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.

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.

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.

I hereby resolve to write some posts this trip, because I herein read a post, and it’s pretty funny, and there’s something about writing that captures a concision and a worldview I have yet to replicate with on-the-fly videos:

Volume issues better, but not entirely fixed, in this installment from yesterday:

Someone should let me know if this is too quiet to hear. There was some ambient noise and I think the computer was at a bad angle for picking up sound. I think it’s still audible, but it might not be. May use a mic on non-driving renditions of these in the future.

There is a wet-dog smell to the world today, the rain seeping into everyone’s fabrics and pores and hair and hope in the insidious unstoppable way of moisture everywhere. It is neither a cold rain or a warm one, kind of incidental and unfeeling, more than a drizzle but less than a downpour, to the point where one can walk and sit and stand in it long enough and believe that there is no other state to the sky than precipitation, mild and drowsy and endlessly wet.

I am on the train bound northeast, ever northeast, and the ads on the platforms seem even more discordant than normal with the landscape, their bright colors and outlandish claims brandished against a landscape otherwise gone monochrome. The green-gray vagueness swimming by against the bubbled pebbles of gathered water on the plastic windows’ exterior as I try to focus on capturing a series of thoughts every bit as much a moving target as my own body in this inexorable transit conveyance. The little rundown graffitied towns and rusting cars seem more melancholy than the last time, deeper reflections of a day where no one is quite happy it’s Friday. There is relief in the air, but no joy to it. Perhaps it is the apprehension of the rumors of tomorrow, the slim but inerasable possibility that this is the last night of the world.

I have been impressed with the ability of a few committed people to so thoroughly proliferate the concept that the seemingly innocuous date facing us tomorrow will be the beginning of the end. Certainly days in May always seem like the end-times to me in some way, but in no way can this or even mere spending and advertising account for the sheer universality of American awareness of May 21st’s alleged rapture. It can only speak to something deep within us, as almost all prophecies of doom and finality do. Armageddon holds the same appeal for the modern American as a snow-day for their progeny. I don’t need to do my homework or mow the lawn if it’s all going up in a fireball or under an unnavigable blanket tomorrow.

A medical education. A brand new sedan. A bundled cable package with phone and internet. Happy Hour. Cancer treatment. Business loans. A circus act.

There is a dead blue payphone booth, empty but still labeled and standing, and literally twelve visible cellular telephones, all held in the same crook-armed way of the totally absorbed, necks bent down in concentration as fingers plug away or pause mid-scroll, looks of consternation and concentration and the passive acquiescence of giving over one’s time to things that are not quite worth it. And I barely exceptional, plugging away on my portable big-screen within as they absorb and I could be writing what they could be reading and we are communicating without ever exchanging so much as a look or a sound or an acknowledgement of the other’s existence. And is it a tragedy or is it just change? Is it a loss or just a difference? And that question reflects back, reverberates through the echo-chamber of self-reflection like a nuclear-powered ping-pong ball in a zero-gravity tin-lined corridor. Plink plink plink plink plink, forever.

I am saturated. Soaked. Unable to absorb any more as the stutter-step of the train carries me endlessly to a place that would be the proverbial ground zero of any imaginable end of the world. Can I root against it any more than the self-proclaimed prophet? Can I suspend my own hubris long enough to entertain the slightly relieving possibility that there will be no more struggling with this journey, no more Sundays to face? And yet, of course, as my own experience dictates, as the dead window-smashed husks of industrial trackside buildings illustrate, the world ends every day. People die, divorces are filed, the loss of communication or contact or care or compassion, every day a tragedy somewhere for someone from which they will never recover on this planet. Their world spinning of its axis, out of orbit, falling into the sun of whatever challenge they will not be able to overcome. Salvations too, perhaps, but there is a permanence to loss that seems to have no corollary in things working out. The simple tautologies of life. Something found can always be lost, but many things lost can never be found.

This is the nature of a world that dies, where things thereon die, where we are all mere guests in the face of something larger than ourselves. We may want to be here when our host’s fate is tied to our own, when mortality can fuse for all living things. But the odds are otherwise, that we will go alone and in small groups, leaving behind – hopefully – more than just a pile of clothes.

I | II

Six: I had a long list of things to do constructed for the few interim hours between landing in Philadelphia the night prior and heading up to Middlebury for the opening tournament of what is likely to be my last semester associated with APDA. This included printing tab cards and otherwise preparing for yet another stint at Tab Director, one of my favorite roles on the debate circuit. I’ve devote a good bit of verbiage herein in prior posts explaining what I love so dearly about tabulating tournaments, but it remains the perfect intersection of my interest in debate, teaching, statistics, and competition. I am looking forward to Nationals for more than a couple reasons.

My stint running a calibration round to acquaint the rarely competing Middlebury team with the expectations of running a quality tournament was preceded by a remarkably short-seeming six-hour drive that wound us from cold to colder as we approached the remote climes of northern Vermont. Coming back to a debate setting, be it a car ride or a tab room or a round or a meeting always feels like a return home. Arguably even more than my actual return home did this winter. Indeed, it filled me with pangs of pre-regret to type the words above describing the separation I may about to be declaring from the world of collegiate debate. I remember missing it so deeply and I don’t relish missing it again. At least I know that coaching has, somehow, been able to provide me nearly as much joy as competing did, and that alone has confirmed at least one set of decisions from the last couple years as being irreproachably valid.

I found the Middlebury team to be much like all debate teams of a certain ilk, though notably larger and more participatory than I might expect for a school that has been of limited presence on the circuit the last couple years. The calibration round was a great success and we were whisked off to incredible buildings whose presence on campus postdates my last visit to the school, one of several semifinal appearances I made at the liberal arts college’s annual invitational. The remainder of the night, crawling into the following day, involved a series of false starts at sleep wherein I would awake to navigate another of our many carloads of people to the cemetery-side frat mansion that was putting us up for the weekend. Bleary but excited to sleep in, I finally succumbed to rest circa four in the morning.

Seven: The tournament went as smoothly as almost any I’ve tabbed, all the more remarkable for the fact that not one of the appointed Middleburians had served in a tab room before. We ran close to schedule after an expectedly late start in the face of an oncoming snowstorm, one that adorned the entire night with a Narnian fall of lamplit accumulating precipitation. The mid-small draw of the tournament gave it that memorably enjoyable Middlebury feel of a debate slumber party where camaraderie runs high and competition seems to carry lower stakes. Friday was punctuated by one of the most lavish banquets assembled in recent APDA memory, whose offerings could only be discovered after a long trek through the fast piling snow along newly slippery paths. I had to rush from it to get back to tab, but tab continued to punch along like clockwork and we had to wait to announce round three for everyone to return from dinner.

The remainder of the night, post-tournament, was spent in a comical run back and forth to the site of the debate party, almost entering before deciding it was unworthy of our presence. The team seemed to struggle with a certain schizophrenia about wanting to go to the party, and we talked it over at the lodgey student center with its late-night snack offerings and an epic game of pool where Farhan finally knocked me off with only the eight ball on the table. Another trudge back to the party revealed a comically depleted dance-floor and we had only the snow to play with on the long walk back, exhausting almost everyone with an every-person-for-themselves contest along uncertain paths and bizarrely footstep-rung trees. By the time we decided to bring the snowball fight inside to the few cohorts who hadn’t gone out, we realized it was probably time to turn in.

Eight: You can read about how the tournament panned out on the RUDU blog, but it doesn’t quite capture the drama of getting there. Going into round five, none of our teams were guaranteed a break appearance, nor was Farhan in any way ensured such a high speaker performance. Watching the ballots come back and being able to once again be blown away by how far the Rutgers team has come was a great joy while in tab, though not being able to share any information with them till the suspenseful post-pizza announcement was, as usual, aggravating. Nevertheless, announcements were made and break rounds were won, and by the end, Farhan had become the fifth modern Rutgers debater to qualify for Nationals, and the first to take home a top speaker prize at a tournament. Knowing that nothing was riding from a team perspective on the semifinal result – either Dave & Kyle would advance to second TOTY or Farhan would qualify, both excellent outcomes – was quite enjoyable as I tabbed up the speaker and novice rankings and noted that we’d taken both of those prizes as well.

This is all to say nothing of rounds I enjoyed judging, especially fifth round between a Canadian team and Stanford that provided the perfect blend of fun topic with serious debate. And I was quite proud of the Final, watching Farhan get within a ballot of winning his first final round appearance, made all the more incredible for it being with an unpracticed novice partner he’d met the day prior. We capped the celebration with a long fun dinner with the Maryland team at a local diner, missing the three teammates who’d departed early but reveling in the additional definitive proof that this team has Arrived.

We were ill prepared for the daunting snowbound journey that awaited us upon heading east for an interim week in New Hampshire with my friends Stina & Dav, however. Snow was falling heavily as we trudged back to the car, almost at whiteout by the time we were fishtailing on country roads the GPS insisted would get us across the width of two states and into Durham. After an eleven-mile stretch of particularly daunting road, I pulled over into a church parking lot, making jokes about sanctuary, contemplating seeking a hotel or alternate lodging if we weren’t close to getting on an interstate. The GPS revealed that our next direction would put us on I-89 in just a couple miles, though, and I’ve rarely been so relieved to see the letter I. The rest of the trip was uneventful till the next departure from an interstate, this time outside Durham, put us in the heaviest snowfall I’ve ever driven through. But the roads were full of traction and progress was quick, if blinding. We hit Stina & Dav’s student housing and were quickly all asleep, bone-weary but quite satisfied to punctuate Middlebury’s successes with living to see another day.

Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve: I can differentiate between these days at this point, but I probably like them better bundled since that’s how they’ve felt. Like any good vacation, especially one unscheduled and in an unfamiliar place, the days have melded into a relaxing blend of half-effort activities. Games and reading, computers and snow, practice rounds and TV have swirled together in this medium-sized apartment and series of locally run eateries. Durham, New Hampshire wouldn’t be my first pick for a place to live, but it’s a great place to stop by in the winter and all five of us (Farhan and Dave came along for the ride) have gotten along well over Clue, Trivial Pursuit, snowball fights, and meals. We’ve one more day to come of this, one foraying all the way out to Manchester to see some summer friends of Stina’s, but I think I can already call the tour a success in its ability to restore energy. It’s also taught me a few things about the sudden pervasiveness of laptops and a general computer mentality, especially in those younger than I am. At the same time, this same attitude has enabled me to write these posts about the opening fortnight of the year, as well as participate in online Diplomacy games and keep informed about both local and worldwide circles of information.

I’m not sure I like it as a model for a vacation that I initially assumed would require reading and maybe some games or snow-play as the only possible outlet. The vision of a New Hampshire retreat to a snowed-in world (and we did get about a foot and a half today) is marred somewhat by the ubiquity of technology and its corresponding proliferation of television reruns. Let alone how much broadcast TV I’ve watched this week and how foreign it feels to my newly untrained eye – one of the very few improvements to my life that the recent losses have created. Granted that much of that has been sports that I’ve enjoyed, though the loss of a potential Oregon championship in anything was deeply sad. Which reminds me also of a Middlebury tie-in I nearly forgot – the finding, through all that technology and Facebook – of a friend I last saw in person on the Middlebury campus, during a magical weekend in 2000 when Zirkin and I made semifinals at a thoroughly enjoyable little tourney. The friend is one of my oldest, a literal pen-pal of all my Albuquerque days, one whose letters I was hoping to show Brandzy as part of his visit through my archival history when he came to New Mexico. She was my best friend from seventh grade and has long been living in Seattle, but only just joined Facebook this week and looked me up right away. We haven’t even properly caught up yet again, but the loose ends in my life who feel important have started to feel all the more important in the last few months, unsurprisingly. Where are you, John Schneider? Just drop me a line someday once again.

I guess all this technology is worth it, even if its saturation could stand to be kept at bay in favor of a little more paper now and again. That friending the day after Middlebury wouldn’t have been the same in a week. And these posts probably wouldn’t keep over longhand drafts of endless paper.

Like everything in life, or at least the last few parts of it, it seems to be all about trade-offs.

I

Two: The Frontier Restaurant in Albuquerque has long been a sort of totem of my relatively limited affection for the world. The things I like tend to be things I like a lot and the Frontier may be close to my favorite of these things. It has great food, relatively cheap (it used to be unqualifiedly cheap, but now such things have gotten a little less certain), a wide expanse of comfortable, Western-themed rooms, a wide cross-section of Albuquerque’s population, and hundreds of memories (most of them even good) haunting its tiled corridors. Introducing new people to the Frontier has become a hallmark of their visits to New Mexico and a highlight of any trip home for me, for spreading the Gospel of the Frontier is one of my most thoroughly developed skills.

Brandzy had been to the Frontier before we made it in for a crowded Sunday lunch, but he’d been there alone and in a rush and only on my far-flung recommendation while I sat in, I believe, an office at Glide. So while the experience was not entirely untested, his ability to fully embrace the Frontier ethos as one who is being guided and shown around had not been breached. Having discovered a new love of green chile the night before at Garcia’s, it was no problem convincing him to try a cheeseless breakfast burrito and begin the rapid indoctrination process often underway by the time someone sets foot over the Frontier’s well-traversed thresholds.

He arranged a hasty reunion there with a long-estranged friend, leaving us just enough time in the schedule to stop by the old place on Twelfth Street for a glimpse of what my actual upbringing in Albuquerque was like before my parents moved and were able to claim the place they’ve lived since I was ensconced in college. Gone were the chickens and ducks and geese; added were several walls and outcroppings of the structure my Dad had begun to augment before our move. But the echoes of a bygone era, already reverberating through my perspective after nearly a month in New Mexico, began to thunder loudly in my cranium as it perched just visibly over the ditch-side wall to offer a view of stuccoed straw-bales and the wispy visage of a teenager who’ll never walk that yard again.

We didn’t reunite thereafter till it was dark outside, a fire blazing within to offer a bulwark against single-digit temperatures that threatened any stranded without the walls. Brandzy’s picked up guitar lately and he picked up his, encouraging me to literally dust off an instrument I hadn’t touched in over a decade as he began to practice. I almost caught up to him in a couple-hour impromptu jam, relearning “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “This Land is Your Land” and plowing through our recently recounted memories of me at eighteen or thirteen to squint into an even more distant past, one at eleven and twelve, one accompanied by the plucking of strings and the pressing of frets as I failed to practice sufficiently to make good on a musical promise always more hoped for than manifest. “Puff the Magic Dragon” added heart-strings to those already being tugged, but we struggled with B-minor and had to regroup with the two we’d played together as we laughed and celebrated a minor victory in being able to learn, or at least remember, at thirty years old.

Three: A return to the Frontier and a series of near-goodbyes marked this sleepy day, with Brandzy departing for Arizona before tragedy was to strike there coincidental to his more planful journey. We said farewell repeatedly, culminating in a last farewell as he retrieved forgotten sheet music on his way westward once more, promising to listen and talk of future farewells as many times as might be necessary. I spent the day in increasing awareness of my hurtling toward departure from New Mexico, left once again to feel the already waning rhythms of life in a family of three as I lived it for almost two decades, but so little in the past twelve years. Late in the day, after good portions of reading and computer time, I was able to convince my parents to engage in some magical thinking and accompany me to my father’s first (modern) 3D movie, the “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. And on the third day of the year, the three of us watched a three-dimensional film, the third in the classic Narnian series, nearly having the theater to ourselves before a couple stragglers joined us in late preview. All were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the film and the engagement of its contours, convinced once more that sharing a movie outside the bounds of the homestead is not only viable, but vital.

Four: My last full day in Albuquerque was slow and methodical, as I took periodic care to note the passage of time and the significance of a day that, like any at home or in the company of those one rarely sees, could bear unseen and increased significance in certain retrospects. I have learned over much belaborment that it is important not to overemphasize such days, to overload them or overstress them if possible. There is great pressure put on departure, especially when it carries potential portends of long absence and the gaping maw of life unknown and unplanned, of reunions whose dates are unmarked on the calendar. That very pressure that inclines one to enjoy and squeeze the stuffing out of these moments of significance can suffocate same, strangling the throats that would call on memory to the point where all that can be heard are plaintive, even frustrated cries. It is one of those Murphian curses of our existence that an awareness of important days can crush them, that our most beautiful memories are often of days almost unnoticed at the time.

I managed to finish my book, to dine with my family, to make plans to see a friend who’d just made it to town in time to play piano and a last card game with Fish and I before we departed. Eliaii and I rarely overlap for long in Albuquerque, but our conversation made the most of it this time, as early hours of the fifth day of the year were burned in serious contemplation of life and its foibles after he and Fish’s father conquered Fish and I at what Trivial Pursuit recently informed me was the most popular four-player game of all-time (bridge). If it was the last night at what I’ve lovingly called The Tank for a decade and a half, it was one for the ages. Fish and I had sat before the gas fire several times this trip, contemplating New Year’s past and further past, or imagining what future hope could be carved from the newly breached shore my life has been wrecked upon. I had not realized how much of these opportunities to regroup and reminisce had been made possible by Fish himself until that night, until hearing his parents wax wistful about Florida on Christmas and realizing that at age thirty, despite feeling like kids, we are directing more traffic in our lives than we really might imagine.

Five: Village Inn is no Frontier. It’s not even Waffle House. But it is open and relatively close to The Tank, and Eliaii and I finished the last large meal of my time in Nuevo over discussions of where things are heading in a year that if I keep saying it has to be better than last year, it almost certainly won’t be. A cop sat behind Eliaii and looked up occasionally over his strongbox-computer-sourced work, trying not to acknowledge me as I talked about places I might live and jobs I might pursue and avenues I might attempt to sidle down in the coming months and years. I often caught myself wondering what he might think of our cavalier evaluations of Albuquerque, its advantages and disadvantages. It’s easy to assume that almost any well-settled local is a lifelong native, but it’s quite possible he was an import from Texas or California or even possibly Chicago, though there’s something about police in particular that I believe makes them seem provincial. It’s probably halfway between a stereotype and the belief that they take up arms and badges in the defense of a long-held community tradition, or at least in a place where they’re familiar with what neighborhoods require what sort of patrol. In any event, he heard me compare Seattle, Denver, Flagstaff, and Vancouver favorably, though I lamented that Albuquerque’s affordability and climate were not available without the ghosts.

I considered staying up all night, but it was clear by six or so that this would be a poor plan, especially since my departure was later than my traditional bargain-basement dawn voyage. I caught about a hundred minutes of sleep in the steady restlessness of the jittery need to awaken quickly when it is, in fact, time to awaken. How many mornings spent alarmed and ready without necessity, starting alert every five minutes only to discover that the need to leave bed is still many minutes or even quarter-hours hence. And then the final moment of awakening, of sounded emergency startling, it seems anticlimactic and almost sad, wasted in its annoyance on a person already feeling as though he’s been awake and ready for days.

It was in this state that I began to cry, facing the magnitude of the departure that was upon me, feeling the welled and stored pressure of all that had built in days and weeks and a near-month of muddling through in search of resolutions, answers, hope, holiday, restoration. Once unleashed, my final of many floodgates on New Mexican soil knew no stoppage, prompting a contemplation of punting the flight altogether in favor of later times or, perhaps, making a vacation more permanent or at least indefinite. Departures like this, as often tagged in this format itself by my “Pre-Trip Posts” moniker, tend to carry that pre-remembrance feeling even more heavily than last full days in a locale. My family is heavy with premature death, with tragic losses and missed opportunities to say goodbye, adding extra weight to every long preview of extended absence. A deluge of unchecked tears as the last of the packing culminates is hardly a harbinger to ward such misgivings. We bawled and hugged and my parents begged me to reconsider my resolve to fly to Philadelphia. I almost relented. But at some point, amidst the pangs of reconsideration and reformatting of a whole vision of this year, I stood up and said “it’s time.”

Airports are lonelier than any Valentine’s Day, any New Year’s, any holiday spent solo. Many are alone, but nearly all of them are heart-filled with the last kisses of loved ones or the even more soaring anticipation of long reunion. It is too early to declare these experiences forever spoiled, but a thirty-hour jaunt to Liberia resulting in a cold shoulder went a long way toward inhibiting my taste for unaccompanied air travel. After a steadying phone call to Stina to iron out last details of the pending trip to Vermont and New Hampshire, I resolved to sleep as fast as possible, making up for the nervy hundred minutes of half-rest that had preceded my teary farewells to hearth and home. We were airborne, underway, then as Albuquerque receded ‘neath a bank of clouds, I nestled in the very back row against my parka and gave in to merciful unconsciousness.

I was awakened some hours later by a special announcement over the loudspeaker with a surreal-sounding request that all passengers aboard our flight from Albuquerque to Chicago lower our window shades and press our flight attendant call buttons. It was a minute or so before I could be sure I wasn’t dreaming, groggily blinking at the 100% participation with what appeared to be a prelude to an ill-lit ritual of cult or creed. Instead, it proved to be a marriage proposal, inarticulate and choked as it emerged from a pudgy but sincere-seeming guy as introduced by a profoundly polished contrasting stewardess. The view from the back was murky enough to briefly convince me that he was offering a wedding to the stewardess herself, but it proved to be a fellow traveler on the wind to Chicago that was receiving what would long be considered the happiest news of her life. My thoughts went quickly to a mid-inning proposal at a Philadelphia ballgame Emily and I attended shortly before she flew away, our wincing looks to each other reminding both of us that our best proposal story of our lives, the best proposal story either of us have ever heard, has been burned on a needlessly heartbroken marriage whose memory now only brings pain. It is hard to say how particularly cruel life has been lately or whether I merely notice its cruelty more unguardedly in my present state, but I would also venture that none of you have borne witness to an airborne proposal and that things are really going out of their way these days. I tried to fall back asleep as soon as possible, shortly after desperately trying to make myself clap along with the congratulatory crowd.

I didn’t leave the plane in Chicago, instead waiting for all but 9 of the seats to be filled by those who filed on in annoyed single-file, scouting seats and bin space like buzzards on a planet of immortals. Inevitably one of the loudest of the future passengers found his way across the aisle from me, where I was newly placed in good old row seventeen. He’d made a new friend in line and spent almost all of the boarding phase yelling details of his dramatic life across the way to her chosen seat, just behind my head. Turns out he’d flown back to Chicago from Philly to bail his ex-wife out of jail. She’d just burned his house in Chicago down. He was taking the kids, who were coming with their grandparents in the back of the line, back to one of the grandparents’ places in Philadelphia to recover while he contemplated whether to press charges and how to collect on the insurance. The guy looked like the kind of person who would make up a story like this just to pass the time, but by the point when two scared-looking bear-clutching grade-schoolers dutifully boarded between hand-wringing matriarchs trying to look brave, I was convinced. Maybe the only thing special about anyone’s experience is that they think it is special. Maybe suffering is all the same.

I read at length from my Mom’s long-recommended recent favorite, The Shadow of the Wind, while trying to shake the idea that I was getting a portrait of American nuptials presented by Southwest Airlines. I couldn’t sleep a wink all the way down into Philadelphia, a rarity for me on planes. I have long tried to keep myself awake on the large commercial vehicles, often just to see if I can, sometimes because I desperately want to read or converse or otherwise enjoy consciousness. But this was my first flight in ages to offer me such, almost not counting since its first half was spent almost completely asleep. As we eased down toward Philadelphia in one of the most gradual descents of all-time, I was able to peer through cloudless skies at early evening scenes of eastern America. It occurred to me, squinting and sighing, how like constellations the light patterns of winter cities in this country are, how the order/chaos of patterned streets and traffic and buildings, especially in smaller towns, resembles nebulas and swirling galaxies high above in the same dim-lit view. We rotate and revolve around a center, we follow an orbit, and dim glimmers of yellow or white or even purple hints at our existence, winking in the void as we wait to be driven homeward.

All the way back, I’d think how strange it was that I’d never before correlated far-flung star systems to the electric networks that adorn our own civilized groupings. Sitting for long stretches on overlit trains, even longer stretches in even more overlit train stations, hauling my overstuffed bags down the rickety ice-flecked stairs of the New Brunswick depot, hailing a cabbie my parents had insisted I employ to make the last tiny stretch of my journey less exhausting than all that piled on before it, I would wonder. How can we be so close to so much and not see? What am I not seeing before me now that might be my skyward salvation? And what, most of all, might I never see, never connect or correlate, until such time when its knowledge is no longer useful? Are we ever making decisions as though truly informed? Or does the chaos outweigh the order, leaving us as much starstruck or star-crossed as we are illuminated?

I’m not sure about this emergent 2011 pattern of recalling a day or a handful of them in somewhat distant retrospect, but I kind of like the affect it has on my thinking and the way I talk about things. Like these constellation/streetlights themselves, I think I might often be too close to the days I’m writing about, and even a few hours or a week of reflection time can make an enormous difference in how circumspect or thoughtful I can be about them. I can’t imagine sandbagging future thoughts and entries to create this effect, but while I’m still catching up on the early parts of the year, I’m not going to fight it. In other words, this vignette series will continue, at least for another entry or so.

We’re eleven days into the only year ending in eleven that most of us will live through. And I’ve gone eleven days without posting. This was not a deliberate move – I had no resolution to avoid or reduce my commentary on my own life in this space. It just sort of happened, the way things do before and during and after travel, when time is short and emotion is capable of being long. I’ve composed partial posts in my head but run out of steam by the time I get to the keyboard, or been distracted by others. I’ve been spending a lot of time with a lot of others – after living alone for the first time since 2001 (and that year I had my own room in a hall that housed probably two-hundred people), I’ve spent the last month or so living with other people again, first at home, then at a debate tournament, and now on the road between tournaments. One gets accustomed to a different rhythm living with others, especially in close quarters. It is harder to muster that self-reflective, introspective state that gives rise to so many of my posts, so much of my writing in general. Living with others has still traditionally given me the opportunity to stay up till three in the morning and reflect on my day – traveling and crashing with friends, less so.

Anyway, it’s hard to sum up a series of days that have all been radically different in some sort of clean or poetic post. So I guess all I can try to do is pull together vignettes, maybe many of them at length and in succession, to try to not lose hold of the moments that have introduced me to this already intriguing year known as twenty-eleven. By the end, there may be some emergent thread or common bond, or there may be just a collection of days at the outset of a long journey whose destination is uncertain. So it has/does/will gone/go.

One: Rang in an essentially arbitrary new year (we just decided to do a countdown after, in the midst of a game of Celebrity, someone noticed it was 11:59 and then 12:01 on their cell phone) in front of the fire at Miranda Gray’s place. Miranda wasn’t there, but most of her family was, including some extended family. Fish and I were also there, as was Anna, who’s practically family at this point. In any event, we’d played plenty of Oh Hell and Celebrity and I actually enjoyed the latter game for perhaps the first time in my life. So much seems to be changing about my attitude toward the world. It’s tough to see how much of it is for the better, but it’s a little unnerving to feel that fundamental attributes of my personality are being washed out with the tide of former vantages. Then again, it’s just a game.

Drove Fish home and spent an hour waiting for Brandzy to show up, little knowing that he’d decided to drive from Berkeley to Albuquerque in a single day. It’s true what they say about geography knowledge in this country – there isn’t any, even and often among the best and brightest and most well educated. He’d deliberately obfuscated mileage and timing to himself for fear of intimidating himself out of what proved to be an extremely ill-advised venture – one that Google Maps lists as taking 17 hours and 6 minutes without traffic, stoplights, gasoline refills, or sustenance. Only the GPS knew the depths of his absurd attempt and yet he made it safely and almost coherently. And then there was much sleep, the first of the year.

The Frontier was closed that day (I’m still getting used to such closures after years of them not being 24/7/365), so we had to settle for Garcia’s after an epic tour of the Academy, Brandzy’s first. This featured the first-ever retelling of the caterpillar story in the place where it originally happened, as well as recounting some other storied events of my past life in the vicinity of their inceptions. The Academy tends to have an overwhelming affect on people, but I expect it less from someone who graduated from a place called the Athenian School. I also had moments of looking up and out and around and having to remind myself what a majestic place not only the Academy could be, but also and especially Albuquerque itself and even New Mexico generally. By the time I could virtually manifest a balloon-streaked sky in my mental theater, I was ready to reconsider my admonishment on moving back to the Land of Enchantment.

More than anything, my friendship with Brandzy is demarcated by talking. Well, talking and joking. Talking, joking, and tangents. Talking, joking, tangents, and irreverence. Talking, joking, tangents, irreverence, and… you get the idea. We were slated to be roommates upon arrival at Brandeis in the fall of 1998 and while I have always carried a bit of resentment at his late decision to abandon Scheffres 212 for an internship in city government in Oakland and a year’s deferral to ‘Deis, we both have long discussed that we’d have had to drop out of school for infinite distraction and failure to attend a class had we actually been paired together. So the remainder of the first day of this year was spent in endless verbalized contemplation of our recent past and potential future, adorned as usual with vast gulfs of mutual mirth and oblong spokes of barely relevant trivia. It was a typical good evening of plunging into our mental morass, made all the more amusing for its priming over a lengthy card game with Fish.

I have many more vignettes from early in the year to relay, but it is late in the overhang of the tenth day and I am feeling underwhelmed by the idea of getting through those nine days in the next hour or so amidst thousands of words. I feel impelled to get this first breath of 2011 out into the world, take my leave, some rest, and return reinvigorated to recount all that has transpired in the new year’s infancy. So far, so good. Already the first feels a month or so ago. Hopefully by the time I have caught pace with my tale, the time will not have sailed past me in its inevitable march toward the infinite.

Not much to say today except that I’ve concluded the day after Thanksgiving may be far better than the day of. No, not because of the shopping. I’m not sure I’m going to buy (or accept) any gifts this year. Just because, if one’s not tied up in shopping or being conscripted into working on the day after Thanksgiving, it has all the same advantages of the holiday itself with even less inkling of the pressure or expectation. We spent the whole day lounging, mostly eating, playing board games, eating, reading, eating, talking, and eating. I think I’ve actually gained weight this trip.

Anyway, another installment of my recently increasing proclivity to turn this into a photolog:

Storey is obsessed with leaves, vol. 47.

I just liked that a big van with “Press” in the window was parked so close to a funeral parlor.

The inscrutable sign on the wallside is advertising cheap and safe parking, presumably on the shell of steel beams.

Avoid.

Crisp skyline.

The trash almost made it.

Ben always did like turkeys.

Storey is obsessed with leaves, vol. 49.

Tiers.

Industrial/Waste.

Fish!

Snow!

Heavier snow.

Ariel & Michael’s new fireplace.

Before…

…and after!

First Thanksgiving as a married couple.

Boggle!

Fish =! amused.

Food, glorious food.

Happy cooks.

Risk!

The game gets intense.

As a brief postscript, Fish wants to ask you all what the odds are of getting T-Pain to help out with a cleverly written and imagined spoof of the ever-fabled “I’m On a Boat” web video phenomenon. If you’re not pretty sure he’ll go along, you’re a pessimist in his book. Fish’s, not T-Pain’s.

It’s my first Thanksgiving in Philadelphia since 1998, wherein I stayed with my friend Kate and I met her rollicking family and quotations for the ages were first coined. I’m friends with Kate again, after a bit of a hiatus, so these memories are even nicer and fresher than they used to be and make being back in Philly for the holiday that much cooler. I’m just glad we don’t have a Thanksgiving parade to be in like 12 years ago. In no small part because it was snowing when I awoke this morning.

It’s disorienting to wake up in an unfamiliar place, but doubly so when the sky above is gray and white and mottled with the aura of inscrutability. And while most aspects of this place (Fish’s now longtime home in South Philly) are not unfamiliar, I am unaccustomed to staying downstairs or having it look like a place that’s presentable. I’ve been choosing the couch over the room I spent much of August in, in part perhaps because of that, but also because it’s such a novelty for Fish’s long torn-up place to have a couch. And I think I feel more at home on couches anyway, it keeps me in better touch with transience, makes the adjustments easier. Waking up in a bed unfamiliar can be even more uncertain.

For some reason at Thanksgiving, I’m always tempted to review the last few years’ worth of the days or several. I feel like this blog itself is littered with references to summarative statements about the holiday and my own experiences with same. I’ve been through the political mixed feelings, the eventual distillation of the meaning of this holiday being able to transcend its dubious genocidal beginnings. I’ve been through the touchstone of this holiday with collegiate loneliness, with my adopted long-time family, and now am confronting it on my own again, though with the company of the lifelong family that are my friends. I intend to split the day between Ariel/Michael’s and Fish/Mad’s, getting two dinners for the price of zero and managing to avoid a household with football for the duration. There aren’t even TV’s in these places!

The snow has since given in to rain as the day plows toward afternoon and we are reminded how early in the winter it really is. Yesterday I wandered around the city for several miles and a couple hours, getting myself really chilled before turning around and almost running back to the warm confines of Fish’s abode. This is perhaps the eternal thing about Thanksgiving, that which transcends specifics of location or even the company of fellow diners at a Chinese restaurant outside an empty campus. That humans gather together, in groups large and small, to huddle together against the cold an unforgiving world to consume sustaining foods and celebrate their survival and the bounty of whatever they’ve been offered in life. No matter how isolated I might feel in comparison to Thanksgivings past, no matter how trying the holidays might in some ways feel this time ’round, I can take solace in still being here, still cradling a flame of warmth and light and hope against the torments of a tumultuous unrestrained external reality.

I am thankful for you. And you, over there. And you too. You are my community, my beacon in the darkness. Together we’ll make it through. We need not share the same table to feel the same sustenance this peaceful day.