores, and not spending any money because I don’t trust my budgeting skills.

I’ll be sleeping in the van tonight. It’s getting too late and windy to set up camp. Hopefully the curtains my friends and I fashioned out of sheets and Velcro will work well. I really don’t want people peeking in on me. And just in case, for protection, I have a baseball bat, a few knives, and a can of bear mace that will hopefully stop even the fattest and furriest would-be assailant.

In two days I’ll be backtracking north to Weymouth, MA (very close to Brockton) to attend a book release party for Dave Daniel, one of the writers in the writing group I belong to that meets in upstate New York every summer. His new book is called Reunion, and I’m looking forward to reading it. After that, I’ll be driving straight down the East Coast, one city at a time. So these next two days are kind of a dry run for me. I’ll be able to test out sleeping in the van and then have the option of going back home to grab anything I’ve forgotten. After that, this trip will probably feel a lot more daunting than it does right now.

People who need people . . .

2008-05-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

About 75 people showed up to last night's book release. 50 books were sold and signed.

Thank you to Greg and Gina for all your help, and I'm sorry I forgot to thank you publicly last night. I should've also thanked my dad, who reminded me that I'd forgotten to thank anyone. He's read DMR many too many times.

Thank you also to Noelle for hosting the event at Fuller Craft. It was a much classier affair than my first novel's release which was held at George's Cafe in Brockton. Both were a lot of fun, but this one felt more literary.

We went through two trays of little roller wrap sandwich thingies, one tray of day-old cheese and fruit (it was free), a tray of grilled vegetables, a hummus and olive and pita thing from Whole Foods (thank you Dennis for your discount and skilled hands), and a raw veggie and bread bowl dressing receptacle platter.

Dennis gathered up the leftovers at the end. He plans on making a massive amount of "tres delicious" soup (he pronounces the s on tres for some reason). According to him, using day-old grilled vegetables is the secret to really great soup. I find this hard to believe but look forward to tasting whatever he ends up with. Unfortunately, it won't really matter what I think. Dennis doesn't take my food opinions seriously—my sense of smell disappeared at some point during 2006 (no cool story behind this; it just vanished).

I read the first sixteen pages of DMR, the part where John is introduced to all the Individuals he'll be working with (yes, the capital I is intentional). People seemed to enjoy it. They laughed at the right places and applauded at the conclusion, despite the general offensiveness of the last lines I read: "Most people would pay a hundred dollars for the opportunity to watch a retard fling meat sauce into their bosses hair. I paid only two." I think the fact that I introduced John as a bad character before I read probably softened the impact.

People from just about every portion of my life attended. One of my elementary school teachers was there, friends from various periods showed up, along with employers, coworkers, family members, a Walnut Hill writing student, a dude from my writing group (who told me some cool things about Walt Whitman's marketing tactics) and a few extraordinarily kind and loyal people I met through the readings I gave for my first novel back in 2003.

I hope everyone had a great time. Thank you all for coming out and supporting DMR's Road Trip. Gas prices are very high. This is the worst summer in the history of the world for a 16,000-mile book tour. Mahhh!

. . . do you believe in life after love?

2008-04-27T18:31:00.001-07:00

Last summer, my boss at the farm bought an old, fixer-upper camper van. I inquired as to whether he might be willing to sell it to me after fixing it up. “Sure,” he said. “What are you gonna use it for?”

I told him, “I’m taking a trip across country to promote my new novel. I’m going to be hitting 48 states—or at least, I’m going to try.” I didn’t tell him the novel was very much unfinished.

“Do you know anything about cars?”

“I know how to change tires and oil, that’s about it.”

He shook his head gravely. “I’d sell you this van for $400 if you really wanted it, but you don’t really want it.”

Since that brief exchange, I’ve been noticing cars a lot more. Whenever I see a van, I look at what condition it’s in, I check to see which manufacturer made it. These are things I never noticed before.

(Before we go any further, I want to address the fact that I refer to mini-vans as vans throughout this blog. Please don’t judge me too harshly for it. I just can’t bring myself to write the words my mini-van.)

According to the NPR Car Talk guys (and other experts), the most reliable vans out there are Toyota Siennas and Honda Odysseys. A couple months ago, I began searching for them on the web. I discovered there is a direct relationship between reliability and cost. In general, Siennas and Odysseys seem to cost much more than other vans with similar mileage and features. But, due to my lack of car repair knowledge, I decided to keep hunting until I found a Sienna or Odyssey within my price range.

So about two weeks ago, after lots of internet searching, I found an Odyssey with 100,000 miles on sale for $3,800 on Craig’s List. This seemed like a pretty good deal, so I sent my father to look at it (I was out of town at the time). Although the van’s actual mileage was 138,000, my dad still thought it was a pretty good deal for a van in near excellent shape. He gave them $200 to hold it until I got back.

As soon as I returned from my trip, I went in to see the van. In the time between my dad’s visit and my arrival, the small dealership in Quincy, MA was supposed to change the oil and fix the ABS system if there was a problem (the light was on). When I got there, neither of these things had been done, but I bought the van anyway. The interior was pretty clean, and to me, this was the most important factor.

I didn’t haggle with the salesman, a man in his eighties who joined the army in 1945. The noise his leather jacket made when he moved made me nervous, so I just handed him a bank check for $3,600.

While filling out the paperwork, Bill, the salesman, began telling me about the owner of the dealership. He was in the Marines; hence all the Marine stickers and bulldog stuff. And he’s very much into extreme sports; hence all the scuba diving stickers and sporting paraphernalia. When I asked if the owner was an ex-wrestler, Bill said no. When I pointed to the wrestling shoes behind Bill, he looked, very slowly, leather jacket crinkling noisily, and then looked back at me without saying anything.

Bill handed me some forms to sign and got mad at me because I didn’t sign my middle name even though he had written it on the form. I apologized.

My dad drove me to the insurance guy, a friend of his, who asked me about my driving history. I was glad to have zero accidents to report, but I had to admit about my OUI. He said something about how we were similar, and this made me feel better. My better feeling didn’t last long—my insurance for the year would be around $1,300.

With my insurance information in a manila folder, my dad drove me to the registry. I got new plates. It wasn’t as exciting to hold them in my hands as I thought it would be (I’ve never bought a new or used car before). The numbers on them didn’t mean anything to me.

The next day, my father, a very patient man, drove me back to the dealer to pick up my white, hideously ugly, soccer-mom Odyssey.

Bill was in a very different mood; he seemed friendlier post sale. He asked me about my road trip. Up until that point, I had no idea my father had told him about the trip.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going all the way to California.” I didn’t tell him I was coming straight back to Brockton, MA after hitting the West Coast—I thought the trip would seem more impressive if it lacked a definitive (and rather lame) ending.

“Do you surf?” Bill asked.

I admitted I did not, wondering why this dealership was so bent on crazy-ass sports.

“It doesn’t matter. Just make sure you bring a board with you, or buy the cheapest one when you get there. Girls don’t care whether or not you know how to surf; they just wanna see that board.”

I nodded profusely, and suddenly felt mystified by the old man.

He helped me screw my new plates into the Odyssey, and as I started up the vehicle and put it into drive, he said, “Change the oil regularly—you’ll make it to Huntington Beach no problem.”

Although his sentiment was nice, I immediately regretted not telling him I had to get back home in the Odyssey. What if he was selling me this van thinking I wouldn’t need it past California (past California?)? What if he didn’t realize my trip was going to be 8,000 miles both ways due to my penchant for zigzagging? What if the van was only good for 3,000 miles? What if it was only good for a straight shot? The trip I have planned is anything but.

I pulled out of the lot and immediately turned on the radio. I hate driving without music. The last station the last driver (hopefully a person obsessed with routine auto maintenance despite the holistic medicine brochures s/he left in the glove box) had listened to was 100.7 WZLX, classic rock, a station I listen to on a regular basis. The song playing was Phil Collins’ Take Me Home.

In the days before purchasing the van, I’d been hoping the first song I heard in it would serve as a kind of omen. I’m a person who often asks, when I first meet people (at bars), “What song would you want to be playing on the radio if you died in a car wreck?”

Take Me Home was a bad omen. If I could have picked any song to NOT hear when I first turned on the radio, I probably would’ve picked Take Me Home—seriously.

Although I felt an incredible urge to change the station, I listened to the song through to its conclusion—this seemed important somehow. When a commercial followed, I changed the station repeatedly, desperately searching for something uplifting, or fun, or something. In the entire ride from Quincy to Brockton (25 minutes) I found nothing. It felt like an incredibly long time to not find something nice.

The next day, the day I’d been dreading the most, I took the Odyssey to my mechanic, my friend, Mike the Married Mechanic (no one calls him this to his face). He’d just gotten married two weeks earlier. I was an usher in his ceremony, and I appreciated the fact that he’d saved me from having to pick out my own clothes.

I pulled the car into the lot of his garage. Mike approached after waving from inside one of the bays.

“Should I shut it off?” I asked.

“You afraid it won’t turn back on?” Mike asked, shaking his head. Mike’d wanted me to get an American car. I’d wanted an American car also, but was worried when I didn’t see any of them atop the list of most reliable vans.

I shut off the van.

I was out of my element, Mike could sense this; I would’ve admitted it. I’ve done my best in the course of our friendship to conceal my ignorance of all matters motor. I feel like a dog outside of his yard when I bring my car to Mike’s garage. I’m a couple years older, I’m bigger, and I’m probably a bit stronger than Mike, but when I’m in that garage, my tail is between my legs. Of course, I’d still rather bring my car to him than anyone else.

Whenever Mike and I go out, I find myself nodding and saying, “Yep, yep, yep,” when the subject of cars is inevitably brought up. I’m sure he can see right through me. He doesn’t drink much.

After finishing up the car ahead of mine, Mike took the keys from me and brought the Odyssey into the bay. Once inside, he held the wheel and looked at me. “It’s hesitating,” he said, shaking his head again. I was sure I’d purchased a $4,000 lemon—the book trip would have to be cancelled. My company/I couldn’t survive a $4,000 loss.

Mike shut off the van and checked under the hood. He pulled out a spark plug (I think) and showed it to me. “It doesn’t need a tune-up,” he said. “But I will put in some acid, some de-gunker.”

“Is that a big deal?” I asked.

Mike shook his head and continued looking. He slammed the hood shut and raised the van up on the lift. He searched the undercarriage for oil leaks and any other problems. Then he took off all four tires and checked the brakes. He was surprisingly quiet during all of this. I took his silence as a bad sign.

After lowering the van, I asked if anything was seriously wrong with it.

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head, and I could see he wasn’t happy to have found no major problems. “This thing will get you where you need to get.”

I shook his hand and thanked him.

“It’s gonna fail inspection,” Mike said. “There’s a leak in the exhaust. But it’s no big thing. The dealer will repair it. They have to.”

Mike was right. It failed inspection.

I brought the Odyssey back to the dealer, and after a bit of arguing, they agreed to replace the offending piece of the exhaust (a life-changing victory for me). They also agreed to change the oil. My dad picked me up at the dealer, and then drove me back four hours later when they called to say the van was ready.

I pulled out of the parking lot, without protesting the fact that they still hadn’t changed the oil, and, fearing the worst, turned on the radio. Between the time I dropped it off and the time I picked it up, someone had turned on the radio and changed the station. I’d left it on a classic rock station, but the song pumping through my feeble system was Believe by Cher.

Really, this isn’t a song I would normally rock out to—but if you’re ever looking to recover from Phil Collins, listen to Cher’s Believe. You will be confident in your Odyssey . . . you will believe in life after love.