There is a bit of a holiday atmosphere in New Brunswick today, though one of those more trepid holidays whose outcome is uncertain. More like the speech to be given by a new and unpredictable leader than the trotting out of an old tired routine that carries on year to year. This sense is augmented by the presence and infusion of thousands of new young students just arriving at the campus, students whose memories of coming to college will be as much dominated by Hurricane Irene as the class of 2005’s were by 9/11.

One can just start to feel it, the last couple hours, the burgeoning clouds harbinging the dark bands of green, yellow, red, pink to follow. One has to wonder what hurricanes were like before the advent of Doppler and schools of meteorology, how well attuned or not human beings were to the little clues in the sky and the air that whisper to take cover, to barricade, to hole up. Surely most birds and squirrels survive hurricane-force winds and the foot or so of rain we’re expected to get, so it’s possible within all of us to detect what’s on the horizon. Earthquakes, like the one last week, perhaps less so, though there’s much documentation of animalian recourse in such events. One has to wonder how much of our inner eye we shut down by maintaining so many optical and audial distractions, the bells and whistles of the entertainment culture.

I’m riding it out here, twenty-some miles inland and well uphill on the banks of the old Raritan. There’s entirely too much glass on the fringes of this apartment, but all of it is at least somewhat shielded and staying here will help me move stuff out of the way of any wind and rain that lobbies a tree branch or other debris to help it get in. I have to admit to a certain giddy fascination with what it’ll be like to pass time in or near the eye of such a storm, recalling childhood evenings staying up late to watch coverage of storms battering Florida and feeling the precipice of Earth’s ultimate dictation over its most hubristic species. The camera is poised as well, just in case there’s any dramatic footage to be gleaned – footage that will almost certainly have to wait a couple days to see the Internet since no one expects power to run through the circuits here for a day or two amidst Irene.

Even with all the modern technology, technology that (it should be noted) was developed by and for governments and in spite of capitalism, we can’t ever predict exactly where a hurricane will go. It’s always possible it floats a bit out to sea, possible it jams inland and gives us mostly a miss. And indeed that minor variability reflects that larger variability of the circumstances of life itself, how little control we have over the minute bounces and rolls that end up making such a difference. Where I choose to park today could be a matter of inches between the Prius ending up under a whomping willow or unscathed but for being strewn with a handful of wet leaves. Slight calculations or guess can be made, the same speculation we approach any decision or choice with, convincing ourselves we have far more information and security about the future than we ever do. Perhaps events of nature are exciting not only because they remind us how fragile we are in the face of larger forces, but especially because undetermined outcomes open the conduits to possibility and remind us, perhaps paradoxically, how much freedom we really could exert if we just opened our minds.

Ultimately, though, the storm’s greatest volatility could come from people themselves. As the trappings of normal society start to go on hiatus, the ramping up of fear and uncertainty with undoubtedly impact different people in different ways. A direct hit on New York City is hard to contemplate. Were the skyscrapers of Manhattan built for hurricane forces? And even if so, how good or serious were such calculations and preparations? And if the sky fell, how much do we trust New Yorkers to keep their feet on the ground?

Ultimately, the storm is a potentially lonely experience. Riding it out solo in a big apartment, facing potential shortages of all trappings of modernity (water, power, communication), one can simulate a personal apocalypse of isolation for a day or two depending on how those small bounces go. It’s possible all of this will be, in a word, overblown, but events like this at least offer the pause to contemplate much time alone in the face of swirling outside unknowns. Which, like the rest of it, is equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. But all parts, in all ways, a useful reminder about where one’s individual life fits in to the larger scope of the winds of change that howl for us all.

It has nothing to do with the price, although the increase doesn’t hurt for putting things in perspective.

I’ve talked about this phenomenon to a few people, but it seems like the kind of thing that’s worth documenting at this juncture as I cancel Netflix today, because I think it has some implications for broader incentives and how money messes with people’s better motivations. I’m also considering creating a “War on Capitalism” category for posts here because the broader “Politics…” one is starting to feel like it’s getting thrown at too many disparate ideas. We’ll see.

Anyway, I like movies. Quite a bit, I feel, perhaps more than most people. Although I traditionally don’t like watching movies at home. I’ve spent a lot of time discerning why I love movies in theaters and am kind of annoyed, generally, by the process of watching movies at home. Most of it, I’ve found, is about immersion. I’m able to really lose myself in a film and the world it’s creating when it’s on the big screen in a huge dark room and I don’t control the timing of the event. It is just that: an event. I cannot pause the movie, I cannot rewind it, I cannot determine the parameters of the environment. I am part of something larger and bearing witness and thus I have no choice but to let go and be captive to the universe around me. Whereas that element of control that a remote offers, combined with the reduced sound and size and co-viewers, saps the surreality from the perspective and reminds me, repeatedly, that this is just a movie I’m choosing to watch and I can break the spell of illusion any time I want.

And that immersion gap is the hinge point for a lot of my enjoyment of experiencing a film. If I’m constantly hyper-aware of the fact that I’m in a fictional space with fictional characters, I’m far less likely to learn anything from what they’re trying to illustrate. The reason I like fiction is that there’s more truth in it than the often blatantly biased “non-fiction” presentation of an argument or perspective. If I’m continually being reminded that it’s just a bunch of actors, then that goes out the window. Which it can, because I’m in a room with windows, as opposed to the theater.

But I’ve been able to put up with shifting gears to a lot of home-watching, first because Em and I were trying to save money after moving to Jersey (and she had spent years lobbying me to watch more at home because she liked couching it, which makes her citation of that as a flaw in our relationship thereafter so unfair and ridiculous) and then later after she’d robbed me. It’s not as much fun, but I did it enough that I got used to it and didn’t mind so much. And then, in the last six months or so, I started noticing a creeping phenomenon from Netflix subscription that was having a detrimental impact on my life.

Netflix is a subscription service, and an unlimited one at that, with the only restriction on one’s capacity for utilizing it being how many movies one wants to pay for at a time and how quickly one can turn those movies over. There is also streaming, sure, but I forgot to buy a laptop with an HDMI port and thus my connecting it to the TV screen is extremely complicated and requires unhooking my desktop speakers and a bunch of other garbage, making it unpalatable. And I really don’t like watching movies on the laptop itself, since that’s a whole extra stairstep down in the immersion factors discussed above. Once in a while I’d watch something in bed with a headache, but the reduced immersion made it almost a non-starter.

So for the most part it’s about turning DVD’s over. And one has this pressure in the back of one’s mind that makes it clear that the value of the subscription is maximized by turning over the most number of DVD’s possible. Ideally, from an economic perspective, one would watch ever DVD the day it arrived and ship it back that night. This would make the price per movie the lowest possible and thus maximize the value of the service.

As a result, even though I am often able to resist economic motives and urges, I would feel this light but needling pressure to watch movies whenever they were available so I could ship them back and get more movies. The irony being, of course, that the reward for satiating this feeling of pressure was the opportunity to feel it again, sooner and more frequently. Which I feel is actually true of a lot of capitalist motivations, when it comes down to it.

This becomes especially problematic when what I most want to do at home most of the time is either read or work on a creative project. Given that I’ve mostly been reading library books lately, or books purchase for me or a while ago, there’s no economic pressure there. And creative projects, except for the occasional “next big thing” to win the Internet, are also the opposite of a financial incentive. Both of those pursuits tend to be ends in themselves, where the process of doing them is their own reward. Whereas watching movies, something that should probably also be an end in itself, had been corrupted by Netflix implying how I could best value its service.

The problem, of course, is that I actually prefer doing things that are an end in themselves, but frequently would choose to watch a movie because of this slight monetary motive. There were several nights in sequence when I was really into my book and would prefer to read it, but somewhat begrudgingly forced myself to watch a movie first so I could turn it over. This, my friends, is insane behavior. It’s totally irrational and it’s exhibit 342001389B in why capitalism is crap.

So I’m unhooking myself from the machine. In retrospect, maybe it’s entirely about the price. Obviously if Netflix were a free service, I’d feel none of the economic compulsion and thus be content to keep it for the occasional filmy distraction. But it’s just that, a distraction, stealing time from the pursuits I actually prefer. And I hear they have DVD’s at libraries from time to time, so I’m not completely stranded on that front if I want to have a movie night. Libraries, one of the few bastions of salvation from this collective insanity we’ve all decided to embrace in society so it can motivate us to ruin our lives.

People ask all the time why kids love video games but generally seem to hate going to school. Why people will spend a lot of time diligently devoting themselves to baseball statistics or the arcane rules of a particular game or even Angry Birds or how their cell phone works, but not apply the same steadfast energy to chemistry or the latest novel they’ve been assigned to analyze. It’s often not a question people investigate seriously or intellectually; more often, they’ll simply throw up their hands and say “kids these days” or decry the collapse of attention spans and young minds.

What they often overlook, as is becoming somewhat trendy to observe, is that there’s actually a lot of effort and even intellectual curiosity going into these alternate pursuits. There’s creative problem solving and collaboration and sometimes almost obsessive dedication. It just happens to be to the “wrong” things. Or as I’ll explain in a minute, I don’t think it “happens” to be to that at all. I think it’s obvious and measurable exactly why some things get attention from the younger generations of our era and others get ignored to the aghast gasping of old-school academics and their ilk that everything is about to collapse.

Video games and other time-consuming pursuits of the genre are structured around motivating a certain series of behaviors. And many of them, especially the best ones (e.g. the much-maligned Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMORPGs [e.g. World of Warcraft or WoW, which you've almost certainly heard of]) do an almost insidious job at motivating their player to achieve the goals desired at the expense and detriment of everything else in their life. The rewards are frequent and satisfying and there are always more goals and rewards to unlock, all amidst a fun and interactive environment to partake in. Contrast this with traditional classroom learning or the traditional workplace, where the main goal to achieve is simply putting in hours, regardless of accomplishment or function. There are goals and rewards to unlock, potentially, but the main goal and reward is being at an appointed place for an appointed time when expected and surrounded by others doing the same thing.

Indeed, this motivation, something my Dad and I have called “time in the seat” since my first serious rebellions against education in the late 1980’s, is the fundamental core of the modern Western life. People are not recognized or acknowledged so much for what they do or even how they do it, but when they do it. And not even when they do it so much as for how long. The person who works 60 hours a week is automatically respected more than the person who works 40 (let alone 20 or 30), no matter what they’re actually doing with that time. They could be surreptitiously playing eight hours of Minesweeper while no one is looking over their shoulder at their computer screen, but people will nod sagely and say that this is a better worker than someone putting in 20 hours of brilliantly focused work and otherwise out living their life.

Thus we see that Minesweeper itself, unlike our school and work places, actually motivates people to minimize how long it takes to complete a given task. And one ends up spending a long time, or long enough, mastering and perfecting that task in order to complete it more minimally the next time around. While school and work actually motivate and incentivize people to maximize the amount of time it takes to do a given thing, because that will prolong the time in the seat and fill the hours or enable one to work longer and thus get more respect and/or money.

It’s no coincidence that pay is traditionally doled out by the hour in our society and those like it, or that schools are paid for the number of full days of attendance logged by their students. And even for the increasing army of “exempt” non-hourly-paid employees, their respect and prestige tends to correspond to how long they can be seen “slaving” away at the office, yet only an excellent supervisor or trained eye will be able to see the person actually working smarter and harder, not just longer and longer. These incentives and motivations are precisely backwards, and among the best and brightest actually create a very common and extremely pernicious impact.

This impact is to actually sandbag productivity in the effort to make something challenging or interesting or actually push oneself to develop. Almost everyone I know will recognize this from their own college days, but I’m sure many have also done this during high school and work. The phenomenon is centered around procrastination of a given task or duty, not because one is lazy or disinterested, but because the procrastination itself builds a sort of excitement or pressure around then having to complete the work in a short period of time. And that pressure supplants the lack of excitement or push to learn or grow or exert effort normally found in a school/work environment, building a learning curve and a thrill of challenge that the work would otherwise go without. And almost universally, inevitably, the work completed under such circumstances is better than that completed over a slow plod or mincing hours of working laboriously. It’s fresher, it breathes with the passion of a looming deadline, and it reflects the rise to the occasion so often seen as a result of a human pushed to their capacity.

So what’s the solution? Is Storey just railing again with another problem and no fixes? Or is he going to suggest something absurd like having us all play MMORPGs instead of working? Fear not, friends, for I have the most obvious solution in the world.

School is the easy one – work’s a tiny bit trickier. But we need to unleash school students of all ages from their annual fixed rate of progress. Graduation from high school – not a GED or quick-fix substitute, but actual full graduation – should have no implied age. One should be able to complete the full work of high school assignments at any pace they so desire. Maybe people have to get kicked out of high school by 22 or 25 or something to keep things moving along, but there are otherwise no restrictions on pace of work. Assignments are available to be taken on at any point – the only catch is that when an assignment is given, it comes with a fixed deadline X number of days thereafter. But if you want to do three grades’ worth of work at a time and graduate at 11, you’re welcome to try.

Suddenly under such a system, which would take roughly the same resources as status quo, just more open-minded teachers and a more flexible attitude overall, everyone in school would be motivated. Don’t like high school? Get out quick! Bored with a subject? Finish it in days! Your motivation would be not just to play a game for grades or to goof off in the back of class for a diversion, but to actually absorb material, demonstrate mastery, and get moving with your actual life. Even if this system took more resources to try to deal with all the people flying around at an individual pace, the job satisfaction and ease of work increase from dealing with people who want to be learning would be exponential. You’d basically turn school into a video game with checkpoints that can be completed faster and better with more obsessive play.

Work can be trickier because there’s sometimes the need for people to have meetings and, worse, committees. But I think the same basic rules apply. Release all hourly requirements and restrictions. Have each job assigned a pile of tasks. These tasks must be completed by X time and short of that, however much or little you have to work to do that well is done. This even works for construction and ditch-digging and some of the worst jobs imaginable, because you’d suddenly be incentivized to complete projects faster rather than take your time and milk them for hours. Lawyers would no longer be limited to billable hours, but freed up to try to streamline the efficiency with which tasks were completed. About the only thing I can’t figure are certain service jobs where a place is open for X amount of time and people have to be there to anticipate that. Then again, outside of maybe restaurants, most of these jobs are being replaced by online retailing. And I think that’s great, because most of those jobs being replaced are no fun at all.

The human mind was not meant to pursue things for fixed amount of hours every day. It craves creativity, spontaneity, new thinking, innovation. It is not greed that motivates us to such things, but flexibility and our own internal motivations of wanting to get things done. If the motivation were to speed up this process, then synergies and opportunities would continue to rise exponentially. Instead, our society languishes in the doldrums of clock-watching. No wonder we’re disproportionately overweight, saddled with back problems and stress and all the other collateral damage of life glued to chairs for fixed amounts of time. We need to get up, get out, get going, and get faster. And we can’t do that with the number 2080 (or a larger one) around our necks like a stone collar.

Free your time and the mind will follow.

First, a full disclosure. I have seen the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 four (4) times in theaters. I started seeing scenes from the movie in dreams, in waking moments when I would sit idle for a brief time, started quoting and reciting passages in everyday conversation. It got so bad I decided to reread the book under the extremely thin excuse that I had a British copy of the book (a gift a year ago from a close friend who’d visited Britain) and I hadn’t read the version with extra u’s in it yet. It should be noted that I have reread perhaps five or six books in my entire life, at least once I got past the echelon of tomes authored by one D. Seuss. This is a rare occasion, but one I started before viewing four but didn’t complete till after it.

I have also done ancillary reading and research on Harry Potter, with particular focus on this installment of the book and the film. The film was more excellent in my first couple viewings than it seemed in rereading the book. Especially the final bits, which are so much better conveyed in the book. The movie did a good job of making me forget how much better the book was because it, itself, was good. I read reviews, I read analyses, I signed up for Pottermore, I was just eating and breathing a whole HP world for something like a month.

And throughout, despite most people joining with me in the belief that Harry Potter is excellent overall, that the movie was generally a great adaptation of the book, that the book was an excellent conclusion to the series (possible qualms about the deus ex machina survival of Harry aside – and no, you don’t get a spoiler alert, because look at the title of this post and have you been living under a rock?), and so on, there has been one almost universal critique. Everyone hates the epilogue. Everyone, I should note, except me.

When I first read it, I adored the epilogue. I thought it was maybe a tiny bit too pat as far as there being no trouble at all in the last line, but otherwise every prior word was great. And I couldn’t believe those who criticized it after comparing notes. And now I’ve had the opportunity to see endless lampoonery heaped on it from almost every corner, to the point where people are attributing all but the very ruination of Harry Potter itself as a phenomenon to a few thin pages under the banner of Nineteen Years Later. So allow me, if you will, a bit of time to defend what I think is a key part of Harry Potter’s literary ascendance from great young adult reading to true literature.

By far the shallowest and yet most pervasive critique of the epilogue is that it doesn’t make any sense that everyone (or the key figures at least) marries the person they’re with throughout the duration of Book 7. Prominently, of course, that Harry marries Ginny and Ron marries Hermione. Now we can leave aside doubts about Ron and Hermione’s coupling to begin with, but that doesn’t seem to be the objection most people have. No, they say, it’s obvious that people have to go through lots of cycles with tons of people after school before finding the people they marry and this is an amateurish attempt to make the fans happy.

First of all, how many of these people have ever been through a war? Like, in their homeland? Have you ever seen the impact that trying circumstances, that life-or-death traumatic situations have on people’s relationships? They bind people together like little else. It’s an unfortunate fact that timing plays an enormous role in who we end up with (don’t make me dwell on this too much right about now), and the sense of timing can greatly be enhanced by the kind of urgency and meaning that being close to death infuses into a situation. The fact that so many of these couples from the 7th year at Hogwarts stay together to marriage is actually evidence that JK Rowling has great insight into actual human behavior and is the opposite of amateurish.

It should also be noted that the wizarding world clearly matures and marries at an overall younger age than its more modern counterparts. Surely you’ve noticed there’s no university education in wizarding Britain. Hogwarts is an amalgam of the classic boarding school and college. Graduating Hogwarts makes you a full wizarding adult, so it naturally follows that this is chronologically more like university than high school. And that makes finding a mate at that time far more reasonable and understandable than the lampooners portray.

I can’t really figure out why else people hate the epilogue – many of the critiques seem to just sort of see it as self-evident. I’ve heard that the whole thing, not just the last line, is too pat. I think it should be noted here that JK Rowling had sworn off writing anything more about the Harry Potter world (something she’s already repeatedly gone back on, but she must’ve believed it at the time), so she was trying to wrap up a whole landscape she didn’t want to revisit. To do that with an ending in the rubble of Hogwarts would be far more unsatisfying than to provide some sort of perspective and closure, besides opening the door wide for endless speculation and clamoring for sequels. It seems Rowling wanted to get very much away from being pigeonholed as a writer the rest of her career and that, possibly sadly, she’s being forced back into that comfort zone, whether it’s from the pressure of expectations or her own nervousness at failing at something else. The point is, only by offering some closure and making it seem as unadventurous and unthrilling as possible could she have a hope at ending the series instead of turning 7 books into 10 or 14 or 21. And I think that’s perfectly reasonable. Any opening for major ongoing conflict or strife would’ve been an invitation to that expansion.

It’s also worth noting the beauty of the narrative arc that’s completed in the closing of the scene on Platform 9.75, which is far more evident and obvious from the movie than it is from the book. (I also think the movie gives a slight out for people who don’t like the epilogue – the three protagonists close their eyes while holding hands on the bridge at the close of the main part of the movie, making it possible to believe they are all envisioning what their future will be like in 19 years and possibly even apparating to that vision. Watch it again – it’s there.) The close reminds us that each generation has its challenges, just as Harry struggles with in relation to all the people of his parents’ generation and their struggle against the same foe. By stringing us back to the place where it began, we can find our place in the cycle of life now as an older generation thinking of others to come after us, having grown up with Harry and the series. It’s, in a word, brilliant. It seems obvious that for the real impact of the entire effort to be felt, we need something expository like this to put the whole trajectory and experience in perspective, especially given how much speculating about even having a future that Harry does during the book and the entire series.

Not only do we get to see what Harry’s life on borrowed time came to, that he fulfilled the simple desires of life that we all forget to appreciate while we’re enjoying them because few of us came back from the dead, but we get to put ourselves on that train anew and remember where we’ve come from as Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione are doing on that platform. You can also believe that it’s about seeing everyone off to safety and happily ever after, but even the pat ending that Harry isn’t bothered anymore doesn’t promise that it’ll always be that way. But now we’re speculating about future lives of characters we don’t even know, making our insistence to hear their story less important than its reflection on our own lives.

You don’t have to be as obsessed as I strangely became with this work of art to recognize that it’s really excellent literature that takes the next step and has something meaningful to say to all of us. I just wish people could trust the author enough to recognize the merit of the whole work, not just the parts they particularly like. Even the deus ex machina is growing on me, which is real proof that Rowling’s won my respect, word by word.

I actually bought furniture the other day. New furniture. New furniture other than an office chair. I’ve basically never done this in my life. Emily and I bought a new bed when we lived in Berkeley, mostly at her insistence. She kept that one. Other than that, I’ve never bought anything more impressive than an office chair new. And suddenly I have a new plush microfiber overstuffed couch, armchair, and ottoman. It’s pretty surreal. For the last half-week, my living room has smelled like a furniture store and I keep walking by doing Krameresque starts every time I see the chocolate brown comfort that has invaded my quarters.

A funny thing happened on the way to exchanging meaningless electronic representations of meaningless green pieces of paper for fabric-covered stuffing, though. I was having a nice conversation with a pretty competent salesman who seemed genuinely interested in debate (either he was really good or really interested) and then, right after he’d quizzed me about all the ways he could improve his own public speaking (and thus, presumably, sales), he offered to make a side-bet with me. He offered to bet me money about the longevity of the furniture he was selling me.

To be fair, he offered to bet the furniture store’s money with me about this. On behalf of the store. Yes, folks, he offered me an insurance plan. An extended warranty. A fee for replacing the furniture, whatever happens to it. And I had been enjoying the interaction, so I did my best not to get angry.

Insurance has become a common, accepted, and even well-liked thing in our society. There’s a lot of rhetoric, some of it well-lampooned in this recent mac-n-cheese commercial campaign (I think it was in front of a movie or a YouTube clip at some point, because I don’t know how I otherwise would’ve seen it) about “security”, “peace of mind”, and “safety” associated with insurance. And since our government has decided to guarantee us almost none of these things in the US, it’s not terribly surprising that we go looking for it from corporations. The problem is that corporations are sleek, well-evolved, profit-making machines that have no regard for anything else. Kind of like sharks without the remorse.

So insurance is nothing of the kind. It’s a wager that I’m invited to make against myself. It’s saying that I bet I will cost myself more than the bet on the table through my own stupidity or contact with danger or, in this case, likelihood of ruining furniture. It’s saying that I want something bad to happen to me so I don’t look like a dummy for making this bet in the first place. Or at least lowering the possibility of my best-case outcome to losing that bet. And increasingly, corporations are offering them at every turn. Warranties and insurance on almost every item (maybe not quite macaroni – yet), deals and offers that sound so good. For just a little extra, you can make sure that you don’t have to be careful in that rental car or with that chair or on that hotel visit. Almost nothing that costs more than $100 these days is sold without the offer of a tack-on fee for replacing it.

The problem, of course, besides the philosophical issues with betting against oneself, is that these profit-seeking missiles know the bet is rigged in their favor. They have armies of staff evaluating and bean-counting and figuring out how to maximize profit and have it outstrip any potential liability from people signing up for insurance. The odds have been critically determined, proven, and reproven, to be against you any time you take that bet. Because otherwise, they would have no incentive whatsoever to offer you the bet in the first place. And trust me, the furniture store knows more about furniture costs and longevity than you do. The car company knows more about cars, the macaroni company… you get it. So they know that they’re going to make money on that bet, regardless of what happens. Maybe you’ll take it and get lucky and need a replacement, upgrading your stolen insurance money to a lottery ticket. But since when were lottery tickets sold at furniture outlets?

So when my otherwise friendly salesman looks me in the eye and offers me a $129 bet that I’m going to want to take the scissors into my chair at some point in the next 5 years and get a brand-new one for free, I say no thanks. Granted, there’s also a small moral compunction here that makes me recognize that, were I ruthless capitalist, I would throw the furniture off the roof about 4.5 years into my 5-year term and then say “oops, look what I did – I guess I need new stuff now” and that there would be this Friedmanesque voice in the back of my head telling me I was a fool if I didn’t do that if I made the $129 bet. Of course, there’s also the other issue that the new stuff would presumably come with a new bet, maybe $159 now since I’d proven I was risky, for that furniture. And if I was the kind of guy who took the bet in the first place, I should surely take it again. And that’s how these things guarantee that they make money no matter what, because the odds of you calling in that bet sequentially are pretty low, and by that time you’ve basically paid for the full price of the replacement furniture.

There’s a reason that gift cards are everywhere now, vast quantities of them hanging tantalizingly on racks at every grocery store and convenience shop. There’s a reason everyone wants to tack on a warranty and tries harder to sell you that than the initial item itself. There’s a reason three cents of soda sells for a couple bucks at most places and five or seven at movies and plane stations. And you really have the audacity to tell me that this is efficiency? Really?

Quick update here to observe the passing of the theme here at StoreyTelling as this incarnation of the blog steams toward its fourth anniversary to be achieved in October. I’m going to more or less let this theme speak for itself, though the color scheme is full of the kind of bold dark warm colors that I really most enjoy. It’s almost nifty enough that I might ride out the October change this year, especially since there was no pumpkin-carving party last year from which to draw thematic imagery.

Facebook’s been obsessed with telling me that it’s two years to the day since Emily and I arrived in Jersey after our summer roadtrip in 2009. My update recounting the stats there (39 days, 6,200 miles, 16 states) has eerily reminded me how similar said sojourn was to the roadtrip I just wrapped (34 days, 5,800 miles, 25 states). And putting everything in context that no matter how much progress I’m making a building a new life, there are shadows and echoes in my even being here that will be challenging to transcend in daily existence.

My apartment is almost where I want it to be, though, and I’m hoping to have some pictures up on Facebook (and maybe here as well) soon that document the place as one remade in my own efforts as much as possible. The new couch and armchair have already been put to good reading use and while I’m probably going to cancel Netflix, I don’t know if I’m quite going to take the step of taking the TV down altogether. A few things yet to determine, as there always will be – a place one lives in tends to be a living place. And before I know it, I’ll have the whole debate building to decorate as well, or at least my office therein. We’re still on pace for a 1 September opening, but I’m expecting it’ll actually be closer to the 8th or the 15th given how these things tend to run. Still exciting stuff all around.

About to be hurtling headlong into one of the busiest phases of my life. Teaching a class will be an exciting new challenge and the current projections for the size and scope of the debate team are going to test the limits of my capacity and the entire team’s. If last year was our breakout, this year will be the growth spurt, and hopefully we’ll blossom into one of those precociously mature adolescents who everyone’s dazzled by instead of the gangly awkward kid who has more limbs than they know what to do with. Stay tuned.

Recently had the pleasure of meeting Aaron Mandel of Clarion Content, a blog steeped in the same kind of free-thinking lefty slant that I (usually) have and we’ve worked out Duck and Cover’s first syndication deal. There’s a great deal of mutual excitement about this and you should definitely go check out his willingness to hold Obama accountable to an actually progressive standard and other excellent political insights. I may also be writing for CC periodically, but for now it’s another place to get your daily fix of animal puns.

Speaking of which:

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, a quick wrap of impressions I gathered in the 25 states and the District of Columbia on the road. I didn’t really keep a log or a journal of any kind on the road (other than the videos and periodic blog posts hereon), but I did remember forming distinct thoughts about what was different about some of the locations, having not really been to many states outside of the east coast, New Mexico, or California in the last two years.

This will also tie-in nicely with the Facebook-likability of the State Quiz, which joins pretty much all of the other modern still-active quizzes as now being likable on FB. I’m using the graphic images from the SQ for the headers on this little segment.

Away we go:

New Jersey: I can’t believe I still live here. No, in all seriousness, my impression was probably just of how far away New York feels on the Turnpike when NYC is really rather close to New Brunswick. Something strange happens to time when you’re in a vehicle in New Jersey. Everything gets slower… and more dangerous. This became especially true the second time through, when I was literally crying through much of the state as I passed the home exit on the way to 5,000 more miles of what would eventually turn my mood around.

New York: Most of my impressions were about debate and being back in that world as a competitor for just a day, and thus about how happy debating makes me. But beyond that, I think I noticed for the billionth time how much more expensive everything is in New York. There are those who make a lot of the cost of living in the Bay Area, but even if housing is comparable (it isn’t, of course), food and parking and just daily expenses are out of this world in New York. It’s like its own stratosphere of cost. I’m sure there are ways around it if you live there and are diligent, but it just seems exhausting to me.

Connecticut: Connecticut never fails to be the state that is only on the way to other states. Even when the destination is in Connecticut, which is almost never, it still feels like you’re waiting to get to a real place. I’m sure that Yalies and the Gilmore Girls feel differently, but really… this isn’t a state.

Massachusetts: The first time through, it was dark and I was tired, but still impressed at how many exits off the old interstate routes still carry powerful memories for me. This was only amplified by hanging out around Brandeis and even going back to the Taqueria in Waltham. But I was also impressed at how much more reasonable the Boston area seemed in the summer. I’m not much of one for weather/mood correlations and their accompanying theories, but I could make an exception for the people of Massachusetts. I only spent one summer in the Boston area, and it was a great one, though we didn’t get out a whole lot. The city actually seemed warm in a way that it never did in four years there, and I’m not just talking temperature.

New Hampshire: There are no mountains in this state, despite what Stina & Zimmy kept trying to tell me. None. Not a one. Also, it always seems weird to me that New Hampshire has a coast and Pennsylvania doesn’t. Also, as I observed to Stina & Dav at dinner one night, this states is very whitebread.

Maine: I’d never really gone to any coastal parts of Maine before, and I think they underlined for me how interchangeable and identical all coastal tourist towns really are. Don’t get me wrong, I love most of them, and probably not just because I grew up around Seaside, Oregon (though maybe mostly because of that). But they all have such a similar feel and vibe. And as long as it’s not an insane tanning/picking-people-up scene, it’s a really nice vibe. I miss the ocean is really the long and the short of it.

Delaware: Nearly every time I enter or exit Delaware, it blows my mind that the other states let it get away with being what it is. The state is basically one giant troll demanding the payment of tolls because it happens to just barely be in the way. As far as I can tell, this money goes to lining the coffers of DuPont and buying train tickets for Joe Biden. As the economy continues to worsen and states continue to run short on funds, I fully expect Delaware tollbooth workers to simply start ransacking vehicles that make the mistake of pausing at the border-lining booths.

Maryland: I’m trying to remember the context, but someone either on this trip or just before it made fun of me for being able to recognize the color scheme of the Maryland flag in some sort of logo that someone had. This is a very vague memory, I know. But I know most flags and Maryland has a super-distinctive one. Anyway. I know I get this impression every time I go, but Baltimore always impresses me as a friendly, down-to-earth, so much better than the rest of the east coast town. And this trip was no exception. I’m not sure I’d actually be allowed to live there, though, as someone who doesn’t eat fish.

District of Columbia: Holy God, how does anyone drive in this town? I had some really maddening experiences with buses and other transport on this trip, but having a car in the center of the city seems rather akin to being told to extricate yourself from the center of a twenty-mile-wide hive of disgruntled bees. You can theoretically do it, but will you even care by the time you get out? Quickly climbing the list that will still probably forever be topped by NYC, Boston, and SF (in that order) as cities not to be driven in.

Virginia: Despite the alleged gaps on the interstate from the Waffle House site’s WH-finding tool, there are a LOT of Waffle Houses in this state. And by a lot, I mean one every single exit without fail. And sometimes two, just in case you pass the first one. If only Calvin Li had known this when he first tried to lure me into coaching UVA, history may have turned out very differently.

North Carolina: I can’t say enough about how impressed I was by Durham on this trip. The town seemed so great in so many different ways and was exactly the college town that I wish New Brunswick could be. And I really do like the South, mostly, though occasionally certain elements of weird cultural norms will rise up and bite me and remind me that I’m actually in a different place and not just in a drawlier form of the West. Although my other big impression of NC was how pervasive tobacco imagery, iconography, and references were throughout the state. Beth assured me that tobacco has a lot less influence than it did, though I still think I saw a lot more smoking than elsewhere. But it just feels like most people outside NC have realized that tobacco is a terrible scourge on humanity, not something to name districts, towers, and monuments after.

South Carolina: I don’t think I got out of the car in South Carolina, but I hadn’t yet perfected the technique of snapping pictures out the window of the car while driving, so I missed the chance at perhaps the most amazing water-tower I’ve ever seen, painted precisely like a peach with perfect shading. It was gargantuan and right on the highway and missing that picture may literally have been the biggest regret of my trip. I’m sure you can find it on the Internet, though the name of its town currently escapes me.

Georgia: I guess my biggest impression here was how familiar Atlanta felt going through it, even though I’ve only been a couple-few times. Thrice? I think thrice. No, maybe four times. Or five. Maybe this is why I was both familiar and it was surprising. Yeah.

Alabama: Alabama is where the heat started to really get intense, though its impact was magnified by me camping out in it. Obviously Cheaha State Park being the highest point in the state at 2,407 feet made an impression. The whole demeanor of the staff at the Park was also interesting, both in their general skepticism about my camping and especially in their amusement at my question of where I could get fresh fruit. It was kind of like stumbling into some very back woods and realizing that it was really obvious I wasn’t from around there. It was here that I also started to notice, possibly as a defense mechanism to this kind of reaction, that I was adapting my speech to a Southern accent, just slightly around the edges, already. I think I do this all the time when talking to people in subtle and subconscious ways, though. Adapt to their speech patterns, that is, not go Southern.

Mississippi: Mississippi just looked desperate the whole time I was there. If I were going to film a documentary about the economy these days, this is where I would have put down tent-pegs and really started talking to the locals. Maybe Mississippi always looks like this (throughout high school, New Mexico would always be in the running for 50th in a given category among states with Alabama and Mississippi), but by the time I got to Vicksburg, I was feeling like every dollar I spent in the state was like unseen and unexpected manna. Maybe they just don’t get that many summer visitors? I hadn’t started reading As I Lay Dying yet, but that felt like an apt subtitle to the state.

Texas: In this state, I observed how much Nikki’s accent has changed, the result of years of the process I described happening in just a couple days in Alabama. But seriously, I started to notice how hot and dry everything was, especially after driving through slow-down-to-35-on-the-highway-or-just-pull-over thunderstorms every afternoon that suddenly evaporated when I crossed into Texas. It was also funny when Nik and I were the only ones who wanted to sit outside in an early evening in Dallas when it was 104 out. I also remembered, which I’d sort of recalled from Em’s and my roadtrip through there in ‘02, just how lonely the road from Wichita Falls to Amarillo is. It hugs the border of Oklahoma and just sort of rolls on forever between tiny towns that you haven’t heard of. It’s the kind of road only used by people who live in those towns or in Amarillo or Wichita Falls or maybe Dallas, who have reason to get to those places or Albuquerque. Stopping into a Dairy Queen in one of those tiny towns made me feel way more foreign than the State Park in ‘Bama. Oh, also, Harry Potter is the same everywhere. The theater in Amarillo had just as much excitement, geekiness, and sheer joy as any other midnight HP showing in America.

New Mexico: First impression came right away: they made a sort of gate at the entrance of the state that was seriously impressive. But after that, it was amazing how vast the distances of New Mexico normally feel and how short they felt in the context of this trip. Indeed, this was true throughout the trip, but really hit home (if you will) in Nuevo. I really enjoyed driving the 6,000 miles for the most part, and 6-8 hours of driving in a day seemed like no big deal. Normally, that long in the car would depress me, especially without the debate team. It was here when I first started thinking about how roadtrips change your whole state of mind and being, and some of the other things that came up in this post.

Colorado: I did a lot of thinking in Colorado Springs about the way having the Air Force Academy in town impacts the city. Denver and Boulder are serious liberal bastions, but Co Springs is all conservative because of the military influence that the school brings to it and that impact, together with some outlying areas, helps keep the state purple. Which got me to thinking about how many towns rely on bases or military schools or the like and how much more conservative this makes people because their livelihoods and existence feel tied to this thing. It’s like if someone made a monument to an ideology in the center of a town, said their living and ability to have a job or live in that place depended on the welfare of that ideology, and then said go. Which is of course so much of what’s true about all sorts of ideological and military devotion, that it just gets tied to the economics or, to a lesser extent, the personality of people, and then they make it a question of livelihood instead of critical thought. Very insidious, the way these things work. Not a new thought, really, but one that really hit home in Colorado Springs. Also, it was really dumb to go to Colorado Springs, where I’d stayed with Em in ‘09. I remembered loving Manitou Springs and Pike’s Peak and the whole area, but it was precisely because I remembered loving these places that I’d initially bypassed them on the itinerary. Really dumb to alter that on the off chance of camping there, which I didn’t do anyway.

Kansas: Kansas is really not that flat at all. I was expecting this huge gas mileage boon that was totally wrecked by unending hills, at least throughout the western part of the state. Also, Manhattan had to be the biggest disappointment since Colorado Springs (but also the second biggest of the trip). Maybe I couldn’t find the right parts of the town, but this place just did not hold up with the charm and joy I remember it conveying in 1987. Then again, I was 7 then and it was 24 years ago, so maybe I or it or both have changed. Topeka, since 1996, seemed largely the same, though. Also was impressed at how many exits on I-70 in Kansas are trying to build up little random points of interest because they know how little there is for tourists to do in Kansas. I think the Wall Drug model is being deployed in 39 states at various exits, mostly with little or no success. These mostly just made me miss South Dakota, still one of my favorite states in the Union.

Missouri: My impression of Missouri is what most inspired me to write about the trip in this way, because almost immediately upon crossing the border, I noticed an uncanny uptick in the proliferation of billboards. I’m talking random stretch of highway, miles from any town, there would be billboards stacked atop each other and lined up on BOTH sides of the freeway, maybe 300 yards apart, as far as could be seen. Amazing. Not surprisingly, there were also about twenty times as many “your ad here” empty billboards advertising for billboard space as I’ve seen anywhere else. There were stretches where over half of the billboards were advertising that you could buy this billboard. I mused that billboards in Missouri had been like housing in most other states – an unending hyperbolic growth market that suddenly went bust and left countless ads turned out of billboards, but it would always be cheaper to try to sell the space than tear them down. I realized I probably knew only one person who I was sure was from Missouri and resolved to ask Omar Qureshi about this at Hopkins in September.

Illinois: Illinois, outside of Chicago, may be the most regular seeming state ever. There were a lot of empty billboards as well, but nothing like Missouri. Otherwise, the state was just… non-descript. It’s like describing a voice that you really think doesn’t have an accent. Things were just regular. Almost weird in their regularity.

Indiana: Indiana may be the state that I forget about most. Not when I’m trying to name all 50 states in a hurry – then the state I always forget is Delaware. (Maybe THAT’S why they charge so much to pass through – so people remember it’s there!) But whenever I plan a roadtrip across the country, Indiana is almost always somehow involved and I almost always forget it’s going to be there. It’s like “Hm, Chicago, then something in Ohio, right? Why does it take so long? Is something in the way? Oh, Indiana, that’s right.” Every time. I even set a scene in Loosely Based about Indiana as a crossroads because this just seems like what the state is all about. Fortunately, upon crossing the border, it seems to have embraced this role, since its slogan on the sign was something like “Crossroads of America” or “Gateway to America” or something. Basically, in short, Indiana is the Connecticut of the Midwest.

Ohio: I think on this trip I got a better idea than ever before of what a bifurcated state Ohio is. Cleveland is the kind of place that could elect Dennis Kucinich and is urban and has factories and is comparable to Detroit or Chicago or at least sees itself that way. Cincinnati is just a southern city that happens to have a river in the way as a technicality. I’ve observed this before, about each city, having been to both, but it took going in the middle, to Dayton, and bypassing both cities, to really realize that Ohio is a blend of these influences. Dayton is mostly in Cincy’s orbit, it would seem, and this effect was augmented by the Dragons being the single-A affiliate of the Reds. The crowd was just Southern. It was a Southern experience, in Ohio. There’s no better way to put it. The sensibilities, reactions, conversation (I talked to people on either side of me, at their initiation, which tells you just how Southern it was), and look and feel were all Southern. I feel I could have gone 50 miles north and been in the orbit of Cleveland, more hard-nosed, industrial, urban. A little like Colorado, maybe, without the Academy.

West Virginia: There’s this little tip of West Virginia that juts into the gap between Ohio and Pennsylvania and draws the interstates and just makes Delaware look west across the country and salivate at how much unwarranted toll revenue is going uncollected therefrom. Across this 20ish-mile stretch, West Virginia has apparently decided that tolls would distract or even embitter the average visitor against the unending tide of coal propaganda that litters the side of the freeways in both directions. Almost all of these referred to coal as “clean” or “safe” or both. Even the tobacco stuff in NC didn’t have the audacity to plaster the cigarette references with “unaddictive” and “cancer-free”.

Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania is such a big state. It takes crossing it in a day, lengthwise, to really appreciate that. Not big by Western standards, quite, but it would be a decent Western state by size, so it’s a nice antidote to its surrounding Eastern brethren. Unless you’re just tired and lonely and want to be home already when you get there. The freeways are well designed in PA to bypass Pittsburgh and Philly completely if you don’t want to go to either, so that’s nice, but there’s this honking big Turnpike in the middle of the state that charges some really serious tolls. I don’t like paying for road crossings in the best of times (as I’m sure you’ve detected from this post already), but a $12 fee to go only about a third the length of a pay-road is really serious. I wish I could report that the toll roads are really better in some way, but they of course aren’t (read: capitalism is bunk). And this one was especially bad because they were reconstructing it so much and slowing traffic so thoroughly that I almost made a sarcastic remark about having to pay at all to the tollbooth attendant, which is about diametric to my normal character and treatment of said attendants. I was that upset/annoyed about the whole thing. Or perhaps tired, lonely, and wanting to get home.

And when I started this post, I was worried I wouldn’t remember enough to say about each state.

Edit/Addendum: I went and looked up Pennsylvania’s land area to make sure I was neither slighting nor exaggerating its size. Turns out, I was exaggerating. What I should have said, I guess, is that Pennsylvania is a long state, because it’s laughably smaller than any Western state. Except, y’know, Hawaii, which is still larger in land area than New Jersey. (Amazing, huh? Think about that. Hawaii has more land than New Jersey.) To give you an example of scale of magnitude, you could fit Penn into New Mexico over two and a half times. Put another way, Pennsylvania is roughly comparable to Malawi while New Mexico is roughly comparable to Poland. Even the smallest of the non-Hawaii Western states, Washington, is over 1.5 times the size of Pennsylvania. If Pennsylvania were a Western state, it would look freakishly small and all the other states would make fun of it. It’s 33rd in the nation in land area. Then again, Idaho is larger in land area than either Washington or Utah, a fact (all this is from Wikipedia, bee-tee-dubs) that makes me think Wikipedia was recently hacked by a geographic terrorist. Nope, the edits look right. Wow. New York is larger than Penn. Mississippi is. Basically, I really stepped in it with that comparison. But rather than change that, I’ve added this addendum. More fun, don’t you think?

While it is hard to be alone and harder to pass through towns where memories abound, there is an upside to roadtrip living to be found even in the midst of having one’s life ruined. It is arguably the reason for going on roadtrips in the first place, but it’s most vital to remember that the underlying issue here is a reminder, not a conduit to the only way of living that way. This is a giant note-to-self, yes, but also a note-to-others who may find themselves mired in daily life not on the road, to daily routines or travails that are tiresome and yawn before one like an unending maw of drudgery.

What am I talking about?

When one is on the road, one lives a certain way. There is an expectation to each day, it dawns full of promise, one has a plan or schedule (or maybe no plan and no schedule!) or at least the outline of possibility. One makes demands from one’s day. “I will have fun today!” one says to one’s day. There’s an expectation of seeing people, doing something outgoing and entertaining, eating at restaurants one chooses and likes. There is a vacation/holiday atmosphere, by definition. Even when alone, I’ve been playing cards or seeing baseball games or camping, and when with friends there’s all the trappings of seeing old friends and hanging out. Even if one just hangs out all day, a day with friends is a special time. The point is that every day becomes special and savored on a trip.

But the larger point of living this way ought be the realization that it is not the trip that makes it so. It is merely that this is what we come to expect from living on a roadtrip. (Or I do, at least. It must be noted that some people don’t travel much and others get super-stressed and crazy whenever they do and so don’t actually enjoy it or let go.) One builds in Waffle House visits or even gets the thrill of Frosted Flakes being available as part of the free hotel continental breakfast (an old trip tradition for me that still makes me feel eight years old and excited about the world again). And suddenly one is atop the world, able to control one’s destiny and steer a course, even in the wake of heartache and homesickness. There is something about the coverage of land and the unknowns of a day that portends excitement that courses with energy through one’s veins. This surely must have been what drove the wagon trains west, the migrants of any era across their respective seas, the oldest of our ancestors out of our first primal valley.

But again, it need not only be so when on the road. It is easy on the road, intuitive, the very nature of being away from a daily routine dictates the thrills and elation and hope. But the challenge of life after a roadtrip is to build as much of that energy as possible into regular daily life. Which arguably is a challenge to not live anything that could be labeled as a “regular daily life”. Which is not to say that one can’t have a schedule or a routine or a day job, but merely that each day at home can be viewed the same way as a day on the road. Time is what we’re given and some of us may feel like there’s too much of it (okay, maybe that’s just me). But time is also an opportunity and there’s no difference between the me who feels all this possibility out here in Kansas or Colorado or Mississippi or whatever and the me who feels stuck in Jersey, or indeed whenever I get too tied down to a day job or a set of commitments. The context is different, but the potential is the same. So trips like this are not just to take a break from the routine, but to actually try to break the routine, to harness the energy of real life and raw openness on the road and apply it to daily life back on the home field.

It’s all, of course, easier said than done. There are tangible reasons why it’s intuitive to feel this way out here and intuitive to feel laden and squashed back home. But just remembering and reminding are a good start. A lot of it is about how you look at your day, a mere matter of perspective. Demand something from your day (these are instructions to me, but also to you). Insist that you will take time to be creative, to think, to do something that matters regardless of the context of your life. Something you’d be proud of. Something you’ll want to remember on your deathbed. Make contact with people, just because they’re there. Even if you won’t get to see them for years, reach out. Let them know they’re loved. It is the connections we have with other people and with the creative cognizance of our own souls that really matter in this life. The rest is just figuring out a way to maximize that. Or it should be.

Go. Do. Be. Pretend you’re on a roadtrip for the rest of the week. I’ll be trying every week to come for a long time.

(Remind me to do this if I seem to forget.)

1. I am in Kansas!
2. Kansas is not as flat as you think it is.
3. I am going to Manhattan, Kansas this evening, which I’m afraid will be very dull. It was really fun when I was there in 1987. I was an impressionable 7-year-old.
4. The Seattle Mariners have lost fifteen (15) games in a row.
5. I have not seen anyone I know for thirty-two (32) hours. It will be even longer before I see someone I know again.
6. I will be in Topeka tomorrow, a key setting in Loosely Based. I have not been there since I wrote said novel.
7. I used to regularly compare things to “the size of Topeka” to indicate their largeness.
8. “Largeness” is probably not a word, but Firefox has not red-squiggleyed it for spelling. Firefox has now chosen to red-squiggley “squiggleyed”. And “squiggley”.
9. I get a little punchy on the road. This mood is preferable to the incredibly sad/angry spells I get at least once an hour when on the road alone these days.
10. This list has more than ten facts.

Leaving Albuquerque today, a few days later than anticipated originally. About a week away from Jersey, probably less. Going to pick up some baseball on the long lonely road home while probably seeing no one I know till Philadelphia. That should be interesting. I cannot claim that at this moment I feel great about that fact, but I’m hoping to pick up some momentum out there on the American highways I am so familiar with.

Saw Bob Dylan a few days back with my Dad. There’s a 4th Facebook album for those of you following along but not on FB. About the sixth time I’ve seen Dylan if I had to guess – I’m sure I could piece it together with information on this site in various places. The show seemed to me like it was all about divorce, but then, it would. A lot of his songs tore me to shreds in their melancholy beauty, but “Visions of Johanna” was the highlight of the night, followed closely by “Simple Twist of Fate”. The heartbreak in this universe is astounding and thank God we have the poets to try to capture little droplets of it, like stoppered tears in a bottle, to distill our pain and help us understand it and maybe compel us not to pass it on.

Maybe.

Leaving New Mexico, like departing from almost anywhere in the West for points east, always provides this little pang in the back of my mind. This little question of “why?” arises. Why are you doing this? You have seen people who feel more real, more down-to-earth, a community that stands not in opposition to openness in the same way as where you are going. Why leave? Why return? I know why, I have better answers this time around than any of the last times for awhile, but still the question nags like snagged bits of thread on a nail that tugs one just for a moment before releasing the frayed end as one walks away, just a little less whole than before. Every departure is a loss, every decision is opportunity cost, every move is at the expense of some unexplored reality. These are the trade-offs innate to life and to mourn too seriously over any that are not clearly devastating mistakes is costly and counter-productive. But there is a passing glance to be given on the way out of town.

And of course there is the difficulty of leaving alone. Of going anywhere alone, a feeling that doesn’t take, an experience that doesn’t wash no matter how many ventures are made under said conditions. The reason that the night of Dylan was the last night I could’ve chosen to see the Isotopes play at home, not because they were leaving, but because the New Orleans Zephyrs were coming to town thereafter and I cannot watch them play. For reasons that only Emily knows. Reasons I may share someday, but cannot bring myself to, for the dream doesn’t die. I find myself likely to grow old like Snape, embittered, blackened, but carrying this soft fragile unfulfilled love to the end of my darkest days. The pain does not subside, it does not dissipate, it subsists and burrows, grows and changes like a tumor, like a tapeworm, like a ravenous parasite of the soul. The texture or feel may be different, like shades of a bruise, but there is not healing in this metamorphosis. And in the changing, the pain defies adjustment or adaptation, refuses to be tamed by the human spirit, insists on hurting in new and unforeseen ways.

I leave laden and humiliated, the way I make my way in the world. Burdened with the frivolity of items that may help me make a new way and a new life in an old familiar and difficult place. The future has never looked so blank as it does today, at least not since I wrote “Hypothermia” on the frigid Castle fire escape in the early winter of 1999. I remember a decade of telling that young freezing boy it would all be okay. I was lying.

Bob Dylan
The Pavilion
Albuquerque, New Mexico
21 July 2011

Rainy Day Women #12 and #35
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Things Have Changed
If You Ever Go to Houston
Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
Tangled Up in Blue
Cold Irons Bound
Visions of Johanna
Summer Days
Sugar Baby
Highway 61 Revisited
Simple Twist of Fate
Thunder on the Mountain
Ballad of a Thin Man
—
Like a Rolling Stone
All Along the Watchtower
—
Forever Young

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that having access to all of one’s e-mails for several years should allow the refinement of particularly effective advertising. Still, seeing these two back-to-back was a bit jarring this morning:

Thanks a lot, GMail. Are there really people out there who are worried that Facebook is closer to taking over the world than Google?

As Goo Goo Dolls would put it, “Scars are souvenirs you never lose. The past is never far.”

In other news, while it wasn’t the most impressive book overall, methinks it was particularly well-timed for me to read Siddhartha this week. There’s a lot of insight in there about the particular paths that might be tempting at this juncture of life and good reminders of what roads are full of folly. Especially interesting as I play some poker and wrestle with the material reminders of my past that I want to haul out to Jersey.

Been sleeping and dreaming too much lately. The hazards of being home. Have extended my home visit a little bit and then will probably be taking about a week to cross back over the country. Leaving Saturday maybe? Still a little bit in flux. Might hike in Rocky Mountain NP, but definitely skipping Grand Canyon and LA, as were possibilities even a couple days ago. Feeling daunted enough about driving another 3k-4k miles at this point.

Next immediate stop: The Frontier!

For those without Facebook, here’s the latest album of pics: Volume 3.

I’ve been displaying all the APDA Summer 2011 tournament rounds as they get uploaded, so I might as well include our semifinal loss, a monstrosity which included 6 minutes of points of clarification, pervasive ad hominem attacks (mostly directed at me), and the scattershottiest opp I may have ever witnessed. Nevertheless, you can judge it for yourself below:

APDA Summer 2011: Semifinals from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

After a long break, here’s a video from a few days ago, camping at Alabama’s highest point in Cheaha State Park:

Eight years ago today, I married the love of my life in the hills above Los Gatos, California.

Seven years after that, she sent me a sweet recommitting note from Monrovia, Liberia, which I already reprinted here.

Two days after that, she met a man.

Four days after that, she called me to express sudden and unprecedented doubts in our marriage, eventually admitting after six hours that they stemmed from meeting a man. She promised not to cheat on me.

Five days after that, she cheated on me.

One day after that, she called me to try to divorce me by telephone.

I can’t believe I have lived through the last year. Most days, I’m not so sure I’m glad I have. But for the sake of you all who keep saying you want me to pull through, I’m trying. And the last couple days have been pretty good, actually. No crying in 48 hours alone, which might be a record this year. I don’t expect it to last today, but neither will I be alone all day, thankfully. I do try to plan to maximize my chance at hope.

Been taking a bucket full of pictures on my sojourn across the South, which will all be on Facebook along with the latest video and some other musings as soon as I’m at an Internet connection that isn’t throttled down to prevent visual uploading. That may be as late as Albuquerque, so don’t hold your breath. It also occurs to me that at least two or three of you aren’t on Facebook, so if you’ve missed the pictures you can see them here and here.

Next stop, Dallas. Nuevo by sundown on the 15th.

Happy eighth anniversary, Emily, since we’re not officially divorced yet. It was always you.

If you liked it when I argued we should profit off of hapless students instead of offering them non-profit education, you’ll love this.

This was the case Dave & Kyle were going to run in Nats Finals had they gotten there. Instead, Dave & I had fun with the sisters Sanders in this round that is not precisely an exemplar of full decorum. Enjoy:

APDA Summer 2011: Round 1 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

From almost a week ago – viewer discretion is advised:

So I haven’t written an actual post in a really long time, and you’ve probably noticed that I’ve stopped really making videos too. The thing is that I made a Day 8 video and it was of me crying and I debated about posting it and then I tried to post it three times and the upload kept failing and I sort of took that as a sign that maybe the Internet isn’t ready for footage of Storey driving and crying simultaneously on the New Jersey Turnpike. (Incidentally, Jake and I once saw the band Drivin’ and Cryin’ perform live at Georgia Tech. Unrelated.) Anyway, the upload fail both made future uploads from present location unlikely and sort of interrupted the daily momentum I’d built up for a while. So now I’m entering Day 12 and there are no new videos. Don’t hold your breath. I know you won’t because not that many of you were watching them to begin with. I’m not sure the format really works or is my thing. I like experiments and I will keep doing them. Just maybe not too many more videos. Though I kind of enjoy them as a personal chronicle in some ways. I’d really like to see videos of my high school or college self and those basically don’t exist. Even Gris may have lost the fabled Love Video. I guess there are the old Stanford rounds, but those are a little poisoned at the moment.

Trying to capture every passing moment and twist and turn on the Tour so far is both infeasible and slightly dull, so I think a list is both fitting of my mood, energy/time expenditure interest on this particular evening, and entertaining. It will call to mind a bunch of very random experiences I’ve had that will hopefully, upon future reflection, spring forth a bevy of memories from what this last two weeks have been like without having to itemize each one. Some things are perhaps best recalled as a jumbled mass of joy rather than a sequential turn of linear builds. Of course, memory is pretty darn intractable in my experience, so why I take actions to enhance or alter memory is sort of beyond me. A lot of the rules of how this works don’t seem to apply to my experience or perspective.

Oh, speaking of experiments, I’ve spent a lot of time today deciding that I think I want to get a rabbit in August when I’m back in Jersey. I need to do some research into the availability of rabbits in the area, as well as do some thinking about whether I want to get a show-quality breed or just settle for a mutt or what. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to be taking the rabbit to fairs and ditching debate for 4H. At the same time, there are some really pretty breeds out there and I’ve studied them long enough to have a wishlist of rabbit breeds that is worth consulting when I’m considering purchasing a pet rabbit that may be part of my life for some time to come. But a lagamorph seems to strike the right balance between an attentive furry friend and an animal that does not require constant care over, say, weekends or even possibly week-long trips. The issue of a trip like my present one does come to mind, but next summer is more likely to be set aside for a book than a trip, and there’s always the possibility that people will want to rabbit-sit, especially if he/she is cageable for certain durations. Which itself is another issue – I’m not wild about animals in cages, but if I let him/her romp around the apartment when I’m home, it might be a decent compromise. Even Pando boarded in very small spaces for weeks at a time when we went on longer journeys.

Anyway. Without further dilly-dally, the 24 things I’ve learned on TH’HEAT so far:
1. When robbing a house, one should not attempt to become the Foursquare “Mayor” of that house.
2. Most of the Ryan Adams album “Gold”.
3. Most of the Regina Spektor album “Soviet Kitsch”.
4. I don’t read much when people are around.
5. My phone’s spontaneous-turning-off is 100% correlated to it being closed. If left open, it works permanently until something forces it closed.
6. Many of my friends continue to be better than I am at chess.
7. Dominion may be the most universally liked board game, at least among those who’ve been exposed to it.
8. People are aliens. (To be fair, I’ve known this for a long time – it’s only gotten reaffirmed/reinforced.)
9. Some of the Sufjan Stevens album “Seven Swans”.
10. Some of the Vanessa Carlton album “Harmonium”.
11. It’s a bad idea for me to drive alone for nine hours on the day after a wedding.
12. Waffle House is always a comfort. If I lived nearer a WH, I’d probably be happier. This is probably a good chunk of what got me through 1997-98, no foolin’.
13. I should be more grateful that I still have a lot of hair at age 31 than I am on a daily basis.
14. A laptop makes it possible to not really feel like one is on a trip in the same way that taking a trip before having a laptop (and a cell phone) felt.
15. I don’t regularly eat as often as most people. (Also previously known but re-emphasized.)
16. I apparently have built my entire life around communicating with other people who I like. This has probably been a great decision. It also explains why most of my lifetime travel has been in the US, where these people are, rather than outside it, where other adventures may be more interesting but communication is vastly harder.
17. Lots of people are or seem or claim to be completely fine being partnerless for long and even perhaps permanent stretches of their lives.
18. I have very little in common with the people described in 17. (Probably a known, though 17 itself was just not well known prior to this trip.)
19. While no one else’s obsession with Chipotle burns quite as brightly as mine, most people functionally act as though it does.
20. No one thinks the Bar Exam is fun. This may or may not be related to the fact that there is no “high pass” or commendation for being a top scorer thereon.
21. Everyone is optimistic going into law school. Everyone.
22. The 30’s are when the real medical problems seem to start.
23. The evidence that families are cults seems insurmountable. (Also previously known, but boldly underlined herein.)
24. I have no idea, still, what this trip is going to be like on the long lonely stretch between North Carolina and Texas, nor on the return run between New Mexico and Philadelphia.

I like lists. I can’t even pretend that that was even a little unknown prior. So twenty-four is what you get. Good night for now.